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A NEW PRECEDENT SET
Russia Profile
August 14, 2008
Russia
The South Ossetian War Turns a New Page in post-Soviet History
In the wake of the compelling events in the South Ossetian War,
advocates of both sides of the conflict have been eager to label each
other with accusations largely based on well-worn truisms. Such a
heated display of political convictions requires a revised observation
of the Caucasus question, by taking into account the circumstances in
the Caucasus' recent historical past. What emerges is the understanding
that the August conflict has created a new standard in post-Soviet
hostilities, where old saws have lost their value.
The tragic events of August 2008 in South Ossetia have once again
agitated the already restless regions of the Caucasus. But this
time, it's not just another disturbance of the status quo--even up
until this August, the ethno-political situation in the Southern
Caucasus was far from peaceful and stable. Beginning in 2004,
attempts to resume military action have been made in South Ossetia,
while for four years, skirmishes and artillery fire have become a
part of everyday reality. Having brought military equipment into
the upper part of the Kodori Gorge in 2006, Georgia thus in many
respects provoked the current escalation of the conflict in this
"hot spot." Yet in the history of Eurasian conflicts, August of 2008
has become a turning point.
>From this time onwards, the old rules of the game, formulated following
the disintegration of the Soviet Union, no longer apply in the Caucasus
(and who knows, possibly in the Black Sea region or even in the CIS
as a whole). To use computer programming jargon, we can say that in
August, 2008, a total "reboot" of the conflicts on Eurasian territory
took place. An extremely significant precedent has been created,
where legal and political agreements that have ensured stability and
the status quo are no longer valid. Georgia ceases to adhere to them,
after fully refusing to implement the Dagomys and Moscow treaties on
Abkhazia and Southern Russia respectively. But neither does Russia,
whose leadership has broadened its understanding of the peacekeeping
operation.
In 2008, the conflicts in the CIS have reached a qualitatively
new level. If, at the beginning of the 1990s, they were spurred
directly by the disintegration of the Soviet Union, then today they
are no longer defined by the inertia of the past, but by the current
dynamics of formation and development of new nation-states. If the
conflicts of the beginning of the 1990s were delayed payments on
the "Evil Empire's" accounts, then the conflicts of today are an
introduction of new payment requirements. There are no longer any
"frozen conflicts"--they are an anachronism of the 1990s, that
has departed along with Boris Yeltsin's "generation." Contemporary
conflicts are planned and resolved by the post-Soviet generation of
politicians. But this generation makes up new rules for the game as
it goes along. What arrangement we will have in the end we shall see
in the near future.
Today, it has become fashionable in the Russian mass media to
see a "Western hand" in everything. Let's leave this task to the
propagandists. Meanwhile, it is evident that this concept largely
relieves the Georgian establishment (what has it got to do with
anything while it is the West which is at fault? Mikheil Saakashvili
is just a puppet), as well as the Georgian society (as always,
people aren't responsible for the actions of the politicians)
of responsibility. Such an approach distances us from making a key
diagnosis of the epidemic - small nationalism, no less (if not more)
dangerous than large nationalism. Georgian society as a whole bears
direct responsibility for the tragedy in Tskhinvali. It was the society
(in the face of its outstanding intellectuals and public activists)
that shaped the demand for a person like Saakashvili. I don't mean the
specific politician and individual Mikheil Nikolaevich Saakashvili,
born in 1967. I speak of the type of "statist" who is willing to
make any kind of sacrifice for a strong Georgia (understood as
an antipode to Eduard Shevarnadze's Georgia and as "territorially
wholesome"). While debate in Russia still continues to touch upon the
"cost" of having incorporated Chechnya, in Georgia state leaders are
being criticized for anything that goes (corruption, authoritarianism,
lack of professionalism) but not for the wars in South Ossetia and
Abkhazia.
Let us recall that at the beginning of the 1990s, the Georgian people
(with no help from the Americans and the British) willingly gave
their votes to a person who spoke of Ossetians as "trash that needs
to be swept through the Roki Tunnel). This person, Zvias Gamsahurdia,
has been politically rehabilitated by the current president, who
in August of 2008 went from words to action. Back in 1991, Georgian
intellectuals in their masses did not support the sentiment of their
great fellow countryman Merab Mamardashvili, who said that "if my
people elect Gamsahurdia, I will be against my people." Sadly, since
then, nobody in Georgia chose Mamardashvili's path.
