Obama’s Political Heritage? Nothing to Write Home About!

26.11.2016 Author: Martin Berger

Any election, and presidential elections in particular, are a sort of a test for the ruling party. Therefore, the number of votes received by the ruling elite shows if it is going to remain in power or be forced into the dustbin of history.

The latter happened in the US recently, where the ruling Democratic party had to give way to a new presidential candidate, which means that it has failed the test of the vote. It’s curious that to evaluate all the activities of the Obama administration one does not need to search for pro-Kremlin sites on the net, sites Hillary Clinton suggests are more capable of affecting US elections than any Western media source. Yes, we are being told that Russia was trying to manipulate the recent US presidential election, but let’s now take a look at what grade was given to “Obama’s reign” by the Western media itself.

As it was noted by Allen West, the executive director of the National Council for Policy Analysis (NCPA), an author, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel and an outspoken former member of Congress in his interview for the Daily Caller, this recent election – is a rejection of the political class that failed the American people. “I think it is a huge referendum on the failures of Barack Obama” – he added, noting that after Obama, the US was reluctant to endure four more years of his successor in office.

In turn, the American Thinker would state that the US president is near the end of an eight year train wreck presidency. Though, it is no secret that he has done nothing for the black community, whose unemployment and crime rates are rising every day, while the demonization of police and the lauding of racist activists who condone assassination and lawlessness is carried on. This media source says that we all know that elitist progressives are nothing if not master liars and puppeteers. They have spent years tailoring and refining their manipulation of black communities, inflaming their resentment, bitterness and hopelessness by reminding them of how little progress they have been able to make, without reminding them that the Democrats have led them for decades into this dead end.

The Democrats are behind the declining role of the United States across the globe, the American Spectator notes. While the American Conservative goes further, noting that it’s looking like it may be Obama’s world vision headed for the proverbial ash heap of history.

Unfortunately for President Obama and his legacy, the American Thinker notes, history won’t be kind at all. Of course, he will always be the first black president but not much more than that. Obamacare is collapsing on its own. Yes, the GOP majority will move to repeal it, but that’s a bit like signing the death certificate on a person dead for months. It’s true that President Obama’s foreign policy is in total disarray. It’s hard to see anyone defending any of it, except for liberal Democrats from safe seats who just want to oppose President Trump. The US economy is desperately calling for liberation from Mr. Obama’s regulations.

According to the latest Gallup poll, Americans’ support for the healthcare law continues to be slightly more negative than positive, with 51% of the population disapproving of it. At the same time 29% of Americans say Obamacare has hurt them and their family. Yet another poll conducted by the same entity shows 50% of Americans say Obama deserves a “great deal” or “moderate amount” of blame.

The Economic Collapse says that President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers announced that 83% of men in the prime working ages of 25-54 who were not in the labor force had not worked in the previous year. So, essentially, 10 million men are missing from the workforce across the US today. This means that the Wall Street Journal is right about dubbing the situation in America as the weakest “economic recovery” since 1949.

This entire seven year stretch since 2008 has come while Barack Obama has been in the White House and he is solidly on track to be the only president in US history to never have a single year when the US economy grew by at least three percent.

It’s noted that under Obama, US national debt will come close to doubling. What that means is that during Obama’s eight years Americans would accumulate almost as much debt as they did under all of the other presidents in US history combined. Right now, the US government is responsible for about a third of all the government debt in the entire world.

The Foreign Policy Journal is convinced that the proximate cause behind the rise of Islamic State, Jabhat al-Nusra and myriads of other terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq has been Obama Administration’s policy of intervention through proxies in Syria, which leads to the conclusion made by the Week that Obama will leave his successor a ticking time bomb.

So no matter where you look, it’s unlikely that anybody has any words of praise left for Barack Obama and his eight years in office. One can only hope that the new president-elect will not follow in Obama’s tracks, since it doesn’t look like the US and the world can take any more disastrous decisions right now.

