From: Arch Getty <getty@ucla.edu>
Subject: separate and unequal
Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2008
Things look very different from here in Moscow,
almost as if one is observing things from another planet.
The other night I watched a story on Russia
Today, a semi-official Russian news channel. It
showed CNN footage purporting to come from the
apparent Russian “capture” of the Georgian town
of Gori. Actually, the film was (unattributed)
Russia Today footage of damage from the Georgian
attack days ago on Tskhinvali, the So. Ossetian capital.
But even aside from the difficulty of getting
anything resembling accurate news here, the
Russian point of view is, predictably, vastly
different from the knee-jerk Russophobia in the
U.S. press. And to many of us here, the Russian
point of view is at least as compelling as the
mainstream U.S. attitudes we hear about.
Russians have always been sensitive to western
views of them and are particularly alert for
attitudes that smack of inequality and
hypocrisy. The vast majority of people here are
amazed, sad, and confused at the way the western
media has transformed the Georgian side, which
started the war, into the victims. When Prime
Minister Putin decried the west’s cynical
“turning black into white” he spoke for large numbers of Russians.
People here were amazed and insulted when
President Bush bragged about his “stern” warnings
to Putin. Like Putin, they cannot imagine a
reason to pay any attention to such a person,
whose paternalistic but helpless schoolmarm
lectures are considered here to be “not serious.”
Russians wonder how, before Russian intervention,
something more than a thousand deaths including
the destruction of villages and shooting of
civilians by the Georgians escape western notice.
They wonder why Georgian attempts to suppress the
Ossetian alphabet were not cultural genocide and
Russian defense against Georgian attack is.
They wonder how prying Kossovo away from Serbia
was popular self-determination but So. Ossetian
independence from Georgia is not.
They wonder how President Bush, who for the sake
of regime change invaded Iraq far from his
shores, nevertheless managed to denounce Russian
use of force and complain that the days of regime change had passed.
They wonder why, in 1942 when attacked by Japan,
the U.S. did not follow its own advice about a
“measured response” and stop her counterattack on
Japan at Pearl Harbor. “Were the Japanese the
victims then, just like the Georgians?”
They wonder why, as one puzzled but sincere
friend put it, “you Americans hate us so much when we do what you do.”
But mostly they wonder why US leaders cannot come
up with a more sophisticated world view for the
21st century than surrounding Russia (which after
all has nuclear weapons and much of the world’s
oil) with verbal abuse, hostile alliances and
provocations. They don’t understand why US
leaders cannot see beyond or outgrow the cold
war. Another asked, “So Cheney and Rice, they
aren’t your most advanced global thinkers, right?”
By Michael Dobbs (dobbsm@washpost.com)
Michael Dobbs covered the collapse of the Soviet
Union for the Washington Post. His latest book is
“One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and
Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War.”
It did not take long for the “Putin is Hitler”
analogies to start, following the eruption of the
ugly little war between Russia and Georgia over
the breakaway Georgian province of South Ossetia.
A neo-conservative commentator, Robert Kagan,
compared the Russian attack on Georgia with the
Nazi grab of the Sudetenland in 1938. President
Jimmy Carter’s former national security adviser
Zbigniew Brzezinski said that the Russian leader
was following a course “that is horrifyingly
similar to that taken by Stalin and Hitler in the 1930s.”
Others invoked the infamous Brezhnev doctrine of
limited sovereignty, under which Soviet leaders
claimed the right to intervene militarily in
Eastern Europe, in order to prop up their
crumbling imperium. “We’ve seen this movie before
in Prague and Budapest,” said presumptive
Republican nominee John McCain, referring to the
Soviet invasions of Czecholovakia in 1968 and Hungary in 1956.
Actually, the events of the past week in Georgia
have little in common either with Hitler’s
dismemberment of Czechoslovakia on the eve of
World War II or Soviet policies in Eastern
Europe. They are better understood against the
background of the complicated ethnic politics of
the Caucasus, a part of the world where
historical grudges run deep, and the oppressed
can become oppressors in the bat of an eye.
