Los Anglese Times
Sept 12 2004

In Caucasus, Frozen Conflicts Are Still Hot
By Kim Murphy, Times Staff Writer

Disputes stoked after the Soviet breakup wreak misery and
instability years later.

GIZEL, Russia – Each day for 12 years, the rhythm of life in this
village of scrap-metal lean-tos, plywood shacks and misery in North
Ossetia has been the same.

Those who have jobs in the nearest city hike up to the main road
and flag down a passing car or, with luck, catch a bus. Later in the
morning, the children set out for school, walking a mile and a half
along roads that are often muddy or buried in snow. At 5 p.m. sharp,
the water tap in the center of town opens up for precisely three hours.

There is a reason why no bus stops at Gizel, why there is no school
or running water and two outhouses must do for 300 people: Gizel
is a “temporary” place, set up in this Russian republic in 1992 to
accommodate some of the 100,000 refugees fleeing South Ossetia’s
separatist war against Georgia.

Somehow, the war never officially ended, and many of the refugees
never went home. In addition, brief clashes have flared again over
the last few weeks, and officials here say a revival of the fighting
is their worst fear.

Across the territory of the former Soviet Union, as many as 1 million
people are living in the forgotten limbos of frozen ethnic and
territorial conflicts, some so obscure that most of the world isn’t
aware of them, and so deeply hostile that they may never be resolved.

Nowhere are these frozen conflicts as volatile as here in the North
Caucasus, where ethnic battles that erupted after the collapse of the
Soviet Union in 1991 could ignite again at the slightest provocation.

Here in North Ossetia, the horrific hostage-taking at a provincial
school in the town of Beslan resurrected in many minds another conflict
from 1992, with the neighboring Russian republic of Ingushetia, that
killed 200 people and displaced thousands. The Beslan hostage-takers,
a combination of Chechen and other rebels, were reportedly led by a
well-known Ingush militant.

No sooner had the hostages been taken than some Ossetians began
pulling weapons out of their closets, determined to strike against
Ingush villages in North Ossetia.

“Me and my friends had a plan. We wanted to go to an Ingush village
… and we were going to capture two schools there,” said one man,
a veteran of the Ingush-Ossetian war. “But in the end, we realized
those were such evil terrorists that even if we had their schools,
we could never break them.”

For those seeking to undermine what remains of the Russian empire,
the North Caucasus is the chosen field of battle, thanks in part to
the constant threat of instability in this highly strategic region.
One of the hostage-takers captured in Beslan said that the real aim of
the school seizure was not simply to free the neighboring province of
Chechnya from Russian rule, but to “start war in the entire territory
of the North Caucasus.”

Frozen conflicts plague the region. In South Ossetia, officially part
of Georgia but seeking to join Russia, periodic mortar attacks and
small-arms skirmishes claimed several dozen lives over the summer
as Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili moved to end the de facto
autonomy there and in the Black Sea republic of Abkhazia.

The conflict over Azerbaijan’s Armenian-majority enclave of
Nagorno-Karabakh is no closer to resolution than it was when
the heaviest fighting ended 10 years ago. And in Moldova, the
self-proclaimed but otherwise unrecognized republic of Trans-Dniester
has seen deliberate electricity shut-offs and a rail blockade after
increased tension over language issues.

The world may tune out the conflicts in these hard-to-pronounce areas,
but analysts warn that it does so at its peril: The conflict belt runs
along the vital energy corridor linking Caspian Sea oil supplies with
Western Europe and the United States.

Moreover, the self-declared independent zones – answering to no
recognized governments – are potential breeding grounds for problems
that can spill well beyond their borders, experts warn.

Abkhazia, which Saakashvili has sworn to bring back under Georgian
rule, was the site of the reported disappearance of more than a pound
of highly enriched uranium sometime after fighting broke out in 1992.
On at least two other occasions, Georgian officials have found stolen
radioactive material they believed was bound for a port in Adzharia,
a third breakaway region that Georgia retook in May.

“It is widely and correctly believed that these unresolved fragments of
the Soviet empire now serve as shipment points for weapons, narcotics
and victims of trafficking, and as breeding grounds for transnational
organized crime – and, last but not least, for terrorism,” said
a report produced by the German Marshall Fund and the Project on
Transitional Democracies.