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Oil Tests May Prove One Test Too Many for Erdogan

09.12.2015 Author: Henry Kamens

Before oil is sold, it is tested. Oil test labs know exactly where the oil they test comes from and where it goes. We knew this even before the Las Vegas Sun broke a story about it.

But even though this story provided confirmation that there is no mystery about the oil sales funding ISIS, or the mechanism behind them, it hasn’t prevented these sales and transports continuing. This is because the logistics behind them are so sophisticated, and overseen at such a high level, that it is very difficult to isolate and expose the weak links in the chain.

When Bob Woodward of Watergate fame investigated drug use in Hollywood for a biography he found it more difficult to get to the truth than he had with Watergate, because the film industry closed ranks. Imagine how hard it is to expose what world governments are doing to support terrorism, when they try so hard to pretend they are doing the opposite. But maybe, just maybe, enough fingers are pointing in one direction to make it easier for other players to find an alternative, and sacrifice an ally along the way.

Would-be emperor with no clothes

We don’t know all the players involved in the transport and sale of ISIS oil. Inevitably, many are actually reputable oil testing and transport companies who go through the same procedures every day without them being called into question. But a few names which keep cropping up are a bit less than reputable, largely due to the concerns over their existing connections and how they maintain the bottom line.

One of these is Genel Energy Plc. This is one of the Rothschild companies, which should start alarm bells ringing in itself. Giving it the benefit of the doubt, we can say that it has made vast investments in Syria and Northern Iraq and it would make more business sense if it could deal with one compliant government in these countries rather than two unreliable ones. Taking a less charitable line, we can suggest, as some pundits have, that there has long been a Rothschild plan to create a Kurdish state for this purpose, and it was in the works even before the 9/11 attacks.

However, no one is going to sacrifice the Rothschilds, who can buy and sell any country on earth, and through investing in military actions. So if one of the players has to be cut out for being an embarrassment, it would have to be one the West already has plenty against. This is where, once again, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan comes in. He and his clan have made a lot of money by abusing their authority to become major components in this business. But if anyone has to take a fall to keep the operation running, they are the prime targets, and they know it.

Divorce of convenience

Turkey is a US ally because of where it is. It may be under constant disapproval for being everything the West claims to oppose, but as long as it is useful that doesn’t matter, unless, of course, you have the misfortune to live there.

One of Turkey’s most useful features is its ports – or rather, certain ports not actually in Turkey. Under the Treaty of Kars, signed in 1921, the area now known as the Adjarian Autonomous Region was ceded by the transitional Turkish state to the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic. However, one clause of that agreement states that Turkey has the right to transport goods in and out of the port of Batumi without paying any duties and can use the port whenever it wants without paying any duties. In effect, this means it retains control of Batumi’s port facilities, and can classify them as a “strategic interest”.

This arrangement has several useful aspects. Firstly, the Georgian authorities cannot police the port. Turkey can do whatever it wants there, transporting goods which would be too risky to move elsewhere, and Georgia’s best bet is to claim a piece of the inevitable action. Secondly, as the port is a “strategic interest” any threat to it can be met with a military response, under another clause of the Kars treaty. Get too close, Turkey sends troops in, you risk World War Three over some dodgy goods.

Thirdly, the port was once in the Soviet Union and is now very close to Russia. People, as well as goods, can be smuggled through it, and this has created the smoke-and-mirrors world Batumi presents today, in which no one knows who really controls what. It has long been known as a can of worms best steered clear of, and this is the advice routinely given to reporters, diplomats, businessmen and even Black Sea holidaymakers who get too close to something they aren’t even aware of.

The nature of this port operation was confirmed in 2007. In that year Georgia embarked on an investigation into alleged Russian spies in its Ministry of Defence, including links to Saybolt Georgia. This was conducted with the help of Turkish and Israeli intelligence, but focused not of the Georgian MoD itself but on Batumi, where a thorough investigation was done into everything no one else is allowed to get near. It goes deeper than that … but let’s start with pipeline wars and all kinds of intrigue for the record.

