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gegen das Vergessen - not to forget
Heute ist der Tag der Vertragsverletzung des Sechs-Punkte-Abkommens vom 16.08.2008 durch Russland!

Seven Questions: Russia’s Big Mistake

30.08.2008 | Foreign Policy | Link zur Quelle | Bilder | Video |
Think Russia is the big winner in Georgia? Think again: Regional expert and CIA veteran Paul A. Goble explains how Moscow has shot itself in the foot by recognizing South Ossetia and Abkhazia and why Russia’s nouveau riche might be the ones who pull the Kremlin back from the brink.
Foreign Policy: There’s still a lot of debate about just who started the war in Georgia. Russia, of course, claims that Georgia started it, and Georgia says it was provoked by shelling from South Ossetia. Many others see Georgia falling into a long-planned Russian trap. What’s your view? What do you think provoked this war?

Paul Goble: Well, there are two different questions: what provoked this war and what caused it. After the NATO summit in Bucharest, when the United States indicated it would press for Georgia to be included in NATO, the Russian government, as Mr. Putin indicated at the time, was sufficiently angry that Moscow began planning to be able to use force at some point. I believe that [Georgian President Mikheil] Saakashvili gave Moscow the occasion for the use of such force. Had Saakashvili not moved in the way that he did, it would have been far more difficult for Moscow to present itself as acting within the limits of its [peacekeeping] mandate.

However, once the Russian government moved beyond the borders of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and once it moved into parts of Georgia that had never been in dispute, this was an act of Russian aggression, even if the trigger was an unfortunate miscalculation by Tbilisi.

FP: Russian President Dmitry Medvedev writes in Wednesday’s Financial Times that he chose to recognize the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia because “some nations find it impossible to live under the tutelage of another” and because he couldn’t “tell the Abkhazians and South Ossetians… that what was good for the Kosovo Albanians was not good for them.” What do you make of his argument?

PG: Moscow’s effort to blame the West and blame NATO action in recognizing Kosovo doesn’t cut as much ice as I think Moscow expected, but the Russian government continues to make it. It’s significant that the Serbians are very, very unhappy, because in Georgia Russia is doing exactly what it denounced in Kosovo.

Medvedev’s comment can be played elsewhere as well. The country in Eurasia that has the most people who would like to be independent is not Georgia—it is the Russian Federation. In the words of one Chechen I saw quoted the other day, “Are we any worse than the Abkhazians?” So, Medvedev has unsheathed a sword that has two edges.
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FP: Medvedev also writes, “In international relations, you cannot have one rule for some and another rule for others.”

PG: Well, he’s just done that, hasn’t he? He said there’s one rule for Abkhazians and there’s another rule for Chechens. I have yet to see a convincing argument on how those two crises are in principle different.

The Russian government is basically saying, “If you’re friends with us, we’ll support territorial integrity; if you’re not friends with us, we will support self-determination for minorities.” That is a pretty heavy-handed approach, and it’s one that at, least so far, isn’t getting much positive support around the world. Indeed, in the first 24 hours, the only political leadership in the world that has supported Russia is Hamas, and that’s hardly much of a recommendation.

FP: So, what’s the difference between Kosovo and Abkhazia and South Ossetia?

PG: I’m not an expert on Yugoslavia, but what I see is the following. The first difference is that Kosovo did not become a client state of someone else. It did not get absorbed by Albania, as Serbs and Russians said would happen at the time. With all due respect, the governments in South Ossetia and to a lesser extent Abkhazia are clearly client states. The South Ossetian government says whatever Moscow wants to be said, and you don’t have that in Kosovo.

The second difference is that nobody went in and said, “We have international peacekeeping responsibilities, and now we’re going to put our forces in so we can recognize this place.” That’s in effect what the Russians did.

FP: But if the South Ossetians and the Abkhazians don’t want to be part of Georgia, why should the West support President Saakashvili’s position? Why is it a good idea to support Georgia’s “territorial integrity”?