Unlike most of the armchair generals now posing
as experts on the Caucasus, I have actually
visited Tskhinvali, a sleepy provincial town in
the shadow of the mountains that rise up along
Russia’s southern border. I was there in March
1991, shortly after the city was occupied by
Georgian militia units loyal to Zviad
Gamsakhurdia, the first freely elected leader of
Georgia in seven decades. One of Gamsakhurdia’s
first acts as Georgian president was to cancel
the political autonomy that had been granted to
the republic’s 90,000-strong Ossetian minority
under the Stalinist constitution.
After negotiating safe passage with Soviet
interior ministry troops who had stationed
themselves between the Georgians and the
Ossetians, I discovered the town had been
ransacked by Gamsakhurdia’s militia. The
Georgians had trashed the Ossetian national
theater, decapitated the statue of an Ossetian
poet, and pulled down monuments to Ossetians who
fought with Soviet troops in World War II. The
Ossetians were responding in kind, firing on
Georgian villages and forcing Georgian residents
of Tskhinvali to flee their homes.
It soon became clear to me that the Ossetians
viewed Georgians much the same way Georgians view
Russians: as aggressive bullies bent on taking
away their independence. “We are much more
worried by Georgian imperialism than Russian
imperialism,” an Ossetian leader, Gerasim
Khugaev, told me. “It is closer to us, and we feel its pressure all the time.”
When it comes to apportioning blame for the
latest flareup in the Caucasus, there is plenty
to go around. The Russians were clearly itching
for a fight, but the behavior of Georgian
president Mikheil Saakashvili has been erratic
and provocative. The United States may have
stoked the conflict by encouraging Saakashvili to
believe he enjoyed American protection, when the
West’s ability to impose its will in this part of
the world is actually quite limited.
Let us examine the role played by the three main parties one by one.
Georgia. Saakashvili’s image in the West, and
particularly in America, is that of the great
“democrat,” the leader of the “Rose revolution”
who spearheaded a popular uprising against former
American favorite Eduard Shevardnadze in November
2003. It is true that he has won two, reasonably
free, elections, but he has also displayed some
autocratic tendencies; he sent riot police to
crush an opposition protest in Tbilisi last
November and shuttered an opposition television station.
While the U.S. views Saakashvili as a pro-Western
modernizer, a large part of his political appeal
in Georgia has stemmed from his promise to
re-unify Georgia by bringing the secessionist
provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia under
central control. He has presented himself as the
successor to the medieval Georgian king, David
the Builder, and promised that the country will
regain its lost territories by the time he leaves
office, by one means or another. American
commentators tend to overlook the fact that
Georgian democracy is inextricably intertwined with Georgian nationalism.
The restoration of Georgia’s traditional borders
is an understandable goal for a Georgian leader,
but is a much lower priority for the West,
particularly if it involves armed conflict with
Russia. Based on their previous experience with
Georgian rule, Ossetians and Abhazians have
perfectly valid reasons to be opposed to
reunification with Georgia, even if it means
throwing in their lot with the Russians.
It is unclear how the simmering tensions between
Georgia and South Ossetia came to the boil last
week. The Georgians say they were provoked by the
shelling of Georgian villages from
Ossetian-controlled territory. While this may be
well be the case, the Georgian response was
disproportionate. On the night of Aug. 7-8,
Saakashvili ordered an artillery barrage against
Tskhinvali, and sent an armored column to occupy
the town. He apparently hoped that Western
support would protect Georgia from major Russian
retaliation, even though Russian “peacekeepers”
were almost certainly killed or wounded in the Georgian assault.
It was a huge miscalculation. Russian Prime
Minister Vladimir Putin (and let there be no
doubt that he is calling the shots in Moscow
despite handing over the presidency to his
protege, Dmitri Medvedev) now had the ideal
pretext for settling scores with the uppity
Georgians. Rather than simply restoring the
status quo ante, Russian troops moved into
Georgia proper, cutting the main east-west
highway at Gori and attacking various military bases.
Saakashvili’s decision to gamble everything on a
lightning grab for Tskhinvali brings to mind the
comment of the 19th century French statesman
Maurice de Talleyrand: “it was worse than a crime, it was a mistake.”