It was later alleged that Russia had set up a spying facility in Batumi, disguised as an oil testing laboratory. But that would have nothing to do with the Ministry of Defence. The ministry’s name had been used to justify bringing in outside intelligence services for another purpose, Georgia having its own intelligence service, which calls in the CIA, not Turkey and Israel, when it wants extra help. So several of the managers of Saybolt Georgia, Armen Gevorkian, director and Ruben Shikoian, his deputy were arrested based on trumped up spy charges. The purpose was to secure actual control of oil exports from Georgia, and this was done in collaboration with Turkish intelligence—as now there would be no oversight.

When the long-preplanned Georgia-Russia war came the following year some regional analysts wondered why Georgia’s largest seaport was not being bombed by Russian planes. Israel is, of course, always seeking friendly terms with Russia as well as being a US ally, and secures a regular supply of oil through Batumi. They also asked why the war only lasted eight days, despite the Western protestations of support for Georgia. Turkey’s behind-the-scenes reminders of its right to intervene to protect its interests, and the disruption this would cause to global oil supplies, go a long way to explaining this.

So it is hardly surprising, given this background, that influential people in the Turkish state use the port for their own purposes. These include the son of President Erdogan. Bilal Erdogan owns the BMZ group, a marine transport company. Of all the companies he might own, this is the one he considers the most useful and unimpeachable.

Both Russia and Syria have openly accused the Erdogan family of transporting undocumented crude oil deriving from ISIS. Russia has also stated that the shooting down of its plane was retaliation for Russia bombing truckloads of oil supplies near the Syrian border.

Obviously the Erdogans deny all this. But Turkey is known to have smuggled Kurdish crude oil through another port, Ceyhan, for years. That port is state-owned. It is also Turkish state policy to support the Syrian opposition through oil sales, alongside the Western powers who arm, fund and train them, and therefore a state-controlled oil smuggling mechanism must exist and be part of a wider Western oil supply operation.

Turkey is serving a purpose, in exchange for the usual payoffs. But maybe the gravy train is about to come to an end. It is possible for test labs to tell exactly where the oil came from. Exactly!

Proof of the pudding

All the information now being released in the Western media conveniently smears Turkey. It is not the only country involved of course. But it is the one which will suffer most when the West tries to continue its game by investigating the allegations which are now being made.

When oil tankers arrive at their destinations the oil they carry can be retested. If results are falsified in Batumi or elsewhere, this will be picked up later on. At the moment the BTC oil pipeline, which passes through Batumi and Ceyhan (the ‘B’ and ‘C’ of its name) does not keep backup samples after testing, which suggests that some of the oil going through it is not what it is purported to be. But this must have been exposed elsewhere, by end users who may now be being given the signal that to maintain their existing supplies, it is in their interests to say what they know.

After all, this process has been gone through before. One of the oil testing labs in Batumi was once run in collaboration with a company called Saybolt Georgia. It parent company, based in The Netherlands, has a sordid history, having been implicated in Food for Oil deals with Iraq between 1996 and 2003.

Saybolt was set up as a scapegoat by US testing company Intertek Caleb Brett, working with US and Turkish intelligence. These parties raised no objection when it hired the son of Alex Bakradze, the former Head of State Security for former Adjarian ruler Aslan Abashidze. When the time came, Caleb Brett dropped the word and it was reported that Saybolt wasn’t all it presented itself as. Saying it was obliged to investigate its own allegations, it discovered that the head of the testing had had no qualifications whatsoever and removed several staff for having failed drug tests, which were of course undertaken in-house.

Thereafter Saybolt’s history revealed, and its connection with Bakradze and the reviled regime his father worked for made public knowledge. Caleb Brett did not pretend this was anything other than a plot: one of its management told one of the dismissed employees, “I can continue to list all non-conformities in QHSE/Compliance, Georgian Branch to explain the departure of one testing employee who was terminated and to share it with the media”.

