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The hazards of a long, hard freeze
Unresolved wars have poisoned the newly independent republics of the
former Soviet south - and could flare anew
The Economist
August 19th 2004
STEPANAKERT, SUKHUMI, TIRASPOL AND TSKHINVALI -- If the so-called frozen
conflicts of the Black Sea region are ever thawed
out, somebody will need to be standing by with a very large bucket indeed.
To outsiders, that may seem like an odd warning: unless you have a special
interest in the obscure enclaves of small, impoverished states, where local
feuds have flared up and died down, a frozen conflict may sound like a
conflict you can forget. But such a conclusion would be wrong: the region's
unresolved wars-in Transdniestria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia and
Nagorno-Karabakh-are a big reason why the newly independent states of the
former Soviet south have failed miserably to fulfil their potential. Instead
of enjoying their freedom, they have emerged into the world as stunted,
embittered and ill-governed creatures. And if real fighting flares again-a
process which has begun in South Ossetia (see article)-things could
become far worse.
At the heart of each conflict is a claimed mini-state whose rulers
prevailed, by dint of Russian arms, in a local war. While there are huge
differences, these statelets have things in common. Ten years or more of
isolation under unrecognised governments have left them as harsh,
militarised societies, with few functioning institutions, and economies
open to crime.
South Ossetia is the pettiest, but currently the hottest of the conflict
zones. It is a landlocked province of Georgia which would have no viability
as a legitimate country. It survives as a conduit for smuggling between
Georgia and Russia, mainly in cheap spirits, arms and grain, under the
diplomatic protection of the Russian government and the military
protection of Russian troops.
Of the four statelets, Karabakh comes closest to being a normal society-at
least for the ethnic Armenians who remain there. Nearly a million people
from both sides of the war were put to flight by the fighting which
concluded in 1994 with a big victory by soldiers from Karabakh and
Armenia itself.
Especially since 2001, when a local bully and racketeer, Samvel Babayan, was
put in jail, Karabakh-which calls itself independent but is in practice
virtually joined to Armenia-has had something recognisable as local politics
and a mixed economy. Investment from the Armenian diaspora has boosted the
economy. One new arrival from America, Vartkes Anivian, started a
dairy-products company after the war, and now employs 250 people. Municipal
elections have just been held in the enclave-to the fury of Azerbaijan, to
which Karabakh legally belongs-and there was genuine competition between the
candidates. The atmosphere in Stepanakert, Karabakh's capital, is
orderly in a post-Soviet way, not chaotic.
So Karabakh might have a decent future if the enclave's future could somehow
be settled. Four years ago, a compromise seemed within reach: most of
Karabakh would have been joined to Armenia, while the Azeris recovered the
surrounding areas and gained a corridor between their republic's two parts.
More recently, the mood on both sides has hardened, and a big body of
Azerbaijani opinion longs to recover the land by force.
Small wars, or medium?
The fighting over Karabakh was and could again become a fair-sized war;
South Ossetia by comparison is a small, though strategically significant,
squabble. Abkhazia, in Georgia, and Transdniestria, in Moldova, fall
somewhere in between.
Both Abkhazia and Transdniestria can make claims to special political
status, if not to independence, on historical grounds. Both regimes control
territories and economies capable of standing alone. But both are willing
hostages of Russia, which helped them fight their wars of secession when the
Soviet Union collapsed, and has given them military and diplomatic support
ever since. It has issued passports so freely that probably a majority of
the population in each enclave could claim Russian nationality. But Russia's
"protection" has also become the main obstacle to a constitutional
settlement. Russia prefers to keep the enclaves as its own pawns. At its
most mischievous, the Kremlin's strategy may view Transdniestria as a second
version of Kaliningrad, the Russian enclave near Poland-in other words, a
trouble-making outpost on the borders of NATO. And some of the worst
features of Russia's own governance have been transferred to its protégés in
Georgia and Moldova: organised crime, corruption, and authoritarian
leadership.
For the people of these non-countries, life goes on, after a fashion. "It is
a normal town, but blown up a bit," says a United Nations official trying to
put the best face on Sukhumi, "capital" of Abkhazia. And there is indeed the
ghost of something lovely in the landscape, where the beaches curve
north to the Russian border.
"It is a normal town, but blown up a bit"
But to call Sukhumi "normal", even by the elastic standards of the Caucasus,
is stretching things. For one thing, half of its population is missing.
