OF HELPLESS HOTHEADS AND HALF-BAKED WARRIORS
By Christian Neef
Spiegel Online
08/11/2008
Germany
The escalating war in the Caucasus region is an example of political
stubbornness on both sides. Diplomacy is ineffectual and, aside from
warm words, can deliver nothing. The West, where speaking plainly to
Russia went out of vogue long ago, is also partly to blame.
REUTERS How is this conflict to be resolved? The answer — in all
honesty, at least from today’s perspective — is not at all.
"War in South Ossetia," "General Mobilization in Georgia," "Russia
Invades." These are the headlines of a weekend in which newspaper
publishers had expected the Olympics in Beijing to dominate the
front page. The surprise, or rather, irritation over this conflict
that has suddenly pushed its way into the limelight is so great that
even the International Olympic Committee — which, as we well know,
is a master of political sensitivity — criticized the escalation
of fighting. "Conflict is not what we want to see," IOC spokeswoman
Giselle Davies said.
For once, the IOC is right. South Ossetia — excuse me,
where? Tskhinvali? Never heard of it! A tiny mountainous realm
one-and-a-half times the size of Luxembourg, and all of this happening
less than 3,000 kilometers (1,875 miles) from Berlin? And in that
not-so-faraway place, Russian and Georgian tanks on the move, while
Russian fighter jets launch strikes into the Georgian hinterland? It
sounds crazy, but what is now coming back to haunt us is the
consequence of everyone — for a full 20 years — having disavowed
this small, simmering trouble spot in the oh-so-inscrutable Caucasus,
the home of breakaway regions like Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia and
South Ossetia.
PHOTO GALLERY: BOMBS, REFUGEES AND SUFFERING IN THE CAUCUSUS Click
on a picture to launch the image gallery (14 Photos)
Mikhail Saakashvili, the young hothead sitting in the president’s
chair in the Georgian capital Tbilisi, wants to rein in two breakaway
provinces lost in the bloody wars of secession in the early 1990s,
a period when hundreds of thousands of his countrymen were forced
to leave their homes overnight. One of Saakashvili’s key campaign
promises was to enable them to return to their ancestral home, an
understandable wish that no Georgian president could ignore. It is
as if the Lusatian Sorbs, a tiny Slavic ethnic group that settled in
the border region between modern-day Germany and Poland in the 6th
century A.D., had suddenly taken control of a slice of the German
state of Brandenburg and driven everyone else out, or as if the
Bavarians … But let’s leave it at that.
A Futile Effort to Join NATO
Saakashvili’s logic is supported by the fact that the (Western)
international community has been making it clear to him for years
that Georgia would not be welcomed into NATO or the European Union
as long as its conflicts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia remained
unresolved. But membership in these two alliances is near and dear to
Saakashvili’s heart, since it would enable the Georgian leader and
his country to finally escape from the gravitational field of their
domineering neighbor, Russia.
And, to the trained lawyer’s credit, the half-baked leadership in tiny
separatist South Ossetia, whose so-called president came to the job
with prior experience as a freestyle wrestler, generally boycotted
Saakashvili’s offers to discuss autonomy. This suggests that it
has never been truly interested in a serious political solution,
because it has enough Russian backing for its cause. Even Russian
revolutionary leader Leon Trotzky characterized the Ossetians as a
crude and violent people, which, of course, was meant polemically
and was mostly directed at his arch rival, Josef Stalin.
PHOTO GALLERY: FIGHTING IN SOUTH OSSETIA Click on a picture to launch
the image gallery (13 Photos)
All of this suggests that Saakashvili may have believed that nothing
could be achieved in the Caucasus with diplomacy anymore, and that
the conflict, therefore, could only be resolved militarily — and
resolved now, while his most powerful benefactor, US President George
W. Bush, is still in office. The West’s appeals to end the violence
immediately are merely evidence of its own helplessness. And German
Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier’s plan to return the Georgian
refugees (more…) to their old homeland and settle the issue of the
disputed regions’ status at a later date also seems naïve.
