THE CASPIAN'S PARTICULAR AILMENT

In subduing the expanses of the seas and oceans over the course of time, people have learnt to cope with sea sickness effectively by airing the premises, being careful what they eat and doing special exercises, so that the sea sickness gradually gets less. Modern civilisation has simplified this process by taking two travel sickness pills before setting sail. This solution was not arrived at immediately, but by trial and error, after quite a few worthy gentlemen and others on ships had been lost.

But these pills, like the special exercises, do not help on the Caspian at all. Here the sickness is a special one not known to science at the moment. Viktor Kalyuzhnyy, head of "Caspian science and innovations" has tried to designate it somehow. Sailing the expanses of the Caspian, he may not have managed to plough the sea, but for many years now he has worked as the Russian president's [Vladimir Putin] special representative in charge of regulating Caspian Sea status issues. This has obviously not been an easy job, if it is taken into account that the status has still not been clearly defined for a period of 20 years now.

 "We cannot just sit on the fence, we cannot restrict ourselves to protocol matters. We are suffering from some kind of cautiousness. We are at a standstill. We should take a critical look at ourselves and our stand.  In the Caspian dialogue we should make our first priority the slogan 'Let's all work together to save the Caspian!' Primarily this relates to the environment," Viktor Kalyuzhnyy said, speaking off the cuff, at the "Caspian Dialogue 2015" International Economic Forum held in Moscow on 15 April.  

 In total 260 million people live in the Caspian Sea states and, according to the statistical data, 15 million of them live off the Caspian Sea's resources. In the course of a single generation, all these millions of people have been observing the slow, but inevitable destruction of the unique fauna and flora of their native sea, or is it lake? They are not aware that it is a lake from an international legislation standpoint. In particular, the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea cannot be applied to it. It never even crosses their minds that a legal precedent should be in force here. But no-one informs the seals about it in particular. You see, for example, in the spring and summer of the year 2000, according to reports from Kazakhstan's Ministry of the Environment, 10,500 seals mysteriously perished. Independent Kazakh environmentalists say that around 30,000 actually perished.

In 1985 an oil and gas spill occurred at the Tengiz oil and gas field. It took more than a year to put the gigantic conflagration out. In that time 3.4m tonnes of oil, 1,7bn cu m of gas, and 900,000 tonnes of soot were released into the atmosphere over a radius of 400 km. And this was in the north-eastern Caspian conservation area which is a sturgeon spawning-ground.

According to reports in the Azerbaijani press, in 1998 something like 30,000 birds perished on the bird sanctuary island near the Absheron peninsula. The residents of the northern littoral zones of Kazakhstan have a two- to four-times higher incidence of diseases of the blood and haematopoietic organs than the average for the republic. The list of victims of environmental crimes in the Caspian is endless.

According to world-wide statistics, 7-9 per cent of the oil extracted from the sea bed is spilt into the waters owing to accidents, leaky pipelines and storage tanks. On average, during the development of marine oil fields 30-120 tonnes of oil leak out from a single borehole. Altogether one tonne of oil can cover an area of up to 12 sq. km of the sea surface.

For several dozen years now, old moth-balled boreholes and those being exploited today have been polluting the Caspian with oil to such an extent that everything living has disappeared from the waters around the oil rigs. Terek has to put up with large volumes oil from the territory of Chechnya. Huge amounts of poisons are brought into the Caspian by the river Volga. According to data from the head of the Rosprirodnadzor [Russia's Enviro-nmental Protection Agency Regulator], Natalya Sokolova, 40 per cent of Russia's industrial enterprises are located in the Volga basin. All of theme release their chemical wastes into the river in incredible quantities.  But Russia's Environmental Protection Agency Regulator does not have the right to inspect the enterprises and, according to Sokolova, an endless competition is being fought between the entrepreneurs' lawyers who are seeking out loopholes in the Russian legislation and the Russian Environmental Protection Agency Regulator which is trying to close them. Even if they do manage to call the enterprises to account, the figures involved are just laughable; for example, in three months of this year, fines worth just over 14,000 dollars were levied and they only managed to recover 10 times less. These enterprises themselves have turnovers of many billions [of dollars]. The businessmen are not shy about admitting that it is more advantageous to them to pay the fines than to spend money on purification installations.

Sokolova responded in an emotional manner to Kaluzhnyy's rather impolite comment on the Russian Environmental Protection Agency Regulator's incompetence by saying that their organisation was especially kept "on a short leash" and was not permitted, as the lady in epaulettes put it, "to create nightmares for business" which brings income into the treasury

In his speech at the forum, Kaluzhnyy himself stressed the threat of an ecological disaster on a planetary scale posed by the development of the Tengiz and Kashagan oil fields in Kazakhstan, since the oil extracted there has a high hydrogen sulphide content. But the development of oil fields in other parts of the Caspian is just as dangerous.

