There is no place in the world like the Bosphorus Strait. It divides two continents. Dolphins and 33 other marine species migrate down its biological corridor. Three millennia of battles and civilizations have erupted on its shores. A fifth of Turkey’s gross national product comes out of its waters. Five times the amount of ships pass through the Bosphorus than the Panama Canal ever year, and two million people commute across it every day. (Oral, Ece 94)
The Bosphorus’ uniqueness endangers it as much as it distinguishes. The masses of vessels choking the strait have generated economic prosperity and political importance, but petrochemical globalization has turned the traffic into a heavy history of scarring pollution. Oil, bodies and chemicals have sank, dripped, gushed, burnt, and exploded on the Bosphorus, combining with the offal of 12 million citizens along its shores. The Bosphorus’ importance to foreign states has stifled Turkish regulatory attempts to prevent accidents.
The strait is known as an “acclimatization zone” where marine and avian species traveling between the Mediterranean and the Black Seas adjust to new waters in the Sea of Marmara. Fish hatched in the Aegean traverse the Bosphorus in spring, followed by birds and dolphins, and return in the autumn. Without the “stepping stone” ecology of the strait, 150 zoobenthic species wouldn’t be able to gradually adapt to the saltiness of the Black Sea. (Oral, Ozturk 119)
SPILL LEDGER
Old are the legends warning of the danger passing through the Bosphorus. The Argonauts knew the strait as The Clashing Rocks, uncrossed before Jason followed his dove. Ships have to change course 15 times to travel between the Black and Mediterranean Sea, and taking on a pilot specifically trained for the strait is recommended. Fast currents flow opposite each other to and from the Black and Mediterranean Seas. Fog blankets, whipping winds, and snowfalls hinder navigation. It’s a deadly road, but 55,000 take it every year.
Four thousand years ago, Agamemnon and a thousand black ships sailed to the legendary Anatolian city of Troy alongside the Sea of Marmara. His mythical fleet pales compared to the modern millions choking the strait every day. Their density, combined with the inherent dangers of the Bosphorus, has led to nearly 700 accidents in the narrow strait since 1948, according to Istanbul’s ministry of Environment and Forestry.
“The Bosphorus Strait is the most dangerous waterway in the world,” states the report, a decades-long catalogue of ruination.
The Bosphorus hosted the tenth worst oil spill in history. The collision of the Greek Eviriali and the Romanian Independenta on November 15th, 1979 killed 43 people, released 94,600 tons of Libyan crude oil into the strait, and burned until December 14th. Twenty-two days after the collision and a failed containment attempt by the Turkish Navy, the Independenta exploded, delivering 380 barrels of oil to the port of Hydarpasa (NOAA/HMRAD). The Independenta spill killed 96% of the bottom-feeders of the northern Sea of Marmara. Only nine species survived (Oral, Ozturk 120).
In 1994, the Cyprian Nassia wreck claimed 28 lives and left 33,500 tons of petroleum trapped in the narrow strait. Eight harbor porpoises, two common dolphins and two bottlenose dolphins were stranded and 1,500 seabirds died (Oral, Oztruk 120). Compared to the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill near the coast of Anchorage, Alaska, where 35,000 tons of oil dissipated into the North Atlantic, the Nassi and Independenta spill were disastrously trapped. The banks of the Bosphorus confine marine pollution, its geologic formation corrals the damage. (Turkish Marine Research Foundation)
Disaster doesn’t have to be flammable black gold, though. When the Lebanese Rabunion-18 collided with Filipino Madonna Lily in 1991, three crewmembers sank with a flock of sheep. The decomposing bodies of 20,000 woolen bovines and three men consumed the strait's surrounding oxygen, creating a hypoxic dead zone where striped red mullet, Japanese snails, blue mussels, and sand shrimps died en masse. (Unlu 60)
RESPONSE
After nearly a decade of explosive disasters, Turkey responded with science, infrastructure, investment and legislation in 1994.