The recent fighting in South Ossetia appears to have been triggered
by the Georgian government’s attempt to crack down on the huge
smugglers’ market on the border with Russia. Georgia says it is
determined to collect taxes on the rampant shipments of cheap vodka
and other smuggled goods that routinely flow out of South Ossetia,
but leaders there say the market closure was the first step in an
attempted economic blockade.

“The Georgian side is not fulfilling its agreement, because it took
up an obligation to invest certain means to restore the destroyed
economy of South Ossetia, and it has done nothing,” South Ossetian
President Eduard Kokoity said in an interview.

Under the Soviets, Ossetia was split between Georgia and Russia,
in large part because of geography: The north and south are divided
by the high, forbidding peaks of the Caucasus range, whose passes
were historically closed up to six months of winter. Today, about 95%
of South Ossetians hold Russian passports, and Russian border guards
and peacekeeping troops patrol the frontier.

The specter of Russia looms over many of the frozen conflicts along
the belt of the Black Sea and the Caucasus. All lie in Russia’s
“near abroad,” the geopolitical zone around which Moscow has drawn
a line in the sand against U.S. diplomacy.

Georgian President Saakashvili has accused Russia of supplying missiles
to its peacekeepers in South Ossetia and engaging in a military
buildup on its borders. But Moscow has spoken in favor of a negotiated
settlement, and of maintaining Georgia’s territorial integrity.

“There are no fools in the Russian leadership who want an international
war on their hands right now,” said Sergei Mikheyev of the Center
for Political Technologies in Moscow. “Russia would be happy to
mediate a settlement in which Georgia becomes a federalized country
and incorporates South Ossetia and Abkhazia as autonomous units,
but at this point it seems impossible to make all three sides see
that this is the only nonviolent way out of the situation.”

Kokoity, a former wrestling champion, said that South Ossetia had
the same right of self-determination that Georgia exercised when it
withdrew from the Soviet Union in 1991, taking South Ossetia with it.

During the war that broke out in South Ossetia in 1991, 1,000 people
died and more than 112 Ossetian villages were destroyed.

“I had a house, a beautiful, three-story house. But it was destroyed,
and I never got any compensation,” said Tusya Galoyeva, a 64-year-old
native of the South Ossetian village of Gory, who fled to Gizel during
the war.

Before the war, Gizel was an unfinished recreational center for a
collective farm; many of the rooms in its half-done concrete buildings
are open to the summer air. Buckets stand on the floors to catch rain
dripping through makeshift roofs, and most units have several families
crowded inside, sleeping dormitory fashion and sharing kitchens.

“You have a lot of people living really in some of the worst conditions
I have ever seen, certainly the worst conditions in Europe,” said
William Tall, head of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees office
in the North Caucasus.

“The conflict has been going on for so long, and we’re not getting
anything. We’ve been living in indignation for years,” said resident
Zemfira Laliyeva, whose relatives have all returned to South Ossetia.
She has not, mostly because she lived in a predominantly Georgian
village, and fears her neighbors.

“My husband’s brother returned, and look what’s happening there
now,” she said, referring to the clashes. “He’s spending nights in
the forest!

“Not only that,” she added, “but our house was not rebuilt. Where
can I return to?”

In settlement talks, Ossetian refugees have demanded restitution
from Georgia. Now Saakashvili has been offering some benefits and the
possibility that displaced South Ossetians could take over their lost
homes from those living in them now.

But most here regard the idea of integrating South Ossetia into
Georgia as a pipe dream; Kokoity rejects even the widely discussed
proposal of offering South Ossetia broad autonomy in a Georgian state.

“This will never happen, and I can claim this with complete
confidence,” he said flatly. “What state do they think they are
inviting us into? Georgia is a failed state. Let’s operate with the
facts: In Georgia, three presidents were elected…. None of the Georgian
presidents finished his term in accordance with the constitution –
they were all removed with coups, or ‘rose revolutions,’ or whatever.”

Saakashvili, who was elected after longtime Georgian President Eduard
A. Shevardnadze was ousted in a popular uprising, has insisted that his
aim is unification of a democratic state within its internationally
recognized borders. Russia’s encouragement of separatists in South
Ossetia and Abkhazia can lead to dangerous consequences, he warned
in an interview this month with the Moscow newspaper Novaya Gazeta.

“If they denounce separatist support in Chechnya while advising it in
Georgia, they simply do not understand what this war can become,” he
said. “It would have consequences far more serious than the conflicts
of the early 1990s. The region has more weapons, the fighters can
organize themselves more efficiently; they are more experienced,
more disciplined. It will turn into a long-term conflict.”