|
|
Conflict in the Caucasus
Background to the present crisis
ROB JONES outlines the developments in the region
from 1990 which have led to the present crisis.
GEORGIA GAINED INDEPENDENCE from the Soviet Union
when the latter broke up at the end of 1991. The first years of
independence were painful. The country had as president the former
anti-Soviet dissident and nationalist writer, Zviad Gamsakhurdia. He
leaned on the widespread mood of opposition to the centralised Soviet
Union to become head of newly independent Georgia, but his rule proved
to be not only nationalistic but far from democratic.
Georgia was racked by the economic and social
collapse that affected the states of the former Soviet Union as they
attempted to restore capitalism. In fact, it suffered the worst collapse
of all of them with a 70% drop in production. Gamsakhurdia preferred to
rely on nationalism rather than attempt to defend living standards for
all those living in Georgia. His supporters demanded that ‘Georgia
should be for Georgians’ although, at the time, over 30% of the
population were non-Georgians.
The national minorities, in particular, the ethnic
Russians and groups such as the Ossetians, had always been more
pro-Russian than pro-Georgian and began to get concerned for their own
position. Pro-Russian movements were deliberately whipped up to
undermine the Georgian government, sometimes by the Russian state, as
part of a conscious policy and, just as often, by rogue elements within
the Russian state and Russian nationalist politicians, such as Russia’s
current envoy to NATO, Dmitri Rogozin.
Unhappy with the lack of progress with economic
reforms, other sections of the ruling elite moved against Gamsakhurdia.
Three ministers resigned, calling him a ‘demagogue and totalitarian’.
The army divided into pro- and anti-Gamsakhurdia factions.
Most analyses of this period contain no clear
description of what the real nature of the differences within the
Gamsakhurdia government were, as the authors either treat history as a
conflict between personalities or because they look at the question
through the prism of their own national interests.
But in general, throughout the ex-republics of the
former Soviet Union at that time, the ideological disputes within the
ruling elite centred on the best way to restore capitalism – through
neo-liberal ‘shock therapy’ or a slower, state-regulated approach à la
China. They often, but not always, ran parallel with the conflict
between pro- and anti-Russian interests.
On the level of the newly independent republics,
these conflicts were complicated by clan interests. In Georgia’s case,
neo-liberals who expected the declaration of Georgian independence to
lead to the rapid restoration of capitalism found themselves in conflict
with Gamsakhurdia’s nationalism.
During the period of economic stagnation before the
break-up of the Soviet Union, when the conditions were ripening for the
restoration of capitalism, the working class was unable to form its own
political organisations with a revolutionary Marxist ideology. This
could have offered a genuine alternative to Stalinism and capitalism – a
real socialism based on workers’ control and management, freedom and
democracy, national self-determination and internationalism. Instead of
taking society forward through a political revolution, the lack of a
working-class alternative led society backwards into capitalist
restoration, with all the horrors that entailed.
In Georgia, the divisions within the ruling elite
led, in December 1991, to a coup d’état against Gamsakhurdia. After a
week of fighting in Tbilisi, a military council took control of the
country and appointed as president probably Georgia’s only real ‘elder
statesman’, the former Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze.
While without the direct involvement of the Russian government of the
time, this coup took place with at least the participation of some of
the most reactionary elements of the Russian state. Although
Shevardnadze often caused difficulties for Russia, he waged a repressive
campaign against former supporters of Gamsakhurdia and, by the end of
1993, further armed conflicts broke out into a civil war affecting the
west of the country.
Azerbaijan, Armenia and Russia all intervened to
support Shevardnadze when it appeared that Gamsakhurdia might gain
control of the Black Sea ports and thus threaten their export potential.
In return for his at least temporary victory, Shevardnadze ensured that
Georgia joined the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). While he
essentially had a pro-western position he managed mostly to maintain
workable relations with Moscow.
South Ossetia and Abkhazia
TENSIONS BETWEEN SOUTH Ossetia and Georgia began to
increase before the collapse of the Soviet Union. With his nationalist
rhetoric, Gamsakhurdia proposed that the only language to be recognised
should be Georgian. Ossetians have their own language and this provoked
the South Ossetian leaders to appeal to the Russian government for
support and even recognition as a separate state.
In response, the Georgian government moved to
abolish South Ossetia’s autonomous status within Georgia. Tensions grew
and clashes developed, which eventually broke out into brutal, largely
ethnically-based conflicts. At the end of 1991, ethnic clashes in South
Ossetia left over a thousand dead and huge population shifts. Over
100,000 Ossetians were forced to leave Georgia (23,000 from within South
Ossetia and the remainder from the rest of Georgia). They went to North
Ossetia and the basis was laid for an ethnic conflict there as the
Ossetians were allocated homes once occupied by Ingush people. The
ensuing Ingush-Ossetian war claimed hundreds of lives. At the same time,
over 20,000 ethnic Georgians were driven out of Ossetia after their
schools and homes were burned to the ground.
