PLAYTHING OF THE GODS
Kurdish Globe
Wednesday, 13 August 2008, 12:37 EDT
Iraq
Russian and Georgian armoured vehicles are on the Gori-Tbilisi road
The Guardian
South Ossetia is a scrap of land with only a few thousand inhabitants.
As it tries to break away from its neighbour Georgia, independence
movements around the world wonder what its fate will mean for them. But
is it just a pawn in a larger political game? Tim Judah, who has just
visited the region, reports Even before the fighting that claimed
so many lives, Tskhinvali, the putative capital of South Ossetia,
was a pretty miserable place. Stalin Street (really) was its one and
only proper thoroughfare; it had a tiny market with a couple of old
women selling vegetables and batteries, and billboards celebrating
eternal Ossetian-Russian friendship. A couple of miles away, bored
Georgians soldiers sat keeping warm around a brazier.
When I visited it a few months ago, South Ossetia seemed like the
end of the world, not the place that would spark a new war in the
Caucasus. It was one of the four so-called "frozen conflicts" of the
former Soviet Union and, as it had been for years, still very much
in the deep freeze.
The mood was not much different in Sokhumi, the capital of Abkhazia,
to the west. This city by the Black Sea, much of which remains in ruins
from the war of the early 1990s, was once the holiday playground of
the Soviet elite. Now old men played chess under gently swaying palms
in front of wrecked hotels, and I visited a memorial for the Abkhaz
soldiers who had died fighting the Georgians. At the Inguri river,
where you crossed from Georgia proper, the Georgians had erected
a sculpture of a huge pistol pointing north to Abkhazia – but in a
futile gesture the barrel had been tied in a knot.
South Ossetia and Abkhazia both broke away from Georgia in savage
fighting when the Soviet Union disintegrated. The other two "frozen
conflicts" in this region are Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian enclave
wrenched from Azerbaijan, and Transnistria, whose Slav population
rebelled against Moldova, whose people and language are closely related
to Romania. All are the unhappy legacies of Stalinist map-making,
lines drawn in a period when the wishes of people counted for little
and the demise of the Soviet Union was beyond imagination. All are
unrecognised but exist as de facto states, albeit with support from
Russia and, in Nagorno-Karabakh’s case, Armenia.
Take South Ossetia, which like Abkhazia had autonomous status within
Soviet Georgia. Although many South Ossetians live in Tbilisi and
elsewhere in Georgia, its people are really connected in terms of
family, kin and language with North Ossetia, which is now in Russia,
across the mountains to which it is connected through the Roki tunnel.
Ossetians speak a language related to Persian and believe (truly)
that the King Arthur of British myth was actually an Ossetian. I found
billboards in Tskhinvali emblazoned with pictures of men dressed as
knights in armour celebrating the 17th anniversary of South Ossetia’s
declaration of independence.
Its population is tiny – somewhere between 22,000, as the Georgians
claim, and 70,000, according to the South Ossetians. The numbers vary
not least because, as there is no work (and no university) in South
Ossetia, many go to Russia and only come home for the holidays.
Even before last week, South Ossetia was hardly a candidate to be a
viable state, especially as large swathes of it – as much as a third –
were held by the Georgians. Only 800 metres separated the centre of
one Georgian-controlled village from Tskhinvali. The Georgians had
recently built a brand new cinema and sports complex in that village,
and roads and infrastructure were being upgraded.
The head of the Georgian administration for South Ossetia was a burly
former military man who had defected from the separatists. He cut
little ice in Tskhinvali, where officials scoffed at his notion of
striking a deal and making peace with Georgia. Indeed, their plans
were rather more ambitious.
"Our aim is unification with North Ossetia," Alan Pliev, the deputy
foreign minister of South Ossetia, told me in his broom cupboard of
an office. "We don’t know if that would be as part of Russia or as
a separate united Ossetian state." Juri Dzittsojty, deputy speaker
of parliament, says: "I would prefer there to be an independent and
united Ossetia, but today it is not possible. It is safer to be with
Russia. The main aim of the struggle is to be independent of Georgia."
