Estrategia Creativa

The presidents, directors, and managers of the NOCs are actors who potentially threaten those at the apex of power because of their access to capital, which they skilfully use to build their own power bases. At the same time, in the oil-rich areas local notables are potentially threatening because they lack privileged access to the capital – access which is instead granted to the groups from the centre of the country. It should be kept in mind that in an oil-rich country, one of the most lucrative ways to enrich oneself is to win a long term contract – for instance for construction – with the foreign oil company. Individuals and groups that are usually awarded those contracts – with the ruler or his inner circle’s apparent approval and in co-operation with the foreign companies – are the regime’s close allies. In real terms, however, the situation of the local actors is not hopeless – with time, they also establish their own relationships with the foreign oil companies. Locals, however, feel that they are not being treated fairly by the government. This feeling stems from the fact that as inhabitants of oil-rich areas, they should be given special access to contracts rather than being treated as third class clients of the regime.

Furthermore, the feeling of unfair treatment is also widespread among the wider population of the oil-rich areas. People living in those areas assert that they are being treated unfairly, even if their living standards do not necessary differ from those in other areas of the country. Whereas on some occasions the grievances of the local populations are fully justified, their demands – in number of cases – can also be exaggerated. Hence, the population as well as the local notables almost uniformly maintain that the central 18_{Arkady Ostrovsky, ‘Chief executive has a vision for Gazprom,’Financial Times, 4 April 2005.}

authorities neglect their interests, whether this is in fact so or not. The combination of greed on the part of the local notables and imagined or real grievances on the part of the local population can – in the most extreme cases – lead to the emergence of secessionist movements which, once set in motion, tend to endure for a very long time. Thus, from the ruler’s perspective, satisfying interests groups and the local populations in the oil-rich areas is as important (if not more) as bringing the NOC under the regime’s firm control. The case of Aceh, Indonesia offers a good illustration of the tensions between local notables, the population and the regime in a resource-abundant area that transformed itself into a secessionist movement.

The rebellion in Aceh led by the Aceh Freedom Movement, known by the popular

acronym GAM,19 is often seen as a product of the region’s cultural, religious, and

primordial differences with other parts of Indonesia. Yet, it was argued that while religious concerns were in fact mentioned by the GAM’s leaders, it was only in passing, with the real demands focusing squarely on political and economic independence (Robinson 1998: 132).20 Hence it was no accident that the secessionist movement was formed in 1976, just as a large natural gas facility was beginning its operations. The leadership and initial members of GAM came from a small, but growing business class, which felt aggravated because outsiders, ‘particularly those with good political connections in Jakarta, or with the military in Aceh, appeared to be winning more than their share of [the] lucrative contracts’ that were awarded by the foreign companies (Robinson 1998: 132; see also Crouch 1979: 577). For instance, in 1974 none other but GAM’s leader, Hasan di Tiro, lost a bid to build a pipeline for Mobil Oil. In addition, intellectuals and local government technocrats were frustrated by the fact that substantial revenues generated by taxes and royalties were channelled directly to the central government rather than being spent locally (Kell 1995: 27–30).21This exclusion from the regime’s networks left the Aceh elites with little scope for accumulating wealth and status, thereby leading to a situation in which political change became ‘the only avenue

19_{Gerakan Aceh Merdeka}

20_{A similar sort of argument was made about the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM).Source:}

‘Special report Sudan: glittering towers in a war zone,’The Economist, 9 December 2006.

21

That money was primary spent by General Suharto and his inner circle on rewarding and buying off a growing circle of beneficiaries, with the result that the stability of the regime was maintained (Crouch 1979: 578).

for satisfying their greed and aspirations, or expressing their grievances’ (Le Billon 2001a: 567). The local population came to share the local elites’/rebels’ views; however, they were not obvious allies.

It was argued that generally, Aceh’s economy was in good shape, and as such did not provide a basis for a widespread rebellion. According to a national survey in 1971, Aceh’s per capita GDP was 97 per cent of the national average, and between 1971 and 1975, Aceh’s real annual growth rate averaged 5.2 percent (Ross 2003b: 7). Moreover, there were considerable economic benefits for Aceh from the liquefied natural gas (LNG) boom.22 Yet, the boom also brought a number of undesirable side effects, including the expropriation of land from small farmers without adequate compensation, and a failure to provide adequate social amenities and infrastructure for displaced communities (Robinson 1998: 136). Whereas all those factors were important for the local population themselves, they were not enough to generate sufficient support for the rebellion. Michael Ross states that the locals’ belief that the jobs and the revenues from the natural gas plant were not being adequately shared with the people of Aceh pushed them towards more radical elements. These issues were seized upon by GAM, whose ‘propaganda suggested that if independent, the Acehnese would become wealthy like the citizens of Brunei’ (2003a: 8). Hence, the key factor in gathering the local population behind GAM seems to be the belief that secession would make them richer (2003a: 7). It should be added that in the years to come, the factors sustaining the rebellion – besides greed and grievances – were firstly, random brutality towards the general population, which led to a growing radicalisation of Aceh’s people, and secondly, the geographical location of the region itself.

