United Caspian information space

By Vestnik Kavkaza

Each side has a right to choose its economic partners, if it doesn’t violate the legal interests of [others], Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated at the State Duma. According to him, the project of the Transcaspian pipeline which is aimed at transportation of Turkmen gas to Ukraine, “touches on the interests of countries which don’t participate in the negotiations on its construction.” Russia insists on the fact that issues of development of the Caspian Sea should depend only on Caspian states.

“At the moment, the adopted declarations don’t state that it concerns construction of pipelines on the sea bottom; but our colleagues, including our Azerbaijani and Turkmen friends, understand our arguments on the legal status of the Caspian Sea, which is not agreed yet, and on ecology,” Lavrov stated.

The convention on the legal status of the Caspian Sea could be adopted at the next summit of the Caspian countries in Kazakhstan. Thus, the bargaining which has been going on for 18 years would be completed.

Tofik Abbasov, the editor-in-chief of The New Baku Post Online Newspaper, a political scientist, told Vestnik Kavkaza that “the problem of the legal status of the Caspian Sea is an absolutely new thing in geopolitics. After radical geopolitical changes in the late 20th century, the countries appeared to be unready to solve the problem. There was no model which would be appropriate for all sides. So they had to start from zero level. Each of the five countries has its own coordinators, working groups of experts, special envoys of the heads of state. They regularly hold consultations, negotiations and discussions. Step by step they are developing a new strategy, which in the near future will lead to approval of a general declaration, a general approach to the legal status of the Caspian Sea.”

Speaking about the prospects of development of the pentalateral cooperation in the Caspian region, Sergei Mikheyev, the deputy chairman of the editorial board of Vestnik Kavkaza, the Director General of the Institute for Caspian Cooperation, expressed his view about the necessity of a Caspian united information space.

At the moment there is no common information space in the Caspian region, and Mikheyev believes there are several reasons for this, for instance, peculiarities of Iran and Turkmenistan.

“Iran is a country which has always had its independent policy. The state has an ancient and rich culture. Historically, it turned out that Iran had never been involved in the common Caspian dialogue. In the last 20 years the situation has dramatically changed. And now in the Caspian region there are five countries which strive for collective discussions of the problems which appear in the region – not only in the local context, but also in the global, geopolitical one. There is a demand for a common information space, and Iran should be integrated into it, as without the active participation of Iran we couldn’t discuss the problems on a full scale,” Mikheyev believes.

“Turkmenistan has a very special position on bilateral and multilateral cooperation. I think the more active participation of Turkmenistan in some common, pentalateral arrangements and information exchange could be beneficial for everybody,” Mikheyev says.

As for Azerbaijan, Russia and Kazakhstan, there is something between them that could be called a common information environment, and environment of common expert discussions of certain problems. “The authorities of the countries more adequately understand the problems which appear in the Caspian region. And it is logical that there are no serious problems on the Caspian between Russia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan; while bilateral cooperation between the countries is developing well.”

Mikheyev thinks that an important factor of mutual understanding between Russia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan is preservation of the Russian language as a language of international communication: “Citizens of the former Soviet republics communicate in Russian. And if I look at an Azeri website which presents news in Russian, I read it. Or Baku experts open a Kazakh or Russian website and read news in Russian. If news is written in national languages, the audience reduces significantly. So, in these countries the Russian language is a factor of preservation of the common information space. At the same time, it is a fragment of the past, while we should move forward to the future.”

According to Mikheyev, a common expert and information environment over current problems is needed for this. “At the moment the information agenda is being formed by certain Western major information holdings or agencies; others rewrite their news, and their picture dominates in the global information flow. This is wrong. Often Western information agencies don’t know a problem well, consider it shallowly, simply, through a prism of certain ideological clichés. Their picture is inadequate; and through this picture the whole world understands the situation in Iran, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Russia, or in the Caspian region in general. We are not second-class people for someone else to describe us, our life, what we should do, where we should move. We are able to detect, discuss, and solve the problems on our own.”