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Category: Europe

  • RESPONDING TO GEORGIA CRISIS, TURKEY SEEKS NEW CAUCASUS SECURITY INITIATIVE

    RESPONDING TO GEORGIA CRISIS, TURKEY SEEKS NEW CAUCASUS SECURITY INITIATIVE

    By Alman Mir – Ismail

    Friday, August 22, 2008

     

    The Georgian-Russian military conflict has created new security dilemmas in the South Caucasus. Not only has the fragile stability established since the chaos of 1990s been ruined, but the East-West energy and transportation corridor has also been made vulnerable. Turkey, as one of the largest donors of the South Caucasus region and an active player in regional politics, surprisingly stayed out of the conflict, neither defending its regional ally Georgia nor making official statements at the governmental level. For many in the region, this was perceived as a sign of Turkish weakness, lack of interest in the South Caucasus region from the ruling AKP party, and growing dependence on Russia in terms of trade and regional alliance. Others simply called it a “sell-out of Caucasus.” Indeed, Turkey benefits from the regional energy pipelines and such a reaction can only raise surprise among regional countries.

    Partly because of the desire to refute these rumors and partly to achieve Turkey’s long-awaited goals in the Caucasus, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyib Erdogan came up with the “Platform for security and cooperation in the South Caucasus” initiative. The initiative, which Erdogan plans to discuss with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, is intended to create a regional security framework. It intends to accomplish this by encouraging greater integration between Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Armenia and empowering Russia and Turkey to play the leads roles of regional security guarantors. Erdogan’s vision is to solve the frozen conflicts in the region on a sustainable and long-lasting basis and to satisfy the national interests of Russia, which regards the West’s influence in the region as a “zero-sum game.” Under this initiative, NATO would be limited to an outside role in providing security for the region — a clear effort to minimize Russian distrust and anger.

    With this idea, Erdogan visited Baku on August 21 to talk with President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev and unveil this plan. Azerbaijani public and politicians generally have greeted this proposal with a great degree of skepticism. Political analyst Rasim Musabeyov was quoted by ANS TV on August 21 saying, “Turkey wants to push Azerbaijan towards compromise and also make sure Armenia plays more pragmatic role. This is the vision behind the Caucasus Platform idea of Erdogan.”

    Opposition newspaper Yeni Musavat believes that under the pretext of the Common Caucasus Platform, Erdogan wants to open borders with Armenia. Indeed, since its arrival in power in 2002, the AKP party has been favoring the idea of restoring economic and trade ties with Yerevan in order to improve the economic situation in Turkey’s Eastern regions, such as Kars and Erzurum, which suffer greatly from the closed borders with Armenia. Azerbaijani officials have protested against these ideas, saying that opening borders prior to Armenia’s liberation of the occupied Azerbaijani territories would not only damage Turkish-Azerbaijani solidarity and alliance in the region, but also symbolically forgive the ethnic cleansing by Armenia. Previous Turkish governments have preconditioned the opening of the borders with Armenia to the end of the Karabakh conflict. For Azerbaijan, closed borders between Turkey and Armenia are another tool of pressure on the officials in Yerevan.

    Nevertheless, after the presidential elections in Armenia in early 2008, Turkish-Armenian relations seem to be entering a new stage. Newly elected President of Armenia Serj Sarkisian has invited his Turkish counterpart Abdulla Gul to Yerevan to watch a soccer game between the two countries. This sport event began a series of diplomatic events, culminating with the revelation by senior Turkish officials that high ranking diplomats of the two nations are engaged in negotiations in Geneva. And on August 22, Yeni Musavat even reported that Turkey opened flights into Armenia.

    Officials in Baku seem less nervous this time about the possibility of the normalization of Turkish-Armenian relations than back in 2003-2004. It appears that even in the circles of the Azerbaijani political leadership, there is an understanding that the economic pressures on Armenia do not work and simply reinforce Armenian dependence on Russia. Perhaps the normalization of Turkish-Armenian relations will entice a breakthrough on the negotiation process in Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. More trust between these two nations might prompt Armenia to extend certain concessions, should Yerevan feel itself more secure.

