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MIXED RESULTS FOR STATES WHICH SUCCEEDED THE FORMER SOVIET UNION
THE IRISH TIMES
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2011/0818/1224302638302.html
THURSDAY, AUGUST 18, 2011
A Turkmen soldier guards a fountain with a golden statue of President
Saparmurat Niyazov, who turned the gas-rich country into a personal
fiefdom following the fall of the USSR.Photograph: Reuters
Since Russia led the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the fortunes of
the other 14 republics have diverged widely, writes SEAMUS MARTIN in
Moscow
IN THE Soviet era the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic
(RSFSR) was the largest component part of the USSR. Not surprisingly,
it led the way to the dissolution of the Soviet Union when its
president, Boris Yeltsin, met his Ukrainian counterpart Leonid
Kravchuk and Belarussian prime minister Stanislav Shushkevich at a
hunting lodge in Belovezhskaya Pushcha near the Polish border.
On December 8th, 1991, they issued a statement saying the Soviet Union
had "ceased to exist as a geopolitical entity". The deal effectively
eliminated Mikhail Gorbachev as a political force.
He had been president of the USSR but now that there was no USSR he
was president of nothing. The move may have been unconstitutional but
it stuck, despite efforts by the Kazakh leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev,
to row back on the decision.
Once again Russia led the other republics, this time in dissolving
the union, but the experience of the other 14 Soviet republics in
the union's aftermath differed greatly.
The three Baltic countries were never recognised as part of the
USSR by most western states and their de jure independence became de
facto immediately after the failed putsch of August 1991. All three -
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania - are now members of the European Union
and Nato, while Estonia has adopted the euro as its currency. Just
as it was in Soviet times, the standard of living is higher there
than in most former Soviet republics.
Moldova, on the other hand, is Europe's poorest country and has a
"frozen" conflict on its borders in the form of the unrecognised
breakaway region of Transnistria, which has a mainly Slavic population.
Ukraine, bigger than France and with a slightly smaller population,
has become hopelessly divided. In the former Austrian-controlled
regions of the west, the Greek Catholic Church and Ukrainian natonalism
prevail. In the east, the Ukrainian and Russian Orthodox churches are
dominant and the population is pro-Russian. In Crimea, the majority
is not only pro-Russian, it actually is Russian, while the Crimean
Tatars, exiled in Stalin's time, have returned in considerable numbers.
Ukraine's politics is factional in the extreme. Brought to power by
the "orange revolution" in the winter of 2004-2005, Viktor Yushchenko
overturned what had been generally viewed as the fraudulent election of
Viktor Yanukovych as president. Yushchenko was then elected president
but turned out of be something of a disaster. He outraged Poles and
Jews by declaring Stepan Bandera, a nationalist who co-operated with
Nazi Germany, as "hero of the Ukrainian people".
It was his lack of progress economically and his sacking of fellow
"orange revolutionaries" that cost Yushchenko the presidency in
2010, when he received a little more than 5.4 per cent of the vote
and was eliminated in the first round. The winner of that election,
declared to be fair by observers from the Organisation for Security
and Co-operation in Europe, turned out to be the same Viktor
Yanukovych who had fraudulently won the presidency in 2004. Under
the Yanukovych administration former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko,
once Yushchenko's ally in the orange revolution, has been imprisoned
while awaiting trial for fraud. This internal friction has not helped
economic development and Ukraine lags behind Russia in this respect.
The other Slavic republic of Belarus has been turned into a Soviet
theme park by its elected dictator, Alexander Lukashenko. Felix
Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police, has an honoured
place in the statuary of Minsk, the capital city. Opponents of the
regime are regularly imprisoned, freedom of expression is curtailed
far more severely than in Russia and the country is going through an
extremely severe economic crisis.
In Georgia, internal strife immediately followed the USSR's
dissolution.
Its president, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, ignited sectional tensions and was
deposed after a civil war in 1993. He died in mysterious circumstance
on the final day of that year. The Georgian regions of Abkhazia and
South Ossetia declared themselves separate entities and in the case of
Abkhazia there were heavy casualties and large numbers of internally
displaced persons as Abkhaz forces, aided in some cases by Chechen
volunteers, drove ethnic Georgians out of the territory.
There were high hopes for his successor, former Soviet foreign
minister Eduard Shevardnadze, but he too was ousted after allegations
of corruption in the "rose revolution" of November 2003.
Shevardnadze's successor, Mikheil Saakashvili, has been extremely
pro-western, pushing through a referendum to validate a campaign for
Nato membership. His re-election as president in January 2008, after
a campaign that ran alongside the referendum campaign, was marred by
a large number of irregularities, according to international observers.