In Abkhazia, where the ethnic make up was much less
homogenous, the war which broke out was absolutely brutal. After the
Georgian military seized hold of Sukhumi, it introduced a regime based
on the exclusion of non-Georgians from power. This led to a flow of
refugees from the city and the ground was laid for horrific ethnic
conflict. The Abkhazians, with the support of significant sections of
the Russian state, responded to the Georgian attacks with ethnic attacks
of their own. Within 18 months at least 10,000 ethnic Georgians had been
brutally murdered, while a further 200-300,000 Georgians were forced out
of Abkhazia.
Many Georgians, of course, were opposed to the
nationalist policies of their government, just as in the same way many
Abkhazians opposed the ethnic cleansing. Indeed, it is wrong to even
call the separatist forces purely Abkhazian. The hard core was made up
of mercenaries from the North Caucasus with the later notorious Chechen
warlord, Shamil Basayev, and his bandits playing a central role in the
massacres of ethnic Georgians.
These thugs did not care who they killed. On many
occasions they slaughtered Abkhazians who attempted to protect their
Georgian friends and neighbours or who refused to join them. One report
from Human Rights Watch says, "out of a group of twelve frontline
soldiers, two were Abkhazian, two were Armenian – one Armenian locally
from Sukhumi, one from Yerevan who was too young to go fight the good
fight in Karabakh – and the rest were either from the North Caucasus or
from places like Siberia. What were they motivated by? Looting. They had
been promised houses with tangerine gardens. They had been promised
cars".
While the official Russian government policy was to
call for an end to the conflict and for peacekeeping troops to be
engaged, at key moments the involvement of Russian forces, mainly
aircraft and special troops, was critical.
Georgia was forced to accept a ceasefire to avoid a
large scale-confrontation with Russia. The government of Georgia and
South Ossetian separatists reached an agreement to avoid the use of
force against one another, and Georgia pledged not to impose sanctions
against South Ossetia. However, the Georgian government still retained
direct control over substantial portions of South Ossetia, including the
town of Akhalgori. A peacekeeping force of Ossetians, Russians and
Georgians was established with the support of the Organisation for
Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).
Although unrecognised internationally, in effect
Abkhazia and South Ossetia gained de facto independence, just as
Chechnya gained de facto independence at the end of the first Chechen
war – until Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin decided to end the
‘insubordination’ at the start of Putin’s presidential election campaign
in late 1999. In Chechnya, the Russians handed power to a renegade
warlord, Akhmad Kadyrov. When he died in a bomb attack in May 2004, his
son, Ramzan, took over and has effectively established a police state in
Chechnya.
In South Ossetia’s case, the Russians nominated the
St Petersburg-based wrestler-turned-businessman, Eduard Kokoiti, as
president. He returned to South Ossetia to put together a government
team including general Anatoly Barankevich as chief of armed forces, who
leads the South Ossetian armed forces with soldiers mainly from North
Ossetia. Kokoiti also appointed a former head of the Kabardino-Balkaria
FSB (Kabardino-Balkaria is one of Russia’s small Caucasian republics and
the FSB is the successor of the KGB in Russia) as head of the South
Ossetian KGB.
While the Russian regime leant on Kokoiti and used
South Ossetia as a means to pressurise Georgia, it did not want to
encourage South Ossetia to go too far. It was already struggling to
control instability throughout the Russian North Caucasus. If Chechnya
had almost been brought under control under Kadyrov, it was at the cost
of spreading discontent to the neighbouring regions.
Ingushetia, Dagestan and North Ossetia became zones
of almost constant bombings and armed attacks. The North Ossetian town
of Beslan gained worldwide notoriety after the school siege in September
2004 was incompetently handled by the Russian state, leaving hundreds
dead. The Russian elite needed to avoid further instability.
The South Ossetian ruling elite, however, used the
autonomous republic’s position to their own benefit. No real economic
activity was possible in this isolated state in one of the poorest
regions of the northern hemisphere, as indicated by the scale of South
Ossetia’s GDP – just $15 million. The elite, however, ensured that they
had enough to live on by developing smuggling into a business. When the
population objected, they diverted attention by blaming Georgia. The
success of the smuggling business was due to South Ossetia’s location in
the Caucasus region, squeezed between Russia in the north, Turkey, the
Black Sea and Europe in the west, Iran to the south, and Central Asia to
the east.