    However, some analysts believe that this Erdogan’s initiative is doomed to failure. Nationalism, realpolitik, and irrational behavior still dominate politics in the Caucasus, and it would be unrealistic to expect Armenia to be less nationalistic or Russia to behave more pragmatically. “If the West manages to push Russia out of Caucasus, then the idea of the common Caucasus home might be possible. If Russia stays in the region, then not,” says Ilgar Mammadov, political scientist (ANS TV, August 21). His colleague Zardusht Alizadeh echoes pessimism: “The initiative of Erdigan will be unsuccessful” (Day.az, August 20).

    Similar proposals for the common Caucasus House, like the common EU, were made in the early 1990s but eventually failed due to a lack of desire from the competing powers both inside and outside of the region.

  • Post-Soviet security bloc ends joint drills in Armenia

    Post-Soviet security bloc ends joint drills in Armenia

     
    16:31 | 22/ 08/ 2008
     

    YEREVAN, July 22 (RIA Novosti) – The joint Rubezh-2008 command-and-staff exercises of the Collective Security Treaty Organization finished Friday in Armenia.

    About 4,000 troops from Armenia, Russia and Tajikistan took part in the four-stage military exercise, which started July 22, on the territory of Armenia and Russia.

    Other CSTO members were represented by military staff from their defense ministries.

    The Collective Security Treaty Organization is a security grouping comprising Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan.

  • Activists in Ukraine’s Crimea ask Russia to reclaim territory

    Activists in Ukraine’s Crimea ask Russia to reclaim territory

     
    16:24 | 22/ 08/ 2008
     

    SIMFEROPOL, August 22 (RIA Novosti) – About 50 protesters gathered in the Crimean capital of Simferopol on Friday, urging Russia to pull out of a friendship agreement with Ukraine and to make a territorial claim on the peninsula.

    The organizer of the rally, Valery Podyachy, told the gathering: “We ask Russia to tear up the agreement [on Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership with Ukraine] and to file territorial claims to Ukraine.”

    The Crimea, which has a predominantly Russian-speaking population, has been the focus of frequent disputes between the Russian and Ukrainian leaderships, over the Russian Black Sea Fleet’s lease of the soviet-era Sevastopol naval base.

    During the recent conflict between Russia and Georgia that followed Tbilisi’s August 8 offensive in breakaway South Ossetia, Ukraine threatened to bar entry to Russian Black Sea fleet vessels that had been deployed near Georgia’s coast.

    Ukraine’s Defense Minister Yuriy Yekhanurov signed instructions on Thursday to implement an earlier presidential decree complicating the rules of deployment for the Black Sea Fleet.

    Podyachy, who heads the Sevastopol-Crimea-Russia Popular Front, said: “While Russia sent aid to flood-hit Ukrainian regions, Ukraine failed to help Russia to force Georgia to peace, and took an openly hostile stance.”

    Ukraine supplied weaponry to President Mikheil Saakashvili’s regime that was used to kill Russian peacekeepers, he said.

    “Ukraine has proved by its policies that it is not a friend but an enemy to Russia,” Podyachy said.

    Former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who grew up in Ukraine, made the Crimean Peninsula – a territory of 26,100 sq km – part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1954. The peninsula was until then a part of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic.

    Since the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union, the Crimea has unsuccessfully sought independence from Ukraine. A 1994 referendum in the Crimea supported demands for a broader autonomy and closer links with Russia.

    Relations between Russia and Ukraine have deteriorated recently following Kiev’s NATO membership bid and its demand that Russia’s Black Sea Fleet withdraw from its naval base in Sevastopol.