Russia. Putin and Medvedev have defended their
incursion into Georgia as motivated by a desire
to stop the “genocide” of Ossetians by Georgians.
It is difficult to take their moral outrage very
seriously. There is a striking contrast between
Russian support for the right of Ossetian
self-determination in Georgia and the brutal
suppression of Chechens who were trying to
exercise that very same right within the boundaries of Russia.
Playing one ethnic group off against another in
the Caucasus has been standard Russian policy
ever since tzarist times. It is the ideal wedge
issue for the Kremlin, particularly in the case
of a state like Georgia, which is made up of
several different nationalities. It would be
virtually impossible for South Ossetia to survive
as an autonomous entity without Russian support.
Over the last few months, Putin’s government has
issued passports to Ossetians and secured the
appointment of Russians to key positions in Tskhinvali.
The Russian incursion into Georgia proper has
been even more “disproportionate” — in
President’s Bush phrase — than the Georgian
assault on Tskhinvali. The Russians have made no
secret of their wish to replace Saakashvili with
a more compliant leader. Targets for Russian
shelling included the Black Sea port of Poti —
more than 100 miles from South Ossetia.
The real goal of Kremlin strategy is to reassert
Russian influence in a part of the world that has
been regarded, by tzars and commissars alike, as
Russia’s backyard. Russian leaders bitterly
resented the eastward expansion of NATO to
include Poland and the Baltic states — with
Ukraine and Georgia next on the list — but were
unable to do very much about it as long as
America was strong and Russia was weak. Now the
tables are turning for the first time since the
collapse of Communism in 1991, and Putin is seizing the moment.
If Putin is smart, he will refrain from occupying
Georgia proper, a step that would further alarm
the West and unite Georgians against Russia. A
better tactic would be to wait for Georgians
themselves to turn against Saakashvili. The
precedent here is what happened to Gamsakhurdia,
who was overthrown by the same militia forces he
had sent into to South Ossetia a year later, in January 1992.
The United States. The Bush administration has
been sending mixed messages to its Georgian
clients. U.S. officials insist that they did not
give the green light to Saakashvili for his
attack on South Ossetia. At the same time,
however, the U.S. has championed NATO membership
for Georgia, sent military advisers to bolster
the Georgian army, and demanded the restoration
of Georgian territorial integrity. American
support might well have emboldened Saakashvili as
he was considering how to respond to the “provocations” from South Ossetia.
Now the United States has ended up in a situation
in the Caucasus where the Georgian tail is
wagging the NATO dog. We were unable to control
Saakashvili or to lend him effective assistance
when his country was invaded. One lesson is that
we need to be very careful in extending NATO
membership, or even the promise of membership, to
countries we have neither the will nor the ability to defend.
In the meantime, American leaders have paid
little attention to Russian diplomatic concerns,
both inside the former borders of the Soviet
Union and farther abroad. The Bush administration
unilaterally abrogated the 1972 anti-missile
defense treaty and ignored Putin when he objected
to Kosovo independence on the grounds that it
would set a dangerous precedent. It is difficult
to explain why Kosovo should have the right to
unilaterally declare its independence from
Serbia, while the same right should be denied to
places like South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
The bottom line is that the United States is
overextended militarily, diplomatically, and
economically. Even hawks like Vice President
Cheney, who have been vociferously denouncing
Putin’s actions in Georgia, have no stomach for a
military conflict with Moscow. The United States
is bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, and needs
Russian support in the coming trial of strength
with Iran over its nuclear ambitions.
Instead of speaking softly and wielding a big
stick, as Teddy Roosevelt recommended, the
American policeman has been loudly lecturing the
rest of the world while waving an increasingly
unimpressive baton. The events of the past few
days serve as a reminder that our ideological
ambitions have greatly exceeded our military
reach, particularly in areas like the Caucasus,
which is of only peripheral importance to the
United States but is of vital interest to Russia.
