IN THIS ISSUE:

* Russian gas cut off reinforces importance of Azeri gas to European markets
* Ergenekon prosecutors to investigate unsolved murders in the Kurdish region
* EDM Commentary by Taras Kuzio: Russian territorial claims against Ukraine: A double-edged sword?

Rush for Nabucco: Azerbaijan’s Position Strengthens

Fariz Ismailzade

On January 22 President of Bulgaria Georgi Parvanov paid a one-day visit to Baku. The issue on the agenda was obvious: diversification of the gas supply to the EU and making Caspian gas available to EU households. Discussions with President Ilham Aliyev were very useful; and Bulgaria, together with Greece and Italy, are expected to become the first purchasers of Azerbaijani gas from the Shah Deniz field. The Visit of the President of Bulgaria to Azerbaijan was connected to the gas conflict between Russia and Ukraine,” Azerbaijan’s Minister for Foreign Affairs Elmar Mammadyarov told journalists on January 21 (APA News Agency).

This, however, is neither the first nor last visit of an EU official to Azerbaijan. Prior to Parvanov, EU Commissar for External Affairs Benito Ferrero-Waldner visited Baku and described the EU’s new Eastern Partnership initiative in relations with several countries in the region, including Azerbaijan. This initiative is likely to draw Azerbaijan closer to the EU, both politically and in terms of the economy and energy. Other presidents and prime ministers from the EU are scheduled to travel to Baku, and the Hungarian government has already announced plans to open an embassy there (www.day.az, January 23).

The recent gas crisis between Ukraine and Russia is portrayed in Moscow political circles as a victory for the Kremlin, which had once again successfully demonstrated Russia’s importance for the energy security and economy of EU member states. In the long run, however, this crisis might well hit Russia hard, as the EU starts looking for alternative sources of gas and oil for its domestic consumers. The unreliability of Russia as an energy partner for the EU became evident in 2005 and 2006 with respective shut-downs of gas exports through Ukraine and Belarus. This time, however, the crisis was deeper and had a wider impact in European capitals; and subsequently, the position of Azerbaijan as a potential alternative supplier and transporter of natural gas for the EU is rising day by day.

On January 26 Aliyev left for Hungary to participate in the Nabucco summit. Heads of state and government of several EU countries will also participate in the event. The presence of Aliyev in this important but politically sensitive event once again proves that Azerbaijan’s foreign policy is independent and that Aliyev is willing to take risks when the national interests of his country are at stake. Russia opposes this summit and the whole Nabucco project, and President Aliyev is showing a great deal of courage by taking part in this important meeting.

Meanwhile Iran, another fierce opponent of Azerbaijan’s energy cooperation with the EU, spoke against the trans-Caspian pipelines. Deputy Minister of Oil Hossein Noqrekar-Shirazi said that “Iran is against the construction of pipelines under the seabed of the Caspian sea, because it might damage the environmental balance of the sea” (RosBusinessConsulting news agency, January 25). Without such pipelines, including the gas pipeline from Turkmenistan, Nabucco’s fate would be questionable. Turkmenistan, with the fifth largest gas reserves in the world, is seen as one of the main elements in the Nabucco pipeline.

In an interview with www.day.az on January 22, Latif Gandilov, Azerbaijan’s ambassador to Kazakhstan, highlighted the importance of Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan for EU energy consumers: “We see that the West pays more and more attention to those countries that can potentially become pivotal members of the Nabucco pipeline, including Azerbaijan and countries of Central Asia.”

It is clear that the chances for the Nabucco project have dramatically risen after the recent tension between Kiev and Moscow. The Romanian Ambassador in Baku, Nicolae Ureke, said, “In my opinion, the future of Nabucco is very bright” (www.day.az January 26). Yet, much work lies ahead in order for the project to materialize. Most of all, the EU must engage in a very courageous dialogue with Russia and prevent future threats from Russia toward the South Caucasus and Central Asian republics. Attacks on the energy infrastructure, similar to those that took place last August during the Georgian-Russia war, should not be tolerated. If they were to happen again, it would discourage political leaders, as well as Azerbaijan and Central Asia, from investing in the East-West energy corridor.

Significant support will be needed both politically and financially for the Nabucco pipeline. The EU has been too slow until now on these fronts. Without backing from the EU, private companies will not move ahead with the project. The European Union must support the governments in the region and attract additional funding in order to carry out the Nabucco pipeline and finally end the EU’s energy dependence on Russia.

The Ergenekon Investigation May Reveal JITEM’s Dirty Past

Emrullah Uslu

The investigation of the neo-nationalist criminal Ergenekon network involving military and police officers, politicians, media members, labor union leaders, and political strategists is continuing. In the 11th wave of arrests, on January 22, 40 people were detained including 10 police officers, nine active duty military officers, and a union leader accused of being one of the network’s financiers (CNNTurk, January 22). It was claimed that among those arrested were two assassination teams consisting of police officers from special forces units and the military (Sabah, January 22). At the same time, new evidence has been revealed that has turned public opinion against the Ergenekon network. According to a poll conducted by the A&G polling company, 61.7 percent of the respondents believed that Ergenekon existed, 20.3 percent said they believed there was no such crime network, and 18 percent were undecided (Milliyet, January 27).

