living on the PiPeline

A fisherman with his nets in Bibi-Heybat, an oil village in Azerbaijan.

A young girl in a wedding party in Djandarsky, opposite the BTC Marneuli pumping station in Georgia.

Djandarsky residents complained that they had lost their farmland due to the BTC construction and were never properly compensated.

Yelena Rodina with her granddaughter Lika in Dgwali, Georgia, approximately 800 meters from the BTC pipeline. Rodina, like many others, lost her house to a landslide and received only minimal compensation from the pipeline company.

Eshana Arviladze, 81, on the ground floor of her home, and (above) an abandoned house. Both were damaged by landslides.

Village of Dgwali, Georgia.

Aynur Gokchay with her husband Isa at home in Calabas, Turkey. Isa and other villagers never received the jobs promised by a BTC contractor.

56 :: SoroS FoundationS network report 2007 ::

e

reVenue watCH inStitute

Opening the Books

on Natural Resource Revenues

aCh nIGht

for a month, messages appeared on the cell phone of a community activist in one of Indonesia’s sprawling urban areas. the messages were consistent, the threat unsubtle: “If you want to live in this city, don’t talk about budgets.” next came “informal conversations” with the local police, then interrogations, then a traffic incident involving another community activist who was thrown from his motorbike. the incident might have been happenstance. But, after so many warnings, it might have been something else.

It is dangerous work to empower people, to provide them information about malfeasance and the tools they need to collect official documents, to show them how to discover whether

government officials, some local, some national, are mismanaging and sometimes skimming massive amounts of public money paid by foreign companies to extract oil, minerals, and other natural resources. In many cases, local people doing the tedious, risky grassroots work have benefitted significantly from support provided by the Open Society Institute and the revenue Watch Institute, a former OSI program and now a major grantee working to promote transparency and accountability in resource-rich countries.

Ilham Cendekia works for PattIrO, the Center for regional Information and Studies, a grantee of the OSI-supported tifa Foundation in Indonesia and a key local partner of the revenue Watch Institute. headquartered in Jakarta, PattIrO has trained local advocates, including the community activist who received the threatening text messages, to teach people how to demand access to information about budgets, government revenues, and the dispersal of revenues from natural resource extraction, including payments made by huge oil and mining companies. “It takes time to strengthen them and build their confidence,” Cendekia said. “We direct them to the local governments, to confront them.

We find champions within the government.”

Success comes in fits and starts, and the

revenue Watch Institute provides support to

capitalize upon it. One cooperative member of

Indonesia’s parliament passed PattIrO a copy of

a contract between Indonesia’s government and an

oil company. “We sent the document to revenue

Watch’s legal department,” Cendekia said, “and

used its expert opinion as an advocacy tool and in

educational materials. It makes us stronger. It gives

us greater credibility.”

the importance of PattIrO and the multitude of other civil society organizations working to bring genuine transparency and accountability to resource-rich countries around the world can hardly be overstated. Behind the massive violence, poverty, and corruption that are ravaging so much of the world—behind the killing, the rape, the maiming, the abduction of children to serve in military units in places like Sierra leone, liberia, the Democratic republic of the Congo, and so many other countries—lies a driving force: the mismanagement and theft of revenues produced by the extraction of oil, diamonds, metals, and other natural resources bound mostly for the developed world.

In the Democratic republic of the Congo, the cash comes mostly from metals and diamonds.

In equatorial Guinea, nigeria, Chad, Iraq, and so many other countries, it’s oil. even in relatively peaceful countries like Indonesia, which is recovering from decades of insurgent violence and government repression, mismanagement of revenues from natural-resource extraction can undermine healthy sectors of an economy, and particularly those sectors, like manufacturing and agriculture, that are engines for alleviating poverty and achieving sustained growth; this can produce unemployment, massive public indebtedness, the impoverishment of millions of families, and the severing of the ties that make a country’s government one that is of the people and for the people.

the revenue Watch Institute’s mission is to help introduce and strengthen transparency and accountability in resource-rich countries around the globe. the institute helps provide citizens with the information, training, networks, and funding they need to become more

effective monitors of government revenues and

expenditures. the revenue Watch Institute works with and engages not only civil society but also government officials, parliaments, and the private sector in producing and consuming countries around the world, as well as international financial institutions.

two of the revenue Watch Institute’s

main partners are pillars of the campaign for

transparency and accountability in resource-rich

countries. the first is Publish What you Pay, a

coalition of more than 300 local and international

nongovernmental organizations from around the

world that are working to require oil, gas, and

mining companies to disclose the payments they

make to governments for the extraction of natural

resources and thereby help citizens of

resource-rich developing countries hold their governments

accountable for the management of these

revenues. the second is the extractive Industries

transparency Initiative (eItI), a coalition of

governments, companies, civil society groups,

investors, and international organizations that

promotes transparency and accountability by the

governments that receive revenues for extraction

of natural resources.