A few hours’ drive away, along the road now cut by Russian troops,
the Abkhaz dream was a different one. Their goal is simply to hang on
to what they have got. And here’s the rub. Before the Abkhaz war of the
early 1990s, less than 18% of its population were ethnic Abkhaz. Today,
of some 200,000 people, this group still constitutes only 45% of its
people, and hundreds of thousands of Georgians who left Abkhazia in
the 1990s want to return home. The Abkhaz, who are in firm control
of the government and of all levers of power, argue that to allow
more of these refugees back than they have already permitted would
simply be to turn back the clock and to make the Abkhaz once more a
small minority in their own homeland.
In the foreign ministry of the unrecognised republic I waited to
see Maxim Guinja, Abkhazia’s deputy foreign minister. Then he came
out, and before we talked he tidied away some flags in the waiting
room. There had just been a meeting in Sokhumi of the leaders of
Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Transnistria.
"We became 18% because of Soviet rule and Russian before that,"
he explained. Abkhaz were deported to Siberia and Turkey, and
Georgians settled here. "My grandfather was put on a train in 1937
with thousands of others, and the next day a train arrived with
Georgian settlers. No one returned from Siberia." His dream is that
one day hundreds of thousands of Abkhaz – or rather their descendants
who fled the Tsarist invasion to Turkey in the late 19th century –
will come home. A pipe dream? Maybe, but Guinja said that he had a
very clear precedent in mind. Israel did it, so why not Abkhazia?
In the meantime, the Abkhaz have to play gingerly with the Russians,
whom they distrust as much the Ossetians trust them. "For Russia,
Abkhazia is just a card that can be played," I was told by Leyla
Taniya, who runs a thinktank in Sokhumi. "Abkhazia is linked to
Russia, and Russia is the only country that actually cooperates with
Abkhazia, and today many are afraid this could lead to our political
absorption." She wants to correct a "common misunderstanding" in the
west: despite its small size, Abkhazia "is not a Russian puppet".
It is easy to comprehend why such a misunderstanding should exist. The
Abkhaz, like the South Ossetians, have all been given Russian passports
and vote in Russian elections, even though their unrecognised statelets
are legally part of Georgia. They use the rouble, their people work
and study in Russia and they speak Russian at least as much as Abkhaz
or Ossetian. Their elderly receive their pensions from Russia. And,
as the last few days have helped demonstrate, without Russian military
support, it is doubtful whether the breakaways would still exist.
Yesterday, Abkhazia began a military operation to take back a strategic
sliver of territory held by the Georgians within Abkhazia. They could
do this because Russian troops had struck far outside Abkhaz territory,
routing the Georgian forces. No wonder everyone was so relaxed when I
was in Sokhumi. I went to see Stanislav Lakoba, the Abkhaz official
in charge of security. Georgia, I put it to him, was pouring 10% of
its GDP into its army, was bidding to join Nato, had intensely courted
the US and was demanding that Russia pull its so-called peacekeeping
troops out of Abkhazia, 14 years after their deployment. "Georgia
just screams about it," he said laconically. "It would just mean
suicide if they attacked." He obviously knew what he was talking about.
Despite its massive military support for the breakaways, the curious
thing is that Russia does not actually want their full secession. It
is a case of, "Listen to what I say, not what I do." After battling
separatists in Chechnya and beyond for well over a decade, Moscow
is afraid of anything that might set a precedent and encourage the
break-up of the Russian Federation. It is not the only big power
with such concerns: China is nervous about anything that might boost
separatist hopes in Tibet or Xinjiang, let alone Taiwan.
This year the argument over breakaways and precedents has reached
fever pitch, and the reason for that is Kosovo. On February 17,
Kosovo, which has a population of some two million, 90% of whom
are ethnic Albanians, declared independence from Serbia. Serbia of
course rejects its independence, as does Russia, China and indeed
the majority of countries in the world, including Georgia. Twenty
out of 27 EU states have recognised it, however, alongside the US
and other western countries. But in doing so these 45 states seem
to have crossed a legal Rubicon. Until then, the only new states
in Europe had been the six republics of the old Yugoslavia, such as
Croatia or Bosnia, the 15 former Soviet republics and the Czech and
Slovak republics. Kosovo is different. Like the four post-Soviet
breakaways, it was a province or part of an existing republic. So,
argued Serb leaders, it did not have the same right to independence as
the republics did. "Yes, we do," argued the Kosovo Albanians. Their
struggle, they argued, was based on the legal right of a people to
self-determination – just like the Serbs argued in 1991 when they
briefly set up a breakaway republic of Krajina in Croatia.