These issues were raised at the forum, and a separate session was even devoted to them. But the impression was created that it was all just a box-ticking exercise. The speakers droned on, reading from their notes; the audience who filled one third of the oval room in the library of the Russian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, were openly yawning, tinkering with their mobile phones or simply dozing off. It seemed that if any of the speakers even uttered a phrase like "saving the seals is up to the seals themselves" no-one would have taken the slightest bit of notice.

Work is being conducted on improving the contractual and legislative basis of the five-sided cooperation. The Astrakhan summit last September ended in a number of further agreements "On the conservation and rational use of the aqueous biological resources", "On dealing with emergency situations in the Caspian" and "On cooperation in hydrometeorology". Before this, an agreement was ratified on safety cooperation in the Caspian. This is primarily in relation to preventing terrorism, combating illegal drug trafficking and putting a stop to poaching, already a political and economic component of the cooperation among the five Caspian countries, Igor Bratchikov, the Russian president's special representative for delimitation and demarcation of Russia's state boundaries within the CIS [Commonwealth of Independent States] reported at the forum.

During the Astrakhan summit of heads of the Caspian states "interesting proposals were made on stepping up production cooperation, setting up a permanently operating Caspian economic forum and Caspian logistical centre and forming a free-trade zone in the region. Economic cooperation issues were the main topic at a special conference for business circles attended by the heads of the leading companies whose interests are concentrated in the Caspian region. A packed subject-related discussion was held on transport, the banking sector, the development of tourism and the service sphere," Igor Bratchikov went on to stress.

It sounds weighty and highly promising, but here is the unlucky part about it. In the view of Mahmoud Shouri, the director of the Eurasian study department of the Iranian Centre for Strategic Studies, owing to the absence of controlling structures within the framework of any regional organisations, the accords would not lead to any results. The analyst thought that, owing to the differences existing among the littoral states with regard to the Caspian's legal status, many opportunities were missed, which only resulted in the emergence of new problems.

Thus, everything is based on the fact that the legal status of the Caspian has not been defined. From the moment that the Soviet Union collapsed the leaders of the Caspian countries have invariably been reiterating their firm desire to cut "the Gordian knot" of interstate relations. But for the moment only three countries have more or less legally formulated relations. In May 2003 Russia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan divided up 64 per cent of the northern waters of the Caspian into three parts. Kazakhstan got 27 per cent, Russian 19 per cent and Azerbaijan 18 per cent. Even now relations between Iran and Russia with regard to the Caspian are defined by agreements from 1921 and the 1940s.

In October 1992 at a meeting in Tehran the heads of state of the five Caspian states discussed the issue of setting up a Caspian Economic Cooperation Organisation for the first time. Azerbaijan was opposed to it, proposing that the legal status of the Caspian should be defined to begin with. In the future the idea of an organisation like this was put forward by Russia and Iran in turns. But Turkmenistan was opposed to it. There were ideas both about the setting up of a joint oil company (1995-1996), which would develop the oil fields located outside of their territorial waters and on the institution of an interstate bank. But none of these proposals went through because the Caspian does not have a legal status

In the opinion of many of the experts involved in the negotiating process, this issue will not be resolved until Iran approves the stand of the other countries. For the moment it is demanding that the Caspian be divided up into five equal parts, to coincide with the number of countries on its shores.

It does not matter which sphere of Caspian cooperation you touch upon, everything depends on the unresolved legal status, even in a sphere like tourism apparently.  Presenting the opportunities for tourism in Azerbaijan at the forum, the spokesman for the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Mahir Qahramanov, proposed to his colleagues supporting the idea of Caspian cruises making calls at all five countries. In a conversation with Regionplus, he admitted that without the support of the neighbouring countries round the sea, this idea cannot be realised for many reasons, including legal ones. We did not discuss possible complications linked with environmental pollution of the Caspian, since you need to get like-minded countries together first. Well, as they say, "there is seven feet of water under the keel"!

I think that future cruise travellers will not be afraid of ordinary sea sickness, because the first-aid kits in every cabin will contain the necessary pills. But ordinary doctors cannot help in treating the Caspian's particular ailment. Specialists are needed here. Let us hope that by the time the first steamship sets sail on its voyage around the Caspian, the sea that we share will manage to rid itself of the ailment forced upon it.