GEORGIA, RUSSIA AND NATO

“Georgia must rebuild its ties to Russia”

Wednesday, 08 October 2008

Interview with Lasha Shawdia, Anti-war Movement Georgia Anti-Imperialist Camp Q: Did Georgia’s president Saakashvili emerge from his war of last summer weakened or strengthened? Definitely weakened. It is a tragic mistake to believe that the territorial integrity of our country can be resorted by military means, a mistake to be paid for by the Georgian people. The defeat was predictable. Russia had repeatedly declared that it will rush to the defense of South Ossetia – different to 1990. Q: Many signs indicate that a majority wants to follow their president into NATO. This is not true. In early 2008 a referendum was held where supposedly 79% voted for the accession to NATO. But these are no real figures, especially after the war. The war demonstrated that the assumption, that NATO could secure the territorial integrity of Georgia, is wrong. On the contrary, NATO means more conflicts and less stability. Q: You refer to the territorial integrity but would you accept the autonomy which South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Adjaria enjoyed in the period of the Soviet Union? Stalin is being blamed form all sides to have established the autonomies. But the statute did not originate from the USSR, it is older. It was indeed chartered in the Soviet Union but it only displayed actual power relations. After the decay of the Tsarist empire South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Adjara became de facto independent, similar to the recent past. They have been integrated into Georgia with their autonomy rights right from the start. Only its socialist character of Georgia made that possible. Today many people do not want to hear that but those three peoples were well off in the Soviet Union. This historic record cannot be erased although all three sides try to do so, namely the leaderships of Georgia, South Ossetia and Russia. Q: Why then the USSR did not merge South and North Ossetia? First of all for economic reasons because they are separated by the peaks of the Caucasus. South Ossetia used to be mainly connected with Georgia and also in the future another economic integration will not be possible. Q: Again, what do you think of the restoration of the autonomy? The South Ossetians themselves refuse the autonomy offered by the government. We insist on the restoration of the territorial integrity of Georgia and do not support the disintegration. But with a government in Tblisi which wants to join NATO at any cost, this is not possible. We support South Ossetia and Abkhazia inasfar as they struggle against the accession into NATO. We are for the unity of Georgia in friendship with Russia. Q: Why the South Ossetians refused the offer? Because Tbilisi is following NATO and Washington which is being refused by both Ossetians and Abkhazians. And one should not underestimate the enormous Russian influence. The situation could be compared with the one in Transnistria. There they go for a confederative solution by the mediation of Moscow. Although the Moldavian government does ogle with NATO, it was keen not to completely alienate Russia. Q: Are you ready to sit on one table with South Ossetians and Abkhazians? Certainly, we commonly fight against NATO and the war waged by the pro-American forces. We are the ones in the Georgian society with whom the South Ossetians and Abkhazians should seek good relations with. Q: What are the chances of the anti-NATO forces in Georgia? The propaganda apparatus set in motion by NATO is very powerful. There is for example not a single TV channel which counters this line. Nevertheless the popular sentiments changed after the war. Many understood that the rapprochement with NATO does not serve the interests of the people and that friendly relations with Russia are indispensible. Furthermore we need to be part of the Russian economic area in order to revive our economy. Maybe the relationship of forces between those two lines is 50:50. If you take for example a look at our neighbor Armenia our geostrategic situation is, however, different. There all are pro-Russian regardless whether they are right or left wing. This flows from history and the difficult relations to Turkey which continue up to now. Q: Are you able to co-operate with the official opposition to Saakashvili? It is a right wing opposition fully aligned with him in the war and equally pro-Western and pro-NATO. Q: Are you allowed to freely express your positions? Public protest against NATO today is impossible in Georgia. I myself was detained and tortured in the aftermath of the war. The Communist Party is declared a terrorist group and any opposition against the war is labeled destructive force. A kind of Georgian Patriot Act has been enacted, which de facto bans us. Q: What you think about Chechnya? The Chechen tragedy was induced by Yeltsin. He set up a regime which followed the interest of the capitalist oligarchy and led a wrong policy with regard to the nationalities. He betrayed the Russian people and steamrolled the Chechens with tanks. Putin just treads in his footsteps. We are opposed to the disintegration of the Russian Federation but this aim must be reached by different methods. If Moscow does not change his policy it will create new problems in the Caucasus as we face them too.

RUSSIA'S RESPONSE TO NATO ENCIRCLEMENT

This is a tale of US expansion
not Russian aggression

War in the Caucasus is as much the product of an American imperial drive as local conflicts. It's likely to be a taste of things to come

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Seumas Milne
The Guardian

The outcome of six grim days of bloodshed in the Caucasus has triggered an outpouring of the most nauseating hypocrisy from western politicians and their captive media. As talking heads thundered against Russian imperialism and brutal disproportionality, US vice-president Dick Cheney, faithfully echoed by Gordon Brown and David Miliband, declared that "Russian aggression must not go unanswered". George Bush denounced Russia for having "invaded a sovereign neighbouring state" and threatening "a democratic government". Such an action, he insisted, "is unacceptable in the 21st century".

