[LINK] "Is the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway worth the fuss?"

[rfmcdonald]

The geopolitics of a rail link connecting Turkey to Azerbaijan via Georgia is the subject of an Open Democracy article by Georgian journalist Yana Israelyan.

Georgy Arutunov is a local citizen of Akhalkalaki, near Georgia's Armenian border, but he doesn't know a great deal about the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway (BTK) currently under construction close to his hometown. 'I have heard about it, but I don't know whether it's being carried out or not.' About a dozen local residents have given me the same answer—they know next to nothing about the grandiose 'project of the century' as the BTK railway has been dubbed. According to the contract, 70% of workers hired to construct the railway are supposed to be Georgian citizens: it is strange that they have heard so little about it.

Marabda-Kartsakhi, the company responsible for construction, says that it is complying with all of the terms of the agreement. 'We employ specialists from Ukraine, Turkey and other countries, but in general, we recruit citizens of Georgia. Now the project employs about 600 people. When the road will go into operation, we will add another 1,000 employees,' said Levan Kankava, the Executive Director of Marabda-Kartsakhi Company.

BTK is a joint project of Turkey, Azerbaijan and Georgia, and it aims to unite the railway systems of these three countries. Originally, the project was supposed to be completed by 2009, but the terms were breached. Then the completion date was moved to 2011, but that soon came and went. The deadline was then postponed several more times. The construction was finally restored after the Georgia's 2012 parliamentary elections, when, according to a company representative, Marabda-Kartsakhi underwent a management change.

'I do not want to look back and criticise, but many things were not completed then. When our new team started to work in 2012, only 20% of the work was completed. Now we have already completed 60%. We cannot promise to finish work by the end of the year – it is impossible, we need another two or three years. But we are ready to open it up to the first trains,' Kote Ninidze, CEO of Marabda-Kartsakhi, told me.

The current capacity of the BTK is 5m tons of cargo and 1m passengers. In the future, it could be increased to 15m tons of cargo and 3m passengers. The route's total length is 826 km, and 180 of those kilometres are situated inside Georgian territory.