The role of the West is too oblique in this situation. Firstly,
the United States to a greater degree and the EU to a lesser degree
could not overcome their own propagandist labels. Among them is the
perception of the break-up of the Soviet Union solely as a victory
of democracy, the identification of anti-communist nationalism
(even in its most extreme states) with a movement for freedom,
and an acceptance of the fact that small nationalism, compared with
Russian imperialism and a possible rebirth of the Soviet Union, is
the lesser of two evils. This is the second lesson of the Ossetian
tragedy. For the sake of countering "the imperial onslaught," both
Ossetians and Abkhazians have been sacrificed (nobody wants to hear
them, they don't fit within the framework of a struggle between a
"small democratic republic" and a "large aggressor"). Meanwhile,
far from everything that worked against the Soviet Union had to do
with freedom and democracy.
The August tragedy has been a failed attempt to repeat the Serbian
Krajina precedent. This time there is an experience of a successful
military-political revenge in the Balkans. While in Russia (and in
the CIS in general), where only the laziest did not write about the
"Kosovo casus," there was little talk of copying Croatia's experience
of destroying the infrastructure of the unrecognized state of the
Republic of Serbian Krajina. Let us remember that at the beginning of
the 1990s, Croatia had initially lost a large part of its territory,
but then in 1995, with support from the United States and Germany,
restored the entirety of its state within the borders of the socialist
republic of Tito's Yugoslavia. Meanwhile, this scenario was widely
discussed in Tbilisi and in Baku. And it wasn't just discussed as a
theoretical problem. Beginning in 2004, military action of a different
level of intensity was carried out in South Ossetia.
"The Krajina example can become a more influential model than
Kosovo...There may come a time when the political elites of Baku
and Tbilisi will consider a successful and speedy war to reintegrate
Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Nagorny-Karabakh will get the green light
on behalf of the United States, which made the Croatian offensive
against Krajina easier." This was written in an American magazine in
May of this year by Charles King, an authoritative American scientist
from Georgetown University. However, King also no less justly noted
that the "Krajina precedent" can be successful only in the form of
blitzkrieg warfare. "Georgian and Azerbaijani forces are likely to
win within the first weeks of such a war, but they are most likely
to lose when the weeks that follow arrive." Russia interrupted
Georgia's "Krajina flight" in just days, not weeks. Tbilisi begun
destroying the infrastructure of the de facto state (accompanied by
an expulsion of an unnecessary ethnic element), but did not conclude
what "democratic Croatia" did by cleansing its territory of Serbs,
thus fully resolving the issue of ethnic separatism. Accordingly,
it should not be ruled out that the number of "Krajina precedent"
followers in Eurasia has significantly shrunk.
For the first time in many years Russia has taken military action
beyond the borders of its own territory. Following the break-up of
the Soviet Union, Russian servicemen and border guards took part in
localizing two civil wars in Tadzhikistan (1992-1997) and in Georgia
(1993). But after that, the Russian army only participated in military
action within its own territory. In 2008 the format of the Russian
army's involvement beyond the country's borders was drastically
different from the historical experience of both the tsarist and the
Soviet periods. Russian troops did not try to resolve ideological
problems (as was the case with suppressing the Hungarian uprising of
1894, or during the events in Budapest in 1956 or in Czechoslovakia
in 1968). The goal of the Russian forces was not to increase its
territory, although with this Tbilisi has been the most consistent in
denouncing Moscow. The goal of the "peace enforcement" operation was
primarily to ensure the security of the Northern Caucasus. If Russia
had remained quiet in the South Ossetian case, different forces would
emerge in the Northern Caucasus willing to replay the conflict in the
Prigorodny district (the Georgian-Ossetian and the Ossetian-Ingush
conflicts are closely tied to each other). The inability of the
Kremlin to articulate this national interest (for fear of Russia
being seen as a weak and vulnerable nation) is a different issue. In
any case, Russia has defined its particular role in the "near abroad"
(similar to the role of the United States in Latin America, Israel's
in the Middle East, Australia's in Oceania and France's in the former
colonies of Sub-Saharan Africa). This is a qualitatively new definition
of one's vital and legitimate interests.