Could these by any chance be the leaders of the same governments that in 2003 invaded and occupied - along with Georgia, as luck would have it - the sovereign state of Iraq on a false pretext at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives? Or even the two governments that blocked a ceasefire in the summer of 2006 as Israel pulverised Lebanon's infrastructure and killed more than a thousand civilians in retaliation for the capture or killing of five soldiers?

You'd be hard put to recall after all the fury over Russian aggression that it was actually Georgia that began the war last Thursday with an all-out attack on South Ossetia to "restore constitutional order" - in other words, rule over an area it has never controlled since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nor, amid the outrage at Russian bombardments, have there been much more than the briefest references to the atrocities committed by Georgian forces against citizens it claims as its own in South Ossetia's capital Tskhinvali. Several hundred civilians were killed there by Georgian troops last week, along with Russian soldiers operating under a 1990s peace agreement: "I saw a Georgian soldier throw a grenade into a basement full of women and children," one Tskhinvali resident, Saramat Tskhovredov, told reporters on Tuesday.

Might it be because Georgia is what Jim Murphy, Britain's minister for Europe, called a "small beautiful democracy". Well it's certainly small and beautiful, but both the current president, Mikheil Saakashvili, and his predecessor came to power in western-backed coups, the most recent prettified as a "Rose revolution". Saakashvili was then initially rubber-stamped into office with 96% of the vote before establishing what the International Crisis Group recently described as an "increasingly authoritarian" government, violently cracking down on opposition dissent and independent media last November. "Democratic" simply seems to mean "pro-western" in these cases.

The long-running dispute over South Ossetia - as well as Abkhazia, the other contested region of Georgia - is the inevitable consequence of the breakup of the Soviet Union. As in the case of Yugoslavia, minorities who were happy enough to live on either side of an internal boundary that made little difference to their lives feel quite differently when they find themselves on the wrong side of an international state border.

Such problems would be hard enough to settle through negotiation in any circumstances. But add in the tireless US promotion of Georgia as a pro-western, anti-Russian forward base in the region, its efforts to bring Georgia into Nato, the routing of a key Caspian oil pipeline through its territory aimed at weakening Russia's control of energy supplies, and the US-sponsored recognition of the independence of Kosovo - whose status Russia had explicitly linked to that of South Ossetia and Abkhazia - and conflict was only a matter of time.

The CIA has in fact been closely involved in Georgia since the Soviet collapse. But under the Bush administration, Georgia has become a fully fledged US satellite. Georgia's forces are armed and trained by the US and Israel. It has the third-largest military contingent in Iraq - hence the US need to airlift 800 of them back to fight the Russians at the weekend. Saakashvili's links with the neoconservatives in Washington are particularly close: the lobbying firm headed by US Republican candidate John McCain's top foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, has been paid nearly $900,000 by the Georgian government since 2004.

But underlying the conflict of the past week has also been the Bush administration's wider, explicit determination to enforce US global hegemony and prevent any regional challenge, particularly from a resurgent Russia. That aim was first spelled out when Cheney was defence secretary under Bush's father, but its full impact has only been felt as Russia has begun to recover from the disintegration of the 1990s.

Over the past decade, Nato's relentless eastward expansion has brought the western military alliance hard up against Russia's borders and deep into former Soviet territory. American military bases have spread across eastern Europe and central Asia, as the US has helped install one anti-Russian client government after another through a series of colour-coded revolutions. Now the Bush administration is preparing to site a missile defence system in eastern Europe transparently targeted at Russia.

By any sensible reckoning, this is not a story of Russian aggression, but of US imperial expansion and ever tighter encirclement of Russia by a potentially hostile power. That a stronger Russia has now used the South Ossetian imbroglio to put a check on that expansion should hardly come as a surprise. What is harder to work out is why Saakashvili launched last week's attack and whether he was given any encouragement by his friends in Washington.

If so, it has spectacularly backfired, at savage human cost. And despite Bush's attempts to talk tough yesterday, the war has also exposed the limits of US power in the region. As long as Georgia proper's independence is respected - best protected by opting for neutrality - that should be no bad thing. Unipolar domination of the world has squeezed the space for genuine self-determination and the return of some counterweight has to be welcome. But the process of adjustment also brings huge dangers. If Georgia had been a member of Nato, this week's conflict would have risked a far sharper escalation. That would be even more obvious in the case of Ukraine - which yesterday gave a warning of the potential for future confrontation when its pro-western president threatened to restrict the movement of Russian ships in and out of their Crimean base in Sevastopol. As great power conflict returns, South Ossetia is likely to be only a taste of things to come.

s.milne@guardian.co.uk