EU NEIGHBOURS DRIFTING INTO WAR, BRUSSELS WARNS
By Andrew Rettman

EUobserver.com, Belgium
Aug. 29, 2006

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS – Brussels has voiced alarm at the mounting
risk of open warfare in the EU’s southeast neighbours – Georgia,
Armenia and Azerbaijan – amid European plans to sign new cooperation
pacts and build new pipelines in the region.

"Negative trends are coming together, the combination of which
is, frankly, alarming," external relations commissioner Benita
Ferrero-Waldner said at an experts’ forum in Slovenia on Monday
(28 August), citing a recent upswing in aggressive rhetoric and
arms spending.

"Defence spending is going through the roof," she stated, adding
"there is a serious danger of the rhetoric lowering the threshold
for war" in reference to the so-called "frozen conflicts" of Abkhazia
and South Ossetia in Georgia and Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan.

The three regions tore away from Georgia and Azerbaijan in three
separate conflicts in the early 1990s which together claimed some
35,000 lives and displaced hundreds of thousands before the various
warring parties ceased fire after reaching tense impasses.

Local diplomats say potshots are still exchanged "daily" on the
Nagorno-Karabakh border and "monthly" on the borders of the Georgian
territories, with one woman shot dead in fighting between Georgian
troops and Abkhazian separatists in the Kodori Gorge in July.

The International Crisis Group’s (ICG) Europe director, Nicholas Whyte,
shared Ms Ferrero-Waldner’s analysis, saying "That’s an extremely
reasonable concern…they are preparing for war."

He cited potential Georgian military aggression in Abkhazia and
potential Azeri aggression in Nagorno-Karabakh as the most likely
threats to peace in the short term.

Preparing for war Georgia’s military budget proportionally increased
faster than any other country’s in the world last year, he stated,
while Azerbaijan has boasted that its military budget in 2007 will be
the size of the total budget of Armenia – its main aggressor in the
conflict over the ethnic-Armenian dominated Nagorno-Karabakh region.

Georgian and Azerbaijani diplomats in Brussels both say they
are committed to diplomatic conflict resolution under the various
multinational formats at work in the region, but Tbilisi sees Abkhazia
and South Ossetia as Russian-run mafia enclaves while Baku makes no
secret of its growing impatience with the status quo.

"[Displaced] Azerbaijani people have been waiting for the liberation
of the occupied territories, to return to their occupied lands for
15 years," an Azeri diplomat told EUobserver. "It’s ridiculous to
wait for ever, to stand and do nothing."

Russia is an added complicating factor in the region, with between
2,000 and 3,000 Russian "peacekeeping" troops stationed in Abkhazia and
South Ossetia as well as significant numbers in Armenia, with Moscow
issuing thousands of Russian passports to the Georgian separatists.

If fighting breaks out, the ICG’s Mr Whyte believes both Georgia and
Azerbaijan "are underestimating" the severity of the international
and Russian reaction, with Baku also underestimating the tactical
defensibility of Nagorno-Karabakh by an inferior force.

EU goals at risk Ms Ferrero-Waldner is planning to visit the region
in October to sign political and economic "action plans" for closer
EU integration, with the Georgian and Armenian action plan texts set
to "take note that [these countries] have expressed their European
aspirations" for future EU membership.

The texts are also set to give Georgia and Armenia the option to
formally "align themselves" with "some" future EU statements on common
foreign and security policy topics.

But the EU commissioner warned that sepratism could derail the
integration process, saying on 28 August that "the most important
impediments to the region’s development are the frozen conflicts."

South Caucasus is strategically important to the EU, with Azerbaijani
oil already flowing from Baku via Georgia and Turkey to Europe
through the so-called BCT pipeline, and with plans afoot for major
gas pipelines to the EU from the Caspian Sea basin in the next five
to ten years.

Western analysts agree that the energy income to supplier state
Azerbaijan and transit state Georgia is helping to buy extra arms
and creating a bullish atmosphere however. "Oil is not helping to
lubricate conflict resolution," Mr Whyte said.