But it was the war with Russia in August 2008 that was the most
dramatic event of Saakashvili's presidency. There have been claims
and counterclaims regarding responsibility for the conflict. The
most reliable and independent account emerged from the EU-sponsored
investigation led by the Swiss diplomat Heidi Tagliavini, whose team
included senior military officers from Switzerland and the UK.
Tagliavini's report showed Saakashvili had started the war with an
attack on South Ossetia, although there had been provocation from all
sides (Russians, Ossetes and Georgians). The report also criticised
Russia for a response that was not in proportion to the original
Georgian assault.
Despite predictions that he would be ousted as an unpopular leader,
Saakashvili remains in power amid frequent scares, the latest of
which saw a group of photographers accused of being Russian spies.
There are also indications of a cult of personality as Saakashvili
is overseeing the construction of a lavish presidential palace in
a country whose infrastrucure was in a terrible state even before
the war.
Elsewhere, in central Asia, progress towards democracy has ranged from
slow to non-existent. Turkmenistan, a gas-rich country bordering the
Caspian sea, became the personal fiefdom of Saparmurat Niyazov after
the USSR fell. He quickly changed his name to Turkmenbashi (father
of the Turkmen people), built a concrete model of the Eiffel Tower in
the centre of Ashgabat and on top of this monstrosity placed a golden
statue of himself that rotated to face the sun in daylight hours.
His successor, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov, has gradually dismantled
many of Niyazov's excesses and has invited exiled opposition leaders
to contest the next presidential election.
In Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who tried to stop the dissolution
of the USSR, runs a country larger than western Europe with efficiency.
He has continuously been re-elected with more than 90 per cent of
the vote in elections roundly condemned by international observers.
Islam Karimov, communist leader turned devout Muslim, runs a
repressive, undemocratic regime in Uzbekistan. Kyrgyzstan, once
regarded as central Asia's best hope for democracy, has been riven with
ethnic tension in which hundreds have been killed, while Tajikistan
has suffered an ethnic civil war.
In the Caucasus, Armenia and Azerbaijan are still locked in dispute
over the ethnic Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, another possible
cause of future instability but more stable than the Russian region
of Dagestan, where a full-scale insurgency is under way, with the
assassination of moderate Muslim clerics by extremists a worrying
feature.
THE IRISH TIMES
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2011/0818/1224302638302.html
THURSDAY, AUGUST 18, 2011
A Turkmen soldier guards a fountain with a golden statue of President
Saparmurat Niyazov, who turned the gas-rich country into a personal
fiefdom following the fall of the USSR.Photograph: Reuters
Since Russia led the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the fortunes of
the other 14 republics have diverged widely, writes SEAMUS MARTIN in
Moscow
IN THE Soviet era the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic
(RSFSR) was the largest component part of the USSR. Not surprisingly,
it led the way to the dissolution of the Soviet Union when its
president, Boris Yeltsin, met his Ukrainian counterpart Leonid
Kravchuk and Belarussian prime minister Stanislav Shushkevich at a
hunting lodge in Belovezhskaya Pushcha near the Polish border.
On December 8th, 1991, they issued a statement saying the Soviet Union
had "ceased to exist as a geopolitical entity". The deal effectively
eliminated Mikhail Gorbachev as a political force.
He had been president of the USSR but now that there was no USSR he
was president of nothing. The move may have been unconstitutional but
it stuck, despite efforts by the Kazakh leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev,
to row back on the decision.
Once again Russia led the other republics, this time in dissolving
the union, but the experience of the other 14 Soviet republics in
the union's aftermath differed greatly.
The three Baltic countries were never recognised as part of the
USSR by most western states and their de jure independence became de
facto immediately after the failed putsch of August 1991. All three -
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania - are now members of the European Union
and Nato, while Estonia has adopted the euro as its currency. Just
as it was in Soviet times, the standard of living is higher there
than in most former Soviet republics.
Moldova, on the other hand, is Europe's poorest country and has a
"frozen" conflict on its borders in the form of the unrecognised
breakaway region of Transnistria, which has a mainly Slavic population.
Ukraine, bigger than France and with a slightly smaller population,
has become hopelessly divided. In the former Austrian-controlled
regions of the west, the Greek Catholic Church and Ukrainian natonalism
prevail. In the east, the Ukrainian and Russian Orthodox churches are
dominant and the population is pro-Russian. In Crimea, the majority
is not only pro-Russian, it actually is Russian, while the Crimean
Tatars, exiled in Stalin's time, have returned in considerable numbers.