Ethnic Georgians fled the city or were driven out in the civil war of
1992-93. And to say that Sukhumi is blown up "a bit" risks flattering a town
where only about one-third of the buildings are in good shape, one-third are
badly run down, and one-third are derelict. The roads are crumbling, the
pavements are grassing over, and the airport is dead save for a few UN
helicopters. Tourists from Russia are the mainstay, along with agriculture,
of the visible economy. The invisible economy belongs to burly men who drive
smart cars with handguns on their hips. They, or their like, run a
blacker-than-black trade centred on the port. Smuggling probably involves
drugs, arms, fuel and stolen cars. "Whatever you have", says the UN
official, "it disappears into a black hole when it hits the docks."
Tiraspol, the capital of Transdniestria, presents a more orderly façade.
Streets are eerily quiet and clean, and almost bare of cars, even on a
weekday afternoon. Nobody in civilian clothes carries a gun openly. A statue
of Lenin looks down from a pink marble column in front of the presidential
palace. The Bolshevik leader looks uncannily like Transdniestria's own
bearded "president", Igor Smirnov, a former metalworker from Kamchatka in
the Russian Pacific who moved to Tiraspol in 1987 as a factory manager and
manoeuvred his way into power. Mr Smirnov's son heads the "state customs
committee", the second-biggest job in a land which lives largely on trade,
licit and illicit, between Ukraine and the rest of Moldova.
In the past month both Moldova and Ukraine have announced much tighter
customs controls on goods moving out of Transdniestria. Moldova was
retaliating against a decision by the authorities in Transdniestra to shut
schools there still teaching Romanian in the Latin alphabet.
But despite such occasional flurries of firm government, experience suggests
that Transdniestria's borders will remain porous enough for it to go on
supplying Moldovan markets with untaxed consumer goods, and to go on
shipping its more sinister cargoes, including arms, out through Ukraine or
by air. According to a recent report from the International Crisis Group, a
Brussels think-tank, Transdniestria has five or six arms factories making
small arms, mortars and missile-launchers, for sale to the world's
trouble-spots. A recent study from the German Marshall Fund of the United
States has called the conflict zones "unresolved fragments of Soviet Empire
[which] now serve as shipping points for weapons, narcotics, and victims of
human trafficking, as breeding grounds for transnational organised crime,
and last but not least, for terrorism". That may be a bit too hard on
Karabakh, but a fairly accurate account of Abkhazia, South Ossetia and
Transdniestria. It may be time for the world to slop them out.
Unresolved wars have poisoned the newly independent republics of the
former Soviet south - and could flare anew
The Economist
August 19th 2004
STEPANAKERT, SUKHUMI, TIRASPOL AND TSKHINVALI -- If the so-called frozen
conflicts of the Black Sea region are ever thawed
out, somebody will need to be standing by with a very large bucket indeed.
To outsiders, that may seem like an odd warning: unless you have a special
interest in the obscure enclaves of small, impoverished states, where local
feuds have flared up and died down, a frozen conflict may sound like a
conflict you can forget. But such a conclusion would be wrong: the region's
unresolved wars-in Transdniestria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia and
Nagorno-Karabakh-are a big reason why the newly independent states of the
former Soviet south have failed miserably to fulfil their potential. Instead
of enjoying their freedom, they have emerged into the world as stunted,
embittered and ill-governed creatures. And if real fighting flares again-a
process which has begun in South Ossetia (see article)-things could
become far worse.
At the heart of each conflict is a claimed mini-state whose rulers
prevailed, by dint of Russian arms, in a local war. While there are huge
differences, these statelets have things in common. Ten years or more of
isolation under unrecognised governments have left them as harsh,
militarised societies, with few functioning institutions, and economies
open to crime.
South Ossetia is the pettiest, but currently the hottest of the conflict
zones. It is a landlocked province of Georgia which would have no viability
as a legitimate country. It survives as a conduit for smuggling between
Georgia and Russia, mainly in cheap spirits, arms and grain, under the
diplomatic protection of the Russian government and the military
protection of Russian troops.
Of the four statelets, Karabakh comes closest to being a normal society-at
least for the ethnic Armenians who remain there. Nearly a million people
from both sides of the war were put to flight by the fighting which
concluded in 1994 with a big victory by soldiers from Karabakh and
Armenia itself.
Especially since 2001, when a local bully and racketeer, Samvel Babayan, was
put in jail, Karabakh-which calls itself independent but is in practice
virtually joined to Armenia-has had something recognisable as local politics
and a mixed economy. Investment from the Armenian diaspora has boosted the
economy. One new arrival from America, Vartkes Anivian, started a
dairy-products company after the war, and now employs 250 people. Municipal
elections have just been held in the enclave-to the fury of Azerbaijan, to
which Karabakh legally belongs-and there was genuine competition between the
candidates. The atmosphere in Stepanakert, Karabakh's capital, is
orderly in a post-Soviet way, not chaotic.
