To be or not to be: Former Soviet republics question commonwealth’s need for existence
By JUDITH INGRAM

AP Worldstream
May 07, 2005

Dictators and democrats will rub elbows this weekend at a Moscow
meeting of the Commonwealth of Independent States, where the most
pressing question may well be whether the Russian-led organization
shouldn’t just be shut down for good.

The loose grouping of 12 former Soviet republics has long been rent
by disputes _ between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh
enclave, between Georgia and Russia over mutual accusations of support
for separatists and terrorists.

But it has never appeared so untenable as it does today, following
the uprisings against the entrenched leaderships of Georgia, Ukraine
and Kyrgyzstan. The CIS puts democratically elected leaders such
as Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili and Ukrainian President
Viktor Yushchenko in the same club as Belarusian President Alexander
Lukashenko _ whom the United States has branded the last dictator
in Europe _ and the Turkmen autocrat, President Saparmurat Niyazov,
best known abroad for the cult of adoration he’s built to himself
and his family.

“The CIS is a pointless organization for today. It brings together
absolutely different countries with diametrically opposed interests,”
said Levan Ramishvili, an analyst at Georgia’s independent Freedom
Institute.

Sunday’s meeting comes amid a spiraling diplomatic spat between Ukraine
and Belarus, where five Ukrainians have been jailed for taking part
in a protest.

And it comes less than a month since Georgian President Mikhail
Saakashvili, Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin, Ukrainian President
Viktor Yushchenko and the leaders of other former Soviet republics
joined their voices in challenging Russia to make good on its
six-year-old pledge to withdraw troops and weaponry from Georgia
and Moldova.

The CIS clearly has more quarrels than shared vision among its members.

Saakashvili is staying away from Sunday’s meeting, as well as Monday’s
Victory in Europe day celebration in Moscow, because Georgia failed
to win agreement on the withdrawal of Russian bases. Azerbaijani
President Ilham Aliev is staying away because of the attendance of
the Armenian leader, and because Sunday is a day of mourning, marking
a key battle during the six-year war between Armenia and Azerbaijan
over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.

“If the CIS is going to survive, then it will be merely as a
consultative council of heads of state, which doesn’t obligate
anyone to anything,” said Stanislav Shushkevich, the Soviet-era
parliamentary speaker in Belarus who together with Russia’s Boris
Yeltsin and Ukraine’s Leonid Kravchuk signed the 1991 document that
dissolved the Soviet Union.

“There’s only one problem: Does the leader of a democratic state
really want to confer with dictators?”

The most vocal recent criticism of the CIS has come from countries
such as Ukraine and Georgia, where pro-Western leaders have come to
power and hopes of shedding Russian influence are high.

But even President Vladimir Putin has thrown doubt on the future of
the CIS, telling reporters in the Armenian capital Yerevan earlier
this year that the forum had been created for the “civilized divorce”
of the former Soviet republics, in contrast to the European Union,
which was built to foster real cooperation.

Other officials have been no more sanguine.

“There is no good in the CIS as it is now _ ineffectual and unable
to function,” said Ilyas Omarov, the spokesman for the Kazakh Foreign
Ministry.

The group’s attempts to be more than a talk shop have often
only fostered more discord. Its peacekeepers have been accused
of destabilizing conflict zones in the former Soviet Union, and
its election monitors _ deployed to provide a counterbalance to
Western-dominated observer missions from such groups as the Council of
Europe and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe _
have consistently given high marks to blatantly fraudulent ballots.

Pavel Borodin, the secretary of the Russia-Belarus union, said the
CIS would have to radically change its focus to survive _ but survive
it would.

“The CIS will be reborn as a purely economic organization,” he
said. “This is a market of 300 million consumers. There’s nowhere
else to turn.”

Putin made much the same point to German journalists this week,
singling out the shared energy system, transport network and other
infrastructure dating back to Soviet times as strong incentives to
deepen economic cooperation.

“These are all natural advantages that the past has give us,” Putin
said. “Not to use this, I think, would be simply stupid.”

Yet the plans to remove trade barriers between member states that have
dominated the CIS agenda since its creation have never gotten off the
ground. Attempts at forging closer economic ties have been hampered
by the stark differences between the sizes of the member economies and
their levels of development, as well as fears of Russian domination.

“The CIS is a system that has completed all of its set tasks, and
there is no hope for its development,” Ukrainian Economic Minister
Sergei Teryokhin said.