Istanbul’s Ministry of Environment and Forestry produced a study called “The Effect of Dense Maritime Traffic On the Bosphorus Strait and Marmara Sea Pollution.” The report prescribes prevention and describes a vital environment endangered by incremental pollution and cataclysmic maritime accidents.
The biggest fear for Istanbul, a UNESCO World Heritage Site with 12 million citizens, is a toxic supertanker oozing on its shores. The multibillion-dollar accident would severely damage the entire nation (Akiner, Adams 99). With the wreckage strewn history of the strait and the projected future of its traffic, it is no wonder Ankara and Istanbul are alarmed.
The disaster potential is increasing size and voracity. Dangerous cargo traffic –tankers holding nuclear waste and refined petrochemical products – doubled from 2000 to 2004, according to the Turkish Maritime Research Foundation (TMRF). Coupled with exponentially growing Caspian oil exports, the Bosphorus’ present is an inundated economic passageway with a frightening future.
INTERNATIONAL DUTY, NATIONAL RIGHT
Nassia, Independenta and Rabunion occurred in waters with no legal protection. Ankara blamed the lack for Bosphorus’ poisonous past, and critiqued the international legal regime as responsible. Imposed upon the newly independent Turkish state in 1936, and one of the longest lasting of its kind, the Montreaux Convention was designed to balance Russian and Western spheres of influence after the Great War. The nearly lawless zone it creates exists to this day.
In the early days of the secular republic, the menace Montreaux allowed wasn’t obvious. Petrochemicals were not the lifeblood of industrial civilization in 1936, but it was well on its way. As “the blood of the earth” became increasingly connected to global society in the 20th Century, the Bosphorus’ geographic location made it one of the major global fossil fuel energy corridors: oil out of Baku in the Caspian Sea or Russia had to traverse the strait. The thickening toxic traffic resulted in major accidents like the Independenta, Nassia, and Rabunion.
After nearly a decade of high-profile disasters, Turkish policymakers began criticizing Montreaux as outdated. What began as a way for the Great Powers to balance the geopolitical scales in Anatolia became a negligent framework for dealing with the rising problems shipping oil. Under Montreaux, free passage through the strait was basically a “free-good” charged to Turkey. After continual ruinous maritime catastrophes, costing Turkey millions of dollars and irrevocably damage to the Sea of Marmara, the price tag became too much.
Ankara spent $10 million in 1994 to make transit along the Bosphorus safer for merchants and dolphins alike. The Turkish Straits Vessel Traffic System (VTS) is a series of tugboats, pilots, radar towers and checkpoints to guide ships through the unpredictably navigable but predictably dangerous Bosphorus. Turks operate closed circuit cameras, Doppler current and surface water measurement sensors, salinity and temperature profilers, automatic weather stations, and GPS equipment to track ships, monitor the currents and winds, and assist navigation.
Montreaux doesn’t require use of the VTS, despite its obvious benefits to economic and environmental security. Vessels can ignore the VTS and refuse Turkish pilots specifically trained to maneuver the Bosphorus’ currents and curves because of the optional stipulations of Montreaux. (Oral, Orakci 62)
“Are we going to wait for another disaster instead of using tug boats and engaging a pilot?” asks Salih Orakci in the Turkish Marine Research Foundation publication The Turkish Straits.
The oil nightmare nearly became reality two days before the end of the 20th Century, despite the VTS. Raging winds ran the Russian tanker Volganeft 248 aground, gouging one of its tanks. Five kilometers of coastline was coated with 1,200 tons of fuel oil, 3,000 gulls and cormorants died, and 90% of the area’s marine life was killed (Oral, Ozturk 121). The leaked oil made its way to the shores of a residential district, a wetland reserve, and a freshwater reservoir for Istanbul. The city’s head of coastal safety administration, Hucum Talgar told Scotland’s The Herald that Turkey wants to limit heavy tanker traffic on the Bosphorus. (The Herald)
“Of course we wish that tankers were not allowed through our straits,” Talgar said. “But this is an international issue.”
