WHAT SHOULD BE THE APPROACH OF THE TAGLIAVINI COMMISSION?
By Richard Rousseau

Daily Georgian Times
; newsid=18261
Sept 14 2009

Originally due to be released at the end of July, the final report of
the Tagliavini Commission investigating the causes of the August 2008
conflict between Georgia and Russia was delayed for two months on July
4 and scheduled to be submitted to the EU Council of Ministers by the
end of September. The submission of the report is a potential bombshell
in Georgia-Russia relations and more broadly in EU-US-Russia affairs.

The Commission’s sole objective is to establish what took place in
August and what facts and circumstances led to such developments. Why
did the war start? What was the background to the conflict? What
happened during it? These are the main questions members of the
Commission are addressing.

The events before the war are being studied as well as postwar
developments. This may be linked to the United Nations General
Assembly’s adoption on September 9 of a text recognising the right of
return of internally displaced persons throughout Georgia, including
Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Initiated by Georgia, the resolution is
surely a means to force Russia to fulfill its obligations stipulated in
the August 12 2008 ceasefire agreement brokered by then-EU President
Nicolas Sarkozy. This called for both Russian and Georgian troops to
move back to their original positions.

For Georgia, the danger is that the final document will focus mostly
on the period between August 1st and August 7th. If it is given
such an emphasis it is quite likely that the report will put most
of the responsibility for last year’s events on Georgia. Indeed,
the Commissioners will have a hard time questioning the active role
played by Georgia in "de-freezing" the conflict. Needless to say, the
Kremlin insists in its arguments on the importance of these convulsive
days which were marked, it pretends, by a string of provocations from
the Georgian side. However, none other than the Russian Prime Minister
Vladimir Putin is providing Georgia with compelling counter-arguments
should the Commission’s conclusions put the burden of responsibility
on Tbilisi or stress the preceding few days in its explanation for
the outbreak of the war.

On the eve of his trip to Poland to commemorate the 70th anniversary
of the outbreak of the Second World War Putin, as any polite visitor
would do, penned a piece for the Polish daily Gazeta addressing
himself to the Polish people. It was a conciliatory appeal that
sought to address Polish sensitivities to the role played by the
Soviet Union at the start of World War II. Putin paid tribute not
only to the sacrifices of the allied forces in that war but even the
German anti-Hitler resistance. He welcomed the integration of the
Europe born from the ashes of the war, although he did not miss the
opportunity to compare the Franco-German reconciliation of the 1950s
and 1960s to the current cooperation between Germany and Russia.

But at the heart of Putin’s letter was a passionate meditation
on the Nazi-Soviet Treaty of Non-Aggression of August 23, 1939,
better known as the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Putin wrote that Russia’s
Parliament condemned this pact as immoral in 1989 and that he fully
endorsed this view. This was a surprising statement considering that
a few weeks before a Russian TV channel (all Russian broadcasters
are State-controlled) had broadcast a documentary presenting
"evidence" that the Polish Intelligence Service was reportedly
planning an invasion of the Soviet Union in alliance with Hitler’s
army. However, Putin stressed in his letter that the Nazi-Soviet Pact
was the culmination of a sequence of mistakes and miscalculations on
the part of the great European powers in the fight against Hitler’s
aggressive projects. He pointed his finger in particular at the Munich
Agreement concluded in September 1938, which led to the dismemberment
of Czechoslovakia.

Putin wrote: "There is no doubt that one can have all reasons to
condemn the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact concluded in August 1939. But a
year before, in Munich, France and England signed a well-known treaty
with Hitler and thus destroyed all the hope for a united front to
fight fascism."

In today’s Russian historiography, this agreement is considered the
shameful culmination of the Western European policy of "appeasement"
or compromise with the Fuhrer. Putin argued that after the signing
of this agreement, from which the Soviet Union was excluded, the
Soviet Government had no other alternative than to negotiate its
own agreement with Germany. Isolated in Europe and attacked by Japan
in East Asia, the USSR had to accept the agreement proposed by the
Third Reich. Any attempt to present the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact as
the only trigger for the Second World War, continued Vladimir Putin,
is a cynical distortion of the historical truth.

In other words, Putin is merely saying that to understand the origin
and causes (the purpose of the Tagliavini Commission) of World War
II and obtain a complete picture of the factors that led to it, one
should take note of the disturbances produced by WWI and the behaviour
of the European great powers a few years before the cataclysm. Various
factors are intertwined and are to be identified in the years, if not
the decades, leading up to the conflict. The Georgian Government, in
due time, should remind the Russian Prime Minister of this approach
to the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 and be adamant that a study of the
Georgia-Russia military conflict cannot be taken seriously if the
period under scrutiny is limited to the month of August 2008.

When viewed from a broader perspective, there is little doubt that the
responsibility for that conflict lies with Russia. With the Soviet
Union declining, Russia skilfully encouraged Ossetia-Georgia and
Abkhazia-Georgia antagonisms with a view to keeping Georgia within
Russia’s "sphere of influence". After the break up of the USSR Russia
inherited the conflicts that had flared up in the Soviet era and got
involved militarily, politically and economically on the side of the
Ossetian and Abkhazia separatists. After that it systematically and
stubbornly hindered moves to overcome the crises that developed in
the 1990s and the early 2000s. Maintaining the status quo in these
crises provided Moscow with an instrument to thwart Georgia’s process
of integration with Euro-Atlantic organisations. Moreover, one can
hardly ignore the fact that after the disintegration of the Soviet
empire Russia acted in a similar way to influence political processes
in Transdniestria and in Nagorno Karabakh via Armenia.

Tskhinvali and Sokhumi’s ’emancipation’ from Tbilisi was flagrantly
accompanied by the building up of Russian protectorates. The
recognition of the "independence" of South Ossetia and Abkhazia 26
August 2008 provided vindication for this process, which had been
persistently denied by the Russian authorities. Among Russia’s
destabilizing actions in the months preceding the war were the
partial recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia on 15 April 2008;
the strengthening of the "peacekeeping" military contingent in Abkhazia
in the spring of 2008 and violations of Georgian air space in 2006
and 2008.

When analyzing the Russian-Georgian conflict through the prism of
tendencies in international relations over the past several years
one can see a link between it and the pursuit of Russia’s worldwide
aspirations initiated in President Vladimir Putin’s Presidency. South
Caucasus regional developments should be analysed in the context of
a crisis in the post-Cold War system of European security. The roots
of this crisis lie in Russia’s desire to regain the status of a great
power which has the same ability to influence the global order as
the US. Concretely, this objective is reflected in, for instance,
the Kremlin’s interference in the 2004 Ukrainian Presidential
election and, once that interference failed, a campaign against the
OSCE’s involvement in the transformation of post-Soviet states. The
deterioration of the European security environment was impacted,
in unparalleled ways, by the use of energy resources for political
purposes in relations with some energy-dependent CIS and EU member
states, the unilateral suspension of the Treaty on Conventional Armed
Forces in Europe (December 2007), Russian Parliamentarians’ frequent
public statements that Ukraine and Georgia’s accession to NATO would
be unacceptable and their claims that Russia has privileged relations
with CIS members, etc.

Whatever conclusions the Tagliavini Commission reaches the big picture
of the August 2008 events should be that Russia exploited the South
Ossetian and Abkhazian conflicts to maintain its sphere of influence
in the CIS, a concept which was for years present in the rhetoric of
the Russian authorities.

Richard Rousseau is an Assistant Professor and Director of the Masters
Programme in International Relations (richardr@kimep.kz) at the
Kazakhstan Institute of Management, Economics and Strategic Studies.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress