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: #