Battleground Bosporus.(Caspian Pipeline Consortium)(Brief Article)

Last week, ecowarriors from a pair of Turkish environmental groups, Greenpeace and One Earth, set out into the choppy waters of the Bosporus, armed with the usual paraphernalia of protest--banners, a megaphone and a jostle of cameramen. Their aim: to highlight the environmental dangers of oil- tanker traffic though the narrow seaway. A new pipeline from the Caspian to the Black Sea has just been completed--heralding a huge increase in traffic through the strait.

What's unusual about these protests, however small, is that they have happened at all. Ruled until the mid-'80s by a hard-line military regime, Turkey has never been particularly tolerant of civil disobedience. Yet the earnest ecowarriors on the Bosporus are not only tolerated but positively encouraged by the authorities. The reason? They are at the front line of a new geopolitical conflict pitting Turkey and Western interests against an age-old rival, Russia.

For once, the ecologists and the state have found themselves on the same side. At stake is the export route for the biggest oil deposits discovered in three decades--the huge Kashagan and Tengiz oilfields in Kazakhstan. The only existing pipelines to the north Caspian, including the largely U.S.-funded Caspian Pipeline Consortium's newly built line, all run to the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk. From there the oil is put into tankers and shipped to the rest of the world. That's where the Bosporus comes in. The 19-mile waterway is a mere 700 meters wide at its narrowest point. Navigating its nine sharp bends is a tanker captain's nightmare. Twelve million people live along the strait, and a major accident would be an ecological disaster of epic proportions. But when all the pipe-lines into Novorossiysk start pumping at full capacity, as Kazakh fields are opened up over the next four years, the number of supertankers going through the strait could easily quintuple.

That has the environmentalists up in arms. But what worries Western and Turkish politicians more are the strategic implications. If all of Kazakhstan's oil were exported via Novorossiysk, Russia would ...