Talgar reflects Turkish frustration with international claims to a national resource.
Turkey proposed legal protections for the Bosphorus while installing the VTS. Ankara wanted to regulate vessel size, prohibit automatic pilots, track nuclear and hazardous cargos, draw navigation lanes, limit traffic during adverse weather, and require advanced registration for admittance in the Bosphorus. Russia and the other Black Sea States criticized the move as an assault on their authority under Montreux. Claiming regional rights, they argued the legislation would cut Black Sea states’ national profits. Bosphorus regulations would increase transportation costs for firms in Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Russia, and Georgia selling in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. With the discovery of major oil fields in the Caspian Sea, the critique hardened.
Ankara was accused of using environmental and public health overtures to pursue hidden self-interests (Dymond). Regulations would make pipelines, with no nasty currents or temperamental weather cycles, in Turkish territory economically feasible, and politically agreeable. When Moscow shut off the pipelines to Europe through the Ukraine because of a price dispute in 2006, the West acknowledged Moscow’s command of Caspian oil distribution. Hoping to avert another Independenta, seeking ascension to the European Union, and knowing the economic benefits of connecting the Caspian to the West, Turkish officials allied with Western investors hungry for an alternative to Russia. An overland route was drawn from Azerbaijin, through Georgia, to Turkey’s coast on the eastern Mediterranean. The proposed Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline was supported by America and Europe as an alternative to Russian delivery of Azeri crude.
The Black Sea state’s critique hardened. What might’ve started as Turkey protecting the Bosphorus and avoiding a billion-dollar disaster in Istanbul, turned into a geopolitical rumble between Ankara, Washington, Moscow, and British Petroluem.
THE EAGLE, THE BEAR AND THE WOLF
On July 13th, 2006, the massive British Hawthorn tanker pulled in the port of Adana in the northeastern Mediterranean to greet BP’s chief executive Lord Edmund Browne. He was beginning a new chapter in oil distribution: Azeri crude delivered to European markets through Turkey. He inaugurated the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline as “the first great engineering project of the 21st century."
Hawthorne loaded105,000 tonnes of oil piped 1,100 miles from Baku. BP estimates 400 such loads at Ceyhan – 770,000 barrels a day. The barrels will unload in Italian ports and gush through German pipelines towards European consumers. Azeri crude now competes with African producers in Italy, Spain and Germany.
With the decline of oil production in the North Sea and the impending economic jolt of peak oil, the BTC pipeline will undoubtedly be front and center in the 21st Century. The nature of Caspian oil distribution, with potential environmental cataclysms in the Black Sea, the Bosphorus and the Mediterranean, is chained to the economies of Europe. (Guliyeva 25)
"The commissioning of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline is a significant step in the long history of the oil industry. It reintegrates significant oil supplies from the Caspian into the global market for the first time in a century,” Browne said at Adana.
The pipeline was funded by a consortium of international companies led by Browne, and Turkmen governments who see the pipeline as a preferred alternative to Russian distribution monopoly in Caucus oil. Ankara’s alliance with the West against the Bear was cemented during the Cold War, but Turkey has been the setting for the Great Powers playing the Great Game since the end of The War to End All Wars.
“Whenever one of the Great Powers had not been able to acquire control directly or indirectly of the strait, it had confined itself to prevent a competitor from getting control,” wrote Nihan Unlu in his legal historical treatise on regulations of the Bosphorus, The Legal Regime of the Turkish Straits. After the Balkan Wars in 1913 and the Ottoman’s defeat in 1918, the Allies controlled Anatolia. While Istanbul was occupied, the Ottoman Sultan signed the treaty of Sevres, effectively curbing Turkish sovereignty on the Bosphorus and creating an international free passage zone. Sevres gradually morphed into the present order or the Montreaux Convention.
