A little over a year, on the morning of 8 August
2008, those of us in Abkhazia who had not stayed up to watch the
late-night news awoke to reports of the Georgian military assault
on the centre and the environs of Tskhinval (Tskhinvali), the
capital of South Osssetia. It was not entirely unexpected: there
had been reports of Georgian plans to attack Abkhazia itself in
spring 2009, and overall tensions had been high. But it was still
a shock, and we speculated on the consequences for Abkhazia and
the region if Russia did not swiftly move to repel the Georgian
advance across the demilitarised zone around South Ossetia.
The sense of Abkhazia's potential vulnerability was increased by
awareness that the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, had in
2006 broken the terms of the Moscow accords of 1994, which
formalised the ceasefire in Abkhazia after the brutal war of
1992-93 that had ended in a shattered Abkhazia securing its
freedom from Georgian rule. Saakashvili had done this by
introducing a contingent of military personnel into the one part
of Abkhazia (the upper Kodor [Kodori] valley) that had remained
under Georgian control after the war. This illegal act - which
Georgia's western partners all too typically chose to ignore - was
accompanied and followed by frequent boasts that Tbilisi would
soon "recover" South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
The outcome, in what turned out to be five days of intense combat
on 8-12 August 2008, was very different. The Russian military
responded to the Georgians' initial assault with overwhelming
force of its own, including the destruction of Saakashvili's
arsenal stored at the military base in Gori (thus ensuring no
further Georgian military advances in that area for the
foreseeable future).
In Abkhazia itself, the authorities both forestalled any possible
action from Georgia and took advantage of the situation by
launching an operation in the Kodor valley; this was retaken over
two days, with no loss of life on the Georgian side or amongst the
local Svan population. The Georgian troops stationed there duly
fled without offering any resistance, abandoning their equipment
in the process. Indeed, a staggering amount of weaponry and
munitions were uncovered in the aftermath; Mikheil Saakashvili's
hubris was reflected in the presence in the Kodor of a "NATO
Information Centre". The operation extended to military stores in
Senaki and the port of Poti (both in neighbouring Mingrelia), thus
protecting Abkhazia from future land-incursion or
seaborne-assault.
The cost of misreading
The decision by Mikheil Saakasvhili to activate his battle-plans
against South Ossetia on the night of 7-8 August 2008 was
extraordinarily stupid - so much so, that it is hardly surprising
if many in the west instantly embraced Tbilisi's charge that
Russia must have made the first move. This rush to judgment
regrettably skewed reporting of the entire war by many western
news-media outlets, including the BBC (thus continuing a long
record of journalistic failure in the region).
This is far more than a jibe, for the misreading of events in and
around Abkhazia and South Ossetia - by western media, but more
widely by the west's diplomats and politicians - has played and
continues to play a role in clouding the actual circumstances of
the region. The implication is that to understand the conflicts
surrounding these territories (in the early 1990s, as well as
2008) and to draw relevant lessons involves also criticising how
these conflicts have been misconstrued at the highest policy
levels.
After all, the outcome of the west's policy choices over these
years has been to produce the direct opposite of what its
consistent support for Georgia has been meant to achieve: namely,
the ever-closer ties of Abkhazia and South Ossetia with Russia.
This process culminated in Moscow's recognition of them as
independent states on 26 August 2008, and all that will flow from
the subsequent agreements being signed with Russia in terms of
security, transport, trade and investment.
The realistic option
The most important conclusion of the August 2008 war, now shared
even by hawkish commentators in the United States who have been
vocal advocates for a hardline Georgian stance, is that both South
Ossetia and Abkhazia are permanently lost to Georgia (see
"Abkhazia and South Ossetia: heart of conflict, key to solution",
18 August 2008). This conclusion seemed obvious to informed
observers at the end of their wars (in, respectively, June 1992
and September 1993); but the cataclysmic events of August 2008
seems at last to have convinced many who had been in denial.
But even many of those who have come round to this view resist its
self-evident consequence: namely, that the two republics should be
promptly and universally recognised de jure as well as de facto.
