Divide and rule for Putin’s dreams

THE KOREA HERALD
December 20, 2004, Monday

To divide a people in order to conquer them is an immoral strategy
that has endured throughout recorded history. From Alexander the Great
to Stalin the Cruel, variants of that strategy have been used to keep
nations in thrall to the will of an emperor. We are now seeing this
strategy at work again as President Vladimir Putin stealthily seeks
to restore Kremlin supremacy over the lands treated as “lost” when
the USSR imploded in 1991. In so overplaying his hand in Ukraine’s
recent election, however, Putin clearly revealed to the world his
neo-imperialist designs.

In the wake of the euphoric mass protests in Kyiv, Russia’s president
has since said that he can work with whatever government Ukraine’s
people choose. These are mere words, for in mind and action Putin
does not want anyone to rule Ukraine that he has not put in place. No
price is too high to achieve that end, so traditional threats about
dividing Ukraine have been used. I speak as someone who has been
on the receiving end of Russian imperialist designs. When Lithuania
and then the other Baltic States – Estonia and Latvia – which were
occupied by Stalin early in WW II, seized their opportunity for
freedom in 1990-91, the Kremlin did not sit on its hands. It knew
that the rest of Russia’s colonies – the so-called “Soviet republics”
– would want to follow the ungrateful Baltic countries into freedom.

Although Russia’s rulers were by then communists in name only,
they didn’t hesitate to reach for the old Leninist recipes. They
began to foster and incite splits and confrontations. They stoked
supposed resentments among different national or ethnic communities
based on Lenin’s idea that even small groups of villages could demand
territorial autonomy.

Note the word “territory.” The demands were never about normal
cultural autonomy as a means of continued identity and supposed
self-protection. Only territorial autonomy, it seems, would do.

This way, minorities become easily manipulated majorities. Divide
enough, stoke enough resentment, and a nation becomes nothing more
than a ruined society within a national territory. Arm some of these
manufactured minority structures so that they can demand autonomy at
the barrel of a gun, and you get the kind of chaos the Kremlin can
use to reassert its control.

Fortunately, Lithuanians – as well as Estonians and Latvians –
understood this game. It failed also in Crimea when Russia sought to
deploy its old strategy of divide and rule there in 1991. But these
defeats did not inspire the Kremlin to abandon the basic strategy. On
the contrary, Russia’s imperial ambitions persisted, and persistence
has paid off.

Around the Black Sea, Russia has called into being a series of
artificial statelets. Georgia and Moldova have both been partitioned
through the creation of criminal mini-states nurtured by the Kremlin
and which remain under its military umbrella. Indeed, in the very
week that Putin was meddling in Ukraine’s presidential election,
he was threatening to blockade one of those statelets, Georgia’s
Abkhazia region, after it had the temerity to vote for a president
the Kremlin did not like.

Moldova has been particularly helpless in the face of the Kremlin’s
imperial designs. A huge Russian garrison remains deployed in
Transdneister, where it rules in collaboration with local gangs.
Proximity to this lawless territory has helped make Moldova the poorest
land in Europe. To the east, Armenia and Azerbaijan were pushed into
such bloody confrontation at the Kremlin’s instigation that the only
way for them to end their ethnic wars was to call in the Russians –
as in Transdneister – for a kind of “Pax Ruthena.”

Now Ukraine’s people may face a similar test after supporters of
Viktor Yanukovich threatened to seek autonomy should the rightful
winner of the country’s presidential vote, Viktor Yushchenko, actually
become president. Who can doubt that the hand of Russia is behind
this? Would Moscow’s mayor Yuri Luzkhov, a loyal creature of Putin,
have dared to attend the rally where autonomy was demanded without
the sanction of the Kremlin’s elected monarch? Indeed, Putin openly
claims this part of Ukraine as a Russian “internal matter.”

It is to be hoped that Ukraine’s Russian-speaking citizens, having
witnessed the economic despair – and sometimes the bloodshed – caused
by the Kremlin’s manufactured pro-autonomy movements, will realize
that they are being turned into Putin’s pawns. The test for Viktor
Yushchenko and his Orange revolutionaries, as it was for Lithuania’s
democrats in 1990-91, is to show that democracy does not mean that
the majority suppresses any minority. Lithuania passed that test;
I am confident that Viktor Yushchenko and his team will do so as well.

But Europe and the world are also being tested. Russia is passing
from being the Russian Federation of Boris Yeltsin to a unitary
authoritarian regime under Vladimir Putin and his former KGB
colleagues. Europe, America, and the wider world must see Putin’s
so-called “managed democracy” in its true light, and must stand united
against his neo-imperialist dreams. The first step is to make Russia
honor its binding commitment to the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe, as well as to the Council of Europe, to remove
its troops from Moldova and Georgia. Any plans to “defend” Yanukovich
and the eastern part of Ukraine by military force must be confronted.

Vytautas Landsbergis, Lith-uania’s first president after independence
from the Soviet Union, is now a member of the European Parliament. –
Ed.