Foreword This report represents the findings of an international Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) of NGOs which travelled to Turkey from March 16-24 2003 to conduct research into the proposed Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline project. The FFM, consisting of representatives of the Kurdish Human Rights Project, Corner House, Platform and Campaign to Reform the World Bank and a UK barrister, conducted interviews in Ankara, travelled the length of the pipeline route from Sivas to Posof on the Georgian border and finished its inquiries in Istanbul. This is the second international FFM to visit the Turkish section of the route; in addition to meeting with NGOs and parliamentary bodies, it returned to several villages and towns visited during the first FFM in July 2002, as well as visiting the north-east of Turkey for the first time. It was in this region that the FFM discovered issues of greatest concern. The north-east is not a predominantly Kurdish area, but it has a large minority Kurdish population of over 40%. In a sense, this is the worst of both worlds: the Kurds of the north-east are exposed to the same systematic repressions and human rights violations by the Turkish state as their counterparts in the south-east, but are neither numerically dominant or politically experienced enough to organise effectively against them. The region feels isolated and the people largely cowed by the omnipresence of the state security forces. It is telling that the FFM itself was detained twice during the course of its stay without explanation. The local people the FFM managed to interview before the intrusion of the gendarmerie confirmed that this kind of constant state pressure was entirely the norm in the region. In this context, the whole practice and idea of ‘consultation’ is fundamentally invalidated— there can be no such thing as a legitimate request for consent (or even opinion) when it is effectively impossible to say no without the likelihood of serious consequences. In an environment where the penalties for dissent are well-known, it is highly unlikely that objections will be aired. In that context, by using their consultation procedures to legitimise the project, the BTC consortium (BTC Co.) is adding a veneer of collective participation to what is essentially another state-led imposition on local people. The FFM also found that although some improvements in compensation and consultation had taken place in areas highlighted by the first FFM report, a wide array of serious problems remains in both the project documents themselves and in their implementation, particularly in the north-east. Evidence suggests that many of the solutions claimed by BTC Co. simply do not exist in practice; the RAP Fund, for example, ostensibly set up to compensate customary land users without formal title, is entirely unknown in the region, and as a result those without title are going unpaid. Indeed, subsequent to the writing of this report, we have received evidence that BOTAS, the state pipeline company undertaking the Turkish section of BTC, is taking those customary users it has paid to court to try and recover the compensation they were awarded. This is truly extraordinary, and fundamentally contrary in both spirit and form to BTC Co.’s promise that no-one would be worse off as a result of the project.
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Environmental/ Human Rights