The Russian invasion of Georgia has not changed the balance of power in Eurasia. It simply announced that the balance of power had already shifted. The United States has been absorbed in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as potential conflict with Iran and a destabilizing situation in Pakistan. It has no strategic ground forces in reserve and is in no position to intervene on the Russian periphery. This, as we have argued, has opened a window of opportunity for the Russians to reassert their influence in the former Soviet sphere. Moscow did not have to concern itself with the potential response of the United States or Europe; hence, the invasion did not shift the balance of power. The balance of power had already shifted, and it was up to the Russians when to make this public. They did that Aug. 8.
Let’s begin simply by reviewing the last few days.
On the night of Thursday, Aug. 7, forces of the Republic of Georgia drove across the border of South Ossetia, a secessionist region of Georgia that has functioned as an independent entity since the fall of the Soviet Union. The forces drove on to the capital, Tskhinvali, which is close to the border. Georgian forces got bogged down while trying to take the city. In spite of heavy fighting, they never fully secured the city, nor the rest of South Ossetia.
On the morning of Aug. 8, Russian forces entered South Ossetia, using armored and motorized infantry forces along with air power. South Ossetia was informally aligned with Russia, and Russia acted to prevent the region’s absorption by Georgia. Given the speed with which the Russians responded — within hours of the Georgian attack — the Russians were expecting the Georgian attack and were themselves at their jumping-off points. The counterattack was carefully planned and competently executed, and over the next 48 hours, the Russians succeeded in defeating the main Georgian force and forcing a retreat. By Sunday, Aug. 10, the Russians had consolidated their position in South Ossetia.
Georgia Conflict Map
On Monday, the Russians extended their offensive into Georgia proper, attacking on two axes. One was south from South Ossetia to the Georgian city of Gori. The other drive was from Abkhazia, another secessionist region of Georgia aligned with the Russians. This drive was designed to cut the road between the Georgian capital of Tbilisi and its ports. By this point, the Russians had bombed the military airfields at Marneuli and Vaziani and appeared to have disabled radars at the international airport in Tbilisi. These moves brought Russian forces to within 40 miles of the Georgian capital, while making outside reinforcement and resupply of Georgian forces extremely difficult should anyone wish to undertake it.
The Mystery Behind the Georgian Invasion
In this simple chronicle, there is something quite mysterious: Why did the Georgians choose to invade South Ossetia on Thursday night? There had been a great deal of shelling by the South Ossetians of Georgian villages for the previous three nights, but while possibly more intense than usual, artillery exchanges were routine. The Georgians might not have fought well, but they committed fairly substantial forces that must have taken at the very least several days to deploy and supply. Georgia’s move was deliberate.
The United States is Georgia’s closest ally. It maintained about 130 military advisers in Georgia, along with civilian advisers, contractors involved in all aspects of the Georgian government and people doing business in Georgia. It is inconceivable that the Americans were unaware of Georgia’s mobilization and intentions. It is also inconceivable that the Americans were unaware that the Russians had deployed substantial forces on the South Ossetian frontier. U.S. technical intelligence, from satellite imagery and signals intelligence to unmanned aerial vehicles, could not miss the fact that thousands of Russian troops were moving to forward positions. The Russians clearly knew the Georgians were ready to move. How could the United States not be aware of the Russians? Indeed, given the posture of Russian troops, how could intelligence analysts have missed the possibility that t he Russians had laid a trap, hoping for a Georgian invasion to justify its own counterattack?
It is very difficult to imagine that the Georgians launched their attack against U.S. wishes. The Georgians rely on the United States, and they were in no position to defy it. This leaves two possibilities. The first is a massive breakdown in intelligence, in which the United States either was unaware of the existence of Russian forces, or knew of the Russian forces but — along with the Georgians — miscalculated Russia’s intentions. The United States, along with other countries, has viewed Russia through the prism of the 1990s, when the Russian military was in shambles and the Russian government was paralyzed. The United States has not seen Russia make a decisive military move beyond its borders since the Afghan war of the 1970s-1980s. The Russians had systematically avoided such moves for years. The United States had assumed that the Russians would not risk the consequences of an invasion.