  • Window on Eurasia: Ukrainians Discuss How Best to Counter Russian Threat to Crimea

    Window on Eurasia: Ukrainians Discuss How Best to Counter Russian Threat to Crimea

    Thursday, August 21, 2008

    Paul Goble

    Vienna, August 21 – Having watched Moscow’s moves in Georgia and listened to various Russians suggest that the Crimea, where Russia’s Black Sea Fleet is based, is or should be Moscow’s next target, Ukrainian politicians, diplomats, and foreign policy analysts are discussing the nature and dimensions of the Russian threat and what Kyiv should do to parry it.
    In addition to Russian actions and threats, this issue has heated up in recent days because of calls by senior Ukrainian officials for Russia to begin preparing to move its fleet out of Sevastopol by or possibly even before 2017, statements that most Russian politicians have refused to take seriously and most military analysts say would be very difficult.
    Today, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Volodomyr Ogryzko said that Moscow must begin thinking about moving both men and materiel from Sevastopol now because regardless of what some may think, Kyiv will honor its agreement with Moscow but “in any case after 2017, the Russian fleet will not be on our territory (news.mail.ru/politics/1960873).
    Ogryzko said that the Ukrainian government cannot understand why Russia has simply “refused” to discuss the situation or any plans to withdraw its forces and close the base. As a sovereign country, the minister said, Ukraine will meet its treaty obligations, but he underscored that Ukraine has “the right to make a choice” about any bases on its territory.
    And if Ukraine makes the decision not to have such bases, the foreign minister continued, “no one, including Russia can influence our decision. … If in Moscow, they do not yet understand this, that governments live according to such rules throughout the world, then this is Russia’s problem” and not Ukraine’s.
    But recent Russian behavior in Georgia and Moscow’s reactions to Kyiv’s positions on this and other issues has convinced many Ukrainians that Russia’s problem in this regard is becoming a problem for their country because of the danger that Moscow will try to destabilize its neighbor to ensure its continued control of Sevastopol or even seek to seize Crimea.
    Those concerns have been exacerbated by three new developments: suggestions by some officials that Timoshenko should be charged with treason, a statement by a Crimean Tatar leader and Ukrainian parliamentarian that Moscow has many levers to use in Crimea, and an assessment by Ukrainian military analysts of what Moscow is already doing.
    The first of these, charges that opposition leader Yuliya Timoshenko should be investigated for possible treason on behalf of Russia, has already been extensively discussed, with some analysts arguing that this scandal by itself represents an effort by Moscow to destabilize and discredit the Ukrainian government.
    But the second and third deserve more attention. Today, Mustafa Dzhemilyev, who is both the leader of the Crimean Tatars and a deputy in the Ukrainian parliament, said that he is convinced that the large number of Crimeans who have dual citizenship with Russia by itself points to a possible South Ossetian scenario for that peninsula (www.vlasti.net/news/20236).
    Moreover, he continued, unlike in South Ossetia, “there is no need [for Russia] to introduce forces [because] there is a sufficiently large and not badly armed contingent of the Russian Black Sea Fleet already there.” Consequently, Moscow could move even more quickly than in did in Georgia, he said.
    “In order to preserve the territorial integrity of Ukraine,” the Crimean Tatar leader said, Kyiv should “close Russian consulates which are violating the law by handing out to citizens of Ukraine Russian passports.” Indeed, Ukrainian officials should force those “who have illegal dual citizenship to annul one of the passports.”
