THE CAUCASUS: A REGION IN PIECES
By Thomas de Waal
ISN
rs/Security-Watch/Detail/?coguid=25BB1D72-0F46-B60 6-6244-ABCF85D374AE&lng=en&id=95227
Jan 12 2009
Switzerland
The political tensions of the Caucasus are reflected on the ground in
a range of obstacles – from roadblocks and closed markets to polarized
attitudes, Thomas de Waal writes for openDemocracy.
The Caucasus region is a small and troubled place. It should be
a common endeavor where its small and diverse nationalities – in
Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan as well as Russia’s north Caucasus –
work together to build an integrated region. Instead, no sense of
common purpose is discernible: the sad reality is, that with its
tangle of closed borders and ceasefire lines, the Caucasus more
resembles a geopolitical suicide-pact.
Nowhere in the world can there be so many roadblocks. The two long
borders – Armenia-Azerbaijan and Russia-Georgia are almost permanently
closed (the latter even more tightly controlled since the war of August
2008 between the two countries). Only two neighbors – Azerbaijan and
Georgia – can be said to have a genuinely close relationship, and even
that is based primarily on energy politics rather than common values;
it does not translate into many tangible benefits for ordinary people.
A tale of two markets
Yet, given the chance, the everyday folk of the Caucasus eagerly
take the opportunity to do business with one another. A tale of two
markets confirms this. The first was the one at Ergneti, right on the
administrative border between Georgia and the breakaway territory of
South Ossetia, where the busiest wholesale market in the Caucasus
used to flourish. The Ossetians brought untaxed goods from Russia
(everything from cigarettes to cars) to sell there, in return for
(mainly) agricultural produce brought by the Georgians. The Georgian
government of Mikheil Saakashvili that came to power in January 2004
argued that since Ergneti was unregulated it was knocking a big hole
in the state budget and had to be shut down; the market was duly
closed in June 2004.
The closure of Ergneti may have been justified on strict legal grounds,
but the decision lacked imagination; for, in the words of Georgia’s
former conflict- resolution minister Giorgy Khaindrava, "If Ergneti
didn’t exist it would have to be invented." Ergneti was possibly the
widest "confidence-building measure" in the entire Caucasus region,
with people of all nationalities doing business. It is arguable
that the day it closed was the day the countdown to war in South
Ossetia began.
The second market was located at the Georgian village of Sadakhlo on
the Georgia-Armenia border. It was another astonishing spectacle:
a mass Armenian-Azerbaijani market on Georgian territory, which
paid no heed to the bitter relations at state level between the
two countries and which moreover was conducted with virtually no
Georgians in sight. There, Azerbaijanis bought Armenian produce
and Armenians purchased Azerbaijani goods that would then flood the
shops of Yerevan. Sadakhlo, though not forced to shut down entirely
as Ergneti was, has been curtailed by governmental pressures. Again,
a magnificent example of inter-ethnic cooperation has been suppressed.
A tale of bad politics
What politics drives apart, common economic and security interests
should drive together. The south Caucasus is a delicate mechanism
in which the malfunctioning of one part affects what is going in
the others.
That became obvious during the August 2008 war in Georgia. Azerbaijan’s
prime revenue-earners, the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan and Baku-Supsa
pipelines, were shut down. When the Grakali railway bridge in central
Georgia was blown up on 16 August, the effect was also to block
the only railway-line linking Armenia to the Black Sea coast. The
result was to cut off landlocked Armenia’s entire imports for a week,
costing the country at least US$500 million in revenue.
The political responsibility for this unfortunate state of affairs
is widely shared.
Armenia and Azerbaijan have adopted intransigent positions which
mean they have failed to resolve the prime source of tension between
them as well as the biggest obstacle to peace and prosperity in
the Caucasus: the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Georgia, in its push
towards Euro-Atlantic integration since 2004, has generally ignored
its neighbors and Russia. In the words of Georgian analyst Archil
Gegeshidze, one reason for Georgia’s problems is that the Saakashvili
government unwisely "put all its eggs in the basket of mobilizing
western support" and did not pay sufficient attention to its neighbors.