If this was the case, then it points to the central reality of this situation: The Russians had changed dramatically, along with the balance of power in the region. They welcomed the opportunity to drive home the new reality, which was that they could invade Georgia and the United States and Europe could not respond. As for risk, they did not view the invasion as risky. Militarily, there was no counter. Economically, Russia is an energy exporter doing quite well — indeed, the Europeans need Russian energy even more than the Russians need to sell it to them. Politically, as we shall see, the Americans needed the Russians more than the Russians needed the Americans. Moscow’s calculus was that this was the moment to strike. The Russians had been building up to it for months, as we have discussed, and they struck.
The Western Encirclement of Russia
To understand Russian thinking, we need to look at two events. The first is the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. From the U.S. and European point of view, the Orange Revolution represented a triumph of democracy and Western influence. From the Russian point of view, as Moscow made clear, the Orange Revolution was a CIA-funded intrusion into the internal affairs of Ukraine, designed to draw Ukraine into NATO and add to the encirclement of Russia. U.S. Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton had promised the Russians that NATO would not expand into the former Soviet Union empire.
That promise had already been broken in 1998 by NATO’s expansion to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic — and again in the 2004 expansion, which absorbed not only the rest of the former Soviet satellites in what is now Central Europe, but also the three Baltic states, which had been components of the Soviet Union.
The Russians had tolerated all that, but the discussion of including Ukraine in NATO represented a fundamental threat to Russia’s national security. It would have rendered Russia indefensible and threatened to destabilize the Russian Federation itself. When the United States went so far as to suggest that Georgia be included as well, bringing NATO deeper into the Caucasus, the Russian conclusion — publicly stated — was that the United States in particular intended to encircle and break Russia.
The second and lesser event was the decision by Europe and the United States to back Kosovo’s separation from Serbia. The Russians were friendly with Serbia, but the deeper issue for Russia was this: The principle of Europe since World War II was that, to prevent conflict, national borders would not be changed. If that principle were violated in Kosovo, other border shifts — including demands by various regions for independence from Russia — might follow. The Russians publicly and privately asked that Kosovo not be given formal independence, but instead continue its informal autonomy, which was the same thing in practical terms. Russia’s requests were ignored.
From the Ukrainian experience, the Russians became convinced that the United States was engaged in a plan of strategic encirclement and strangulation of Russia. From the Kosovo experience, they concluded that the United States and Europe were not prepared to consider Russian wishes even in fairly minor affairs. That was the breaking point. If Russian desires could not be accommodated even in a minor matter like this, then clearly Russia and the West were in conflict. For the Russians, as we said, the question was how to respond. Having declined to respond in Kosovo, the Russians decided to respond where they had all the cards: in South Ossetia.
Moscow had two motives, the lesser of which was as a tit-for-tat over Kosovo. If Kosovo could be declared independent under Western sponsorship, then South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the two breakaway regions of Georgia, could be declared independent under Russian sponsorship. Any objections from the United States and Europe would simply confirm their hypocrisy. This was important for internal Russian political reasons, but the second motive was far more important.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin once said that the fall of the Soviet Union was a geopolitical disaster. This didn’t mean that he wanted to retain the Soviet state; rather, it meant that the disintegration of the Soviet Union had created a situation in which Russian national security was threatened by Western interests. As an example, consider that during the Cold War, St. Petersburg was about 1,200 miles away from a NATO country. Today it is about 60 miles away from Estonia, a NATO member. The disintegration of the Soviet Union had left Russia surrounded by a group of countries hostile to Russian interests in various degrees and heavily influenced by the United States, Europe and, in some cases, China.
Resurrecting the Russian Sphere
Putin did not want to re-establish the Soviet Union, but he did want to re-establish the Russian sphere of influence in the former Soviet Union region. To accomplish that, he had to do two things. First, he had to re-establish the credibility of the Russian army as a fighting force, at least in the context of its region. Second, he had to establish that Western guarantees, including NATO membership, meant nothing in the face of Russian power. He did not want to confront NATO directly, but he did want to confront and defeat a power that was closely aligned with the United States, had U.S. support, aid and advisers and was widely seen as being under American protection. Georgia was the perfect choice.