It is no coincidence that both the BTC pipeline and the smaller Baku-Supsa pipeline are often down for repairs. The oil is merely abstracted from the point at which the repairs are being made, usually before it arrives to Georgian pumping station number 2, and sold on to third parties who use other routes controlled by the same logistics mechanism, off the books. Employing incompetents appears, on the surface, to give a very good reason for undertaking repairs. The repairs themselves also involve filling the pipeline with oil which has not been documented or tested, as theoretically, it isn’t being sent there, until the next political realignment of the logistics arrangements needs to take place.

Ignorance is not bliss

Few would shed tears if the Erdogan family were brought down by oil testing as the case study shows in Georgia. Turkey would likewise present itself as cleansed of its rotten apples, with the same vigour the US displays when distancing itself from Richard Nixon, whose many crimes were not only known about but encouraged by many of those who vilify him today. Then it would continue as an ally on new terms, and we would be told that its ISIS-funding past had been forgotten.

The mechanism for doing this is there, as Caleb Brett tests everything which passes through the BTC pipeline and always has. It has enough knowledge to bring Turkey’s leadership down overnight, and the information we are now receiving indicates that it is interested in doing this. It would also implicate itself of course, and its US and Turkish intelligence partners, if the full extent of its institutional knowledge was revealed. But only the discredited Turks will reveal it, while the international logistics mechanism will be subtly rejigged, with different players, and supplies of ISIS oil to the West, which suit both parties, will continue.

Insider sources claim that these same companies, and players, are tied in with the tankers used today in the smuggling of ISIS oil, and that nexus will give us the link with a group of Georgians working out of the Ukrainian port of Odessa, including former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvii.

When Jimmy Carter was US president he made a number of public addresses about energy, including his famous “malaise” speech. He eventually stopped doing it because the American people were no longer listening. You can get away with a lot if people aren’t really interested in what you’re doing. The progressive exposure of the Erdogan family’s oil smuggling for ISIS will bring down an ally which has pushed its luck too far, but that, rather than what they have done, will be the story.

The actual oil smuggling, and devastation it funds and causes, continue because none of us care enough to stop it. But that is no excuse for cynically exploiting the fact to destroy your own allies, simply because you have the power to do so.

Henry Kamens, columnist, expert on Central Asia and Caucasus, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

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Syria’s Assad to America: “What Do You Get From Supporting Terrorists in Our Region?”

Posted on February 15, 2015 by Raymond Ibrahim

In a recent interview, Syrian President Bashar Assad makes some interesting observations.  When asked “If you were able to deliver a message to President Obama today, what would it be?” Assad responded (via VIE):

I think the normal thing that you ask any official in the world is to work for the interests of his people. And the question I would ask any American is: what do you get from supporting terrorists in our country, in our region? What did you get from supporting the Muslim Brotherhood a few years ago in Egypt and other countries? What did you get from supporting someone like [Turkish Prime Minister] Erdogan?…. You are the greatest power in the world now, you have many things to disseminate around the world: knowledge, innovation, IT with its positive repercussions. How can you be the best in these fields yet the worst in the political field? This is a contradiction. That is what I think the American people should analyze and question. Why do you fail in every war? You can create war, you can create problems, but you cannot solve any problem.

These last observations concerning the Obama’s administration’s many foreign policy failures are hardly limited to Assad and have been voiced by a myriad of world leaders, including Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, Egyptian President Sisi, and Russian President Putin.

After accusing the Obama administration of “encouraging war between neighboring states,” Putin added:

American objectives have not been realized, nor have they accomplished anything, because everything has collapsed.   Afghanistan faces problems, and Iraq and Libya are falling apart.  Egypt also was going to collapse had President Sisi not taken matters in hand.  And all this demonstrates the failures of the Obama administration.