The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 divided Turkey among Greek, French, Italian and British spheres of influence. The Amasya Circular began Mustafa Kemal’s military campaign for Turkish Independence. After four years of military success, Kemal kicked out the Greeks and Allies from Anatolia and defeated Winston Churchill’s defensive strategy at Gallipoli. Kemal established the Republic of Turkey in 1923, ended the Caliphate and became Attaturk, Father of the Turks. The new government in Ankara demanded a new deal for the Bosphorus, criticizing the legitimacy of a Sultan’s signature in a secular republic.
The resulting Lausanne Convention satiated the new republic until World War 2. After victory was assured, Moscow and London acknowledged the other’s post-war strategies, and began vying for control of the Bosphorus.
Soviet warships wanted out of the Black Sea and unfettered access to the Mediterranean. British generals wanted to hold onto their colonies and investments in the Middle East and India. For decades, Russia lobbied for military bases and privileged rights along the Bosphorus. Turkey was only able to refuse with help from Washington and London, who feared communist victory in Greece, and tentacles in Libya, Yemen and Ethiopia. The Bosphorus became a focal point for Truman’s doctrine of Soviet containment. The Joint Chiefs of Staff believed the Bosphorus was a natural barrier to Russian encroachment in the Mediterranean, the Near East and beyond.
Noting communist action in Syria, Bulgaria and Greece, Washington believed the Soviets had inherited the Tsarist ambition for Tsargrad, the “imperial city” of Istanbul. Moscow wanted in the Bosphorus what London had in the Suez Canal, and Washington had in the Panama Canal. Ankara watched the Black Sea states incorporated into the USSR, and remembered the Crimean War and the Russian occupation of Eastern Turkey, and turned their attention to Western fraternity. The Wolf and Bear at odds.
The realignment has lasted into today. Both Turkey and Russia have supported the other’s dissidents. Russia hosts the Kurdistan Worker’s Party in Moscow and Turkey was charged with aiding Chechen rebels (Akin, Bolukbasi 220). Two of the largest oil spills in Turkish history have been caused by Russian mistakes, and recently, the northern Black Sea has been completely devastated by the inexcusable shortcuts taken by Russian oil distribution firms (Venyavsky).
The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline was built within a nearly Cold War mentality. The diplomatic targets for the West, Turkey and Russia are the Turkmen states housing the gigantic oil fields of the Caspian. Turkish cultural and language linkages to the Caucus nations lay untapped and in conflict to Moscow’s objective of incorporating the “near abroad” states lost with the dissolution of the Soviet Union into their sphere of influence.
The pipeline is a bandage, not a cure. While it removes dangers cargo from the Bosphorus, it has increased tanker traffic in the Caspian. The BTC cuts through sensitive environmental zones in Georgia and indigenous Kurdish territory in Turkey. Moving oil traffic to the recently built Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline will stem the flow through the Bosphorus, but won’t break the tide. Even with the 1994 regulations and VTS, tankers crashes increased six-fold in nine years: seven accidents in 1996, forty-two in 2005 (Oral, Oztruk 127).
BOSPHORUS 2050: BP, GORE AND GREENPEACE
Turkey faces a host of challenges in the 21st Century. A secular state with a dominant Islamic political party, national identity within Europe and the Middle East, Armenian ghosts in the closet, and Kurds rallying in the eastern mountains are but a few. Anatolia has seen millennia of conflicts and dynasties, but the crucial problem now is environmental catastrophe. And for the Turkish people, it can come by air, land or sea.
The precise effects of climate change on Turkey are, like the rest of the world, unknown. But the forecast is doom and gloom in both the east and west of Turkey. Carbon dioxide is undeniably changing our atmosphere. The gaseous blanket covering our earth is letting in more radiation and out less heat, mutating the biosphere, melting glaciers, drastically altering weather patterns. Sea level rising will decimate municipalities along the Bosphorus, Canakkale Straights, Sea of Marmara, and the Black Sea, including Istanbul.