Those who expected Georgia (or any other CIS country) to become the
starting point of a new "Cold War" between the West and Russia were let
down. Within the West itself (those in political, expert analysis and
media circles) there was disagreement on approaching this particular
conflict and on the "cost" of aggravating relations with Moscow. In
this regard, the reaction of some officious journalists and experts
regarding the West's "inadequate response" is perplexing. So what is
it that we actually wanted? The president of the United States to
personally acknowledge his previous life as a tragic mistake? When
comparing the U.S. and the EU's reaction to Russia's actions in
South Ossetia with the attitude toward Russian policy in Chechnya,
one must admit that there was much less criticism.
For the sake of being objective, it should note that the level of state
propaganda was much higher. There were no disgraceful persecutions
of Georgians as in 2006 (conversely, the minister of the interior was
ordered to prevent any excesses of this kind); there have been attempts
made to differentiate the Georgian people from the Georgian regime. And
most importantly, the "peace enforcement" operation was performed as a
"humanitarian intervention." Russia has begun speaking a language that
the West can understand. In a rare occurrence, protecting human rights
was at the head of a military-political operation, not the defense of
communism or of a monarch, but the defense of our soldiers, fellow
countrymen, and the rights of an ethnic minority. Of course, there
were a lot of failures here (the information supply to the Western mass
media and human rights groups regarding the situation in South Ossetia
was poor). But the overall propagandist trend was on the right track.
Today, Russia has three main problems. The first one is not allowing
the involvement of new players in the conflict, especially within
the CIS. Ukraine's stance also creates lots of problems not just for
itself. The second problem is winning the informational war. Today,
Russia has accumulated plenty of material that demonstrates all the
dangers of "small nationalism" in retrospective (beginning in the
1990s). This material can be used in the struggle for the minds of
intellectuals and human rights advocates in the West. This resource
should not be underestimated. And finally, the third problem is
the search for a dignified way out of the situation--a departure
maximally beneficial for Russia's national interests (among which,
ensuring security in the Northern Caucasus is a priority). Hopes
for a regime change are unlikely to be realized. Those who have seen
the Georgian opposition in action can not hope for their increased
tolerance toward Abkhazia and South Ossetia. And thus, new rules of
the game have to be created today, in order to stop the qualitatively
new turn of destabilization. Following the "Tskhinvali blitzkrieg,"
the chances of Georgia achieving territorial integrity are practically
impossible. Neither can the status quo be re-established, because
following the Georgian military's action and the Russian military
operation it will still be a different status. Not a good nor bad one,
but different.
Russia Profile
August 14, 2008
Russia
The South Ossetian War Turns a New Page in post-Soviet History
In the wake of the compelling events in the South Ossetian War,
advocates of both sides of the conflict have been eager to label each
other with accusations largely based on well-worn truisms. Such a
heated display of political convictions requires a revised observation
of the Caucasus question, by taking into account the circumstances in
the Caucasus' recent historical past. What emerges is the understanding
that the August conflict has created a new standard in post-Soviet
hostilities, where old saws have lost their value.
The tragic events of August 2008 in South Ossetia have once again
agitated the already restless regions of the Caucasus. But this
time, it's not just another disturbance of the status quo--even up
until this August, the ethno-political situation in the Southern
Caucasus was far from peaceful and stable. Beginning in 2004,
attempts to resume military action have been made in South Ossetia,
while for four years, skirmishes and artillery fire have become a
part of everyday reality. Having brought military equipment into
the upper part of the Kodori Gorge in 2006, Georgia thus in many
respects provoked the current escalation of the conflict in this
"hot spot." Yet in the history of Eurasian conflicts, August of 2008
has become a turning point.
>From this time onwards, the old rules of the game, formulated following
the disintegration of the Soviet Union, no longer apply in the Caucasus
(and who knows, possibly in the Black Sea region or even in the CIS
as a whole). To use computer programming jargon, we can say that in
August, 2008, a total "reboot" of the conflicts on Eurasian territory
took place. An extremely significant precedent has been created,
where legal and political agreements that have ensured stability and
the status quo are no longer valid. Georgia ceases to adhere to them,
after fully refusing to implement the Dagomys and Moscow treaties on
Abkhazia and Southern Russia respectively. But neither does Russia,
whose leadership has broadened its understanding of the peacekeeping
operation.
In 2008, the conflicts in the CIS have reached a qualitatively
new level. If, at the beginning of the 1990s, they were spurred
directly by the disintegration of the Soviet Union, then today they
are no longer defined by the inertia of the past, but by the current
dynamics of formation and development of new nation-states. If the
conflicts of the beginning of the 1990s were delayed payments on
the "Evil Empire's" accounts, then the conflicts of today are an
introduction of new payment requirements. There are no longer any
"frozen conflicts"--they are an anachronism of the 1990s, that
has departed along with Boris Yeltsin's "generation." Contemporary
conflicts are planned and resolved by the post-Soviet generation of
politicians. But this generation makes up new rules for the game as
it goes along. What arrangement we will have in the end we shall see
in the near future.