At any rate, based on precedent, what the United States often “gets from supporting terrorists in the region” is terrorist attacks on its own soil, such as 9/11, which was the work of the “freedom fighters” the U.S. once supported in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Courtesy of RaymondIbrahim.com

Raymond Ibrahim is a Middle East and Islam specialist and author of Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians (2013) and The Al Qaeda Reader (2007). His writings have appeared in a variety of media, including the Los Angeles Times, Washington Times, Jane’s Islamic Affairs Analyst, Middle East Quarterly, World Almanac of Islamism, and Chronicle of Higher Education; he has appeared on MSNBC, Fox News, C-SPAN, PBS, Reuters, Al-Jazeera, NPR, Blaze TV, and CBN. Ibrahim regularly speaks publicly, briefs governmental agencies, provides expert testimony for Islam-related lawsuits, and testifies before Congress. He is a Shillman Fellow, David Horowitz Freedom Center; a CBN News contributor; a Media Fellow, Hoover Institution (2013); and a Judith Friedman Rosen Writing Fellow, Middle East Forum . Ibrahim’s dual-background — born and raised in the U.S. by Coptic Egyptian parents born and raised in the Middle East — has provided him with unique advantages, from equal fluency in English and Arabic, to an equal understanding of the Western and Middle Eastern mindsets, positioning him to explain the latter to the former.

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Turkey: Tersan Shipyard Splashes Multipurpose Offshore Construction Vessel Grand Canyon

Tersan Shipyard launched Multipurpose Offshore Construction Vessel, Grand Canyon with the honorable presences of Norway Prime Minister Mr. Jens Stoltenberg and Turkey Minister of Transportation, Maritime Affairs and Communication Mr. Binali Yıldırım.

Grand Canyon is a cooperation of Tersan Shipyard with Bergen Fosen in order to build a very high standard Offshore Construction Vessel for the Owner, Volstad Maritime. Grand Canyon is a 125m long, 25 m width, electric propulsion offshore vessel with Helicopter deck, DP III notation, 6 pcs of Side Maneuvering Thrusters and accommodation for 108 persons.

During the ceremony, Mr. Stoltenberg pointed out that it was no coincidence that the launch was on his itinerary during his visit to Turkey.

“Norway and Turkey have a long tradition of business cooperation in the maritime sector. Tersan shipyard alone now has a total of eight ships on order for Norwegian interests, worth a total of almost NOK 2 billion,” Mr Stoltenberg said.

Mr Stoltenberg was also able to see the M/S Høydal, a Norwegian ship which is being built at the yard on behalf of the company NSK Shipping, based in North Norway. The M/S Høydal is a specially designed cargo ship that will be assigned to the fish feed manufacturer BioMar in Norway. This will be the world’s first LNG-powered coaster, and the vessel should be ready to load her first cargo in Norway in May 2012. The M/S Høydal will have a cargo capacity of 2200 tonnes of fish feed, making her the world’s largest operational fish feed cargo vessel. Natural gas (LNG) propulsion will make the vessel environmentally friendly and reduce emissions of NOx (nitrogen oxides) by over 90 %.

Mr. Binali pointed out the increased capacities of Turkish Shipyards, highlighted that he had attended to another launching ceremony in Tersan Shipyard just 4 months ago, this represents Tersan Shipyards and Turkey’s achieved high level of Ship production as well as quality; “When I was the General Manager of IDO, Turkey used to import ships from Norway just 10 years ago now we are exporting vessel to Norway” said Mr. Yildirim.

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Domino-1: Romania’s First Deepwater Exploration Well

ExxonMobil’s Romanian subsidiary together with Petrom has started exploration drilling on Domino-1, the first deepwater exploration well in the Romanian sector of the Black Sea​.

The Domino-1 well is located in the Neptun Block, 170 kilometers offshore in water about 1,000 meters deep and will be drilled using state-of-the-art industry technology. The well is being drilled by the world-class, sixth generation drillship, Deepwater Champion, which recently transited to Romanian waters after completing its drilling program offshore Turkey. Drilling operations are expected to take about 90 days.

The drillship is owned by the world’s largest drilling contractor, Transocean.

