Tensions thaw Russia’s frozen border conflicts
By Andrew Jack

FT
August 13 2004

The death of three Georgian soldiers yesterday in clashes with
separatists in the breakaway region of South Ossetia highlighted how
the long-dormant conflicts around the borders of the former Soviet
Union are being reawakened.

An uneasy period of peace risks being replaced by one of the first
significant redrawings of the regional map since the collapse of
communism.

With intensified fighting and renewed diplomatic activity, Russia
yesterday called for a ceasefire in South Ossetia, and Georgia sent in
a top negotiator.

One reason for the tensions has been a more aggressive stance taken by
Mikheil Saakashvili, the youthful and populist pro-western leader
elected president of Georgia last year. He is keen to break the
deadlock since he came to power with increasing efforts to bring the
region back under Georgian control.

But the attitude of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, against a
backdrop of simmering conflict in the neighbouring republic of
Chechnya, and the expansion of the European Union eastwards have
introduced an international dimension.

South Ossetia is not alone. Along with Abkhazia, it is one of two
so-called “frozen conflicts” in Georgia. There are two others
elsewhere: the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan and
Transdnistra in Moldova. All were created by military action at the
time of the collapse of the USSR, replaced by an uneasy peace with
their “host” states.

Between them, they are home to more than 1m impoverished people,
living under regimes that are economically and diplomatically
isolated, accused of corruption and autocracy. Now the security risks
they present are putting them back on the agenda.

“Their residents feel like forgotten Europeans, within but outside
Europe,” says Walter Schwimmer, secretary-general of the Council of
Europe, the inter-governmental human rights organisation. and

The common denominator for all the conflicts is the Soviet Union. When
it collapsed, a series of “grey zones” emerged, resistant to the newly
independent states to which they were historically attached.

Hundreds of thousands of small arms remain, raising concerns over the
militarisation of the regions and the risk of weaponry falling into
the hands of criminal groups and terrorists.

Modern Russia continues to play a role in maintaining the
conflicts. They touch on its “near abroad”, the border zone of
traditional Soviet influence that has again become a foreign policy
priority under Mr Putin as the EU and Nato have expanded into
territory Moscow controlled for the second half of the last century.

Russia has offered easy transit and passports to residents in South
Ossetia and Abkhazia, overseen commercial transactions and maintained
leverage through peacekeeping troops in Georgia and Transdnistra that
operate outside the jurisdiction of the OSCE. “Fundamentally, Russia
keeps these places alive by passively supporting them,” says Dov Lynch
from the EU Institute for Security Studies in Paris.

But he stresses that the frozen conflicts have their own internal
momentum, with the local regimes perpetuating their power and few
democratic institutions.

The international community also helps maintain the status quo,
traditionally through political neglect and the provision of
humanitarian assistance that supports the population and reduces the
chance of social explosion of popular revolt.

There are signs that the problem is starting to be taken more
seriously, however. In the past few months, the EU has become more
active, imposing travel bans on the leadership of Transdnistra in an
attempt to force negotiations for a political settlement with Moldova,
which may be an EU neighbour if Romania joins the EU in 2007.

Russia has also become more assertive, withdrawing troops and military
stockpiles from Moldova, and attempting to broker a settlement late
last year.

“Disintegration is the worst scenario,” says Konstantin Kosachev, head
of the Russian parliament’s foreign affairs committee. “If Georgia
goes out of control, Russia will be the next to be destabilised.”

Without more power-sharing and prosperity from the “metropolitan”
countries from which they have broken away, the tensions in South
Ossetia and its counterparts may defrost in a far less elegant way.