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WSJ: Caucasus Burning

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  • WSJ: Caucasus Burning

    CAUCASUS BURNING
    By Thomas De Waal

    Wall Street Journal
    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1219098587 09051099.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
    Aug 19 2008

    So much has been left in ruins in the Caucasus in the past week. What
    chance is there of a salvage operation?

    The landscape is littered with wreckage. First South Ossetia was
    ravaged; now Georgia is experiencing a great tragedy. Amid the wider
    carnage, the greatest losers are the 25,000 or so ethnic Georgians of
    South Ossetia. Only a month ago Ossetians and Georgians were buying
    and selling from one another in South Ossetia by day even as armed men
    in their villages exchanged fire at night. Now those Georgians face
    total dispossession, their homes burned by South Ossetian irregular
    fighters. Around 50,000 Georgians in Abkhazia are still in their homes,
    but they face a precarious future. These people have the greatest
    moral right to pass judgment on a long list of culprits.

    Russia's guilt is of course the most blatant. The Russian army
    has unleashed atavistic violence and allowed Ossetians and North
    Caucasians to follow in its wake, reinflaming interethnic hatreds
    that had begun to fade after the wars of the 1990s. The cost of this
    will be there for years and Moscow should pay the price, in terms
    of both economic compensation for the wreckage it has caused and
    international opprobrium. On the latter, Germany could take the lead
    by threatening to cancel the joint Nord Stream project -- a Russian
    gas pipeline with a political agenda, designed to bypass Moscow's
    critics in Poland and the Baltic states.

    Next in line for criticism is the Georgian leadership, which has now
    all but lost the two disputed territories. Georgia is a small nation
    under threat from the Russians, and in the short term Georgians
    will rally around their leader. But there almost certainly will be
    a reckoning with their impetuous president, Mikheil Saakashvili.

    Since coming to power in 2004, Mr. Saakashvili has been a man in
    a hurry. His economic reforms are impressive, but he was courting
    trouble from the start when he promised to win back Abkhazia and South
    Ossetia within five years. A brief look at the Balkans, Cyprus or
    Northern Ireland tells you that complex ethno-territorial conflicts
    need more time to heal than that. Yet Mr. Saakashvili deliberately
    thawed the (misleadingly named) "frozen conflicts," challenging
    the Russian-framed peacekeeping operations and moving his security
    forces closer to Abkhazia and South Ossetia. He kept up the economic
    isolation of the two territories and rejected any initiatives to open
    them up -- for example, by allowing the Abkhaz to trade with Turkey --
    as a threat to Georgian sovereignty.

    His rhetoric was just what the Russians wanted to hear and they moved
    in to fill the vacuum economically, politically and militarily. Many
    Abkhaz were unhappy about being swallowed by Russia, but the argument
    that Moscow was guaranteeing their security trumped all others. Now
    the Russians are triumphant.

    How did Georgia's 2003 Rose Revolution, which was greeted with
    such euphoria by Georgians, end up like this? I was present at
    Mr. Saakashvili's first press conference after the revolution. There
    he said explicitly -- and in Russian -- that in contrast to his
    predecessor, Eduard Shevardnadze, he wanted "normal relations"
    with Russia.

    Vladimir Putin, pushing first as president and now as prime minister to
    build the resurgent Russia that we saw rampaging through Georgia last
    week, played a leading role in this. But it is hard to imagine the wily
    Mr. Shevardnadze allowing himself to get sucked into a war with Russia.

    Many Washington policy makers played their part, too. They loved the
    idea of a new "beacon of democracy" run by thirtysomething economic
    reformers astride an important energy corridor and standing up to
    Russia. But they all too often neglected to pay attention to what
    Georgia was actually doing. The Georgians basked in American attention
    and felt emboldened to challenge Moscow even more. When President
    George W. Bush stood on Freedom Square in Tbilisi in May 2005 and
    told Georgians, "The path of freedom you have chosen is not easy,
    but you will not travel it alone," they believed it meant something.

    When I asked a senior U.S. official four years ago what Washington
    would do if Russia attempted a military assault on Georgia, he said,
    "We won't send in the U.S. cavalry." But now it looks as though this
    was precisely what Mr. Saakashvili was counting on.

    As for Europe, France and Germany might say that their cooler
    approach to Georgia all along looks wise in retrospect. But they have
    little to be proud of. The EU had the opportunity to approve a new
    border-monitoring force for Georgia in 2005, when the Russians blocked
    the continuation of the old one under the aegis of the Organization
    for Security and Cooperation in Europe. But France and Germany vetoed
    the plan. The unarmed force could have been an early-warning system
    had it been in place this year, and might have helped deter the
    Russian campaign.

    * * * Few Western policy makers have engaged seriously with the South
    Caucasus, and they would do well now to ponder the fact that South
    Ossetia was not even the most dangerous of the region's conflicts. That
    dubious honor goes to Nagorno-Karabakh, a territory dispute between
    Armenia and Azerbaijan. There, tens of thousands of troops face each
    other across 110 miles (175 kilometers) of trenches, and angry rhetoric
    is strong on both sides. The fragile Karabakh cease-fire is observed
    by just six unarmed European monitors. If the world wakes up to the
    danger of the cease-fire breaking, there will have been at least one
    good outcome from the Georgian tragedy.

    Negotiations over the Karabakh conflict have been fruitless so far,
    but they have come up with a useful formula for squaring the separatist
    circle. A draft peace plan under discussion would defer the issue of
    the status of the disputed region of Karabakh itself. Instead, the
    region would have some interim status short of statehood while other
    issues, such as the return of Azerbaijani land currently occupied by
    Armenians outside Nagorno-Karabakh, are resolved and refugees begin
    to return home.

    That kind of solution now looks to be the most desirable one for
    Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The Abkhaz and Ossetians themselves have
    far more reason to want to live well with their Georgian neighbors than
    the Russians do. Giving them some kind of international guarantees
    and more power to dictate their own futures is the only way to lift
    the Russian wolf off their shoulders and allow at least some Georgian
    refugees to go home.

    Yet it is probably too late. The Russians now have a tight grip and
    will try to keep others out. President Dmitry Medvedev said last week
    that Abkhaz and Ossetians "do not trust anyone but Russian troops...We
    are the only guarantors of stability in the region."

    Answering that charge is a big physical and moral challenge for both
    Europe and the United States. If they want to fix things in the
    region, they need to consider a new version of the mass peaceful
    intervention they made in the Balkans from the mid-1990s, in the
    form of policemen and peacekeepers, human-rights investigations,
    and large-scale economic investment. It would be expensive, but in
    the end it would probably cost much less than doing nothing.

    Mr. de Waal is Caucasus editor at the Institute for War and Peace
    Reporting in London.

    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
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