THE CAUCASUS: A BROKEN REGION
By Thomas de Waal
Institute for War and Peace Reporting
Dec 23 2008
UK
Short-term interests continue to impede hopes of a broad transformation
of this dysfunctional region.
The Caucasus region is a small and troubled place. It should be a
common endeavour for its small and diverse nationalities in Georgia,
Armenia and Azerbaijan as well as the Russian North Caucasus to work
together to build an integrated region.
Unfortunately, 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 suicide pact.
Nowhere in the world can there be so many roadblocks. The two long
borders between Armenia and Azerbaijan and Russia and Georgia are
almost permanently closed. Only two neighbours – 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 and
does not translate into many tangible benefits for ordinary people.
Yet, given the chance, the ordinary 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 where, right
on the administrative border with South Ossetia, the busiest wholesale
market in the Caucasus used to flourish. The Ossetians brought untaxed
goods from Russia – from cigarettes to cars – to sell. The Georgians
mainly sold agricultural produce. Because it was unregulated, the new
Georgian government of President Mikheil Saakashvili argued that the
market was knocking a big hole in the state budget and had to be shut
down, which they duly did in June 2004.
The closure of the market was a justifiable step on legal grounds,
except in the words of former Georgian 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. Arguably the day it closed was the day
the countdown to war in South Ossetia began.
On the Georgian-Armenian border, the Georgian village of
Sadakhlo used to be home to another astonishing spectacle: a mass
Armenian-Azerbaijani market on Georgian territory with virtually
no Georgians in sight. Azerbaijanis bought Armenian produce,
Armenians Azerbaijani goods that flooded the shops of Yerevan. Again,
governmental pressures have curtailed the market, although it has
not shut down entirely. Again, a magnificent example of inter-ethnic
cooperation has been suppressed.
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 this August’s 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 on August 16 was blown up, it also shut the only railway line
linking Armenia to the Black Sea coast, thereby cutting Armenia’s
entire imports for a week and costing it at least half a billion
dollars in revenue.
This sad state of affairs is partly everyone’s fault.
Armenia and Azerbaijan have adopted intransigent positions which
mean they have failed to resolve the biggest obstacle to peace and
prosperity in the Caucasus, the Nagorny Karabakh conflict. Georgia
has generally ignored its neighbours and Russia in its push
towards Euro-Atlantic integration. 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
mobilising western support" and did not pay sufficient attention to
its neighbours.
Europeans and Americans, though often paying lip service to the
idea of regional integration in the Caucasus, have generally pursued
narrower goals. Europe’s grand TRASECA project, a communication and
transport project linking the Caucasus to Europe and billed as a new
"Silk Road", has received less than 200 million euro of investment
since it was inaugurated in 1993 and its effects 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
the Congress, the Pentagon and State Department all have different
policies, with a primary focus on, respectively, Armenia, Azerbaijan
and 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 favours. 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 but a diminishing one – the Russian language, to help form a
new and friendly neighbourhood.
People-to-people ties are still in place, often despite the best
efforts of governments. Russians and Georgians are tied together
by innumerable ties of history, culture and business. Hundreds of
thousands of Georgians continue to work in Russia, despite the August
conflict. "[Russian and Georgians] leaders have tried to wreck a good
relationship between two peoples," said analyst Ivlian Khaindrava.
Previous Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze – who after all ran the
foreign ministry in Moscow in the perestroika years – understood this,
even if he was frequently unable to appease the harder-line elements
of the Russian elite when he had returned to Georgia as president.
In an interview with IWPR on December 3 in his residence outside
Tbilisi, Shevardnadze said – in a rebuke to his successor – that he
had always paid the Russians maximum respect. For example, Shevardnadze
said, when the decision was made in 2002 to invite American troops to
Georgia as part of the ground-breaking "Train and Equip" programme, he
had been careful to inform President Vladimir Putin in advance. Putin
went on the record to say that an American troop presence was "no
tragedy" for Russia.
"I always tried to emphasise that Russia for us is not a secondary
country, that it is a great neighbour with big military and economic
potential," said Shevardnadze.
Conflict gives birth to black-and-white thinking, the view that if your
opponent is suffering that is a good thinking. In the current crisis,
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, as
an economic downturn in Russia will hurt Georgian migrants and the
families back home they send remittances to, while new violence in
the North Caucasus could spill over into Georgia.
This kind of zero-sum thinking is most acute between Armenians and
Azerbaijanis, many of whom seem content to see their country suffer
so long as the other side in the Nagorny Karabakh conflict is feeling
pain too.
It is hard for locals to transcend these divisions. It is up to
outsiders to give the big picture and the 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.
Ultimately, it seems likely that only one big international
organisation – 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 bad habits. The Balkans
provides good proof of it.
Sadly, the 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. But the reason that they are there is a tragic one and let
us hope 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.
Thomas de Waal is IWPR’s outgoing Caucasus Editor. This is the last
edition of Caucasus Reporting Service he has edited, after almost
seven years with IWPR.
The views expressed in this article are not necessarily the views
of IWPR.