If this policy was followed, it would have at least three positive
consequences.
First, it would be good for Georgia. The country would be faced
with a realistic if doubtless difficult option: to discard any
remaining fantasy of Tbilisi's re-establishing its control, and to
focus on building normal, good-neighbourly relations with these
political entities.
Second, it would be good for the republics. They would be opened
to all the regular advantages enjoyed by fully recognised states;
among them unrestricted and universal travel-rights for their
citizens, inward investment, and the free flow of ideas that
accompanies contacts between nations. All of these would balance
the dominant influence of Russia, which otherwise - under
conditions of continuing western boycotts - can only strengthen.
At the same time, it is unrealistic to expect Russia to withdraw
altogether, for two reasons: Russia has legitimate interests of
her own in the region, and the Abkhazians (in view of the west's
longstanding support for Georgia) would not wish this to happen.
Third, it would be good for the inhabitants of the region, on all
sides. The guarantee of the security of Abkhazia and South
Ossetia, and the improving economy and infrastructure that would
follow, would have beneficial knock-on effects. The eastern part
of Abkhazia around Ochamchira is an example: here, the war damage
from 1992-93 is still everywhere visible, with residents left to
survive as best they can amid the ruined houses (only in 2007 was
the Halo Trust able to finish clearing the region of thousands of
mines that had rendered whole tracts of fertile land too dangerous
to risk being farmed). A process of reconstruction could revivify
the area, and make it possible that in time more of the refugees
who fled from Abkhazia to Georgia in autumn 1993 will finally be
able to resume life in their former homeland.
The wasted support
Some analysts offer a very different set of recommendations.
Spencer B Meredith advocates severing all links with the
"separatists"; he suggests that, if Russia does not make the
necessary investments in Abkkhazia and South Ossetia, the result
will be two failed states (see "Restoring Georgia's Sovereignty,
Redux", Foreign Policy Journal, 5 August 2009).
This is wrong. Russians' affection for Abkhazia's Black Sea coast,
and the fact that most Ossetians live in Russia's north Caucasus
(where for centuries they have been Russia's closest allies),
ensure Moscow's continual engagement. In questioning where the two
republics would be without Moscow's support, Meredith neglects
Georgia's dependence since 2003 on huge subventions from
Washington; in lamenting Georgia's lack of funds to spend on the
thousands of refugees living within its reduced frontiers, he
overlooks that much more could have been done if funds spent on
Georgia's military had been devoted to humanitarian projects
(Tbilisi's defence budget increased from $36 million to $990
million in 2003-08).
Such "support" for Georgia is part of the same pattern that led to
the disaster of 2008 (see Vicken Cheterian, "Georgia's arms race",
4 July 2007). It is a long way from the true support that Georgia
needs, which would enable it to accept what happened in the war
and begin to move on.
There is a danger that without a decisive step forward, there will
be merely a continuation of more of the same failed policies that
since the early 1990s have led to the present impasse.
Indeed, after almost two decades of wasted and counterproductive
efforts, it is time for a radical reassessment. If this is to
happen, it will do well to look again at the events of the early
1990s; in particular at the way that high political calculation in
the west reacted to and helped to shape events on the ground in
this period, with disastrous results.
The rush to judgment
The west could probably have done little to prevent the
Georgian-South Ossetian war of 1990-92, imposed by Georgia's first
post-communist leader Zviad Gamsakhurdia on the then autonomous
district of South Ossetia. This is because at the start of the war
both parties to the conflict were integral parts of the
still-existing Soviet Union. But the same most assuredly cannot be
said of the Georgian-Abkhazian conflict (see "Sakartvelo, roots of
turmoil", 27 November 2003).
Zviad Gamsakhurdia was ousted in a coup in January 1992. The war
in South Ossetia was still in progress, and a new (truly civil)
war broke out in Gamsakhurdia's home province of Mingrelia
(western Georgia) between his supporters and those of the junta
that ousted him. Amid this chaos, the coup-leaders invited the
Soviet Union's former foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze out of
his Moscow retirement to provide still-unrecognised Georgia with a
standard-bearer who would appeal to the west.
