MONTREAL - The Turkmenistan Foreign
Ministry affirmed this week its readiness to
continue negotiations with Azerbaijan over the
status of an oil field disputed between them in
the Caspian Sea.
Relations between the two
countries worsened last month as they exchanged
accusations over an incident around the oil field
at the center of their dispute, which Azerbaijan
names as "Kyapaz" and Turkmenistan as "Serdar".
The disagreement centers on the subsea
delimitation for natural resources under the bed
of the Caspian Sea.
Turkmenistan
criticized Azerbaijan for taking "illegal action"
against one of its seismic exploration vessels
that had ventured near the disputed area, while
Azerbaijan said Turkmenistan had
violated a 2008 agreement
reached between the two countries' presidents to
suspend exploration pending resolution of the
dispute.
The dispute over the oil field
has prevented the two countries from cooperating
on energy exploration and development in the
Caspian Sea almost since their independence in the
aftermath of the disintegration of the Soviet
Union in late 1991. It has notably been a
principal roadblock on the path to agreement over
terms of constructing a Trans-Caspian Gas Pipeline
(TCGP).
Turkmenistan, now a major exporter
of natural gas, had threatened to take the
question to international arbitration, a move that
would be seen as hopelessly delaying still further
any prospects for the TCGP. Turkmenistan's
president Saparmurat Niyazov first issued this
threat in the middle of the last decade, and it
has been periodically renewed by his successor,
Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow.
The reason why
it has never been acted upon, and never will be,
is that there is nowhere for Turkmenistan to go.
The matter of delimiting subsea exploration and
development rights for natural resources is a
question of international law and not industrial
arbitration. Consequently, the only possibly
competent venue is the International Court of
Justice (ICJ).
However, the ICJ is
prevented from affirming its jurisdiction over the
matter because Turkmenistan has never deposited
the required legal instrument that would recognize
such jurisdiction. It is required that both
parties to a dispute recognize the ICJ's
jurisdiction before the ICJ will take a case.
Also, it is open to discussion whether
Azerbaijan's recognition of the ICJ's competence
in certain matters would extend to the question at
hand.
The seismic vessel incident came as
a surprise to observers. Relations between the two
countries were extremely difficult during the
presidencies of Heydar Aliev in Azerbaijan and
Niyazov in Turkmenistan. However, after the former
died in 2003 and the latter in 2006, their
respective successors, Ilham Aliev and
Berdimuhamedow, found ways to ameliorate bilateral
relations.
In particular, they publicly
agreed that their two countries could decide to
develop contested deposits and to construct the
TCGP, without requiring the approval of Iran,
Kazakhstan, or Russia, the three other Caspian Sea
littoral countries. This is a correct view under
international law and put paid to the objections,
voiced mainly by Iran and Russia, that a
comprehensive multilateral agreement on the status
of the Caspian Sea was necessary first.
If
that were in fact the case, then Kazakhstan and
Russia would also have had to wait before jointly
developing offshore gas fields located at the
boundary of their respective subsea sectors, and
Iran's recent announcement that it will deploy
submarines in the Caspian Sea would represent an
illegal provocation.
In July 2001, Iran
used a display of military force to block a vessel
chartered by energy firm BP from exploring the
Alov deposit ("Alborz" according to Iran), which
by no construction could lie within any dimension
of a sector that Iran could possibly claim under
the various conventions of international law that
govern such delimitations.
Over the past
six years, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan have
settled all outstanding bilateral government
debts, engaged in a raft of goodwill gestures, and
set up a bilateral commission to enhance
cooperation and address problems of interest.
Analysts in the region itself speculate
that Turkmenistan did not act on its own in making
noises over the latest dispute, and was goaded or
persuaded, in one manner or another, by Russia
and/or Iran. Oddly, the incident occurred one day
after the publication of a false report in the
Russian media quoting the head of the European
Union's office in Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan,
Aurelia Bouchez, to the effect that an agreement
on the TCGP would be signed the next day.
What Bouchez in fact said was that the EU
sees no political or environmental obstacles to
building the TCGP, that the delimitation issue
ought not to prevent construction (Norway and the
United Kingdom had an identical conflict in
principle in the North Sea and just went ahead
together in practice), and that the EU was ready
to finance the project. The EU has been assisting
in the bilateral negotiations between Azerbaijan
and Turkmenistan since late last year.
Dr Robert M Cutler (http://www.robertcutler.org),
educated at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and The University of Michigan, has
researched and taught at universities in the
United States, Canada, France, Switzerland, and
Russia. Now senior research fellow in the
Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian
Studies, Carleton University, Canada, he also
consults privately in a variety of fields.
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