A BAKU "BREAKTHROUGH"

The leaders of Azerbaijan, Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Iran have never managed to agree on the legal status of the Caspian Sea, but this did not prevent the Baku summit from becoming the most fruitful in the history of the talks.  Surprising many people, the participants in the third summit of the heads of the Caspian basin states reached agreement on many issues on which there has been no consensus for many years.

An important outcome of the Baku summit was the adoption of a comprehensive agreement on security problems in the Caspian.  This document was the second important document to be signed by the heads of the Caspian region nations after the framework convention on protection of the sea environment, which was signed in Tehran in 2003.  It delineates the responsibilities of states in the struggle against common challenges -- terrorist threats, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, illegal trafficking of narcotics and so on.  The document declares that security in the Caspian region is a matter to be addressed by the littoral nations exclusively.

The neighbours also decided to instruct appropriate departments to coordinate territorial waters of 24 nautical miles within three months, including sovereign zones, and to prepare documents for the declaration of a five-year moratorium on fishing for sturgeon in the Caspian basin.

The parties described the Baku agreements as a breakthrough and said that by the next summit, the legal status of the Caspian Sea would be coordinated.

"The documents signed are a very important step in the development of cooperation in the Caspian basin and in the process of coordinating issues which have not been addressed yet, in particular an agreement on the legal status of the Caspian, which we are trying to sign as soon as possible," said summit host, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev.

"We had not been able to reach agreement:  some people insisted on a zone of 38 nautical miles, others suggested 25, 10, 20 miles....  But we consulted experts and decided that the zone should be 24-25 nautical miles.  This is a breakthrough," said Kazakhstani President Nursultan Nazarbayev, for his part.

Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who proposed the completion of determination of the legal status of the Caspian in 2011, was even more specific.  He also urged the Caspian nations to create a joint shipping company and establish closer ties in the fields of culture and tourism.

Russian president Dmitriy Medvedev also voiced hope that it would be possible to reach final agreement on the status and delimitation of the Caspian at the next summit in Russia, which might take place next year.

Incidentally, the agreement on security in the Caspian Sea, which was signed in Baku, was a special development for Moscow, which insists on the inadmissibility allowing third countries into the region.  "We alone are responsible for the situation in the Caspian, we alone and no one else," President Dmitriy Medvedev said.  "Otherwise other states might become involved in our business, which have nothing to do with the Caspian but which are interested in gaining a foothold here to address their own economic and, sometimes, even political problems."

The Russian president proposed an acceleration of the work to create transport corridors in the Caspian region and eventually build a canal connecting the Caspian Sea with the Black and Azov seas, and he suggested that all major energy projects should be discussed by the "Caspian five" first and approved unanimously.

At the same time, the Russian media reported that Moscow's attempt to include in the final joint statement of the leaders of the Caspian region a proposal to create an Organization of the Caspian Economic Cooperation turned out to be unsuccessful.  Other leaders did not support the Russian leader's initiative that no decision that could change the economic or environmental balance in the region should be taken without the proposed organization's approval.

Sources of the Russian newspaper Kommersant in the Russian government say that the organization was intended to be a catalyst for processes of integration in the region, a "sort of Caspian CIS or Eurasian Economic Community (Eurasec)."

So, the Baku summit has again demonstrated that Russia views the Caspian region as a priority zone for its national interests and does its best to prevent the United States and European countries from entering the region.

It is no accident that, to all appearances, Moscow sees the main threat as coming from the Transcaspian gas pipeline project, which is to transport Turkmenistani gas through the EU-lobbied Nabucco pipeline.  Especially as, given the decrease in supply of Turkmen gas to Russia, Ashgabat increasingly supports Western-lobbied export routes.  Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow was the only leader among the five who mentioned at the concluding press conference his readiness to build the Transcaspian pipeline.  In his opinion, the building of energy pipelines should be decided only by the participants in these projects.  "Oil and gas pipelines should be built only with the agreement of those countries through whose national sectors they will run, with strict observance of environmental issues," said Berdimuhamedow, thereby confirming that Ashgabat would first and foremost have to seek Baku's approval.  And to secure it, Turkmenistan will need to be more amenable on the issue of dividing the sea into sectors.

President Ilham Aliyev noted that Baku can offer its modern infrastructure to its neighbours to transport the oil and gas resources of the Caspian Sea.  Naturally, this statement was intended for the Turkmen and Kazakhstani presidents.  Especially as Ashgabat is ready to supply up to 40 billion cubic metres of gas a year.

It is notable that the day after the summit, Turkmen Deputy Prime Minister Bayrammyrat Hojamuhammedow said that Ashgabat had enlisted support from the majority of Caspian countries to build a gas pipeline along the bottom of the Caspian Sea, although its status was still not agreed.

Russia and Iran probably do not belong to the majority mentioned by the Turkmen deputy prime minister.  Although in Iran's current geopolitical situation, support from its Caspian neighbours is quite important to Tehran.  It is not surprising that after the meeting with the president of Azerbaijan, the Iranian leader placed emphasis precisely on the foreign political aspect of relations between the countries in the region, noting in conversation with journalists that the "views of Baku and Tehran on international problems fully coincide" and that "we will always be by each other's side and support each other in all organizations."  Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also stressed that Iran and Azerbaijan have "identical views regarding the region and the Caspian."  Bearing all this in mind, a softening of Iran's position on the legal status of the Caspian Sea also seems quite realistic.

But still, in discussing Caspian-related issues, it is impossible to omit the controversies which exist within the region and which hinder the process of determining the sea's legal status.  Azerbaijan urges its neighbours to take the bilateral agreements on delimitation of the sea bed between Azerbaijan, Russia and Kazakhstan as a basis.  "I hope that in the future, our positive experience will be taken as a basis and play a role in determining the status," President Aliyev said during the summit, reminding the audience of the bilateral agreements on delimiting the national sectors of the Caspian between Azerbaijan and Russia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan and Russia and Kazakhstan.

Let us remind our readers that in 1998, an agreement was signed by Russia and Kazakhstan, in 2001 -- by Russia and Azerbaijan, and in November 2001 -- by Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan.  In 2003, the same three countries signed an agreement on the point of convergence of the lines of delimitation of the bordering regions of the sea bed.  The latter document legally defines (in trilateral format) the legal status of about 60% of the total territory of the sea.