    Moreover, Ukrainian officials must focus on the activities of pro-Russian organizations whose statements and activities are exacerbating interethnic tensions and creating the conditions for a Russian move. And Dzhemilyev said, Kyiv should insist that the Black Sea Fleet leave Sevastopol long before the 2017 date established by agreement.
    The third event was the release, also today, of a report by the Kyiv Center for Research on the Army, Conversion and Disarmament, which argued that “Russia has created in the Crimea all the preconditions” for a military operation to keep control of Sevastopol, detach Crimea from Ukraine, and weaken the rest of the country as well (www.nr2.ru/kiev/192334.html).
    “For the achievement of these goals, Russia doesn’t need a major military conflict with Ukraine,” the center’s analysts said. Instead, “it is sufficient to destabilize the situation in a single Crimean region” through the use of precisely targeted operations using “the forces of the Russian special services and particular units of the Black Sea Fleet.”
    Moreover, they continued, Moscow will build on “to the maximum extent possible” the pro-Russian segments of the population and the pro-Russian social and political organizations that Moscow and its friends in Ukraine have been promoting ever since Ukraine gained its independence in 1991.
    The center’s analysts suggested that the first stage of such a conflict might consist of “actions directed at the sharpening of relations between personnel of the Black Sea Fleet and representatives of Ukrainian authority in nearby areas,” possibly by means of “a provocation” taking the form of a supposed Ukrainian attack on the fleet.
    After that happens, according to the center’s scenario, “the pro-Russian population will rise to the defense of the Russian personnel” and then there “will begin clashes with the law enforcement bodies of Ukraine.” That in turn will lead both countries to increase their military presence in Crimea, at which time Moscow will raise the issue of Ukraine’s right to Crimea.
    Kyiv would then appeal to the West, the center said, but its analysts argued that Ukraine would not be any more successful in attracting anything more from Western countries than verbal support. And consequently, Russia could then “swallow” Crimea at its leisure, confident that Ukraine by itself would not be able to block its moves.
    The center’s director added that he does not believe that Moscow is likely to follow such a scenario, but he added that “Russia has already created all the necessary conditions for its realization,” including official statements questioning Ukraine’s right to control Crimea, ramping up anti-Ukrainian feelings among Russians, and “also dominating Ukraine’s information space.”
    Today also, Ukrainian media carried the assessments of five political analysts. Sergei Dzherdzh, the president of the Ukraine-NATO League, agreed that Russia could move in Crimea, but he suggested that “more sober” heads in Moscow were likely to act with restraint given Moscow’s experiences in Chechnya and Georgia (www.vlasti.net/news/20336).
    Vadim Grechaninov, president of the Atlantic Council in Kyiv, said that Russia will launch “not a real war but an information one” and will seek to dominate Ukraine by creating “a fifth column,” a powerful pro-Russian lobby within the government, the leaders of the country’s political parties, and in the regions.
    Political scientist Viktor Nebozheno said that Ukraine was entering a dangerous period because both Russian and Georgian “hawks” might seek to stage provocations in Sevastopol in order to achieve their goals elsewhere, a view echoed by the Ukrainian Diplomatic Academy’s Aleksandr Paliy, who said Russia has constantly been staging provocations in Ukraine.
    But Vadim Karasev, a political scientist, said that Ukraine is in fact in a good position to counter any Russian moves of this kind. If it blocks the formation of “unrecognized formations” and “separatist groups” prepared to help Russia and if it adopts “a new regional policy” to ensure that Crimea develops, then Moscow will have a much harder time in pursuing its goals.
    But “the main thing,” Karasev said, is for Ukraine “not to do anything stupid” that Moscow would then exploit.