“We are very pleased to collaborate with Petrom in this project – a collaboration built upon ExxonMobil’s experience as a leader in deepwater exploration and Petrom’s vast experience in Romania. We highly value the efforts of the Romanian authorities for supporting the progress of the deepwater Black Sea exploration program,” said Ian A. Fischer, Managing Director of EEPRL.

Exploration drilling, especially in such frontier, unexplored areas as the deepwater Black Sea, may or may not result in a discovery. If commercial discoveries are made, the development of the Neptun Block would yield significant positive industrial, social and economic benefits for Romania.

“Together with our partner ExxonMobil, we are developing a unique project for Romania. Deepwater exploration carries high investment risks and requires investments of several hundred million U.S. dollars, yet a potential success would fundamentally change the perspective of the Romanian energy sector,” said Johann Pleininger, Petrom’s Executive Board Member responsible for Exploration & Production.

Offshore Energy Today Staff, January 10, 2012; Image: Transocean

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The Oil and the Glory: Year of the Pipeline

Year of the pipeline: Time magazine’s Person of the Year is the protester, and that is probably valid, but we think that the editors missed an important also-ran — the pipeline. Few care to stop and notice the elegance in unsung lengths of steel cylinders stirring fierce passions such as nationalism, greed and tear-inducing anger. We are talking the 24- and 36-inch steel cylinders that carry oil and gas across continents, under bodies of water and over mountains to the 7 billion people of the Earth. Who for instance considered nominating the Keystone Pipeline as political instrument of the year for how it threatened to shut down the whole of the U.S. government, and may yet in the coming couple of months? Then there is Nabucco, a proposed natural gas line that has much of Europe, Russia along with the U.S. tied up in sanctimonious knots over who will exercise geopolitical and economic leverage in Europe. This week Russia notched up the temperature by securing crucial support from Turkey for its repost to Nabucco, a pipeline that it calls South Stream. That battle also will carry over into the new year. And who can forget the proposed trans-Afghanistan gas pipeline, known by the acronym TAPI? A powerful and high-kicking chorus is backing TAPI, led by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and CIA director David Petraeus, who embraced the line when he was running the ground game as a general in Afghanistan. Observers, including this blog, have cast doubt on TAPI’s feasibility given Afghanistan’s chaos. Yet we celebrate it as a worthy addition to this improbable pantheon — inanimate objects that somehow transmogrify into organic, breathing beings capable of arousing high-stakes emotion in humans.

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Cyprus Oil and Gas

By Michael J. Economides
Posted on Oct. 11, 2011

The January 2011 announced discovery of some of the largest offshore natural gas reservoirs in the world, 90 kilometers west of Haifa and not much further than that from Cyprus has created some understandable excitement among Cypriots. The potential for large hydrocarbon accumulations in the same Messinian geologic formation, underlain Cypriot economic zone waters, should now be considered as high possibility. Seismic evidence makes the Cypriot block, named Aphrodite, currently being drilled by Houston’s Noble Energy, to be at least as good and perhaps as much as 50% better than Israel’s Leviathan field. The latter has been confirmed as holding at least 17 Tcf of natural gas.

It is a dream of so many countries to find oil and gas deposits: easy riches the notion goes, a chance to even the field versus big and powerful nations. However, in spite of the occasional jubilation in some parts of the Cypriot and Greek press and thinly disguised wishful thinking by government officials and politicians a dose of reality is in order.

First, this is undeniably good news. The discovery in Israeli-controlled waters is a clear and positive sign. But what are often missed in the debate are two other important elements that turn the good news into not so good and even bad if countries are unprepared or inexperienced.

There is a big disparity between oil and gas in place in a geological structure and having those resources labeled as recoverable reserves. The latter implies technical and economic attractiveness. Hydrocarbons buried under 2,000 meters of water and then another 5,000 meter beneath the bottom of the sea are far more attractive when the price of oil approaches $150 per barrel as it was in July 2008.

