kurds

A BP-led consortium is breaking international rules governing the human rights responsibilities of multinational companies in its operations on the controversial Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline, the UK Government ruled...

The ruling states that BP failed to investigate and respond to complaints from local people of intimidation by state security forces in Turkey guarding the pipeline. Local human rights defender Ferhat Kaya, for instance, has reported that he was detained and tortured by the paramilitary police for insisting on fair compensation. Villagers allege that they are routinely interrogated when they raise concerns over the pipeline.

The pipeline passes through an area of north-east Turkey with a substantial Kurdish minority who have been subject to state repression for decades. Since the pipeline's inception over a decade ago, human rights campaigners in Turkey and the UK have highlighted the risk of local people, particularly Kurdish minorities, being intimidated by state security forces. Today's ruling has found that, despite widespread awareness of this "heightened risk intimidation", BP failed adequately to respond to or investigate allegations of abuse that were brought to its attention.

The Complaint argued that such intimidation deterred local people from participating in BP's consultations about the pipeline's route and compensation negotiations for loss of land and livelihoods.

By the mid-1990s attacks on Kurds by Washington's Turkish ally reached new levels of violence; one index is the flight of over a million Kurds from the devastated countryside to the unofficial Kurdish capital Diyarbakir from 1990 to 1994, many more later. 1994 marked two records: it was 'the year of the worst repression in the Kurdish prvinces' of Turkey, Jonathan Randal reported from the scene, and the year when Turkey became 'the single biggest importer of American military hardware and thus the world's largest arms purchaser', using the gifts in ways that Saddam doubtless appreciated. The mounting terror, still underway, made an impressive contribution to the ethnic cleansing of the 1990s, leaving about 3,500 villages destroyed, tens of thousands killed, some 2 to 3 million refugees, right within NATO and under the jurisdiction of the Council of Europe and the European Court of Human Rights...