As Georgia does not recognise South Ossetian
independence, it does not put up border and custom patrols. The only
route between South Ossetia and Russian North Ossetia is through the
Roki tunnel under the Caucasus. Travel through this is controlled by the
Russian state. It does not take much speculation to understand why the
Russian army today is so keen to control Gori, which has traditionally
been the first staging post on the smuggling route.
The Caspian energy corridor
WITH RUSSIA’S ECONOMY beginning to grow and the oil
and gas prices on world markets rocketing, naturally South Ossetia found
itself subject to an increasingly bitter struggle for power and
influence between the world’s imperialist powers. Ronald Asmus, director
of the Brussels Transatlantic Fund, commented in the Herald Tribune:
"There are those who say that this is really about Russia and the rules
of the game for Europe writ large for the Caspian energy corridor". Both
the US and the EU grew increasingly worried about Russia’s growing
influence on the oil and gas market. They decided to use the region
around Georgia as the only possible transit route between the oil rich
Central Asian and Caspian regions and Europe that bypassed both Iran and
Russia.
There are now three international oil lines running
through the Caucasus with a further gas line planned. These enter the
Black Sea through the Georgian ports of Kulumi and Poti and the
Abkhazian port of Sukhumi. The BP-operated Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan line
alone has a throughput of over a million barrels of oil a day. The
pipelines are located in neutral zones in which so many metres to either
side of the line are considered international property. In turn, the
Russians are planning to build the South Stream pipeline through the
region to try and maintain some control over supplies, as part of a
project between Gazprom and Italy’s ENI. The equation is quite simple:
the larger the proportion of oil and gas supplies flowing through the
Caucasus is controlled by the west, the weaker is Russia’s grip on
Europe’s energy market and, of course, vice versa.
In June 2004, tensions once again rose as the
Georgian government launched a campaign against smuggling in the region.
Dozens died in the subsequent wave of hostage-takings, shootouts and
bombings. A new ceasefire agreement was reached but both Moscow and
Tskhinvali complained about the Georgian military build-up. They kept
quiet, however, about the increase in the Russian military budget in the
same period.
The rose revolution
THIS IS THE background to the wave of ‘coloured
revolutions’ that spread like wildfire across the region in the middle
of the last decade. In broad strokes, starting with Serbia, through the
rose revolution in Georgia, the orange revolution in Ukraine, and the
tulip revolution in Kirghizstan, these movements developed in countries
in which there was widespread discontent with the state of the economy,
social degradation, and corrupt and undemocratic governments. Because of
the absence of working-class and left-wing organisations capable of
mobilising this discontent in a socialist direction, western-orientated
neo-liberal politicians, with the backing of considerable financial and
‘polit-technological forces’ (spin doctors) were able to parasitically
use the popular discontent to overthrow the old, broadly pro-Russian
regimes.
Threats by the western powers to encourage similar
‘revolutions’ were used to essentially blackmail Azerbaijan’s president,
Ilham Aliyev, and Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, to make
concessions to western economic interests. As soon as agreement was
reached, the US pulled the financial plug and money for the opposition
dried up.
Shevardnadze attempted to balance between the US and
Russia. In 2003, for example, he signed big deals with Russia’s Gazprom
and Russian Energy, effectively giving them control of Georgia’s energy
market for 25 years. This so annoyed the US, it threatened to stop
building the pipelines and cut off financial aid. In the end,
Shevardnadze signed another agreement, this time with the US, which
meant that US troops could enter and leave the country without visas,
and army units, aircraft and ships could cross Georgia’s borders in any
direction without restriction.
For this right, the US agreed to pay an annual sum
of $75 million – 10% of Georgia’s budget, which is supposed to go to
reforming the army to NATO standards. But, by this time, the US had
become increasingly unhappy with Shevardnadze. He could not be fully
controlled and the money it was pumping into the country just
disappeared into corrupt pockets.
In November 2003, following obviously rigged
elections, Shevardnadze was overthrown in the rose revolution and
replaced by the Columbia University-educated Mikhail Saakashvili.
Saakashvili and his ally, Nino Burdzanadze, represented an alliance
between anti-Russian, pro-US Georgian nationalism and neo-liberalism.
From his first day in power, Saakashvili expressed
his determination to bring Abkhazia and South Ossetia back under the
control of Tbilisi. He demanded that the status of the ‘international’
peacekeepers be changed to reduce the influence of Russia over the
breakaway regions, and waged an international campaign in defence of the
‘territorial integrity’ of Georgia. This in itself was sufficient to
raise the ire of Russia but, having come to power with the open backing
of the US, Saakashvili clearly allied his government with the defence of
US interests. Georgia applied to join NATO, troops were sent to Iraq,
and the main road from Tbilisi’s airport was renamed George Bush Street.