  • Adrian Hamilton: It’s economics, not politics, that will influence Russia

    Adrian Hamilton: It’s economics, not politics, that will influence Russia

    Among all the dramatic and doom-laden suggestions this week of how to deal with Russia after Georgia, one of the most naive must be the suggestion that we can somehow separate the politics from the commerce, playing hardball with the one and softball with the other. Tell that to BP. Tell that indeed to the Ukrainians, the East Europeans or the Baltic states in their price negotiations for Russian gas.You can’t separate politics from business, not in Africa, Asia and most of all not in the countries of the former Soviet Union. In the fall of the Berlin Wall it might have been possible to see Europe’s future simply in terms of the spread of democracy and the autonomy of new states. The growing shortages of of raw materials, and particularly oil and gas, have changed all that.

    In the first place, it has altered the bargaining power of Russia itself, as a major oil exporter in its own right. When the Russian state was in disarray and its assets in the hands of the oligarchs, the West as customers could play the game by their rules.Once energy went into short supply and the Russian state acted to retrieve its control of raw materials, the bargaining power moved across the table.

    If that were all, that would be hard enough. But the part of the story that is only now developing – and the part that being so harshly illuminated by the Georgian crisis – is Russia’s role as the distribution centre for the oil and gas discovered in the former Soviet republics along its southern border. Georgia is already the pipeline route for oil and gas from Azerbaijan. It was specifically developed by the West as a route that would bypass Russia on the route to Turkey and hence Europe.

    The difficulty for Europe is that Georgia remains, for the moment, the only alternative route to Russia for supplies from Kazakhastan and Kyrgistan as well as additional supplies from Azerbaijan. The obvious non-Russian route would be by Iran, which has been nullified by the present policy of confrontation with Tehran. For the producers of the Caspian the choice is either Turkey via Georgia or Europe by way of Russia.

    Not for nothing have Russian troops been firmly and visibly in possession of Gori, the Georgian town at which the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan pipeline hinges from Azerbaijan to the east to Turkey in the south. Nor is it for nothing that the Russians are so determined to send out a clear message as to who is in charge in their nether regions and how little the West can be relied on.

    Presidents Bush and Sarkozy may see the Russian message of Georgia as directed against the West. In reality it has far more resonance, and is likely to have the greatest effect, on the other states of the Caucasus and Caspian. The Ukraine is irrelevant to what matters most. So are Poland and the Baltic states. Look to where the oil and gas are and there you will find the real interests of Moscow.

    So should we be confronting Moscow in a battle for “spheres of influence”, as Nato leaders argued this week? No, absolutely not. The very worst thing to do is what we did in Georgia and load a specific local situation with all the panoply of East-Westconfrontation. It is not in the interests of the countries concerned to play this. Many of them, such as Kazakhstan and Georgia (if the enclaves are included), have sizable Russian minorities and long-established relations with Moscow. They cannot afford to choose sides against their bigger neighbour, however much they may resent it.

    But most also have commercial as well as political interests in encouraging alternative sources of investment and influence. If we were to regard Russia less as a rampant bear to be contained and more as a commercial competitor to be competed with, we would get a lot further. We have the money and the skills to offer and we present a countervailing influence, cultural as much as political, to Russia.

    The trouble is that, even in straight commercial terms, we have let so much slip through our fingers. We have been terribly slow to commit ourselves to new pipeline plans, including the proposed Nabucco gas line. EU engagement through trade and aid is slight and diffuse, and attention is now being diverted by President Sarkozy’s mad schemes for a Mediterranean Union. Europe still hasn’t got a proper common energy policy. EU policy towards Iran is both futile and self-defeating.

    This is far more a European responsibility than an American one, if only we’d pick it up and handle it effectively. Condi Rice, David Miliband and Nicolas Sarkozy got it precisely wrong this week. What we need in dealing with Russia and the former Soviet Republics is to play softball on the politics and hardball on the commerce.

    a.hamilton@independent.co.uk

    Source : The Independent

  • Romanian President Traian Basescu arrives in Istanbul

    Romanian President Traian Basescu arrives in Istanbul

    Romanian President Traian Basescu arrived on Thursday (Aug 21) in Istanbul on a working visit.
    The Romanian head of state is currently on a two-day tour to include visits to Ukraine, the Republic of Moldova, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey.

    The main component of the ongoing working tour of the Romanian President to Ukraine, the Republic of Moldova, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey is identifying joint Black Sea security solutions, as well as analyzing with the host counterparts the latest developments in Georgia and the repercussions they might have on other areas witnessing ‘frozen conflict,’ such as Nagorno Karabakh and Transdniester.
    Traian Basescu on Thursday morning paid a visit to the Georgian capital Tbilisi, where he held talks with his counterpart Mikhail Saakashvili.