CAUCASUS BURNING
By Thomas De Waal
Wall Street Journal
09051099.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
Aug 19 2008
So much has been left in ruins in the Caucasus in the past week. What
chance is there of a salvage operation?
The landscape is littered with wreckage. First South Ossetia was
ravaged; now Georgia is experiencing a great tragedy. Amid the wider
carnage, the greatest losers are the 25,000 or so ethnic Georgians of
South Ossetia. Only a month ago Ossetians and Georgians were buying
and selling from one another in South Ossetia by day even as armed men
in their villages exchanged fire at night. Now those Georgians face
total dispossession, their homes burned by South Ossetian irregular
fighters. Around 50,000 Georgians in Abkhazia are still in their homes,
but they face a precarious future. These people have the greatest
moral right to pass judgment on a long list of culprits.
Russia’s guilt is of course the most blatant. The Russian army
has unleashed atavistic violence and allowed Ossetians and North
Caucasians to follow in its wake, reinflaming interethnic hatreds
that had begun to fade after the wars of the 1990s. The cost of this
will be there for years and Moscow should pay the price, in terms
of both economic compensation for the wreckage it has caused and
international opprobrium. On the latter, Germany could take the lead
by threatening to cancel the joint Nord Stream project — a Russian
gas pipeline with a political agenda, designed to bypass Moscow’s
critics in Poland and the Baltic states.
Next in line for criticism is the Georgian leadership, which has now
all but lost the two disputed territories. Georgia is a small nation
under threat from the Russians, and in the short term Georgians
will rally around their leader. But there almost certainly will be
a reckoning with their impetuous president, Mikheil Saakashvili.
Since coming to power in 2004, Mr. Saakashvili has been a man in
a hurry. His economic reforms are impressive, but he was courting
trouble from the start when he promised to win back Abkhazia and South
Ossetia within five years. A brief look at the Balkans, Cyprus or
Northern Ireland tells you that complex ethno-territorial conflicts
need more time to heal than that. Yet Mr. Saakashvili deliberately
thawed the (misleadingly named) "frozen conflicts," challenging
the Russian-framed peacekeeping operations and moving his security
forces closer to Abkhazia and South Ossetia. He kept up the economic
isolation of the two territories and rejected any initiatives to open
them up — for example, by allowing the Abkhaz to trade with Turkey —
as a threat to Georgian sovereignty.
His rhetoric was just what the Russians wanted to hear and they moved
in to fill the vacuum economically, politically and militarily. Many
Abkhaz were unhappy about being swallowed by Russia, but the argument
that Moscow was guaranteeing their security trumped all others. Now
the Russians are triumphant.
How did Georgia’s 2003 Rose Revolution, which was greeted with
such euphoria by Georgians, end up like this? I was present at
Mr. Saakashvili’s first press conference after the revolution. There
he said explicitly — and in Russian — that in contrast to his
predecessor, Eduard Shevardnadze, he wanted "normal relations"
with Russia.
Vladimir Putin, pushing first as president and now as prime minister to
build the resurgent Russia that we saw rampaging through Georgia last
week, played a leading role in this. But it is hard to imagine the wily
Mr. Shevardnadze allowing himself to get sucked into a war with Russia.
Many Washington policy makers played their part, too. They loved the
idea of a new "beacon of democracy" run by thirtysomething economic
reformers astride an important energy corridor and standing up to
Russia. But they all too often neglected to pay attention to what
Georgia was actually doing. The Georgians basked in American attention
and felt emboldened to challenge Moscow even more. When President
George W. Bush stood on Freedom Square in Tbilisi in May 2005 and
told Georgians, "The path of freedom you have chosen is not easy,
but you will not travel it alone," they believed it meant something.
When I asked a senior U.S. official four years ago what Washington
would do if Russia attempted a military assault on Georgia, he said,
"We won’t send in the U.S. cavalry." But now it looks as though this
was precisely what Mr. Saakashvili was counting on.
As for Europe, France and Germany might say that their cooler
approach to Georgia all along looks wise in retrospect. But they have
little to be proud of. The EU had the opportunity to approve a new
border-monitoring force for Georgia in 2005, when the Russians blocked
the continuation of the old one under the aegis of the Organization
for Security and Cooperation in Europe. But France and Germany vetoed
the plan. The unarmed force could have been an early-warning system
had it been in place this year, and might have helped deter the
Russian campaign.
* * * Few Western policy makers have engaged seriously with the South
Caucasus, and they would do well now to ponder the fact that South
Ossetia was not even the most dangerous of the region’s conflicts. That
dubious honor goes to Nagorno-Karabakh, a territory dispute between
Armenia and Azerbaijan. There, tens of thousands of troops face each
other across 110 miles (175 kilometers) of trenches, and angry rhetoric
is strong on both sides. The fragile Karabakh cease-fire is observed
by just six unarmed European monitors. If the world wakes up to the
danger of the cease-fire breaking, there will have been at least one
good outcome from the Georgian tragedy.
Negotiations over the Karabakh conflict have been fruitless so far,
but they have come up with a useful formula for squaring the separatist
circle. A draft peace plan under discussion would defer the issue of
the status of the disputed region of Karabakh itself. Instead, the
region would have some interim status short of statehood while other
issues, such as the return of Azerbaijani land currently occupied by
Armenians outside Nagorno-Karabakh, are resolved and refugees begin
to return home.
That kind of solution now looks to be the most desirable one for
Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The Abkhaz and Ossetians themselves have
far more reason to want to live well with their Georgian neighbors than
the Russians do. Giving them some kind of international guarantees
and more power to dictate their own futures is the only way to lift
the Russian wolf off their shoulders and allow at least some Georgian
refugees to go home.
Yet it is probably too late. The Russians now have a tight grip and
will try to keep others out. President Dmitry Medvedev said last week
that Abkhaz and Ossetians "do not trust anyone but Russian troops…We
are the only guarantors of stability in the region."
Answering that charge is a big physical and moral challenge for both
Europe and the United States. If they want to fix things in the
region, they need to consider a new version of the mass peaceful
intervention they made in the Balkans from the mid-1990s, in the
form of policemen and peacekeepers, human-rights investigations,
and large-scale economic investment. It would be expensive, but in
the end it would probably cost much less than doing nothing.
Mr. de Waal is Caucasus editor at the Institute for War and Peace
Reporting in London.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
