georgia/russia: war?

[scottdisco]

from the archives

the ideology of the Great Power, what we call in Russian derzhavnost, that is, the view of the state as a highly valuable mystical being that every citizen and society as a whole must serve. That ideology was not alien to the Russian political elite under Yeltsin either, but subscribing to it is now obligatory....In today's Russia it is bad form not to be a derzhavnik.

Sergei Kovalev, 9th August, 2001.

Putin himself probably does not know what to do and probably does not want to understand. Chechnya for him is a tough psychological issue. He seems calm and sensible, until you start talking about Chechnya. He is the same to a lesser extent when you start talking about freedom of speech.

 

[scottdisco]

An authoritarian president, an ineffective opposition, an unbalanced polity, and a country once again regarded in the west as a small component of the “Russia problem” - all this equals a political impasse in Tbilisi. Tedo Japaridze, the former foreign minister of Georgia, appeals to the country’s western friends to help resolve a problem that is theirs too.

here.

 

[urbanite]

@urbanite

sure, there's a lot of biased media - much moreso in the U.S. than Western Europe I think (also in Eastern Europe but anti-Russian feelings there are obv understandable). there's also an enormous difference btwn a largely free press - which can be manipulated but not silenced - and one effectively muzzled under threat of death.

The end result seems to be pretty much the same. With so much self regulation as shown in the US as an example the power of the press seems quite ineffectual.

The anti-Russian feelings are indeed not something which is easy to understand. Maybe we are stuck in the wrong mind frame, but under the USSR everyone was supposed to be these friendly states with brother nations, etc. The thing is often what they chalk up to USSR doing horrible things, well it was happening accross the whole of the nation pretty much evenly... not much of the events that went on the Russian territory are publicised though. Also If you look across the leaders of the USSR, there are very few ethnic Russians. It's bizzarre... at least from the point of view of someone who studied history in a Russian school, when Eastern European countries start saying that forexample there was the Great Famine thing in Ukraine and calling it a holocaust... well Russian territory was hit just as much at the same time with the same famine.

the point isn't whether Putin personally ordered this or that killing (tho "lack of foolproof evidence" doesn't equate to innocence), it's that his Russia - well his & that of the siloviki - is an exceedingly dangerous place for journalists & opponents of the regime.

but what happens to the whole "innocent until proven guilty" concept here? Foolproof might be the wrong word, but nonetheless.

The opponenets just aren't even entertaining to be any real as an alternative to be honest, and I don't get much sense from the typical young people of considering them as anything more than a bad joke. Maybe I'm in the wrong circles, but yeah on the whole at least I get the sense that they get a lot of press for nothing. They don't manage to jump through some legal hoops to get a demonstration approved, they get loads of coverage.

re: Chechyna - no offense but I think you're willfully deluding yourself if you think the Russians haven't done an enormous amount of grisly, terrible stuff. the Chechens have done their share as well, of course. this:

I wasn't saying it wasn't an ugly and horrible war. I doubt that it is actually possible to have a pretty one. I just think it is complicated enough that it shouldn't be reduced to the simple big Russia against a small Chechnya which just wanted its independence. Also tying it in with the whole Georgia incident which I would argue happened on the more geopolitical grounds is just wrong.

I find quite hard to believe - there were foreign fighters, certainly, but blaming it all on foreigners & calling everything "terrorism" not only devalues the term but also sidesteps the fact that the Chechens had many legitimate grievances of their own before any foreigners showed up. it sounds like propaganda, in other words.

I do generalise a bit too much I guess. It's more on account of trying to create a bit too much contrast and raise a point I guess... Maybe it is also a bit of a contrarian streak of my character breaking through. The thing is there were foreign fighters on the ground, who helped to train and set targets. One of the main field commanders was Saudi from what I remember and there were definite links to Al Qaida, with many of the videos filmed used as reports back to the boss to get more funding. Clearly i'm not saying this is what everyone in the country did or thought, but that did have an influence on how things went.

 

[urbanite]

Quote:
Putin himself probably does not know what to do and probably does not want to understand. Chechnya for him is a tough psychological issue. He seems calm and sensible, until you start talking about Chechnya. He is the same to a lesser extent when you start talking about freedom of speech.

I think you'll find that to be the case with a lot of Russians probably. But to kill over a book? I mean the book was clearly not good publicity for Russia as it is and I would argue that for a while he definitely did care about the image Russia had internationally. Creating even more bad publicity just seems out of the question at that point. Maybe I am deluded, but I think it just sounds too insane, with someone as cold and calculating.

 

[vimothy]

I don't know how much of this is relevant. These are the facts, as I understand them:

1. Russian forces have committed extensive human rights abuses in Chechnya.
   
2. There is a Russian leadership.
   
3. The Russian leadership is responsible for the actions of its subordinates.

 

[vimothy]

BTW: http://cpj.org/europe/russia/

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

The end result seems to be pretty much the same.

no, it's simply not. not at all. for all the Western media's varied & serious faults it's still possible for Western journalists to publish a story critical of nearly anything w/out being killed.

The anti-Russian feelings are indeed not something which is easy to understand...

oh come the f**k on. Russia has a long, long history, well pre-dating the Communists I might add, of meddling with, invading, annexing, etc. her neighbors. for similar reasons many Latin American & Caribbean countries are well wary of the U.S. that stuff about "brother nations" & things spread "evenly" is just laughable. tell that to all the minorities who were targeted w/Russification, the peoples forcibly relocated, all the countries that were occupied by Red Army troops. tell it to Hungary 56, Czech 68, etc.

complaining about "anti-Russian feelings" is just a sidestep anyway.

I just think it is complicated enough that it shouldn't be reduced to the simple big Russia against a small Chechnya which just wanted its independence.

but that's what it is. the Chechens have been rebelling against Russian rule for over 150 years. they rebelled against the Tsars, they tried to set up their own country during the Revolution, they rebelled against Stalin (who had a 1/2 a million of them forcibly relocated), they begin agitating for independence again pretty much as soon as the USSR ended. all the AQ/foreign fighters stuff is a byproduct of the struggle for independence, not the other way around.

saying that all wars are ugly isn't an excuse for anything either.

 

[scottdisco]

superb letter

 

[vimothy]

Trudat, Scott, and worth copying and pasting in full, I think:

Today [23rd February] is World Chechnya Day. On this day in 1944 Stalin deported the entire Chechen population of 500,000 people to Siberia and Kazakhstan, where almost half of them perished in 13 years of exile.

Sixty-five years on, the Chechen people are still suffering. After the collapse of the Soviet Union Chechnya existed as an independent state in all but name before Russian troops invaded in 1994. Following a bloody war, a peace accord was signed and democratic elections were held in Chechnya in 1997, only for Vladimir Putin to order its invasion in 1999, resulting in the displacement of several hundred thousand refugees and the death of another 100,000 civilians.

The Kremlin now claims that the war is over and that there is peace and stability in the region. The reality is that the intensive bombings have been replaced with a regime of fear and oppression which has eroded civil society in Chechnya and suppressed any open and democratic voice. Visits are carefully choreographed for western journalists and dignitaries. They do not see the daily realities of Moscow-imposed Ramzan Kadyrov's rule.

The facade of stability is dangerous. The only way to establish lasting peace in Chechnya is through free and fair elections, which last took place over 10 years ago. On this World Chechnya Day, we urge President Medvedev to find a genuine political settlement that will finally put an end to an entire people's suffering.

Ivar Amundsen Director, Chechnya Peace Forum,
Malcolm Rifkind MP, Andrew Motion, Ken Loach, Prof AC Grayling, Dr Benjamin Zephaniah, Andre Glucksmann, Aki Kaurismäki, Prof Brendan Simms, Jonathan Heawood, Glen Howard, Danny Alexander MP, Raymond Jolliffe, Nicolas Rea, Peter Tatchell

 

[scottdisco]

one side of the story, we'll get plenty of these 'one year on' pieces in the papers, and this is just one, human face all that, plus some new developments re observers, anyway without further ado; staying with Georgian families who fled S Ossetia in this case

The Kremlin has also forced the withdrawal of two international observer missions from the conflict zone and, in breach of its ceasefire commitments, has prevented the third, the European Union Monitoring Mission (EUMM), from operating in either South Ossetia or Abkhazia.
Even more worryingly, the EUMM came under attack for the first time when an ambulance driver was killed in an assault on a monitors' convoy near Abkhazia in June.
"It was a definite attack on the EUMM," said Steve Bird, a Foreign Office official attached to the mission. "The mine used in the attack was remotely detonated."
The EUMM says that Georgia has abided by the ceasefire agreements, brokered by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, that ended last year's war, but the Russians have not.
...
A year ago, during an intense Russian arterial assault, the Sunday Telegraph took shelter with Makhvala Orshuashvili by the wall of her garden in the village of Tkviavi, where she fed us peaches from her orchard, shouting over the noise of the shells.
We found her where we left her, sitting on a bench outside the garden – only this time she was wearing a black headscarf to denote mourning.
When the Ossetians came through, raping and pillaging, they came across her husband returning home with bread. Telling him to run, they shot him in the back and he died later of starvation after rejecting food.

here

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

...Moscow wanted control over Georgia, both to prevent the construction of a gas pipeline that would reduce Europe's energy dependence on Russia and to find an easier way of supplying its own troops in Armenia...The law of the strongest will apply.

right then.

it's really too bad Saakashvili is such an unlikable petty tyrant himself. and a fool to boot, for taking the Russian bait.

speaking of fools, everyone's seen this? I like the suggestion at the end that Biden is a Cheney-style éminence grise, which of course wasn't even really true for Cheney. o where are thou in our hour of diplomatic clumsiness, Russia Expert Sarah Palin?