Stalin’s Arbitrary Borders
Who is really at fault for all of this? Stalin, of course. He was
the one who drew the arbitrary borders of the Soviet Union to make
it easier for the Kremlin to assert control over its multiethnic
country. This strategy affected the Ossetians directly, because it
meant dividing their region into a northern and a southern part. The
former went to the "Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic" and the
latter to the Soviet Republic of Georgia — a difference that, at the
time, was irrelevant, since it was all part of the same country. Only
when the Soviet Union perished and Georgia seized its opportunity
to become independent once again were the Ossetians suddenly truly
divided. It was at that point that the Caucasus ridge bisecting their
little realm became a national border.
DPA Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili: Embraced by the West —
and abandoned.
Of course, the separatists themselves also share some of the
"blame." North and South Ossetia happen to be two areas shared
by the same people, a people that has always looked to Moscow for
protection, which explains why the choleric Georgians have called them
"Russian lackeys." This led the South Ossetians to fight for their
own independence early on. The circumstances were different for the
Abkhazians, who were never divided and even had their own kingdom
once. But Stalin assimilated them with carrots and sticks, and then
even imposed the Georgian alphabet on the Abkhazians. Unfortunately,
the first presidents of post-Soviet Georgia, Zviad Gamsakhurdia and
Eduard Shevardnadze, continued this course.
This brings us to the next guilty parties. In their newly awakened
patriotic ardor of the early 1990s, the once-so-cosmopolitan Georgians
were convinced of the importance of a strictly centralized state,
instead of offering new forms of autonomy to the other ethnic groups
on their territory. This stance almost cost Shevardnadze his life in
the Abkhazian war. But at least the former Soviet foreign minister
had a more levelheaded personality, which is certainly not something
that can be said of his successor, Saakashvili.
A Pawn of a Wounded Superpower
SPIEGEL ONLINE Map: Georgia and the Caucusus Perhaps all of this
could have been resolved in the mid-1990s, when more liberal forces
were temporarily in charge, not only in Tbilisi, but also in the South
Ossetian and Abkhazian capitals, Tskhinvali and Sukhumi. But then the
new Russia entered the game, this wounded superpower, with people like
then-President Vladimir Putin, who had never quite gotten over the
loss of Georgia. They recognized, in the breakaway regions of South
Ossetia and Abkhazia, the perfect tool to keep the country on the
southern edge of the Caucasus in turmoil. And then, when the West —
the United States, most of all — developed an interest in Georgia’s
strategic location, Tbilisi’s quiet days were gone once and for
all. Putin has repeatedly said that he will do everything within his
power to prevent Georgia from joining NATO. What better way to achieve
this than to keep Georgia’s simmering conflicts artificially alive?
So how is this conflict to be resolved? The answer — in all honesty,
at least from today’s perspective — is not at all. A possible solution
down the road could be for the South Ossetians to be resettled in
Russia, which, of course, would come with the bitter aftertaste of
a deportation and be reminiscent of Stalin’s deportations in the
1940s. The Abkhazians, on the other hand, ought to be given extensive
autonomy.
The West Vacillates
And the West? It — in an approach we have almost come to expect by
now — has only aggravated the situation with its ambiguities. It
supports Georgia’s "territorial integrity," and yet, just as poor
Mr. Saakashvili tries to enforce that same integrity, the West is
suddenly tight-lipped on the issue. Its diplomatic efforts seem
to be in vain, and yet the military route is frowned upon (and
rightfully so).
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The main problem lies in the stance the West has adopted toward Russia
in the past 20 years or so. Speaking plainly to Russia went out of
vogue long ago, which the Russians have consistently interpreted
as weakness. On the other hand, they certainly take clear words
seriously. Since the first war in Chechnya in 1994, the West’s aim has
been to be "inclusive" when it comes to Russia and to make allowances
for Moscow’s sensitivities. This policy has failed to prevent Russia’s
brutal course of action in Grozny, the war over Nagorno-Karabakh or
the massacres of Sukhumi and Tskhinvali.
With the West suffering from self-delusion, fear of a highly
unpredictable major power, ignorance of the region’s ethnic problems
and hopeless differences of opinion within the EU, it can hardly be
expected to exert any influence over the Caucasus.
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