RUSSIA: HOW THE NEW ‘COLD WAR’ PLAYS AT HOME
Ivan Sukhov
Georgiandaily
ex.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=693 9&Itemid=132
Aug 29 2008
NY
Russia’s war in Georgia has killed Medvedev’s hopes of reform. But
recognition of independence for Abkhazia and South Ossetia could foster
trouble across the ethnic patchwork of North Caucasus, particularly
among the Muslims
Only a week ago, Russia’s recognition Abkhazia and South Ossetia’s
independence was regarded as unlikely by most observers. They hoped
that the Kremlin today was too strongly integrated into the world of
global finance to resort to a drastic escalation of antagonism with
the West. Nonetheless, this took place.
Even after 25 August, when both chambers of the Russian parliament
voted for recognition, it could still be hoped that this vote amounted
to nothing more positioning at the beginning of a potentially difficult
and lengthy bargaining process. The chips in this negotiation could
have been not only the status of the disputed territories and the
peacekeeping operations in the conflict zones, but also Georgia’s plans
to join NATO, as well as Russia’s political and economic interests in
Georgia. Now that Russia has decided to recognise the independence of
these two states, this bargaining can no longer be used as a means of
coordinating the interested parties into relatively sensible positions.
To some extent, Moscow could be said to have been forced into
recognising Abkhazia. Once Tbilisi, along with Washington and most
of its European allies, made it clear that the territorial integrity
of Georgia was its only concern, there was no more place in Medvedev
and Sarkozy’s plan for international discussion of the future status
of the territories. Moscow began to see unilateral recognition
of independence as the only way to maintain its military presence
in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. In the light of the now seemingly
inevitable accession of Georgia to NATO it was bound to want this.
The time has come to abandon the idea that Russia, by its actions
in the Abkhaz and South Ossetian conflict, had a decisive influence
on Georgia’s choice to join NATO. By making its choice Moscow has
effectively deprived the unrecognised republics of the possibility
of full international legitimacy, or at least postponed it to the
medium-term planning. But it has also gained the opportunity of
creating a buffer zone on its border, right where NATO is likely
to expand.
Once it has signed agreements on military cooperation with Sukhumi
and Tskhinvali, it will be able to keep troops in this buffer zone,
unrestricted by international peacekeeping controls on the number and
quality of these troops. To put it bluntly, it will no longer need to
explain why Russian air force planes are stationed at the aerodrome
in Gudauta (Abkhazia), which they should have left a long time ago,
and why Russian soldiers use their infrastructure in the region of
Dzhava (South Ossetia).
If you accept the Kremlin viewpoint of NATO as a military rival and an
upholder of alien values, Moscow can be seen as having succeeded. It
has finally found the courage to be consistent in its policy towards
the two unrecognised republics. They have been rescued from the status
of a conditionally controlled ‘gray zone’, which they have occupied
for the last 15 years. Isolation from the western community, which even
leading Russian politicians now admit is a possibility, is seen by them
either as an inevitable side-effect, or even as a desirable result.
In August 2008, Russia twice showed that it was not in any way a
part of the West. The idea of a renewed confrontation not only does
not deter it. It is even popular among Russian voters, however little
this may mean in a ‘managed democracy’. Russia’s political elite and
the majority of the population warmly supported the decisive measures
of President Medvedev in the Caucasus. Clearly, they want to believe
that Russia has regained its ability to act in a heavy-weight capacity
on the international stage, like America. Constrained as it is in its
policies towards Moscow by dependence on Russian energy resources,
the EU has been relatively compliant. This only strengthens Russia’s
dangerous and self-satisfied delusion.
Domestic effects of a new ‘cold war’
But the domestic political scene suggests that populist considerations
and the desirability of creating a military buffer zone in a region
of potential NATO expansion may not have been the Kremlin’s main
motives for recognising the disputed territories.
The August crisis in Georgia has had an important political effect
domestically. It has practically destroyed any hopes that President
Medvedev, who was elected in March 2008, would play an independent role
in changing the character of the regime formed under Vladimir Putin.
There can be no doubt that the war in Georgia has been months in
the planning. Preparations must have begun when Medvedev had not
even been in office for 100 days, before he had even had a chance of
taking an independent position. After some delay at the beginning of
the war, Medvedev started making public statements which showed that
his policy towards Georgia was completely determined by the siloviki
from Vladimir Putin’s circle. As a result, for three weeks in August,
Russia’s relations with the western community plunged to below freezing
point, lower than they have been since the fall of the USSR. They are
worse even than during the dramatic moment when Russian paratroopers
were about to make a descent on Pristina (Kosovo), when Prime Minister
Primakov’s plane turned back over the Atlantic Ocean in response to
the American bombings of Belgrade in 1999.