Climate change is already felt in Istanbul. Turks blamed sporadic weather patterns, shrinking water sources, and a putrid stench from the Golden Horn on the global phenomenon (Turkish Daily News 9 June 2007). Turkey’s Forestry Ministry has planted trees to protect natural habitat from erosion evident across a parched nation. Increasing temperatures have dried out the eastern steppe climate, and Istanbul’s dams were at 58 percent capacity last year. The enormous bottling up of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Attaturk Dam could become the only blue in a sea of sand.
Both Greenpeace, Al Gore, and British Petroleum agree Turkey lacks strong environmental regulation. As a precursor to investing in the BTC pipeline, BP demanded suspension of Turkish sovereignty on-site. Activists heavily criticized Ankara for ceding the special economic zone, but BP argued the designation raised the environmental standards of the project above Turkish levels to BP’s international code (BP Magazine). Greenpeace proposed a sustainable development model for Turkey in April, 2007. Their Global Energy Revolution Scenario defines Turkey as a country lacking but potentially leading environmentally. Greenpeace member Hilal Atici described Turkish policymakers as “blinded by the lobbies of all possible negative energy lobbies.” (Greenpeace, April). Al Gore held a climate change conference in Istanbul in June, 2007. Hosted by the World Wildlife Fund, the former American Vice President’s stated goal was invigorating environmental concern in Turkish citizens (Turkish Daily News 6/12/07).
The mayor of Istanbul is trying to bring his city to European Union environmental standards. After attending a global climate change summit in London in May, 2007, Dr. Kadi Topbas lamented and celebrated the environmental record of Istanbul. The city collects 14,000 tons of waste and turns it into enough energy for 30,000 households. The mayor is trying to introduce biofuels into public transportation, and hoping to use Turkey’s ample solar, wind and thermal energy sources to keep carbon dioxide emissions low, which grew 72.6% between 1990 and 2004 (Turkish Daily News, 5/18/2007). Topbas told Istanbul residents they could save 140 tons of water annually if they “Don’t Spend Water for Nothing.”
A symbol for Turks, Armenians, Christians, Muslim and Jews the world over, Mount Ararat looms over Eastern Turkey. On its 2,500-foot peak lies Noah’s Ark, reconstructed in May, 2007 by Greenpeace. German and Turkish carpenters built the wooden warning, a reinterpretation of the biblical flood wrought upon sinners by the God of Abrahamic traditions. A dove for each of the globe’s 208 nations was released with each member of the flock carrying the group’s Ararat Declaration:
“We remind you, that your mandate is to protect our lives, homes, our communities and our natural resources from both man-made and natural threats. You shall not, either in policy or deed, do anything which imperils the well-being of those whom you represent.” (Greenpeace, May 2007)
DRY BOSPHORUS
Keeping the Bosphorus clean will mean drastic changes. Whether or not that means more pipelines, regulations or conservation, doesn’t matter. The dangers leaking west from the Caspian necessitate action. Replacing Montreaux and developing the sophistication of the Vessel Traffic System would be a great place to start, but it will not be enough to avoid Orhan Pamuk’s apocalyptic vision of a Bosphorus wasteland.
The Turkish Nobel Laureate wrote in his novel Black Book of the Borporus’ future. Learning the strait was slowly elevating due to tectonic plates, he envisioned a valley putrid with the rot of generations of pollution and millennia of waste. While the scenario is fictional, his words reveal an acknowledge truth in Istanbul, a commonly held perception of the murky depths of the Bosphorus. Pamuks’ concentrated truth is an environmental impact statement:
“I can also imagine its denizens drawing fuel for their lamps and stoves from a dilapidated Romanian oil tanker whose propeller has become lodged in the mud. But that is not the worst of it, for in this accursed cesspool watered by the dark green spray of every sewage pipe in Istanbul, we can be sure that new epidemics will break out among the armies of rats as the explore their new heaven… This I know, and this I must press upon you: the authorities will seek to contain the epidemic behind barbed wire, but it will touch us all.” (Pamuk 17)
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Rejuvenated Silk Road
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