By invading Georgia as Russia did (competently if not brilliantly), Putin re-established the credibility of the Russian army. But far more importantly, by doing this Putin revealed an open secret: While the United States is tied down in the Middle East, American guarantees have no value. This lesson is not for American consumption. It is something that, from the Russian point of view, the Ukrainians, the Balts and the Central Asians need to digest. Indeed, it is a lesson Putin wants to transmit to Poland and the Czech Republic as well. The United States wants to place ballistic missile defense installations in those countries, and the Russians want them to understand that allowing this to happen increases their risk, not their security.
The Russians knew the United States would denounce their attack. This actually plays into Russian hands. The more vocal senior leaders are, the greater the contrast with their inaction, and the Russians wanted to drive home the idea that American guarantees are empty talk.
The Russians also know something else that is of vital importance: For the United States, the Middle East is far more important than the Caucasus, and Iran is particularly important. The United States wants the Russians to participate in sanctions against Iran. Even more importantly, they do not want the Russians to sell weapons to Iran, particularly the highly effective S-300 air defense system. Georgia is a marginal issue to the United States; Iran is a central issue. The Russians are in a position to pose serious problems for the United States not only in Iran, but also with weapons sales to other countries, like Syria.
Therefore, the United States has a problem — it either must reorient its strategy away from the Middle East and toward the Caucasus, or it has to seriously limit its response to Georgia to avoid a Russian counter in Iran. Even if the United States had an appetite for another war in Georgia at this time, it would have to calculate the Russian response in Iran — and possibly in Afghanistan (even though Moscow’s interests there are currently aligned with those of Washington).
In other words, the Russians have backed the Americans into a corner. The Europeans, who for the most part lack expeditionary militaries and are dependent upon Russian energy exports, have even fewer options. If nothing else happens, the Russians will have demonstrated that they have resumed their role as a regional power. Russia is not a global power by any means, but a significant regional power with lots of nuclear weapons and an economy that isn’t all too shabby at the moment. It has also compelled every state on the Russian periphery to re-evaluate its position relative to Moscow. As for Georgia, the Russians appear ready to demand the resignation of President Mikhail Saakashvili. Militarily, that is their option. That is all they wanted to demonstrate, and they have demonstrated it.
The war in Georgia, therefore, is Russia’s public return to great power status. This is not something that just happened — it has been unfolding ever since Putin took power, and with growing intensity in the past five years. Part of it has to do with the increase of Russian power, but a great deal of it has to do with the fact that the Middle Eastern wars have left the United States off-balance and short on resources. As we have written, this conflict created a window of opportunity. The Russian goal is to use that window to assert a new reality throughout the region while the Americans are tied down elsewhere and dependent on the Russians. The war was far from a surprise; it has been building for months. But the geopolitical foundations of the war have been building since 1992. Russia has been an empire for centuries. The last 15 years or so were not the new reality, but simply an aberration that would be rectified. And now it is being rectified.
Tell Stratfor What You Think
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EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS – EU foreign ministers on Wednesday (13 August) agreed to send peacekeepers to help supervise the fragile Russia-Georgia ceasefire, putting off discussions on potential diplomatic sanctions against Russia until next month.
“The European Union must be prepared to commit itself, including on the ground,” the EU joint statement said, asking EU top diplomat Javier Solana to draft more detailed proposals for the ministers’ next meeting on 5 September.
EU police in Bosnia – it is unclear what the EU peacekeeping mission in Georgia would consist of (Photo: The Council of the European Union)
“Many countries have said that they are ready to join in,” French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, said, adding that any EU move would require a UN mandate. “We are encouraged by what we saw this morning, but we have to go through the United Nations.”
Ministers did not specify if the EU mission will compose EU-badge wearing soldiers, policemen or civilian monitors. It also remains unclear if it would be part of a wider force involving the UN and the OSCE, or when deployment might start.
“You call it peacekeeping troops, I don’t call it that…but controllers, monitors, European facilitators, I think the Russians would accept that,” Mr Kouchner told reporters.