PG: Since 1932—since the Stimson Doctrine was articulated when the Japanese seized Manchuria and transformed it into “Manchukuo” as a client state—it has been (largely) consistent American policy that the United States does not recognize territorial change achieved by an act of aggression. So, the issue is not, as the Russians have put it, between simple territory integrity or the right of nations to self-determination. It is whether the United States and Western governments will accept border changes brought about by the use of force. And that’s what has happened in this instance.
FP: What about Azerbaijan, which has the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave? Should Azerbaijan worry about being next on Moscow’s hit list?

PG: Russian policy in this region is vastly more variegated than we assume. What Russia will do to promote its interests in Ukraine or Azerbaijan or Georgia are three different things.

For one thing, the Azerbaijanis have a lot more money than the Georgians do, and they’ve invested more in their military. Azerbaijan is far more concerned about being able to ship its oil across Georgian territory through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline than almost anything else. Earlier in the week when that pipeline was not working, Azerbaijan was sending oil through Russia to Novorossiisk, which of course gave Russia a hold, and it was also sending oil south across Iran, an action I suspect a large number of American officials would have problems with.

What Moscow may do either in eastern Ukraine or especially in Crimea is very different than what it has done in Georgia—not only because Ukraine is a lot bigger. It’s really only the Americans who seem to think that all these countries are somehow branch offices. Russia has a very, very good set of experts who understand just how different these places are.

Now, the domestic reaction in Russia hasn’t gotten a lot of attention, but you’ve got people speaking out. You’ve had demonstrations against the war. You’ve got soldiers’ mothers’ committees going to court because the Russian Defense Ministry lied and said that there would be no draftees used in combat, which they were. Boris Nemtsov, the opposition leader, reportedly wrote on his blog that if Moscow continues on the path it is now, “Russia and Russians will suffer even more.”

FP: But this is a minority viewpoint, right?

PG: I’m not suggesting that if a vote were taken tomorrow, Russians would vote down what Putin and Medvedev have done. But it’s wrong to assume that every Russian thinks this was the greatest act of statecraft in the history of the world. There are a lot of people who don’t, and while I don’t think they set the weather, to ignore the role they play is a mistake.

I believe that one of the reasons the fighting stopped was not because there weren’t people in the defense ministry who thought it should go on for a bit longer, but because in the first two working days of the war, there was a total of some $8 billion net capital outflow from Russia. You’re talking about serious consequences for wealthy Russians, and they matter a whole lot more than the soldiers’ mothers’ committees or Boris Nemtsov or Garry Kasparov.
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Because of this war, Russians are no longer going to be as welcome in foreign countries. We’re probably going to see the spread of what is an unfortunate thing: In Germany and France, Europeans are now choosing to go on trips to resorts that the tour operators promise are “Russian free.” In human terms, that’s ugly, but in collective terms that’s a source of enormous pressure.

Polls tell us that for many Russians, the single most important right they acquired after 1991 was the right to travel. If getting a visa becomes more difficult, Russians are going to have a harder time moving about. It’s going to be harder to get their children into elite international schools. There’s going to be less money around. So, there’s probably a constituency, and a pretty large one among an influential group of people, who are going to go to the Russian government and say, “You’re hitting us where it matters most: in our pocketbooks.” And that’s a source of influence that should not be discounted at all.