Saakashvili stepped up the campaign against
black-market trading. One analyst described how Saakashvili "closed the
market in Ergneti, which was an outlet for contraband passing through
South Ossetia, but also a point of sale for agricultural products from
the regions of Tskhinvali and Gori. This vast black market constituted,
in neutral territory, a place of precious exchange, the only economic
integration of a highly divided region. Since its closure, all contact
between Georgians and Ossetians has become more difficult, leading to an
exacerbation of the alienation between the two sides. In Tskhinvali, as
in Gori, many see this closure as a major mistake in the region".
At the same time, Saakashvili won a major victory in
Adjara, a third breakaway region that had been Shevardnadze’s power
base. He managed to essentially blackmail the local government to accept
his conditions. Believing he could repeat his success and fully restore
Georgia’s territorial integrity, he directed his attentions towards
South Ossetia. However, international pressure held him back, but the
relative stability of the previous years was disrupted.
Russian divide and rule
ONCE THE RUSSIAN government realised the
implications of Shevardnadze going, in order to maintain its position it
stepped up its use of one of the oldest weapons in the imperialist
arsenal: divide and rule. The leaders of the breakaway republics were
encouraged to strengthen their borders with Georgia to prevent
‘disruption spilling over’. They were then invited to Moscow to discuss
‘improving their relations with Georgia’. However, Eduard Kokoiti, in
South Ossetia, saw this as a chance for his breakaway territory to link
up with Russia. Naturally, the Georgian government saw this as a threat
and stepped up its protests against the increasing Russian economic and
political presence in the region and against the uncontrolled military
of the South Ossetian side.
This was the background to a referendum organised by
the Kokoiti government in November 2006. The question asked in the
referendum was, ‘Do you agree that the Republic of South Ossetia should
retain its current status as an independent state and be recognised by
the international community?’ This has been interpreted by Russian
chauvinists, including Kokoiti, as meaning that South Ossetia should
merge with North Ossetia in the Russian Federation. The results of the
referendum are, however, much more complex. According to the election
commission, there was a turnout of 95%, with 52,000 people (99.9%)
voting yes. These figures are clearly fraudulent. The whole population
of South Ossetia is about 70,000 and about 25% are Georgian. The
majority of Georgians did not have the right to vote. So it is
stretching the imagination to say that 52,000 voters participated.
The reality is that this referendum was just another
in a long series of fixed votes organised by the Kremlin. For example,
the so-called international observers were from front organisations,
organised by Modest Kolerov, head of the Russian presidential
administration’s directorate for interregional ties. One of the most
active observer groups was the Kremlin-organised youth group, Nashi. As
in the Russian presidential election, it was responsible for organising
the exit poll! According to the Electoral Commission of Alternative
Elections set up by Tbilisi, 42,000 voters turned out for the elections
held in the territories under Georgian control. According to authorities
in Tskhinvali, these voters numbered only 14,000. In the alternative
presidential election in the Georgian-controlled areas, Dimitri Sanakoev,
the candidate favoured by Tbilisi, took 88% of the votes. More than 90%
voted for the return of South Ossetia to Georgia by way of a federation.
These figures are obviously just as fraudulent. Needless to say, the
Russian press reported only Kokoiti’s referendum, the Georgian press
Sanakoev’s.
However, the two referendums did reflect the reality
of South Ossetia in the days before the war. On the one hand, Georgians
populate the villages around Tskhinvali, and nine new settlements have
been established between Tskhinvali and the Roki tunnel, linked to the
Tbilisi-controlled areas by a single path. The area to the north of the
new villages was controlled by the Ossetian militias. This situation
makes the statement by Kokoiti on 16 August that Georgians will not be
allowed to return, sound like a call for ethnic cleansing. Indeed, there
have been reports of Georgian homes being torched.
On the other hand, is the economic position.
Although the Russian North Caucasus is an extremely poor region with
average incomes (as opposed to wages, because there is practically no
work) around €100 a month, the situation in Georgia is even worse. This
explains why so many Ossetians have applied for Russian passports (a
Russian passport is an internal document, as opposed to the foreign
passport, which allows for travel abroad). Holding an internal passport
entitles the holder to citizenship, and thus to pensions, which are more
generous than the Georgian equivalent. Indeed, in the Kokoiti
government’s referendum campaign in 2006, agitation mainly combined
calls to ‘Build the Grand Alani’ (an ancient empire once founded in
Ossetia), with attacks on Georgia for its past aggressions, and
comparisons of how much better life is in Russia.
A clear understanding of questions like national
conflicts can be arrived at only on the basis of patiently examining the
facts. Clear analysis and readily understood programmes can then lead to
the rapid building of the working-class forces capable of ending
capitalism, with all its evils and rivalries, and laying the basis for a
future harmonious socialist society, nationally and internationally.
|