Institute for War and Peace Reporting | Giving Voice, Driving Change

Tehran Struggles to Claim Share of Caspian

As former Soviet neighbours carve out oilfields for themselves, Iranian leaders face near-impossible task of finding deal that satisfies both other states and their own people.
  • The presidents of Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakstan, Russia and Turkmenistan (from left to right) meeting in Baku on November 18 to discuss a sea they all share but cannot agree on. (Photo: Arman Teymoor)







Suggestions from Iran that Caspian resources could be exploited and shared by all in a “condominium” arrangement, in the spirit of Iranian-Soviet treaties of 1921 and 1940, were left by the wayside as its former Soviet neighbours drilled wells and signed a series of bilateral demarcation deals with one another.


The arrangement set out in the trilateral agreement leaves Kazakstan with 27 per cent of the sea, Russia with 19 per cent, and Azerbaijan 18 per cent. It also assumes a 23 per cent share for Turkmenistan and a mere 13 per cent for Iran, although both these states rejected the principles behind the agreement.


The reason for the lack of clarity is that international laws have been used to describe the Caspian as a sea, a lake, or something in between, depending on which interpretation best suits the country concerned. The headlong race to stake claims oil and gas deposits has moved thing far ahead of the academic legal debate, and “winners” like Azerbaijan are reluctant to step back.





At the last Caspian summit, held in Tehran in 2007, it became apparent that Iran was no longer insisting on equal access to the sea’s resources. The final resolution also implied that the Iranians now accepted the bilateral and trilateral agreements its neighbours had signed among themselves, and which Tehran previously opposed.

Speaking at the time, the then foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki, said calls for a 50 per cent share were “unreasonable”, and noted that even before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran did not exploit more than 11 per cent of the Caspian’s resources.

In response to his remarks, some legal experts and opposition politicians suggested that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government was incapable of protecting Iranian territorial interests.

It is unclear what the bottom line is for Tehran, as details of negotiations on the sea’s legal status are kept under wraps.

The more moderate position advocated by some in Iran is a straight 20 per cent share, as one of five littoral states.

Talking to the state news agency IRNA after the Baku summit, Deputy Foreign Minister Mohammad Mehdi Akhoundzadeh, who is also presidential advisor on Caspian affairs, said Iran was still seeking a share of “over 20 per cent”.

Some experts, for example a political sciences professor at Tehran University, argue that accepting the deals that Iran’s neighbours have reached among themselves has fatally weakened the government’s ability to press for even 20 per cent.

Bahman Aqayi Diba, an Iranian expert based in Washington, suspect that the government would settle for as little as 16 or 17 per cent, but “on condition that the share also includes some oilfields like Alborz”.

The next Caspian summit, to be held in Russia in a year’s time, is supposed to tackle the thorny question of a final territorial division. With that discussion on the horizon, the position of Ahmadinejad’s government seems to many to be alarmingly vague.

The dilemma is that a straight demand for 20 per cent is unlikely to wash with the other states at the negotiating table, while agreeing to less would be extremely difficult given the strong domestic pressure on the government to achieve a fair outcome.

The ambiguous messages that the government is sending out may be well part of a strategy to lower public expectations ahead of next year’s talks.