Today, it has become fashionable in the Russian mass media to
see a "Western hand" in everything. Let's leave this task to the
propagandists. Meanwhile, it is evident that this concept largely
relieves the Georgian establishment (what has it got to do with
anything while it is the West which is at fault? Mikheil Saakashvili
is just a puppet), as well as the Georgian society (as always,
people aren't responsible for the actions of the politicians)
of responsibility. Such an approach distances us from making a key
diagnosis of the epidemic - small nationalism, no less (if not more)
dangerous than large nationalism. Georgian society as a whole bears
direct responsibility for the tragedy in Tskhinvali. It was the society
(in the face of its outstanding intellectuals and public activists)
that shaped the demand for a person like Saakashvili. I don't mean the
specific politician and individual Mikheil Nikolaevich Saakashvili,
born in 1967. I speak of the type of "statist" who is willing to
make any kind of sacrifice for a strong Georgia (understood as
an antipode to Eduard Shevarnadze's Georgia and as "territorially
wholesome"). While debate in Russia still continues to touch upon the
"cost" of having incorporated Chechnya, in Georgia state leaders are
being criticized for anything that goes (corruption, authoritarianism,
lack of professionalism) but not for the wars in South Ossetia and
Abkhazia.
Let us recall that at the beginning of the 1990s, the Georgian people
(with no help from the Americans and the British) willingly gave
their votes to a person who spoke of Ossetians as "trash that needs
to be swept through the Roki Tunnel). This person, Zvias Gamsahurdia,
has been politically rehabilitated by the current president, who
in August of 2008 went from words to action. Back in 1991, Georgian
intellectuals in their masses did not support the sentiment of their
great fellow countryman Merab Mamardashvili, who said that "if my
people elect Gamsahurdia, I will be against my people." Sadly, since
then, nobody in Georgia chose Mamardashvili's path.
The role of the West is too oblique in this situation. Firstly,
the United States to a greater degree and the EU to a lesser degree
could not overcome their own propagandist labels. Among them is the
perception of the break-up of the Soviet Union solely as a victory
of democracy, the identification of anti-communist nationalism
(even in its most extreme states) with a movement for freedom,
and an acceptance of the fact that small nationalism, compared with
Russian imperialism and a possible rebirth of the Soviet Union, is
the lesser of two evils. This is the second lesson of the Ossetian
tragedy. For the sake of countering "the imperial onslaught," both
Ossetians and Abkhazians have been sacrificed (nobody wants to hear
them, they don't fit within the framework of a struggle between a
"small democratic republic" and a "large aggressor"). Meanwhile,
far from everything that worked against the Soviet Union had to do
with freedom and democracy.
The August tragedy has been a failed attempt to repeat the Serbian
Krajina precedent. This time there is an experience of a successful
military-political revenge in the Balkans. While in Russia (and in
the CIS in general), where only the laziest did not write about the
"Kosovo casus," there was little talk of copying Croatia's experience
of destroying the infrastructure of the unrecognized state of the
Republic of Serbian Krajina. Let us remember that at the beginning of
the 1990s, Croatia had initially lost a large part of its territory,
but then in 1995, with support from the United States and Germany,
restored the entirety of its state within the borders of the socialist
republic of Tito's Yugoslavia. Meanwhile, this scenario was widely
discussed in Tbilisi and in Baku. And it wasn't just discussed as a
theoretical problem. Beginning in 2004, military action of a different
level of intensity was carried out in South Ossetia.
"The Krajina example can become a more influential model than
Kosovo...There may come a time when the political elites of Baku
and Tbilisi will consider a successful and speedy war to reintegrate
Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Nagorny-Karabakh will get the green light
on behalf of the United States, which made the Croatian offensive
against Krajina easier." This was written in an American magazine in
May of this year by Charles King, an authoritative American scientist
from Georgetown University. However, King also no less justly noted
that the "Krajina precedent" can be successful only in the form of
blitzkrieg warfare. "Georgian and Azerbaijani forces are likely to
win within the first weeks of such a war, but they are most likely
to lose when the weeks that follow arrive." Russia interrupted
Georgia's "Krajina flight" in just days, not weeks. Tbilisi begun
destroying the infrastructure of the de facto state (accompanied by
an expulsion of an unnecessary ethnic element), but did not conclude
what "democratic Croatia" did by cleansing its territory of Serbs,
thus fully resolving the issue of ethnic separatism. Accordingly,
it should not be ruled out that the number of "Krajina precedent"
followers in Eurasia has significantly shrunk.