 

[scottdisco]

well, quite. (goes without saying it has been noted i didn't say i endorsed every angle of the article.)

did you see the Tedo Japaridze piece i linked to up-thread? admirable stuff.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

well, quite. (goes without saying it has been noted i didn't say i endorsed every angle of the article.)

oh no, didn't mean to imply. actually I thought that bit was the $ quote. & I reckon the law of the strongest will apply - at least insomuch as we're currently far too overextended to get into it w/Russia & no one else seems very interested, at least not over the Caucasus. doubtless many EU countries would like to be less dependent on Russian natural gas but there's not much they can do. I dunno, viewing the recent war in light of energy & the relative strength of Russia vs. the NATO countries (& their attempt to bring former Warsaw Bloc into their fold). one other interesting thing is that this - esp. the American reaction, or lack thereof, to the war - is kinda emblematic of the shift of American foreign power from Western Europe to the Middle East.

 

[scottdisco]

very well put wrt your final sentence, yo.

purely from a British pov, there's been so much discussion here in recent years (even in the finance pages of the tabloids) about energy security and Russia, but they do hold cards. (and we are less exposed than many of our continental mainland neighbours, granted.)

turning the tap off occasionally has been proven to work for the Kremlin. you're right, there's little to be done AFAICT. for as much as Biden shooting his mouth off as how he sees it contains a lot of pretty damn accurate observations, the clincher on the flipside is "relative strength", as you point out; trudat.

i wonder whether Merkel's predecessor is still energy consulting etc? he certainly went off in that direction immediately upon leaving Berlin.

P.S.
i have one or two Tbilisi street protest caps on my youtube channel FWIW.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

very well put wrt your final sentence, yo.

well, I like to keep up with which wars I & my fellow citizens will be paying for &/or fighting in for the next 10-20 yrs. & a war w/Russia ain't one of them, unless a whole lot of really bad stuff happens. which it could.

Russia does hold certain cards it's true but the flip is that, yeah, Biden's mostly right. the economy, energy $ aside, sucks, crumbling infrastructure, the total fertility rate is an insanely low 1.4, etc. Actually, & this isn't the first time I've made this point I'm sure, it kinda reminds me of Iran. security regime & all, the IRGC vs. the ex-KGB siloviki clans. it's a rough analogy tbs & one that shouldn't be overdrawn, but nonetheless.

so in this context Russia's heavy-handedness w/the pipeline strikes me a bit like the mullahs' crackdown - desperation, tighter you squeeze the more slips thru your fingers kinda thing. but even a crippled tiger is still dangerous when you back it into the corner w/missile shields & whatever else. what's ironic is that in starkly geopolitical terms Russia & the U.S. share a ton of interests. certainly more than we share w/Israel or, you might even say, some of our European allies (not that I'm necessarily advocating thinking in starkly geopolitical terms, tbc).

 

[vimothy]

The Roots of Germany’s Russia Policy -- Thomas Rid, Survival

Abstract
In the aftermath of the Cold War, many American observers expected that the new Germany would more or less follow in the strong Atlanticist tradition of the old West Germany and its Conservative leadership in particular. A rejuvenated, reunited Germany is now seeking a more prominent role in international affairs, but its foreign policy is evolving away from the staunch Atlanticism that predominated during the Cold War. Two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Germany unquestionably sees the United States as a crucial ally, but also sees Russia as an inevitable partner for the stability of the European order. The bottom line for most German leaders is that the isolation of Russia is unacceptable and must be avoided at all costs. It would deprive the West of its few remaining economic levers over Russian policy and leave Europe and the United States with only cruder means of influencing Russian behaviour. Meanwhile, Russian nationalism and even militarism could accelerate. The sense that Germany has become Russia's last strong link with the West only intensifies German concern, driving German leaders to redouble their efforts to maintain good relations.

 

[urbanite]

here's an interesting account of the whole thing... seems to be the most balanced view to have come out... a bit late though...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8281990.stm

 

[polystyle]

It DID take awhile didn't it ?
And yes, good to look at what both parties were up to .