The ploy worked brilliantly: the west was eager to reward the man
it regarded as a heroic architect from within of the dissolution
of the Soviet system. But why was there such a rush? A clue lies
in the internal politics of Britain at the time.
A general election was due in Britain on 9 April 1992. The
Conservative prime minister John Major had inherited office from
Margaret Thatcher after her forced retirement in November 1990; a
colourless figure whom most opinion-polls suggested would lose to
a Labour opposition emerging from long retreat. Major and his
foreign secretary Douglas Hurd believed they had every reason to
look on Eduard Shevardnadze with favour; the idea that (as a
former British ambassador to the USSR told me) "we in the west owe
Shevardnadze a huge debt of gratitude" was widespread in
establishment circles. (A one-time speaker of the Abkhazian
parliament, Sokrat Dzhindzholia, offered me the very different
view in during a London taxi-ride that "Shevardnadze is a fine
executor of other people's decisions, but he is not a person to be
head of state himself", though few western governments of the time
would have listened to such views).
In any event, two weeks before the election, the John Major
government recognised Georgia and established diplomatic relations
with it. Britain was due to assume the six-month presidency of the
European Union in July 1992; the country continued to - in Douglas
Hurd's deathless phrase - "punch above its weight", as all the
major European countries and the United States matched the British
policy in reaching out to Tbilisi.
It was a fateful step - for it locked the recognising states into
the position of support for the territorial integrity of the
recognised entity, however questionable or indeed illegitimate
that "integrity" (in the case of Abkhazia, it reflected Stalin's
subordination of Abkhazia to his native Georgia in 1931). But what
was to follow was worse. Georgia at the time had no government
with a democratic mandate; the state was in internal chaos, the
civil war was still in progress in Mingrelia, and tensions in
Abkhazia (where there had been fatal clashes in July 1989) were
rising.
A wise policy at this point would have offered Eduard Shevardnadze
and his military- (later state-council) colleagues the conditional
enticements of membership of (for example) the International
Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and United Nations membership - to
be granted once his government had earned democratic legitimacy in
the elections planned for autumn 1992, ended the ongoing internal
conflicts, and reached a peaceful resolution of the crisis in
Abkhazia (see "Post-war Developments in the Georgian-Abkhazian
Dispute", Parliamentary Human Rights Group, June 1996).
Instead, the rush to embrace Tbilisi was heedless. True, the war
in South Ossetia was ended with the Dagomys agreement in June
1992, mediated by Boris Yeltsin; but the Georgian government and
its militia supporters "celebrated" its acceptance by the United
Nations with an assault on Abkhazia - reflecting (in my
interpretation of events) Shevardnadze's (mis)calculation that
Gamsakhurdia's Mingrelian supporters would rally round the
national flag in the face of a common foe.
What happened instead was tragedy all round: widespread bloodshed,
the loss of Abkhazia to Georgian control, a once relatively
prosperous economy in ruins, almost a generation of blighted lives
on both sides. The particular disaster from the Georgian point of
view was that Abkhazia was lost to Georgia's control as of 30
September 1993.
The last war
The precise sequence of events suggests that the west in general,
and Britain in particular, bears a grievous responsibility for the
tribulations suffered by many of the region's peoples in the early
1990s and subsequently: the Abkhazians, more latterly the South
Ossetians, and those Kartvelians (viz. Mingrelians, Georgians and
Svans) whose lives were lost or livelihoods permanently disrupted
in the immediate or longer-term wake of the woeful decisions of
1992. This should be publicly acknowledged and a suitable
recompense paid, specifically through the recognition of the two
states that acquired a de jure status on 26 August 2008.
This would be a precondition for serious thought about how the
Transcaucasus region can be taken forward to the secure and
prosperous future its peoples surely deserve. Such a settlement,
apart from being the only realistic solution to two decades of
failure, would be the best way to redress the mistakes committed
since 1992. The anniversary of Mikheil Saakashvili's crassness in
2008, as of two decades of misguided and self-damaging Georgian
policies, would be a good time to move towards it (see Donald
Rayfield, "The Georgia-Russia war, a year on", 6 August 2009).