For the first time in many years Russia has taken military action
beyond the borders of its own territory. Following the break-up of
the Soviet Union, Russian servicemen and border guards took part in
localizing two civil wars in Tadzhikistan (1992-1997) and in Georgia
(1993). But after that, the Russian army only participated in military
action within its own territory. In 2008 the format of the Russian
army's involvement beyond the country's borders was drastically
different from the historical experience of both the tsarist and the
Soviet periods. Russian troops did not try to resolve ideological
problems (as was the case with suppressing the Hungarian uprising of
1894, or during the events in Budapest in 1956 or in Czechoslovakia
in 1968). The goal of the Russian forces was not to increase its
territory, although with this Tbilisi has been the most consistent in
denouncing Moscow. The goal of the "peace enforcement" operation was
primarily to ensure the security of the Northern Caucasus. If Russia
had remained quiet in the South Ossetian case, different forces would
emerge in the Northern Caucasus willing to replay the conflict in the
Prigorodny district (the Georgian-Ossetian and the Ossetian-Ingush
conflicts are closely tied to each other). The inability of the
Kremlin to articulate this national interest (for fear of Russia
being seen as a weak and vulnerable nation) is a different issue. In
any case, Russia has defined its particular role in the "near abroad"
(similar to the role of the United States in Latin America, Israel's
in the Middle East, Australia's in Oceania and France's in the former
colonies of Sub-Saharan Africa). This is a qualitatively new definition
of one's vital and legitimate interests.
Those who expected Georgia (or any other CIS country) to become the
starting point of a new "Cold War" between the West and Russia were let
down. Within the West itself (those in political, expert analysis and
media circles) there was disagreement on approaching this particular
conflict and on the "cost" of aggravating relations with Moscow. In
this regard, the reaction of some officious journalists and experts
regarding the West's "inadequate response" is perplexing. So what is
it that we actually wanted? The president of the United States to
personally acknowledge his previous life as a tragic mistake? When
comparing the U.S. and the EU's reaction to Russia's actions in
South Ossetia with the attitude toward Russian policy in Chechnya,
one must admit that there was much less criticism.
For the sake of being objective, it should note that the level of state
propaganda was much higher. There were no disgraceful persecutions
of Georgians as in 2006 (conversely, the minister of the interior was
ordered to prevent any excesses of this kind); there have been attempts
made to differentiate the Georgian people from the Georgian regime. And
most importantly, the "peace enforcement" operation was performed as a
"humanitarian intervention." Russia has begun speaking a language that
the West can understand. In a rare occurrence, protecting human rights
was at the head of a military-political operation, not the defense of
communism or of a monarch, but the defense of our soldiers, fellow
countrymen, and the rights of an ethnic minority. Of course, there
were a lot of failures here (the information supply to the Western mass
media and human rights groups regarding the situation in South Ossetia
was poor). But the overall propagandist trend was on the right track.
Today, Russia has three main problems. The first one is not allowing
the involvement of new players in the conflict, especially within
the CIS. Ukraine's stance also creates lots of problems not just for
itself. The second problem is winning the informational war. Today,
Russia has accumulated plenty of material that demonstrates all the
dangers of "small nationalism" in retrospective (beginning in the
1990s). This material can be used in the struggle for the minds of
intellectuals and human rights advocates in the West. This resource
should not be underestimated. And finally, the third problem is
the search for a dignified way out of the situation--a departure
maximally beneficial for Russia's national interests (among which,
ensuring security in the Northern Caucasus is a priority). Hopes
for a regime change are unlikely to be realized. Those who have seen
the Georgian opposition in action can not hope for their increased
tolerance toward Abkhazia and South Ossetia. And thus, new rules of
the game have to be created today, in order to stop the qualitatively
new turn of destabilization. Following the "Tskhinvali blitzkrieg,"
the chances of Georgia achieving territorial integrity are practically
impossible. Neither can the status quo be re-established, because
following the Georgian military's action and the Russian military
operation it will still be a different status. Not a good nor bad one,
but different.