DON’T WRITE RUSSIA OFF YET!
By Sergei Markedonov

Prague Watchdog
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Aug 29 2008
Czech Republic

A response to Sergei Gligashvili’s polemic article "An empire on the
verge of collapse".

Even a superficial acquaintance with the West’s behaviour during
the second half of the twentieth century is sufficient to stop one
harbouring any illusions. The West has always noticed Russia (and
formerly the USSR) when its interests are directly affected, and is
ready to ignore or even indulge Russia if that is consistent with
the national interest of the United States and the countries of Europe.

Thus it was in 1941-1945 (as though America didn’t know about the
Stalin-era deportations). Thus it was in 1956 in Hungary and in 1968
in Czechoslovakia, when the Soviet Union imposed order on its zone
of influence and responsibility. Thus it was in 1991 in Riga and
Vilnius. It was almost the same in 1996, when the election of Boris
Yeltsin as president turned out to be of strategic importance for the
United States and the countries of Europe. Who remembered Chechnya
then? And after September 11 it was hard to find many supporters
of "free Ichkeria" in Washington. The issue of Chechnya was only
seriously raised in the West in 1999-2000, and then only because
of the fact that Moscow’s position on Kosovo was incompatible with
the line adopted by the US and the EU – remember Yevgeny Primakov’s
famous U-turn over the Atlantic.

It was for somersaults like this that efforts were made to teach Moscow
a few lessons. But when it turned out that Moscow and Washington
had more strategic interests in common than they had differences,
"struggling Ichkeria" was simply forgotten.

Meanwhile, one suspects that the fuss surrounding the Russian
action in Georgia will soon die down – especially after the US
presidential elections have been held. Today it is important to the
US administration (and its heir-in-waiting John McCain) to convince
ordinary Americans that Washington will support the "democratic little
Georgia" about which they have been hearing from their television sets
for the past four years. And so they need to create an atmosphere
of fear and hysteria in order to show people that the United States
and its faithful allies have foiled the Kremlin’s plan to revive the
Soviet Union. All that needed to be done was to sacrifice a couple
of places called Abkhazia and South Ossetia (which are not even not
visible on the map). As for the plans to reunify the Evil Empire,
they fell through.

It is strange that the "watchdogs of democracy" stubbornly refuse
to notice that without Russia’s participation it would today be
physically impossible to resolve a large number of the most critical
issues of world politics. There is Afghanistan (to which the transit
route lies through Russia and Central Asia, where Russian influence
is extremely strong and consistent with American interests). There is
Iran, with which negotiations are sometimes simply impossible without
Russia’s involvement (otherwise Iran simply will not talk). There are
the problems of North Korea and the Middle East, terrorism, and the
full range of nuclear issues. Closer to the South Caucasus, there is
above all Karabakh, where the positions of the US, Russia and France,
the three mediating countries, are absolutely identical.

And it can quite safely be asserted that the disintegration of a
nuclear power into separate pieces has no part in the plans of the
United States, any more than the U.S. intended to bring about the
break-up of the Soviet Union. While there are plans to weaken Russia,
complete collapse is not on the agenda.

Regarding the question of standards and international law, any decision
on recognition (or non-recognition) is taken – and not just by Russia –
on the basis of national interest rather than abstract standards. The
European Union and the United States opted for the right of nations to
self-determination when they recognized the independence of Croatia,
Slovenia and Kosovo, and did their utmost to defend the territorial
integrity of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia and Azerbaijan. Russia has
fought separatism in Chechnya and regional particularism in the North
Caucasus and the Volga region, but has recognized the independence
of Georgia’s two separatist republics. Turkey emphasizes that the
principle of the territorial integrity of the states in the region
is the aim of its Caucasus policy, and also does its best to fight
Kurdish separatism. At the same time, Turkey was one of the first
countries to recognize Kosovo and is still alone in recognizing the
de facto Turkish Cypriot state.

And here there is no contradiction, because this apparently illogical
policy is built around one idea – the ensuring of Turkey’s national
interests and security. On the other hand, among experts in polite
society it is considered simply indecent to talk about international
law after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and the
Yalta-Potsdam system. International law is always related to history
– it is produced in specific contexts, and not on the basis of
abstract altruism. The Yalta-Potsdam system reflected the reality
that developed after 1945. And as soon as it ceased to reflect them,
it passed into history.

Now to turn to the argument about the "Abkhaz boomerang," which is
supposedly going to rebound against Russia (in Chechnya, Tatarstan
or elsewhere). Mr. Gligashvili writes: "The Kremlin has given an
impetus to processes that no one is capable of controlling. And it
looks as though Russia may turn out to be the principal victim of a
new world order, or – more precisely – disorder. At some point events
will evolve spontaneously, since Moscow’s recognition of Georgia’s
autonomous regions is setting in motion a mechanism that revises the
basic principle of territorial integrity in the post-war world."