Natural gas is even more cumbersome because it cannot be handled readily as oil can and, therefore, its exploitation is even more tenuous. To understand this issue one needs to realize that in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico and of more recently emerging offshore Brazil, while oil production has been prolific, virtually no natural gas deposits have been targeted. Gas associated with oil has been produced but in most cases it is used for re-injection to augment oil production and not for sales.

The second issue and one that is likely to prove challenging is that a pipeline from the area of discovery to e.g., Europe is highly unlikely because of the water depth and the underwater terrain. This means that the transportation of gas will have to employ conversion into liquid natural gas (LNG) and, in early time, perhaps compressed natural gas (CNG) transportation.

There is almost a sadistic irony that natural gas of the size being contemplated can be so close and yet so far if the right decisions and the right knowledge are not evident. The size of the resource would require tens of billions of euros. The cost will involve the field development with very expensive wells and facilities and, especially, if LNG will be deployed. In all cases it will take huge companies to do it. Nobody should have the fantasy that the state should or could do it.

There are also plenty of examples from afar to the neighborhood of the difficulty to match local resources with local needs. Trinidad in the Caribbean is a major source of LNG for the US but huge parts of the island have no access to gas. Egypt, a major new player in LNG is faced with increasing local discontent. Cairo and its almost 30 million inhabitants have no gas. If Cyprus wants to use natural gas for its electricity a very viable option would be to buy relatively cheap CNG from Israel.

Greece now gearing up for its own exploration program should take an intense interest in the Cypriot experience and learn from it. For Cyprus the tantalizing and difficult dilemma will emerge after all that gas is proven. The geopolitical re-alignment in Eastern Mediterranean will be a yet another issue and the subject of a forthcoming editorial

Original Article

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Cyprus to Press Ahead with Offshore Drilling Despite Turkish Objection

EU member Cyprus vowed on Wednesday to keep Turkey’s entry talks on hold as long as Ankara challenges the island’s rights to launch offshore gas drilling, in an escalating row among east Mediterranean neighbours over hydrocarbon reserves.

Rhetoric over ownership of speculated oil and gas deposits has sharpened after a deterioration of relations between Turkey and Israel, the discovery of massive gas fields by Israel and plans by Cyprus to drill as early as next month.

Cyprus, split during a 1974 Turkish invasion after a brief Greek-inspired coup in which Turkey took control of the island’s north, has blocked the opening of several negotiating chapters in Turkey-EU entry talks. One of those is energy.

“The position of Cyprus has not changed. Turkey must make a formal commitment to the EU that it will end its provocations towards the Republic of Cyprus and stop obstructing Cypriot efforts in the field of energy,” said Stefanos Stefanou, the Cypriot government spokesman.

Cyprus is represented in the EU by its internationally-recognised Greek Cypriot government.

Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said last week Ankara was ready to deploy its navy across the Mediterranean in a dispute with Israel over an Israeli sea blockade of Gaza.

Cyprus falls under the radar of the warning since it coincides with Cypriot drilling southeast of the island, a right Turkey contests, and possible cooperation with Israel, whose rights to offshore reserves has also been questioned by Ankara.

Turkey, the only country to recognise a Turkish Cypriot breakaway state in north Cyprus, says any hydrocarbon reserves do not only belong to Greek Cypriots, but also to Turkish Cypriots.

Turkish Cypriots have not been part of any Cypriot government since 1963, when there was a constitutional breakdown just three years after independence from Britain.

The row could complicate peace talks launched between the Greek and Turkish Cypriot sides in 2008, while the drilling coincides with a major push from the United Nations to resolve the Cyprus conflict by mid-2012.

Timing of the drilling itself, however, is unrelated to the Cyprus talks and stipulated in contractual obligations between Cyprus and Noble , the U.S. company poised to launch an exploratory drill in one offshore sector southeast of Cyprus around the beginning of October.

Cypriot President Demetris Christofias on Tuesday denounced what he said were Turkish threats and said the island would press ahead with drilling as its sovereign right.

Noble reported a massive gas discovery off Israel, and close to the Cypriot field, last year.

Original Article