Villagers in Azerbaijan rail against BP oil giant

"BP ignores us. It doesn't want us to compensate us even though it has a duty to do so," said Momedov, 57, a local school teacher who has vowed to fight for the money along with 21 other villagers that feel hard done by.

The story of this corner of Azerbaijan, some 120 kilometers (75 miles) from the capital Baku, is symbolic of a country that has been flooded with oil dollars from its Caspian Sea reserves but where little has been done to improve the lot of an impoverished population.

The problem dates back to a 1996 land reform and the construction of the Baku-Supsa pipeline by BP between 1997 and 1999 linking the Azerbaijani fields to a tanker port on the Black Sea in neighboring Georgia.

At the time, the British oil producer vowed to compensate the owners of land crossed by the 827-kilometre (513-mile) line, which now pumps some five million tons of crude oil every year.

"In 1996, the town gave me this hectare of land and I started working on it," said Yusuf Novruzov, 78, another villager, smoking Azerbaijan's popular Baki cigarettes in the courtyard of a local cafe.

"When God turned His eyes on us, enough water flowed down from the mountains to irrigate it," said this former taxi driver. The land, Novruzov said, was a chance to "finally earn a bit of money" in this former Soviet collective farm.

But one day in 1997, Novruzov said, Azerbaijani "heavies" from BP security paid a call. "They scared us, threatened us with confiscating our lands if we continued to cultivate them. The locals were afraid." Then in 2003, pipeline officials came to Randjbar to sign a "contract" with the villagers, Novruzov said.

Momedov continued the story. "It was written in Azerbaijani but with Latin characters. No-one understood what was written in it and they didn't give us a single copy," he added. Azerbaijan switched from using the Cyrillic alphabet to the Latin one in 2001 but the change has been long in taking root in more remote parts of the country.

The villagers now feel abandoned by BP, a local administration they suspect of corruption and a local press that is indifferent to their campaign.

BP declined repeated offers to comment on the case of the Randjbar villagers. "All this is politics, villagers are angry at the president," said Agasaf Rasulov, deputy head of the local administration, shaking his head.

Asked about particular aspects of the case, he answered: "I am not up to date on the details."

Now, Mammadov is left mourning the depletion of this village of 3,000 people with "a few fields of barley and some cows where the young leave for Baku or better yet for Russia as soon as they can."

He looked to the distance with envy at the lands crossed by the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, where plot owners received thousands of dollars in compensation - a small fortune in a country where the average salary is around 50 dollars a month.

Sahib Mammadov, a lawyer from a group called Citizens' Labor Rights Protection League that helps fight for landowners, said no owners along the Baku-Supsa line have received compensation and the Randjbar case could become part of a much bigger campaign.

"In 1996, the authorities decided to give the fields to the villagers and between 1996 and 1998 they had a right to profit from them," Mammadov said. "Everyone has the right to be a landowner ... The law in every civilized country allows this."

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