The precipitateness of the British decision to recognise Georgia
was underlined when, contrary to expectations, the party of John
Major won the British general election of April 1992. His and
Douglas Hurd's misjudged policies in ex-Yugoslavia were to be
responsible for huge damage there too. It is very late in the day,
but these statesmen's contemporary European Union and American
successors need to learn the lessons of the last two decades, and
come to decisions that will ensure that the war of August 2008
proves to be the region's last.
Among openDemocracy's articles on Georgian politics and the
region, including the war of August 2008:
-
Neal Ascherson, "Tbilisi,
Georgia: the rose revolution's rocky road" (15 July 2005)
-
Donald Rayfield, "Georgia
and Russia: with you, without you" (3 October 2006)
-
Robert Parsons, "Russia
and Georgia: a lover's revenge" (6 October 2006)
-
Vicken Cheterian,
"Georgia's arms race" (4 July 2007)
-
Donald Rayfield, "Russia
vs Georgia: a war of perceptions" (24 August 2007)
-
Alexander Rondeli,
"Georgia: politics after revolution" (14 November 2007)
-
Robert Parsons, "Georgia's
race to the summit" (4 January 2008)
-
Robert Parsons, "Mikheil
Saakashvili's bitter victory" (11 January 2008)
-
Jonathan Wheatley,
"Georgia's democratic stalemate" (14 April 2008)
-
Robert Parsons, "Georgia,
Abkhazia, Russia: the war option" (13 May 2008)
-
Thomas de Waal, "The
Russia-Georgia tinderbox" (16 May 2008)
-
Alexander Rondeli,
"Georgia's search for itself" (8 July 2008)
-
Thomas de Waal, "South
Ossetia: the avoidable tragedy" (11 August 2008)
-
Ghia Nodia, "The war for
Georgia: Russia, the west, the future" (12 August 2008)
-
Donald Rayfield, "The
Georgia-Russia conflict: lost territory, found nation" (13 August
2008)
-
Neal Ascherson, "After the
war: recognising reality in Abkhazia and Georgia" (15 August 2008)
-
Paul Rogers, "Russia and
Iran: crisis of the west, rise of the rest" (21 August 2008)
-
Ghia Nodia, "Russian war
and Georgian democracy" (22 August 2008)
-
Robert Parsons, "Georgia
after war: the political landscape" (26 August 2008)
-
Vicken Cheterian,
"Georgia's forgotten legacy" (3 September 2008)
-
Rein Müllerson, "The world
after the Russia-Georgia war" (5 September 2008)
-
Martin Shaw, "After the
Georgia war: the challenge to citizen action" (22 September 2008)
-
Katinka Barysch, "Europe
and the Georgia-Russia conflict" (30 September 2008)
-
Robert Parsons, "Georgia:
the politics of recovery" (24 October 2008)
-
Donald Rayfield, "Georgia
and Russia: the aftermath" (16 November 2008)
-
Thomas de Waal, "The
Caucasus: a region in pieces" (8 January 2009)
-
Thomas de Waal, "Georgia
and Russia, again" (30 January 2009)
-
Tedo Japaridze,"A Georgian chalk
circle: open letter to the west" (12 May 2009)R
-
obert Parsons, "Georgia on
the brink - again" (20 May 2009)
-
Nino Burdzhanadze, "A
Georgian appeal: open letter to the west" (12 June 2009)
-
Ilia Roubanis, "Georgia's
pluralistic feudalism: a frontline report" (3 July 2009)
-
Vicken Cheterian,
"Georgia: between war and a future" (8 July 2009)
-
Robert Parsons, "Georgia:
social chasm, political bridge" (21 July 2009)
-
Ivan Krastev, "The guns of
August: non-event with consequences" (30 July 2009)
-
Donald Rayfield, "The
Georgia-Russia war, a year on" (6 August 2009)
-
Plus: openDemocracy's
Russia section reports and analyses
http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/abhazia-and-south-ossetia-a-year-on
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