Unfortunately, it was no slip of the tongue when Medvedev’s used
the term ‘cold war’ in an interview he gave half an hour after the
recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The experience of the last
century tells us that a ‘cold war’ is more than an exhausting foreign
policy confrontation: it costs the economies of the participants
dearly.
This war is also a political statement that blocks any attempts at
internal reform in Russia. By putting Medvedev up against a ‘cold war’,
the siloviki and Putin have ensured their own positions within the
Russian elite. For them this is undoubtedly more important than the
battle for independence of the Ossetians and the Abkhaz. Furthermore,
Medvedev has to carry full responsibility for the events, while Putin
can stay in the shadows and preserve his image as a politician whose
relations with the West, while maybe not rosy, were not as problematic
as they have unexpectedly become under his successor, from whom people
were on the contrary expecting a thaw.
This may be good for the siloviki, but it is not too good for the
country. The relative stabilisation of the elite is perhaps preferable
to a new wave of a division of power and property. But the problem
is that the regime has stabilised itself while creating a whole
number of problems to the system. Quite apart from those posed to
the national economy, there are the issue of relations within parts
of the Russian Federation, with all the inter-ethnic and religious
difficulties connected with this.
Federation troubles
At the moment, relations between different parts of the federation
come down to the personal relationship between the head of state
(and/or Prime Minister) and specific regional leaders, who on the
basis of a certain mutually beneficial contract try to control Russian
territories. This may work in the traditional Russian provinces or
the rich oil and gas regions of Siberia. But in the North Caucasus,
it is becoming increasingly clear that this means of managing the
regions will not be able to cope with important challenges like the
rapid growth of political Islam.
Moscow’s relationship with governors in the Caucasus still follows
the old model. But the people it appoints in these regions are
facing tectonic-scale cultural shifts, to which they have no way
of responding. This not only increases the alienation between
the government and the country’s growing number of Muslims
still further. It is grist to the mill of a coming ‘cultural
revolution’. None of this bodes well for Russia’s influence and
presence in the Caucasus. Russia has created problematic ‘buffer zones’
for itself in Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
Moscow’s decision to recognise the independence of these two republics
may put a dampener on escalating violence in neighbouring regions
of the North Caucasus. Refugees from South Ossetia are now unlikely
to fuel the old inter-ethnic conflict between the Ossetians and the
neighboring Ingush. Furthermore, the decisiveness shown by Moscow
towards Abkhazia and South Ossetia may improve the image of federal
power in the eyes of North Caucasian elites and the population of
the republics. It is at least a more popular step than handing over
the unrecognised republics would have been.
But in the medium- and long-term perspective, Moscow will have
to face the very danger about which it warned western governments
when they insisted on the independence of Kosovo and Metochia. The
principle of the territorial integrity of nations has effectively
been abolished by Russia on its very own borderlands. These regions
are hotbeds for separatist movements. They died down in the mid 2000s
for opportunistic rather than ideological reasons. But they may well
return. Only this time it will no longer be the naïve separatism
of the early 1990s. Now it will be fed by a powerful movement of
political Islam common to the Muslims of the Caucasus, one which the
muftis controlled by Moscow cannot oppose. Unrest in the Caucasus is
bound to increase if the analogy with Kosovo is carelessly applied
to the situation in Nagorny Karabakh.
The Azerbaijan factor
The problem of Karabakh (along with the problem of the transit of oil
and gas through Georgia that has been disrupted by the war) seriously
concerns Azerbaijan. The country is just as important a player in the
South Caucasus today as Russia. The experience of two wars in Chechnya
suggests that Azerbaijan may become a source of instability for the
Russian part of the Caucasus. The communities of divided Dagistani
peoples living there – such as Lezgians and Avars – may become new
conflict zones. If that were to happen, the echo of these conflicts
would inevitably be heard north of the main Caucasian mountain range.
What is more, both South Ossetia and Abkhazia have ethnic relations in
the Russian Caucasus. The Northern Ossetians and the Cherkess peoples
of the West Caucasus are now bursting with euphoric solidarity for
the peoples of the republics just recognised by Russia, whom they
believe have achieved their goals. Ossetia and Cherkessia (in the wide
sense of this ethnonym, which includes Cherkess, Adygians, Karabdins,
Abazins, Shapsugs and other Western Caucasus peoples of common Cherkess
origin) are not likely in the short term to demand a special status
in Russia by analogy with the status achieved by Abkhazia and South
Ossetia. But we should remember that the Beslan hostage catastrophe,
where 331 people died in North Ossetia on 3 September 2004, seriously
undermined Ossetian trust in Russia. Because of its Christian culture,
this region is justifiably considered to be the most reliable ‘outpost’
of Russia’s presence in the Caucasus. But with instability on the rise
north of the mountains, independent South Ossetia and Abkhazia could
become poles of attraction for Ossetian and Cherkess separatism. This
could in turn be directed against Moscow itself.
–Boundary_(ID_GRLqqH7bqoOQ2JcxZdC8Iw)–