Ukraine's politics is factional in the extreme. Brought to power by
the "orange revolution" in the winter of 2004-2005, Viktor Yushchenko
overturned what had been generally viewed as the fraudulent election of
Viktor Yanukovych as president. Yushchenko was then elected president
but turned out of be something of a disaster. He outraged Poles and
Jews by declaring Stepan Bandera, a nationalist who co-operated with
Nazi Germany, as "hero of the Ukrainian people".
It was his lack of progress economically and his sacking of fellow
"orange revolutionaries" that cost Yushchenko the presidency in
2010, when he received a little more than 5.4 per cent of the vote
and was eliminated in the first round. The winner of that election,
declared to be fair by observers from the Organisation for Security
and Co-operation in Europe, turned out to be the same Viktor
Yanukovych who had fraudulently won the presidency in 2004. Under
the Yanukovych administration former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko,
once Yushchenko's ally in the orange revolution, has been imprisoned
while awaiting trial for fraud. This internal friction has not helped
economic development and Ukraine lags behind Russia in this respect.
The other Slavic republic of Belarus has been turned into a Soviet
theme park by its elected dictator, Alexander Lukashenko. Felix
Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police, has an honoured
place in the statuary of Minsk, the capital city. Opponents of the
regime are regularly imprisoned, freedom of expression is curtailed
far more severely than in Russia and the country is going through an
extremely severe economic crisis.
In Georgia, internal strife immediately followed the USSR's
dissolution.
Its president, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, ignited sectional tensions and was
deposed after a civil war in 1993. He died in mysterious circumstance
on the final day of that year. The Georgian regions of Abkhazia and
South Ossetia declared themselves separate entities and in the case of
Abkhazia there were heavy casualties and large numbers of internally
displaced persons as Abkhaz forces, aided in some cases by Chechen
volunteers, drove ethnic Georgians out of the territory.
There were high hopes for his successor, former Soviet foreign
minister Eduard Shevardnadze, but he too was ousted after allegations
of corruption in the "rose revolution" of November 2003.
Shevardnadze's successor, Mikheil Saakashvili, has been extremely
pro-western, pushing through a referendum to validate a campaign for
Nato membership. His re-election as president in January 2008, after
a campaign that ran alongside the referendum campaign, was marred by
a large number of irregularities, according to international observers.
But it was the war with Russia in August 2008 that was the most
dramatic event of Saakashvili's presidency. There have been claims
and counterclaims regarding responsibility for the conflict. The
most reliable and independent account emerged from the EU-sponsored
investigation led by the Swiss diplomat Heidi Tagliavini, whose team
included senior military officers from Switzerland and the UK.
Tagliavini's report showed Saakashvili had started the war with an
attack on South Ossetia, although there had been provocation from all
sides (Russians, Ossetes and Georgians). The report also criticised
Russia for a response that was not in proportion to the original
Georgian assault.
Despite predictions that he would be ousted as an unpopular leader,
Saakashvili remains in power amid frequent scares, the latest of
which saw a group of photographers accused of being Russian spies.
There are also indications of a cult of personality as Saakashvili
is overseeing the construction of a lavish presidential palace in
a country whose infrastrucure was in a terrible state even before
the war.
Elsewhere, in central Asia, progress towards democracy has ranged from
slow to non-existent. Turkmenistan, a gas-rich country bordering the
Caspian sea, became the personal fiefdom of Saparmurat Niyazov after
the USSR fell. He quickly changed his name to Turkmenbashi (father
of the Turkmen people), built a concrete model of the Eiffel Tower in
the centre of Ashgabat and on top of this monstrosity placed a golden
statue of himself that rotated to face the sun in daylight hours.
His successor, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov, has gradually dismantled
many of Niyazov's excesses and has invited exiled opposition leaders
to contest the next presidential election.
In Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who tried to stop the dissolution
of the USSR, runs a country larger than western Europe with efficiency.
He has continuously been re-elected with more than 90 per cent of
the vote in elections roundly condemned by international observers.
Islam Karimov, communist leader turned devout Muslim, runs a
repressive, undemocratic regime in Uzbekistan. Kyrgyzstan, once
regarded as central Asia's best hope for democracy, has been riven with
ethnic tension in which hundreds have been killed, while Tajikistan
has suffered an ethnic civil war.
In the Caucasus, Armenia and Azerbaijan are still locked in dispute
over the ethnic Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, another possible
cause of future instability but more stable than the Russian region
of Dagestan, where a full-scale insurgency is under way, with the
assassination of moderate Muslim clerics by extremists a worrying
feature.