With the recent wave of arrests, the direction of the investigation has tuned to unsolved political murders committed throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. One of the witnesses in the Ergenekon trial testified that a key Ergenekon suspect, retired General Veli Kucuk, personally ordered the assassination of the secular academic Necip Hablemitoglu in 2002 (Today’s Zaman, January 28). The Ergenekon trial will determine whether the witness’s claim is true, but the debate over Ergenekon has finally turned to the state’s policies toward the Kurds in the 1990s. Abdulkadir Aygan, a former member of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and later a member of the clandestine gendarmerie intelligence unit known as JİTEM, confessed to the media that when retired Colonel Abdulkerim Kirca was the head of JITEM in Diyarbakir, the unit conducted dozens of executions (Star, January 19). Since then, Aygan has been living in Stockholm for fear of his life. The following day, Kirca committed suicide (Star, January 20). Chief of General Staff General Ilker Basbug, armed forces commanders, and a large number of military officers attended Kirca’s funeral in what was apparently a show of solidarity by the military for its members (Hurriyet, January 21). The Turkish Armed Forces issued a statement saying, “the media with its untrue stories judges people and drives them to tragedies. The authorities should act to stop this irresponsible media coverage” (www.tsk.mil.tr. January 21).

As was to be expected, the media continued giving attention to Aygan’s confession. Aygan claimed that JITEM had executed between 600 and 700 Kurds in the 1990s and that “JİTEM operations always ended in death.…those who were reported to JİTEM as having any relationship with the PKK were executed” (Taraf, January 27).

In addition, Kurdish activists have started demanding that the acid wells of BOTAS, the Turkish petroleum company, be emptied, because former Ergenekon members have claimed that JITEM dumped some of its victims in them (Today’s Zaman, January 16, Bugun, January 28). The Kurdish nationalist Democratic Society Party (DTP) asked parliament to request that the authorities investigate the unsolved murders in southeastern Turkey. In response, the justice minister indicated that if there were solid reasons to support digging out the acid wells, he would consider investigating the claims (Radikal, January 21).

With the possibility of establishing a relationship between Ergenekon and some of the unsolved murders and PKK operations in the Kurdish region, the Ergenekon prosecutors asked the court in Diyarbakir to send the files of the JITEM trial in which 11 accused JITEM members have been tried in the last 10 years without producing a conviction (Referans, January 28).

Moreover, the Ergenekon prosecutors have asked the court to send the files on Brigadier General Bahtiyar Aydin who was mysteriously assassinated in town of Lice in Diyarbakir Province in 1993 and the files of colonel Ridban Ozden, whose murder in Mardin Province in 1995 was blamed on the PKK, a theory that is rejected by many including Ozden’s wife (Sabah, January 28).

It still remains to be seen how Ergenekon prosecutors will connect the murders in the Kurdish region in the 1990s with the arrested Ergenekon suspects and the buried ammunition found after the last two waves of Ergenekon arrests in January. Another claim that is being circulated about the Ergenekon network is that it plotted assassinations and killings to put the country into chaos in preparation for a possible military coup. While an opinion poll conducted by A&G polling company in second half of January shows that a majority of the people believe that Ergenekon is a criminal network operating outside the boundaries of the law, it is still a difficult task for the prosecutors to prove Ergenekon involvement in the incidents that took place in the past (Milliyet, January 27).

**EDM Commentary
Territorial Claims Can Work Two Ways: Russia and Ukraine

By Taras Kuzio

The majority of Western comments on territorial claims arising from the breakup of the USSR focus on Russia’s demands against its neighbors. The best known, such as the Crimea and frozen conflicts in the Caucasus, are frequently mentioned in the Western media. Added to this are Russian comments that repeatedly have focused on the alleged “artificiality” of post-Soviet borders. Ukraine in particular is pointed out by Russian officials as an allegedly “artificial” and thereby “fragile” state.

These Western media reports and Russian comments overlook two facts: First, potential territorial revisions exist throughout the former USSR; and second, all of the borders of the 15 post-Soviet republics, especially the Russian Federation, are “arbitrary” and “artificial.” Countless post-colonial frontiers throughout the world are of a similar nature, and this is more the rule than the exception.

Belarus made territorial claims against Lithuania in the 1990s and Estonia and Russia have sparred over their border, the treaty for which was signed but never ratified by the Russian State Duma. The Trans-Dniestr region of Moldova, a frozen conflict since 1992, was part of the inter-war Ukrainian SSR as the Moldovan Autonomous Soviet Republic. Similar potential territorial disputes abound in the North Caucasus (e.g., Chechnya and Ingushetia), the South Caucasus (Georgia and Armenia), and Central Asia (Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan).