The Georgian government has called for an EU presence in its rebel-held Abkhazia and South Ossetia provinces for at least three years, but the EU has always maintained that Russia and the Russian-backed separatists must agree first.
Finnish foreign minister Alexander Stubb voiced optimism that Russia will now back the new initiative. “I’m convinced at the end of the day we will find an international peacekeeping [force] in the region, with the EU at its heart,” he said, according to AFP.
Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt told Reuters he was less sure. “There are no signs of the Russians letting in anyone else…I don’t really see it happening – at the moment the Russians are firmly in control.”
The EU statement avoided any criticism of Moscow, despite widespread feeling among EU members that Russia’s massive assault on Georgia has overshadowed Georgia’s initial attack on the rebel town of Tskhinvali.
On Wednesday night, Russian soldiers continued to attack abandoned Georgian military facilities while Ossetian paramilitaries burned ethnic Georgian villages in South Ossetia and looted the Georgian town of Gori.
“I do not think we should get lost today in long discussions about responsibility or who caused the escalation of the last few days,” German foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, said.
Russia sanctions debate
A discussion on the potential suspension of talks on a new EU-Russia strategic pact or other diplomatic sanctions against Russia has been scheduled for the next EU foreign ministers meeting in September.
“We will speak very specifically about that,” France’s Mr Kouchner said.
“The European Union will want to consider how it proceeds with the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement,” UK foreign minister, David Miliband, said. “The sight of Russian tanks in Gori, Russian tanks in Senaki, a Russian blockade of Poti, the Georgian port are a chilling reminder of times that I think we had hoped had gone by.”
The Polish and Lithuanian ministers echoed the British position.
“Of course some consequences must appear of the aggression,” Lithuanian foreign minister, Petras Vaitiekunas, said. “There was clearly disproportionate force used by the Russians,” Poland’s Radoslaw Sikorski added.
In a separate event in Warsaw on Wednesday, the leaders of four former-communist EU states went further by calling for NATO to put Georgia firmly on the path to membership in order to “prevent similar acts of agression and occupation” in future.
The presidents of Estonia, Lithuania, Poland and the prime minister of Latvia also criticised the EU’s endorsement of the six-point Russia-Georgia peace plan, saying “the principal element – the respect of teritorial integrity of Georgia – is missing.”
The UK and eastern European states stand close to an increasingly hostile US line on excluding Russia from “the international system” and “international institutions” in punishment for the war.
‘This is not 1968’
“This is not 1968 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia, where Russia can threaten its neighbors, occupy a capital, overthrow a government, and get away with it,” US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, said on Wednesday, before flying to Paris and Tbilisi this week.
Meanwhile, Russia is blaming the US for training and arming Georgian forces in a geopolitcal “project.”
“It is clear that Georgia wants this dispute to become something more than a short if bloody conflict in the region,” Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said.
“For decision-makers in the NATO countries of the West, it would be worth considering whether in future you want the men and women of your armed services to be answerable to [Georgian president] Mr Saakashvili’s declarations of war.”
The escalating conflict in Georgia–with its unexpected military developments and great humanitarian losses–seems to have caught Azerbaijani officials and the public off guard. Azerbaijanis are not new to the world of Russian political games in the Caucasus. Baku itself suffered greatly from Russian intervention in 1990 and after that from the military conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh. Yet, the rapid and aggressive style of Russian intervention in Georgia in the past few days has created far greater security and economic dilemmas for Azerbaijan than even the most pessimistic analysts in the country could have predicted only a week ago.
Russian jet fighters have bombed both civilians and military airports in Georgia, forcing all airlines, including Azerbaijani Airlines (AZAL), to stop flights. Moreover, for several days in a row the Russians bombed the Black Sea port of Poti, which serves as the main terminal for the export of Azerbaijani energy products as well as other cargo. With the explosions on the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline last week, Azerbaijan was looking for Georgian railways, ports and pipelines as an important alternative for the export of Caspian energy supplies to Western markets. All of this has stopped, putting both Georgia and Azerbaijan in economic difficulties. Nonetheless, there is little fear in official circles in Baku that Russia will bomb the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline and other energy-related infrastructures to destroy the successful East-West transport and energy corridor between Azerbaijan and Georgia.
