Hazar Raporu - Issue 02 - Winter 2012

(CENTO). Five years later, in 1964,
Turkey, Iran and Pakistan attempted to
give their common political alignment
an economic dimension by setting up
a parallel organisation called Regional
Cooperation for Development, or RCD,
which was supposed to promote mutual
trade and economic collaboration. 3 The
CENTO alliance was dissolved in 1979,
after the Iranian revolution, and RCD
with it. However, in 1985 its three former
members established ECO as a successor
organisation. Although this achieved little
in the immediately succeeding period,
it was given a new impetus after the end
of the cold war by the accession in 1992
of the newly independent republics of
Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kirghizstan,
Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan,
besides Afghanistan. 4
ECO’s main stated purpose was to
liberalise trade between the member
states, first through a Protocol on
Preferential Tariffs signed by the original
members in 1991, and then through
the ECO Trade Agreement (ECOTA)
launched in July 2003, in which they
committed themselves to ‘the progressive
reduction of tariffs and elimination of
non-tariff barriers to trade’, 5 besides the
improvement of mutual transport links, 6
3 See William Hale and Julian Bharier, ‘CENTO, RCD and
the Northern Tier: a Political and Economic Appraisal’, Middle
Eastern Studies, Vol.8. No. 2 (1972) pp. 217-9
4 Richard Pomfret, ‘The Economic Cooperation Organization:
Current Status and Future Prospects’, Europe-Asia Studies,
Vol.49, No.4 (1997) pp.657-9.
5 ECO Trade Agreement (ECOTA) (Islamabad, July 2003)
Article 3: from ECO Secretariat website (www.ecosecretariat.
org/ftproot/Documents/Agreements/ECOTA) accessed 28
October 2012
6 Ibid, Article 9.
among other objectives. Future aims
included the establishment of an ECO
Trade and Development Bank (ECObank)
a reinsurance company, and even an ECO
shipping company and an ECO airline. 7
In his speech to his fellow-leaders in
Baku in October 2012, Prime Minister
Erdoğan admitted that ECO was still a
long way from achieving its objective of
founding a free trade area. However, he
pointed out that the member states had
a total population of 400 million people,
and claimed that if the ECOTA were
fully implemented then mutual trade
could be increased eight-fold. 8 Similarly,
writing in the normally pro-government
Turkish daily Zaman, columnist Kadir
Dikbaş emphasised that, in the first eight
months of 2012, while Turkey’s exports to
the European Union (EU) had declined
by 9.1 percent compared with the same
period of 2011, in the case of the ECO
countries it had increased by 115 percent. 9
In interpreting this, strict caution was
needed, however. Paradoxically, Turkey’s
trade with ECO was largely with Iran,
with whom it had the most problematic
political relations, accounting for its
extreme volatility.
Calculating from Turkey’s official trade
statistics for 2011, Iran accounted for just
over 60 percent of total trade with the
ECO countries (39 percent of exports
and 72 per cent of imports) 10 and was
7 Pomfret, op.cit., pp.659-60
8 ‘Serbest Ticaret Anlaşmasını Herkes İmzalasın, Tıcaretimız 8
Kat Artsın’, Zaman (Istanbul, daily) 17 October 2012.
9 Kadir Dikbaş, ‘ Zor Zamanda İhracat Rekoru Kırdığımız
Bölge’, ibid, 16 October 2012
10 Data from Türkiye İstatistik Kurumu (www.tuik.gov.tr),
114 112