Page 24 - bne_newspaper_August_17_2018

Eurasia
August 17, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 24
Smallprint shows Caspian Sea summit was not the ‘summit to end all summits’
Ben Aris in Berlin
For a moment there some analysts who for more than two decades have followed the neverending negotiations on carving up the Caspian Sea may have wondered if a heavily promoted summit in Kazakhstan’s Aqtau was going to go down as the ‘summit to end all summits’.
Alas, the long-awaited August 12 signing of a convention on the legal status of the body of water leaves a lot to be desired.
As it turns out the leaders of the five states that surround the Caspian Sea—Russia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Iran and Turkmenistan—have not yet inked a deal that will entirely carve up the oil and gas-rich resources under the seabed.
Despite all the fanfare, it appears that the all- important definitive delineation of the seabed will have to be determined in future negotiations. What was agreed upon is that each country
will control 15 nautical miles from its shore for mineral exploration and another 10 nautical miles for fishing. The remaining surface area will be shared jointly among all the littoral countries.
A key issue in the dispute has always been whether the Caspian Sea is actually a lake. If it is accepted as a lake that would mean the borders of all five nations would meet in the middle. If
it is decreed to be a sea, there would be some common “international waters” in the middle that all the countries would have to share.
When it comes to the rich resources under the Caspian Sea, the summit attended by the five littoral states surrounding it only produced talks that agreed on more talks, it appears.
‘Not a sea or a lake’
In the end, the parties to the convention agreed to fluff the issue of the ‘sea or lake’ dispute and developed a special legal status for the Caspian, defining it neither as a sea nor as a lake.
Under the terms of the deal, the surface will
be open for common usage. However, the all important seabed, where the natural resources reside, will be divided among the countries via the concluding of bilateral agreements—so expect more interminable negotiations.
The five leaders who gathered in Aqtau—Azer- baijani President Ilham Aliyev, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbajev, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdymuk- hammedov—signed the Convention on the Legal Status of the Caspian Sea that addresses its divi- sion and regulates the issues of military coopera- tion, and the development of biological resources, the seabed and subsoil.
Putin called the signing of the convention a historic event. But a clue that it may not have been so historic came when Berdymukhammedov concluded his opening remarks by saying another summit should be held in Turkmenistan.
Looking at the failure to resolve the division of the seabed, Izvestiya concluded that it "looks like an in- formal recognition of the inability of the five Caspian