Azerbaijan is Georgia’s strategic ally. Both countries are united not only by geopolitical interests and world-class pipelines, but also by the regional security organization GUAM. GUAM, although passive for most of the decade, has lately been re-energized and even played with the idea of establishing its own peacekeeping and security forces. Under such a situation, it seems like GUAM would be a convenient venue to express support and solidarity with the Georgians.
Azerbaijan, however, finds itself in a very difficult situation. On the one hand, there is enormous public support for Georgia throughout Azerbaijan. In private conversations, almost all Azerbaijanis blame Russia for aggression and express frustration with the imperialist policies of the Kremlin in the South Caucasus. A group of intelligentsia went to the Russian embassy on August 10 to protest against the military actions in Georgia ). This was repeated by members of youth organizations (www.day.az, August 11). The main opposition party Musavat issued a statement on August 11, calling for “respect of the territorial integrity of Georgia and an immediate stop to the aggressive policy of Russia” (Musavat party press release). The party called on the Azerbaijani government to show a “principled position” on the conflict. A similar statement came from the Democratic Party of Azerbaijan.
For its pro-Georgian coverage of the events, the most popular Azerbaijani news website www.day.az was attacked by Russian special forces on August 11 and had to cease its activities temporarily (www.day.az press release, August 11). Elnur Baimov, the editor in chief of www.day.az said on August 11 that “we all saw the diplomatic loss of Russia.”
Government officials have been relatively calm about the situation, considering the fragile relations between Moscow and Baku and the desire of the latter not to ruin bilateral relations between the two countries. The spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Khazar Ibrahim told journalists on August 8, however, that “Azerbaijan favors the solution of the South Ossetia conflict based on the territorial integrity of Georgia and Georgian adherence to international law” (www.day.az).
On August 11, ANS TV reported that 50 Azerbaijanis had gathered in Georgia’s Azerbaijani-populated provinces to go to the war for the defense of their country. It is noteworthy that Russians have bombed Azerbaijani populated areas of Georgia for three days in a row, killing four and wounding dozens. The possibility is not excluded that this was done in hopes of fomenting strife between Azeris and Georgians.
The present situation in Georgia presents huge security concerns for official Baku. If Russia manages to squeeze Georgia, then it would put an end to the economic independence of Azerbaijan as well. Many analysts in Baku believe that the real purpose of the pressure on Georgia is the Kremlin’s desire to control Azerbaijan.
Thus, it is vital for Azerbaijan to provide all necessary assistance to its strategic ally. Considering the political realities between Baku and Moscow, it is unlikely that the Azerbaijani government will provide any military assistance to Georgia. Economic and humanitarian assistance, however, is definitely an option. Azerbaijan remains the only viable international outlet for Georgia, and many Georgians have already started using the territory of Azerbaijan to travel abroad.
Azerbaijani political analysts believe that the war in Georgia is a long-term loss for the Kremlin. By showing its neo-imperialist face, Russia may have lost the Caucasus forever. The political analyst Ilgar Mammadov says that “If Georgia stays strong for few more days, we will all see the defeat of Russia from the Caucasus.” Another analyst Vugar Seidov says “The departure of Russia from Abkhazia and South Ossetia is historically inevitable” (Regnum, August 10).
Istanbul: It was a surreal moment. At Istanbul’s modern international airport passengers due to board Turkish Airways flight 1382 to Tbilisi were watching their homes burn on TV news.
Three families from Georgia had been holidaying in Turkey when Gori was attacked and were desperately trying to get back into Georgia even though they knew that returning to Gori was out of the question. Other families had given up trying to get back and decided to extend their stay in Turkey for as long as their money could last.
“What choice do we have? We want to get back to Georgia but on Saturday we saw the place where we live had been attacked by Russian jets. We want to get to Tbilisi at least but it doesn’t look good,” they told Gulf News.