Paul A. Goble is a long-time specialist, at the Central Intelligence Agency and elsewhere, on the non-Russian peoples of Eurasia. Currently director of research and publications at the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy, he blogs at WindowonEurasia and for the New York Times.
Stichworte: Georgien, Abchasien, Süd-Ossetien, Russland, Sprache: englisch, Archiv: #

The Creeping Caucasus Catastrophe

23.08.2008 | Azer.com | Link zur Quelle | Bilder | Video |
by Thomas Goltz
Russian troops and tanks may have completed (at least partially) their pull-out from Georgian territory seized during its August 8, 2008 blitz of this tiny post-Soviet country, but that should be little reason for friends of Georgia to celebrate, as the real (if creeping) catastrophe has just begun.
In addition to humiliating the Georgian army and generally reducing any Georgian military installations to rubble, the Russian blitz has humiliated the EU, the US and NATO by exposing just how little 'friends of Georgia' could do in the country's hour of need.
Even after Russia has announced that it regards in compliance with all points of the emergency cease-fire plan negotiated by France, Russian troops continue to occupy numerous locations in western Georgia, and are in the process of setting up a self-declared "security zone" well outside the legally defined geographic limits of the two contested "autonomous" areas of Georgia that sparked the week-long conflict.
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Baku-Tbilisi Ceyhan (BTC) Pipeline
The first to come to mind is the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline linking Azerbaijani oil and gas fields to an eastern Mediterranean terminal [Ceyhan] in Turkey. The BP-run line was shut some weeks before the conflict, due to Kurdish sabotage in Turkey that does not seem to be connected to the brief Georgian-Russian war. BTC will, no doubt, come back online in the near future. But the idea of building other lines through a country that might get bombed again will be met with extreme caution by Caspian hydrocarbon producers.
Azerbaijan has now started to export its crude via a smaller gauge line that passes through Russia, even though the $4 billion BTC was specifically built to by-pass Russia. Longtime observers in the region can only chuckle at the idea of the rapid completion of a new railway line, the Kars-Tbilisi-Baku (KTB) initiated with such fanfare in the Turkish city of Kars on July 14 of this year. This so-called 'Steel Silk Road' project was to spur trade from Central Asia all the way to Europe when completed in 2014. Azerbaijan had advanced credits to Georgia to pay for its portion of the line, but will soon be looking at a credit crunch itself until the BTC (and another cross-Georgia line that ends at the Black Sea terminal of Supsa) come back on-line.
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Root Cause of Invasion
So, what was the root cause of the invasion? In addition to the standard canard about "Resurgent Russia Under Vladimir Putin" (which is certainly true), the conflict can be traced back to the time leading to the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, when there (briefly) existed a rabidly nationalist (and anti-Soviet) regime in the Georgian capital Tbilisi, that declared its policy as one of "Georgia for the Georgians."
As part of this policy, the regime made efforts to dissolve the special status of the autonomous district, resulting in a brief, bitter war of secession that effectively detached about a third of the territory from the control of the central government. But another third remained under de-facto Georgian control; the remaining third of the region was more or less uninhabited.
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The Future?
Lastly, there is the question of where all this leads.
At this point, the West has few pressure points on Moscow. Weirdly, the best might be oil. If the West (and now China and India) could wean themselves off their hydrocarbon addiction and cause the collapse of Russia's main stream of income and control over much of western Europe, its behavior might be modified.
In the short-term, Moscow has all the cards.
Get ready for a long, cold winter in Georgia, with social chaos around the corner.
Stichworte: Georgien, Abchasien, Süd-Ossetien, Russland, Sprache: englisch, Archiv: #

Georgien als Schauplatz der “neuen Kriege” dieser Zeit

21.08.2008 | Baltische Rundschau | Link zur Quelle | Bilder | Video |
von Anton Landgraf
Nach dem Ende der bipolaren Weltordnung entsteht ein Geflecht aus geopolitischem Großmachtstreben und asymmetrischen wirtschaftlichen, politischen und religiösen Interessen lokaler Oligarchen. Ist der Krieg in Georgien eine Vorschau auf die Struktur der »neuen Kriege« dieser Zeit?