Europeans and Americans have often paid lip-service to the idea of
regional integration in the Caucasus, though in practice they have
generally pursued narrower goals. Europe’s grand communication and
transport project designed to link the Caucasus to Europe – Traseca,
billed as a new "silk road" – has received less than â~B¬200 million
($270 million) of investment since it was inaugurated in 1993; its
effects so far are negligible.
Instead, projects such as Nato expansion, energy security and the
claims of Armenian diasporas have all tended to divide Caucasian
policy into different segments. In Washington, it seems at times that
different agencies are running different policies with a different
primary focus – the Congress on Armenia, the Pentagon on Azerbaijan,
and the state department on Georgia.
Moreover, several Washington strategists have suggested that Russia
could be "contained" in the Caucasus, overlooking the fact that the
region has figured in Russian minds and plans for two centuries and
that much of the Russian elite has family or childhood ties to places
that westerners barely know.
For good or ill, Russia still has a special role in the Caucasus. Its
own policies have done it no favors. Russia continues to see the region
in colonial terms, seeking to intimidate or control resources rather
than use the soft power of trade or – its biggest asset in the region,
if a diminishing one – the Russian language, to help form a new and
friendly neighborhood.
People-to-people ties are still in place, often despite (as Ergneti and
Sadakhlo show) the best efforts of governments. Russians and Georgians
are tied together by innumerable ties of history, culture and business
(see Donald Rayfield, "Georgia and Russia: with you, without you",
3 October 2006). Hundreds of thousands of Georgians continue to
work in Russia, despite the August conflict. "(Russian and Georgian)
leaders have tried to wreck a good relationship between two peoples,"
says Georgian analyst Ivlian Khaindrava.
This was understood by Mikheil Saakashvili’s predecessor as Georgian
president, Eduard Shevardnadze, who returned to Georgia after
serving as Soviet foreign minister in the perestroika years of the
late 1980s. During his term in office in Tbilisi, Shevardnadze was
frequently unable to appease the harder-line elements of the Russian
elite; though in a December 2008 interview with the Institute for War
and Peace Reporting (IWPR) he rebuked his successor by saying that he
had always paid the Russians maximum respect. Shevardnadze cited the
decision in 2002 to invite American troops to Georgia as part of the
groundbreaking "train and equip" program, when he had been careful to
inform President Vladimir Putin in advance. Putin went on the record as
saying that a United States troop presence was "no tragedy" for Russia.
"I always tried to emphasize that Russia for us is not a secondary
country, that it is a great neighbor with big military and economic
potential", said Shevardnadze.
A rooted tendency of conflict – something in evidence too in the war
of 2008-09 in Gaza – is that it gives birth to polarized and zero-sum
thinking, the view that if your opponent is suffering that is a good
thing. In the case of the crisis of relations between Georgia and
Russia, says Ivlian Khaindrava, "many in Georgia are just keeping
quiet and waiting for the situation in Russia to deteriorate, the
oil price to go down, tensions in the north Caucasus to escalate."
That approach, he believes, could be a disaster for Georgia. For an
economic downturn in Russia will hurt Georgian migrants there and
the families back home they send remittances to, while new violence
in the north Caucasus could spill over into Georgia.
A tale of the future
This kind of zero-sum thinking is most acute in the region between
Armenians and Azerbaijanis, many of whom seem content to see
their respective country suffer so long as the other side in the
Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is feeling pain too.
It is hard for locals to transcend these divisions, even more so at a
time of economic pressure and downturn when resources become scarcer
and livelihoods more fragile. It is up to outsiders to offer a sense
of a big picture and a broad vision of how the Caucasus could begin
to function more harmoniously – as a political and economic entity
rather than merely a dysfunctional geographical region.
At the beginning of 2009, it seems likely that only one
big international organization – the European Union – has the
transformative power to treat these countries as a single region and
promise them benefits that make it worthwhile for them to overcome the
divisions and obstacles that hold them and their neighbors back. The
experience of the Balkans since the wars of the 1990s provides good
proof of this.
At the same time, the current signs are that the EU is still
too distant and too inward-looking to care sufficiently about the
Caucasus. A positive development is that European monitors are now on
the ground in Georgia – though the fact that they are there because
of war is a tragic reminder of the region’s dangers. It must be hoped
that they become the advance-guard of a much broader engagement –
not just confirmation for Europeans that this beautiful mountainous
region is a permanent headache that can never be cured.
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