It’s a great pity that the expert has ignored numerous examples
of the revision of the principle of "territorial integrity" in
the world since 1945. Cyprus, Bangladesh, Eritrea, East Timor,
fifteen republics of the former USSR, Slovakia, six republics and
one autonomous province of the former Yugoslavia. And these are
only the successful examples. There were also Biafra, Katanga, and
three unrecognized republics of Yugoslavia. So it all began long
before Kosovo. The Yalta-Potsdam system was built on the basis of
two irreconcilable principles (territorial integrity and the right
of nations to self-determination). These principles undermined the
system from within, and finally toppled it. As for the process of
recognition as an alleged factor in influencing a country’s integrity,
here too one should not try to create myths out of nowhere. Quebec did
not break away from Canada just because Canada recognized Kosovo. When
it recognized the ex-autonomy of Serbia, France did not automatically
experience a Basque uprising or a Corsican secession. And so the
main problem for a multi-ethnic society is not the recognition or
non-recognition of separatist territories, but the creation of a
competent domestic policy and the building of national status.

If the dissident Georgian nationalist movement began its struggle for
power with the slogan "Georgia for the Georgians", the demand for the
abolition of national autonomous regions and a ban on participation
in elections by the Georgian regional parties (Adamon Nykhas and
Aydgylara), then one should have had no illusions about how the
Abkhazians and Ossetians would feel about the "Georgian State"
project. None of Russia’s presidents (for all their failures,
stupidities and crimes) has ever called the Chechen people "trash
that has to be swept out through a tunnel". For that is what Georgia’s
first President Zviad Gamsakhurdia said about the Ossetian people at
a rally in the village of Eredvi in 1989.

One can argue about whether what happened in South Ossetia was
genocide or not. The claim is probably an exaggeration founded on
propaganda. But the fact that the city of Tskhinvali was stormed
four times in seventeen years (twice in 1991, once in 1992 and most
recently in 2008) – is an obvious fact. During the Georgian-Abkhaz war
of 1992-1993 3,000 Abkhazians out of a pre-war population of 93,000
died in the fighting. The failure of the creation of a Georgian nation
state became the spur to separatism in the former autonomous regions.

I am not going to remain silent about the Russian excesses in
Chechnya. But the conflict in that republic is very different from
anything that has taken place in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. In
Chechnya, military clashes began long before the entry of Russian
troops into its territory in 1994. In 1992 Grozny fought with the
forces of Nadterechny district, and then the republican government
began another confrontation (using heavy armour) with the Grozny city
authorities. There were several conflicts in Chechnya throughout the
whole of the 1990s.

The conflict between Moscow and Grozny was only one of those. There
were also conflicts between nationalists, supporters of secular
democracy and Islamists, between Sufis and Salafists, between
supporters of secession and their opponents (the Avtorkhanovites,
for example). Russia has always had its allies in Chechnya. In 1996,
Alu Alkhanov defended Grozny’s railway station from the guerrillas
and in 1999 Beslan Gantamirov and Said-Magomed Kakkiyev stormed it
together with Russian troops. And behind these leaders there were
always armies and a certain degree of strength. Georgia has not faced
"its Abkhazians" for sixteen years.

There is much else that could be said about Chechnya. About Chechen
business activity in Moscow, which continued even during the two
military campaigns, about the migration of Chechens to Russian regions
(for some reason there is no Abkhazian business activity in Tbilisi,
and in August 2008 the Ossetian refugees fled to Vladikavkaz rather
than the Georgian capital). Thus Moscow’s recognition of Abkhazia
and South Ossetia is unlikely in itself to become a challenge to the
country’s unity. If the Russian state is able to conduct an effective
campaign against corruption and the privatization of power, which is
happening in Kadyrov’s Chechnya, it will not collapse like a house
of cards. But if the Kremlin is not able to alter those negative
domestic tendencies, then that is what will be fatal for Russia,
and not the recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Andrei Dmitriyevich Sakharov was right when he referred to Georgia
as a "little empire". It is precisely the inadequacy of its own ideas
concerning its role and place in world politics that has led Georgia
to a natural collapse. Georgia should have been more realistic and
cut its cloth to suit its cloak, rather than trying on suits made in
Washington. Then it would not have had to go looking external causes
for the secession of Abkhazia and South Ossetia and bring political
storms against its the northern neighbour, the country from which
only recently "the sun rose on Georgia." But nota bene: it wasn’t
Moscow’s politicians who talked such nonsense!

Sergei Markedonov is a senior researcher at the Institute for Political
and Military Analysis, Moscow.