Might makes right
Breakaway movements such as South Ossetia’s and Kosovo’s tend to become
proxies for the great powers.
By Tim Judah
LAT
August 17, 2008
Afew months ago, I traveled to Sukhumi, a balmy, war-wrecked seaside
resort that is the capital of Abkhazia. Abkhazia and South Ossetia, as
anyone who has followed the news of the last week cannot fail to know,
are the two breakaway regions of Georgia. In pelting rain, I crossed
the Inguri River from Georgia proper into Abkhazia and noticed that the
Georgians had erected a giant sculpture on their side. It was of a
pistol pointing at Abkhazia, but the barrel of the gun had been tied in
a knot.
Even before the guns started firing 10 days ago, this gesture of peace
and conciliation was a pretty futile one. Indeed, when I visited, there
seemed no hope of a peaceful resolution to these two disputes, nor to
two others that have dogged the Caucasus since the early 1990s. These
are Nagorno-Karabakh, the Armenian-controlled enclave that is
technically within Azerbaijan, and Transnistria, the breakaway part of
Moldova.
The roots of these conflicts run deep, and they are nothing peculiar to
the post-Soviet space. The battles may go into remission, or a long
"frozen conflict" phase, but even with the best goodwill in the world,
they may never be resolved peacefully. Breakaways also tend to become
the playthings of the great powers, which find them convenient as
proxies in bigger conflicts. This has been the fate of South Ossetia
and Abkhazia, which are useful to Russia to destabilize Georgia, and
was the U.S.-cast role of Iraqi Kurdistan before the fall of Saddam
Hussein.
That just compounds the near-impossibility of finding any resolution.
For example, attempts to peacefully solve the Gordian knot that is
Cyprus have failed miserably. After decades of U.N. resolutions, plans
and referendums, the Greek and Turkish Cypriots seem no closer to
reunification on their little island. Croatia, by contrast, solved its
problem with the breakaway Serbs in the state of Krajina in 1995 with a
massive, U.S.-encouraged armed assault. Virtually all of Krajina’s
Serbian population of 200,000 fled. Few returned.
Perhaps the Croatian example is what Georgian President Mikheil
Saakashvili was hoping to emulate when he launched his attack on South
Ossetia, which then went so dreadfully wrong for him.
In Sukhumi, I met Stanislav Lakoba, the man in charge of security, who
might have warned Saakashvili of what awaited him. Lakoba scoffed when
I suggested that Georgia was pouring millions into its armed forces and
might one day attack. That, he said, would be "suicide." Clearly, he
knew what he was talking about.
In the Abkhaz Foreign Ministry, the flags of Abkhazia, South Ossetia
and Transnistria stood next to one another. Their leaders had just been
meeting.
Alongside their banners was that of Russia.
Without Moscow’s support, none of the breakaways could survive. Quite
apart from the military protection that Russia gives them, they use the
ruble, speak more Russian than their own languages, and Russia has
distributed passports to their people. But Russia is in a curious
situation. It had, until now, claimed to support the territorial
integrity of states. On Thursday, Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign
minister, did a volte face. The world, he said, in a dramatic change of
position, "can forget about any talk about Georgia’s territorial
integrity."
This was surely received as good news in Abkhazia and South Ossetia —
but Russia should remember that the breakaways have their own agendas.
Ossetian officials whom I met in their capital, Tskhinvali, dream of a
union with their kin in North Ossetia, which was left within Russia in
the dismantling of the Soviet Union. Whether this would be as part of
Russia or as an independent Greater Ossetia remains to be seen. This
might seem fanciful now, but who knows what will happen to Russia in
the future? Chechnya has, after all, already tried to break away. One
day, it probably will try again.
Meanwhile, the Abkhaz just want to be left alone. When the Soviet Union
split apart, they were a mere 18% of the population of Abkhazia. Now,
although very much in control, they are still only 45% of its
approximately 200,000 people, the rest being Georgians who live in the
south, Armenians and some others. Hundreds of thousands of Georgians
who fled in the early 1990s would like to come home, but the Abkhaz
resist, fearing that once again they would become an insignificant
minority in their own homeland.
They don’t shout this from the rooftops, but the Abkhaz — unlike the
Ossetians — distrust the Russians. The Russian czarist invasions of
the 19th century sent huge numbers of their people into exile in
Turkey. They faced wholesale deportations to Siberia under Stalin, who
resettled Georgians to Abkhazia, sowing the seeds of the conflicts we
are reaping today.
International law is not much help in sorting out what should happen
with breakaways either. Ask an international lawyer, or someone who
supports one breakaway case or another, and soon it is clear: Two
principles — self-determination and the right of a nation to its
territorial integrity — stand in conflict. Court rulings on them
cannot be enforced anyway. In 1975, the International Court of Justice
ruled that the people of the former Spanish colony of Western Sahara,
which had been occupied by Morocco in the same year, had the right to
self-determination. They are still waiting to exercise that right,
still occupied by Morocco.
The situation with Kosovo, which declared independence from Serbia on
Feb. 17, is similar to the current one, especially from the point of
view of international law. Kosovo was a province within Serbia in the
old Yugoslavia, just as Abkhazia and South Ossetia were autonomous
parts of Soviet Georgia. So, argues Serbia (with the support of
Russia), the "provincial" Kosovars should not have the same right of
self-determination as the old Yugoslav or Soviet republics.
But the Kosovars (90% of whom are now ethnic Albanians), like the
Ossetians and Abkhaz, assert that they have the right to rule
themselves. Serbia conquered Kosovo in 1912. But when regions were
reshuffled after World War II, no one asked the Kosovo Albanians if
they wanted once again to be part of Serbia and Yugoslavia. Clearly,
they would have said that they did not.
The U.S. backed the right of the Albanians to self-determination and in
1999 led NATO in a 78-day bombing campaign against Serbia during the
Kosovo war.
In Georgia, however, the politics of Kosovo have been turned on their
head. The U.S. supports Georgia’s territorial integrity while Russia
bombs it on behalf of separatists. And Russia is mustering the same
arguments in support of Abkhaz separatists as the U.S. did in support
of an independent Kosovo.
Some editorialists have argued that Kosovo’s independence has set a
precedent that Moscow is now following. They seem to me to be obscuring
the point and confusing the issue for ordinary readers. The simple
truth is that whatever the rules, the (contested) laws and indeed the
rights or wrongs of the issue, might makes right.
Indeed, Bosko Jaksic, a Serbian commentator writing in the daily
Politika on Aug. 11, has it exactly to the point. "It is high time we
finally understood that the mighty do as they please and the small do
as they must." Politicians, he says, "can continue their debate as to
whether Kosovo has set a precedent or not, but it turns out that
realpolitik has its own rules." That may be a shame but, as the events
of the last 10 days have shown, it also is starkly true.
Tim Judah covers the Balkans for the Economist. He is the author of
"The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia" and the
forthcoming "Kosovo: What Everyone Needs to Know."