Mark Zoryan: The West is beginning to realize that the `Georgian situation’
is absurd

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11:43 10/28/2006

The attempts of the US administration and the European structures to
pretend that nothing worth mentioning is going on in Javakhq no longer
make sense. As far as we know, the embassies of almost all European
states and the US embassy in Georgia have informed their governments
of the processes that took place during the local elections in Georgia
and pointed out the peculiarity of the situation in Samtskhe-Javakheti
and Kvemo-Kartli.

Presently the diplomatic circles in Tbilisi are actively discussing
the `bad marks’ Georgia has received for its local elections. These
discussions got especially active after the Tbilisi visit of the US
assistant secretary of state Daniel Fried, who was obviously trying to
save the face of the ruling regime. At the same time, we have received
enough reports saying that the US administration are extremely
displeased with the style and outcome of the elections. Now that the
Georgian-Russian conflict has gone beyond any sensible limits of
inter-state confrontation, the Americans and Europeans have faced a
problem similar to the ones they faced in the Balkans and solved by
political and military interference.

The recent ` deliberately representative ‘ Washington seminar on
Russian-Georgian relations has come to a conclusion that the
propaganda task has lost any sense as it has become very hard to find
arguments to explain to the world community the point and the
political causes of this conflict, which is already spreading outside
the region.

During the seminar, one of the leading US experts on Eastern Europe,
representative of the OSCE office in the US congress Michael Ox said
that the present situation in Georgian-Russian relations does not
serve the interests of the US and is a barren scheme.

On the whole, the American experts on Eastern Europe, who are known
for their colorful language, describe this situation as `an absolute
deadlock,’ while the attempts of the West to `separate the fighting
sides’ are qualified as `rotten politicking.’ If there is anything
that unites the American and European experts, it is their unanimity
that the `Georgian situation’ is absurd.

Exactly now that there is a real want of effective political
expertise, the International Crisis Group ` who we know well for its
activities in Karabakh ` has been assigned the task of facilitating
the development of proposals ` in fact, a plan of how to settle the
situation in Samtskhe-Javakheti. This work will certainly cover a
complex of problems concerning the ethnic rights of the local Armenian
population. Certain Georgian and Armenian experts are involved in this
project. According to the preliminary information, the group will
recommend to enlarge self-government in Javakheti and
Kvemo-Kartli. Well aware of the ICG’s position on the Karabakh
problem, we can hardly expect that they will make any realistic
proposals and that the Georgian authorities will accept them. At the
same time, this initiative is hardly the result of the activities of
the Armenian lobby or of the talks of US administration
representatives with Armenian politicians. The US has just waited for
a tenser scenario in Javakhq to interfere and is now ready to show an
open interest in this region of Georgia.

Today, the problem is that the US has realized that Georgia is a
peculiar country and one can’t just apply general operational
approaches to it. That’s why they have decided to `divide’ Georgia
into political or regional-political blocs and to deal with each of
them individually. Obviously, they hope that this will help them
achieve certain goals in the sphere of system security. Still, it
seems that they have not yet fully grasped Georgia’s problems. We
don’t mean the current policy but some more fundamental problems. So,
we can assume that, having learned about new circumstances in the
policy of Russia, Turkey and the South Caucasian states, the US has
decided to work out new scenarios of its political and economic
expansion in the region. Otherwise, it would be hard to explain why
they have suddenly taken so keen interest in the processes they
formerly ignored.

Mark Zoryan ` expert of Caucasus analytical center