Wall Street Journal
Feb 20 2008
Separation Anxiety
By THOMAS DE WAAL
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL EUROPE
February 20, 2008
Twenty years ago today, the ghosts of history stirred in Europe and a
conflict that no one had paid attention to since the Treaty of
Versailles re-erupted in the depths of the Soviet Union. The
Nagorno-Karabakh dispute between Armenians and Azerbaijanis was the
first bonfire in a series of ethno-territorial conflicts that burned
through the Caucasus and the Balkans. European Union enthusiasts had
thought that the only conflicts left on the Continent were about
sheep and cod quotas — but they were dead wrong.
In the week when Kosovo embarks on a path of EU-guided independence
and Serbia and Russia voice angry resistance, it’s worth asking
whether the nationalist gunmen or the European dreamers will win the
argument.
* * *
The dispute that kicked it off in the southern Caucasus is still
unresolved. On Feb. 20, 1988, the local Armenian soviet in the tiny
territory of Nagorno-Karabakh decided to take Lenin’s dictum of "all
power to the soviets" literally and vote for secession from Soviet
Azerbaijan and join Soviet Armenia. The Armenians said that Karabakh
was an historic Armenian homeland that had been unjustly incorporated
into Azerbaijan by Stalin, the Azerbaijanis that an Armenian fifth
column was breaking up their republic and stealing their territory.
The region was so obscure that even most people in Moscow knew
nothing about it. Mikhail Gorbachev wisely chose not to use violent
repression to solve the dispute but found he had no other instruments
that worked.
Strikes, demonstrations, pogroms and deportations degenerated into
full-scale war. The dispute tore up the notion of Soviet brotherhood
and began to weaken the architecture of the U.S.S.R. as a whole.
Within a couple of years, the same forces would bring about the
violent death of Yugoslavia.
Hundreds of thousands perished and millions were displaced. The blame
in all these nasty wars — Abkhazia and South Ossetia in the Caucasus
and Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo in the Balkans — is shared unevenly,
but it can safely be said there were no angels in them. The victims
one day became ethnic cleansers the next. Those who suffered most
were those most attached to some kind of modern, multi-ethnic notion
of identity, such as the cosmopolitan families and mixed marriages of
Baku and Sarajevo.
Twenty years on, politicians in the Caucasus continue to give
inflammatory speeches about victory, justice and "no surrender."
Armenian and Azerbaijani historians still seek to prove that the
other ethnic group "never lived" in the disputed territory and that
therefore it is their undisputed historical homeland. These bogus
theories are now being taught in classrooms.
Now the emergent state of Kosovo poses both challenges and threats.
The standard Western line about Kosovo’s independence, from the White
House to Brussels, is that it "does not set a precedent." The
Kosovars, the argument goes, suffered so egregiously under Slobodan
Milosevic’s Serbia that they deserved the U.N. mandate that gave them
de facto independence. That state of affairs is merely being made de
jure, albeit with continued international supervision.
It goes without saying that all these conflicts are different. Kosovo
is certainly larger than the disputed Caucasian territories and its
years under U.N. supervision have prepared it to be a more viable
state. But whether the West likes it or not, Kosovo’s independence
will have a strong ripple effect. Consider the calculation made by
the de facto leaders of Abkhazia or Nagorno-Karabakh when they hear
the news from Kosovo: They will be even less likely to try to sell a
bargain to their people that entails "return" to the sovereignty of
Azerbaijan or Georgia.
That knowledge further frustrates the leaders of Azerbaijan and
Georgia, who fear that they are losing the breakaway territories and
drop ever heavier hints that they could use military action to
reconquer them. Thanks to new Caspian Sea oil revenues, Azerbaijan
has the fastest-growing defence budget in the world, while the
Georgian government recently renamed its conflict resolution ministry
into the more aggressively titled "ministry for reintegration."
Kosovo is further thawing conflicts that have been mistakenly called
"frozen." The peace processes are already all but dead. Around
Nagorno-Karabakh, now under Armenian control, snipers exchange deadly
fire across a 200 kilometer cease-fire line. Shooting incidents and
kidnappings set nerves jangling in Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
In truth, neither side here will get what they want. Full
independence for these territories is highly implausible, especially
when large minority populations remain in exile and are not
consulted; but integration of these territories into Azerbaijan or
Georgia, places they have had nothing in common with since Soviet
times and fought wars against is also fantasy. The only way
"reintegration" can be achieved is through another catastrophic war.
Everyone knows that some kind of shared sovereignty must be the
eventual outcome. But how to arrive at it?
The worrying aspect of Kosovo’s "supervised independence" — and the
most awkward for the European Union as it simultaneously proclaims
its trans-national identity — is the perception that the reward for
intransigence is a full national state, with all the old-fashioned
trappings attached to it. The new Europe is supposed to be about less
borders, not more.
* * *
But if the emphasis is put on supervision, rather than independence,
something good could still be borrowed from the Kosovo model.
In theory at least, the Kosovo model honors the aspirations both of
the Kosovo Albanians and the Serbs, puts conditionality on the
choices made by the new state, introduces some Western-style
institutions and keeps an international security presence.
The key word here is security. If the Balkans have moved further
ahead, it is thanks in large part to a belated but massive
international effort. The Dayton agreement for Bosnia was in effect a
huge international security blanket smothering the conflict in the
expectation that EU expansion would lull the conflicting sides into a
state of prosperity. The Kosovo experiment is also predicated on the
idea of continuing security for both Kosovo Albanians and Serbs.
The underside of the violent nationalist exterior of many people in
the Balkans and the Caucasus is genuine fear. In my travels in
Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, I have met well-educated people who
say that they fear "genocide," the extinction of their ethnic group.
I have met people who took up arms against their former school mates
and neighbors because you had to take sides and kill or be killed.
They did not trust the socialist state to look after their security
and began to look instead to their own young men with guns over their
shoulders. Only an overarching international security architecture
can stifle that fear and allow people to see their former enemies as
traders and potential neighbors again, not as threats to their
existence.
This is the security structure that Western powers have tried to
erect in Bosnia and Kosovo in the last decade and a half, with
partial success. They have not managed to do so in the Caucasus
partly because they lack the resources and the commitment, partly
because this can only be done in partnership with Russia. The
European Union is barely present in the South Caucasus, while the
United States has a stronger presence but several competing agendas,
shaped by energy investments, the domestic Armenian lobby and
relations with Russia.
That calculation may need to change, as the Georgian and
Armenian-Azerbaijani conflicts begin to unfreeze and Western
politicians notice, for example, that the Armenian-Azerbaijani
cease-fire line runs just 20 kilometers from the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan
pipeline that connects Caspian oil fields with European markets.
Interests are at stake here, not just ordinary lives. The fighters of
the nationalist wars have not disappeared; they just left their guns
in the cellar, waiting to see what the future brings.
Mr de Waal is Caucasus editor at the Institute for War and Peace
Reporting and author of "Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through
Peace and War" (NYU Press, 2003).
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