So Karabakh might have a decent future if the enclave's future could somehow
be settled. Four years ago, a compromise seemed within reach: most of
Karabakh would have been joined to Armenia, while the Azeris recovered the
surrounding areas and gained a corridor between their republic's two parts.
More recently, the mood on both sides has hardened, and a big body of
Azerbaijani opinion longs to recover the land by force.
Small wars, or medium?
The fighting over Karabakh was and could again become a fair-sized war;
South Ossetia by comparison is a small, though strategically significant,
squabble. Abkhazia, in Georgia, and Transdniestria, in Moldova, fall
somewhere in between.
Both Abkhazia and Transdniestria can make claims to special political
status, if not to independence, on historical grounds. Both regimes control
territories and economies capable of standing alone. But both are willing
hostages of Russia, which helped them fight their wars of secession when the
Soviet Union collapsed, and has given them military and diplomatic support
ever since. It has issued passports so freely that probably a majority of
the population in each enclave could claim Russian nationality. But Russia's
"protection" has also become the main obstacle to a constitutional
settlement. Russia prefers to keep the enclaves as its own pawns. At its
most mischievous, the Kremlin's strategy may view Transdniestria as a second
version of Kaliningrad, the Russian enclave near Poland-in other words, a
trouble-making outpost on the borders of NATO. And some of the worst
features of Russia's own governance have been transferred to its protégés in
Georgia and Moldova: organised crime, corruption, and authoritarian
leadership.
For the people of these non-countries, life goes on, after a fashion. "It is
a normal town, but blown up a bit," says a United Nations official trying to
put the best face on Sukhumi, "capital" of Abkhazia. And there is indeed the
ghost of something lovely in the landscape, where the beaches curve
north to the Russian border.
"It is a normal town, but blown up a bit"
But to call Sukhumi "normal", even by the elastic standards of the Caucasus,
is stretching things. For one thing, half of its population is missing.
Ethnic Georgians fled the city or were driven out in the civil war of
1992-93. And to say that Sukhumi is blown up "a bit" risks flattering a town
where only about one-third of the buildings are in good shape, one-third are
badly run down, and one-third are derelict. The roads are crumbling, the
pavements are grassing over, and the airport is dead save for a few UN
helicopters. Tourists from Russia are the mainstay, along with agriculture,
of the visible economy. The invisible economy belongs to burly men who drive
smart cars with handguns on their hips. They, or their like, run a
blacker-than-black trade centred on the port. Smuggling probably involves
drugs, arms, fuel and stolen cars. "Whatever you have", says the UN
official, "it disappears into a black hole when it hits the docks."
Tiraspol, the capital of Transdniestria, presents a more orderly façade.
Streets are eerily quiet and clean, and almost bare of cars, even on a
weekday afternoon. Nobody in civilian clothes carries a gun openly. A statue
of Lenin looks down from a pink marble column in front of the presidential
palace. The Bolshevik leader looks uncannily like Transdniestria's own
bearded "president", Igor Smirnov, a former metalworker from Kamchatka in
the Russian Pacific who moved to Tiraspol in 1987 as a factory manager and
manoeuvred his way into power. Mr Smirnov's son heads the "state customs
committee", the second-biggest job in a land which lives largely on trade,
licit and illicit, between Ukraine and the rest of Moldova.
In the past month both Moldova and Ukraine have announced much tighter
customs controls on goods moving out of Transdniestria. Moldova was
retaliating against a decision by the authorities in Transdniestra to shut
schools there still teaching Romanian in the Latin alphabet.
But despite such occasional flurries of firm government, experience suggests
that Transdniestria's borders will remain porous enough for it to go on
supplying Moldovan markets with untaxed consumer goods, and to go on
shipping its more sinister cargoes, including arms, out through Ukraine or
by air. According to a recent report from the International Crisis Group, a
Brussels think-tank, Transdniestria has five or six arms factories making
small arms, mortars and missile-launchers, for sale to the world's
trouble-spots. A recent study from the German Marshall Fund of the United
States has called the conflict zones "unresolved fragments of Soviet Empire
[which] now serve as shipping points for weapons, narcotics, and victims of
human trafficking, as breeding grounds for transnational organised crime,
and last but not least, for terrorism". That may be a bit too hard on
Karabakh, but a fairly accurate account of Abkhazia, South Ossetia and
Transdniestria. It may be time for the world to slop them out.