"Former President Süleyman Demirel: ‘The BTC is an engineering masterpiece and a political success’
Gökhan Kazbek - EkoTürk News Agency / Ankara
04 August 2006
The idea of transferring Azeri oil to Turkey through a pipeline dates back to 1991 when the USSR collapsed. For 15 years there was heated debate surrounding the project. In 1992 when the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) project for Azerbaijan oil was officially proposed, it included Iran on the transit route and was announced to the world as the Azerbaijan-Iran, Nakhchivan-Turkey pipeline. But the route wasn’t approved of by the U.S., which was explicit about its attitude towards the regime in Iran and maintained an economic and commercial embargo on the country. "
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