In reference to the latter point, it is important to keep in mind that the rebellion in Aceh, or indeed in other oil-rich regions, for instance, in the Delta region of Nigeria (Watts 2001; Watts 2004; Frynas 2001), or the Cabinda enclave in Angola (Le Billon 2001b), would not have taken place or endured for long if the resource-rich regions were not located far away from the centre of each country (Ross 2004). Philippe Le Billon stated: ‘[T]he greater the distance or difficulty of access from the centre of control, the 22

‘[D]uring construction, the new facility employed 8,000 to 12,000 people; during the peak years of production, it employed 5,000 and 6,000. Since local infrastructure was poor, Mobil also built roads, schools, medical facilities, and 4,000 to 5,000 new houses’ (Ross 2003b: 12).

greater the cost of control and the higher the risk of losing the resource to the adversary. In other words, a resource close to the capital is less likely to be captured by rebels than a resource close to a border. Resources can thus be classified as proximate or distant’ (2001a: 570). Thus, the geographic proximity of the resource-rich areas is as important in analysing the struggle for the soul of these regions as understanding the events that lead to the radicalisation of the local elites and populations.

To sum up, in this section we discussed situations where the oil industry creates problems for the regime. This is when the oil factor increases the political risk for the regime. The existing literature points to two threats that authoritarian rulers can face, namely: NOC and oil-rich regions. Those two areas are qualified as high-risk, since they occur in the entities (NOC) and spaces (oil-rich regions) that are directly linked to the oil industry. The very possibility of losing control over any of those areas challenges the rulers’ authority. In both instances, various interest groups constitute the most problematic actors, which will attempt to wrestle as much control over the oil industry as possible from the regime for their own benefit. In addition, in oil-rich areas, unsatisfied interest groups can turn into political manipulators that will attempt to destabilise the situation. Thus, an authoritarian ruler has to create a situation in which interest groups are relatively satisfied and remain firmly under his control in order to prevent major crises.

Leading on, this thesis argues that the process of addressing political threats that the oil industry poses by the regime brings into the open the dynamics of the regime–oil industry relationship. This thesis analyses the development of this relationship through the prism of formal (corporatist) and informal (patron–client network) mechanisms of control. In so doing, this thesis moves away from the dominant explanation, which says that the Kazakh regime, in order to remain in power, relies primarily on zhuz-hordes, tribes and clan-based systems (which were adapted to the Soviet power structures and subsequently became a salient feature of Kazakh politics in the post-Soviet period).

The shift from the dominant explanation – as the next section discusses – is predominantly but not solely dictated by growing scepticism towards thezhuz, tribe, and clan prism among some key Central Asian scholars including leading anthropologists. Furthermore, a study of the power structure of the Kazakh post-Soviet oil industry – which is at the heart of this thesis – through a dominant prism ran the risk of getting lost

in a maze of anecdotes which would be potentially difficult to verify. The outcome of such an undertaking could far too easily end up being sensationalistic and journalistic in nature rather than academic. Having said all of that, the following section concludes that detailed ethnographic study of the Kazakh oil industry – conducted by an anthropologists rather than political scientist - is much needed and that this thesis is a first step rather than a decisive statement on the Kazakh regime-oil industry relationship.

Rather than looking at the regime-oil industry through azhuz, tribe and clan prism, this thesis proposes to reintroduce to the study of the post-Soviet Central Asia the concept of corporatism as well as to build and expand on concepts of patron-clientalism and neo- patrimonial regimes (borrowed by Central Asian scholars from the African studies) which enjoyed a brief spell of interest in the 1990s but failed to make substantial inroads into a Central Asian studies.

In reference to the first point, this thesis reintroduces the concept of corporatism which – as discussed in the following sections of this chapter - was used by some leading Sovietologists in order to analysis regime-society relationships in the post-Khrushchev Soviet Union. Despite being an important and fully recognised tool of analysis corporatism was omitted by the students of post-Soviet Central Asia in favour of kinship and informal networks based explanations as the zhuz, tribes and clan driven analysis fully demonstrate. Whereas this thesis does not argue that informal politics did not play a key role in post-Soviet Kazakhstan in the 1990s, it contends however that scholars should make more use of the corporatist prism when analysing – in particular - the first years after the collapse of the Soviet regime. The institutional component of the Soviet Union was far too easily disregarded as unimportant in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse even though it can aid our understanding of the initial behaviour of the post-Soviet Kazakh regime (as this study attempts to demonstrate through the example of the oil industry). Furthermore, this thesis argues that the corporatist prism should be gradually applied in order to explain the current post-transitional period and the survival of authoritarian regimes in Central Asia. Hence while informal politics are a dominant ‘modus operandi’, students of Central Asian regimes should start paying more attention to alternative regime maintenance techniques. This thesis demonstrates that the corporatist prism – at least in the Kazakh case – to a degree explains new ways in which the regime tries to co-opt the

ever-growing oil industry related business class that is growing rich due to the sky rocketing oil prices.

In reference to the second point, the following sections will demonstrate that in the 1990s, some Western scholars attempted to understand the direction into which post- Soviet Central Asia was heading by comparing it - most notably – to sub-Sahara Africa. Whereas those comparative studies made some valuable points about for example, the similarities and difference in the structure of the post-colonial states in both regions, the sub-Saharan prism did not endure for long. This thesis suggests that students of Central Asia should not neglect sub-Saharan Africa and the neo-patrimonial prism to hastily. Firstly, comparing Central Asia to sub-Sahara Africa allows us to better understand the motivations behind decisions taken at crucial junctions by the Kazakh regime. Secondly it allows us to uncover the nature of the Kazakh regime today and the course which it is pursuing.