contract with Iran’s Pars Energy to build a rail track linking Iran with Kazakhstan along Turkme-nistan’s Caspian coastline.
The president gave no clear explanation for the cancellation. He said Turkmenistan would carry on with the project by itself.
It remains unclear if Iran now lose its link to the new rail line, which Tehran has been counting on to carry goods from Asian countries to Russia with great profits to the Islamic Republic from transiting Iran.
Tehran and Ashgabat inked the deal in January 2010, and it was scheduled for completion last December.
Elsewhere in Central Asia, Tehran hasn’t always been the most reliable project partner. Iran has been building a five-kilometer tunnel through the Tajik mountains for over six years, but the tunnel is still partially flooded.
As recently as May, Berdymukhamedov hailed the rail link as a “trans-continental bridge connecting Europe to Asia.”
Iran did not take Berdy-mukhamedov’s announcement at face value. Two days after the Turkmenistan action, Iranian Transport Minister Ali Nikzad told the Fars news agency that Berdymukhamedov’s decision “will not affect the two countries’ joint railway construction project,” stressing that the railway was in its final phase of construction and that it would still be completed by the Iranian firm.
That hinted that Iran suspected Berdymukhamedov was just playing games and trying to extract some concessions from Tehran.
The project’s troubles are unlikely to hurt Iranian-Turkmen relations, Slavomir Horak, a scholar at Johns Hopkins University, told EurasiaNet. He said that was because both countries need each other. Increasingly isolated, Iran needs a friend, and land-locked Turkmenistan needs links to the outside world to reduce its painful dependence on Russia. After gaining independence in the early 1990s, Turkmenistan needed to diversify its gas shipments, to move away from its singular reliance on Russia.
Though Iran and Turkmenistan have had disagreements in the past, such as in 2008 when Turkmenistan halted gas exports to Iran in mid-winter, Ashgabat and Tehran have always managed to sort out their differences, says Horak.
In 2010, the two opened a second natural gas pipeline, which industry analysts predicted would eventually double Turkmenistan’s exports to Iran. (Due to its limited gas transport infrastructure, gas-rich Iran uses the Turkmen gas in its north and exports some to Turkey, while exporting its own gas abroad from the south.)
“The problem with [the railroad] contract is that the deadline was December last year,” Horak said. “Finally Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov went to inspect the project and saw that it was delayed and took it over.”
Western sanctions may have played a role in delaying the project.
Alex Vatanka, an Iran scholar at The Middle East Institute in Washington, DC, believes Western sanctions are disrupting the operations of Iranian firms doing business abroad. Vatanka said, “The rial has lost half its value in the past few months. The difference is huge for contractors and subcontractors” working on the railroad.
Vatanka suspects Washington and possibly Israel – which has been attempting to open an embassy in Ashgabat for several years – could be putting political pressure on Turkmenistan.
“I wonder,” Vatanka told EurasiaNet, “if they [the US and Israel] are playing a role here, saying; ‘You might not want to get close, it’s not in your best interest.’ I think these are all tactical maneuvers, not strategic maneuvers,” Vatanka said. “Joint projects, like the railroad, could be revived in another format in the future.”