Die Reise war ein Alptraum für die Sicherheitsberater und nur mit der Panik zu erklären, die viele ehemalige Ostblockstaaten erfasst hat. Gemeinsam mit dem polnischen Präsidenten Lech Kaczynski trafen die Regierungschefs der drei baltischen Staaten am Dienstag vergangener Woche in Tiflis ein, um Georgien ihrer Solidarität angesichts der »russischen Aggression« zu versichern. Unterwegs nahmen sie in Kiew noch den ukrainischen Präsidenten Viktor Juschtschenko mit. Ein Attentat oder eine verirrte Rakete über dem Kriegsgebiet hätte auf einen Schlag fünf Staatsoberhäupter gefährdet.

Solche Sicherheitsbedenken erschienen den osteuropäischen Politikern banal angesichts viel größerer Ängste, die das Auftreten Russlands im südlichen Kaukasus bei ihnen provozierte. »Heute Georgien, morgen dann die Ukraine, die baltischen Staaten und Polen«, erklärte der Sprecher des polnischen Präsidenten Lech Kaczynski die Motive für die Reise.
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Stichworte: Georgien, Ukraine, Süd-Ossetien, Krieg-2008, Sprache: deutsch, Archiv: #2

What is Caucasian stability and cooperation? What can Turkey do in the Caucasus?

19.08.2008 | NATO | Link zur Quelle | Bilder | Video |
PM Tayyip Erdoğan made public his proposal for the establishment of a Caucasus Stability and Cooperation Platform on Aug. 13 in Moscow and on Aug. 14 in Tbilisi.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Aug. 11 said that Ankara may launch an initiative for the formation of a "Caucasus Alliance," following the Balkan model, adding that the Russian Federation should be part of it.
President Abdullah Gül said on Aug. 12 he supports the "Caucasus Stability Forum" idea voiced by Erdoğan. "I believe the idea of establishing a Caucasus Stability Forum is important. If there is stability in the region and if problems can be solved before they grow in magnitude and if there is a secure environment, then this will bring economic development and welfare to the people in the region," Gül said. Prime Minister Erdoğan made public his proposal for the establishment of a Caucasus Stability and Cooperation Platform on Aug. 13 in Moscow and on Aug. 14 in Tbilisi. The various titles given by Erdoğan and Gül to this proposal concerning the Caucasus -- the Caucasus Alliance, the Caucasus Stability Forum and the Caucasus Stability and Cooperation Platform -- imply that Turkey's policy on this issue is still ripe. What is the Caucasus Stability Pact? What is Turkey trying to do now by giving a green light to the Caucasus Stability Pact (CSP) which it disapproved of in 2000? Moreover, the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe (SPSEE), which is advertised as a model for the Caucasus Stability Pact, was terminated in 2008 on the grounds that it was a clumsy and dysfunctional organization. Apparently, Turkey has made up its mind on the name, choosing "Caucasus Stability and Cooperation Platform" in order to make a fresh proposal by securing the involvement of the Russian Federation.
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EXPERTS ANALYZE CAUCASUS PLATFORM by HASAN KANBOLAT
Stichworte: Georgien, Abchasien, Süd-Ossetien, Sprache: englisch, Archiv: #

Plan mit Folgen

12.08.2008 | SZ | Link zur Quelle | Bilder | Video |
"Schon die UdSSR stützte Separatisten, um ihren Einfluss in den Sowjetrepubliken zu behalten: Die Wurzeln des Konfliktes um die georgische Region Südossetien. ... "
"Dokumente dazu publizierten die Moskowskije Nowosti in den Jahren 1992/93. Das demokratisch gesinnte Blatt, dessen englische Ausgabe Moscow News zum internationalen Sprachrohr der Reformer während der Perestroika wurde, belegte, dass die sowjetischen Geheimdienste bewusst Konflikte in Spannungsregionen schürten, auch im Kaukasus. Mancherorts wurden sogar beide Konfliktparteien aufgerüstet. ..."
Stichworte: Russland, Georgien, Süd-Ossetien, KGB, Kriegshinweise, Sprache: deutsch, Archiv: #1