The most “artificial” post-Soviet republic is Russia, which was established as the residual home for what remained of the Tsarist empire after the non-Russian republics were created. Post-Soviet Russia could not return to the borders of a pre-imperial Russian nation-state because none had ever existed. Unlike England and France, which were nation-states before becoming empires, Russian city-states merged into Muscovy before it emerged as an empire in the eighteenth century.

Russia therefore resembles the Ottoman Empire inasmuch as the Turks also had no pre-imperial nation-state to fall back on when their empire collapsed after World War I. The difference between the Turks and the Russians is that a nationalist leader, Kemal Ataturk, came forward and forged a new Turkish nation-state, while no “Ataturk” appeared in late Soviet Russia and, unlike his Turkish or Ukrainian counterparts, President Boris Yeltsin never prioritized nation-building.

Alone of the 15 Soviet republics, the Russian SFSR has never declared independence from the USSR. Russia’s annual “independence day” is therefore a myth, as it derives from the June 1990 declaration of sovereignty within the USSR.

Three decades prior to the transfer of the Crimea in 1954 from the Russian SFSR to the Ukrainian SSR, larger territories were transferred from Ukraine to Russia. The Ukrainian-Russian border was the subject of confrontation between the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917 and the territorial adjustments made in the two years after the creation of the USSR in 1922.

Ukraine’s pro-independence governments fought with the White and Bolshevik forces who both opposed the creation of an independent Ukraine. Although the Volunteer Army of the Whites was dominated by the liberal Kadets, they defended Russia’s unity and indivisibility, opposed a federally reconstituted empire, and especially denounced “Little Russian” (Ukrainian) autonomy, let alone forging an independent state separate from Russia.

The Starodub region northeast of Chernihiv Oblast was part of Ukraine under the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk but was transferred to Russia. Other areas with ethnic Ukrainian majorities transferred to Russia were Kursk and Voronezh Oblasts east of the Ukrainian oblasts of Sumy, Kharkiv, and Luhansk. The Taganrog region of Russia’s Rostov Oblast, east of Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast, was also contested by Ukraine and Russia. These areas adjacent to the border of the Ukrainian SSR were claimed by Kyiv, because they were 65 to 75 percent ethnic Ukrainian and, together the Kuban, contained two million Ukrainians (see three maps in Vasyl Boyechko et al, Kordony Ukrainy: Istorychna Retrospektyva ta Suchasnyi Stan, Kyiv, 1994).

The Kuban region of Russia’s Northern Caucasus had been populated by the Ukrainian (Black Sea) Cossacks from the eighteenth century. After the Ukrainian Cossack State was absorbed under Catherine the Great into the Tsarist empire, Ukrainian Cossack forces were disbanded, except in the Kuban. There Ukrainian Cossacks were permitted to maintain the only Ukrainian Cossack unit (the “Kuban Cossack Host”) until the end of Tsarist rule; it was one of 12 Cossack armies in the Russian Empire.

From 1917 to 1920 political forces in the Kuban supported opposing tendencies, some backing the White armies while others called for unification with independent Ukraine. The large ethnic Ukrainian majority in the Kuban gave rise to territorial demands by Ukrainian national communists who ran Ukraine until the imposition of Joseph Stalin’s great terror in the late 1920s and early 1930s and an artificial famine in Ukraine in 1933.

The famine was permitted to spread from Ukraine and devastated the largely ethnic Ukrainian Kuban region. This, coupled with the replacement of Ukrainian by Russian in the schools starting in 1934, transformed the Kuban’s ethnic composition. The Kuban became Russified during the course of the following decades, although Ukrainian-language pronunciations can still be heard in local spoken Russian (for example. Mikhail Gorbachev’s Russian).

The 1989 Soviet census gave a total of 44.2 million Ukrainians in the USSR of whom 37.4 million lived in the Ukrainian SSR. Of the 6.8 million living elsewhere, the largest group was 3.7 million in the Russian SFSR.

Aside from 247,000 Ukrainians who were living in Moscow, a similarly large number lived in the Tyumen Oblast of Western Siberia. They had arrived in the Leonid Brezhnev era to provide technical expertise in gas exploration (Ukraine was an important center of gas expertise in the former USSR, especially in western Ukraine. where gas storage facilities are located).

Russia, in recognizing the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, has opened up a potential Pandora’s Box of territorial claims throughout the former USSR that could backfire on Moscow.

**Taras Kuzio is Visiting Professor at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University. His most recent books are Ukraine-Crimea-Russia. Triangle of Conflict and Theoretical and Comparative Perspectives on Nationalism: New Directions (both by Hannover: Ibid.-Verlag, 2007).

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