Quite simply then, in Kosovo as in South Ossetia and Abkhazia,
two pillars of international law – that is to say, the territorial
integrity of states versus self-determination – stand in stark
opposition to one another.
Hence Russia’s refusal to back Kosovo’s independence. "The threat of a
disintegrating Russia – comparable to the break-up of the Soviet Union
in 1991 – is still today seen as a very real threat by the Kremlin
and the Russian elite," says Pavel Felgenhauer, a leading Russian
commentator. "The west is seen today by many in the Russian elite
and public as a threatening force that is plotting to tear Russia
apart and rob it of its natural resources. By supporting Serbia’s
right to veto Kosovo’s secession, the Kremlin clearly believes that
it is defending Russia’s undisputed right to sustain its territorial
integrity by any means available."
Of course, Russia is interested in its territorial integrity, not
Georgia’s. By supporting Abkhazia and South Ossetia, it has the
means to keep Georgia at its mercy and prevent it from following
the pro-western path chosen by its electorate. But beyond that, it
has little real interest in the breakaway states. Where the EU has
poured billions into the reconstruction of Sarajevo and other Balkan
cities ruined by wars of the 1990s, Russia has spent not a kopek in
rebuilding Sokhumi or Tskhinvali.
In September, Serbia will ask the General Assembly of the United
Nations to ask the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to hand down an
advisory opinion on whether Kosovo’s declaration of independence was
legal or not. If this ever happens, the ruling could have tremendous
impact – or not, as the case may be. If Kosovo’s 1.8 million people
can declare independence and be recognised without the permission of
Serbia, then so can Abkhazia or South Ossetia, to say nothing of the
Republika Srpska (the Serb part of Bosnia), Iraqi Kurdistan and –
who knows? – one day perhaps even Catalonia or the Basque country.
On the other hand, the ICJ could declare that Kosovo’s declaration was
indeed illegal – and then what? Not much, probably. In 1975, the ICJ
ruled that the people of the former Spanish colony of Western Sahara
had the right to self-determination. This was disputed by Morocco,
which had occupied the country. Now, 34 years later, Morocco, a good
friend of the west, is still occupying Western Sahara, most of the
population has been driven out and lives in miserable camps in the
Algerian Sahara, and the Moroccans have built a wall around the country
to keep separatist guerrillas out. No one outside the region cares a
hoot about them because, when it comes to these types of conflicts,
hypocrisy is everyone’s order of the day.
What it comes down to is simple: being in the right place at the
right time and having the right friends with the right guns and
interests. Precedent, for all of the diplomats’ fear of the word,
is only part of it. It is where you are on the map and what you can
get away with that counts. In 2002, on a trip to Iraqi Kurdistan,
I was struck by the way the Kurds’ homeland had been carved up as
the Ottoman empire collapsed. Few Kurds I met then made any secret
of their desire not just to achieve independence from Iraq but also
to act as a vanguard that would eventually rally Kurds from Iran,
Syria, and Turkey into one large Kurdish state.
I asked one official if the aim of a Kurdish federal unit in Iraq
was to provide an example for Kurds in Turkey and so that later
they could join together. "Yes," he said. "That’s the aim." Then,
embarrassed, he added: "But don’t write that down." Musa Ali Bakr, the
man who was then in charge of refugees in the Kurdish region of Dahuk,
explained that if the Iraqi Kurds moved too quickly their neighbours
would strangle them by closing the borders. He then summed up what
for me then was the Kurdish dilemma, but I now realise is really the
dictum of all successful separatists: "If you are sick, you visit
the doctor. He prescribes the medicine. You take a spoonful three
times a day and eventually you are better, you are free. However,
if you drank the whole bottle all at once, it would kill you."
Tim Judah covers the Balkans for the Economist. He is the author
of The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, and
Kosovo: What Everyone Needs to Know, which will be published by Oxford
University Press in September.