After watching the first presidential debate between Sen. John McCain and Sen. Barack Obama, one of the only lasting thoughts on my mind was how over-simplified they present the ongoing conflicts in Georgia to the American public, and how dead wrong they both are in seeking to address them.
They are both correct in stating their support for the Georgian people and their young democracy in the face of Russian expansionism, and that the disproportionate (and perhaps premeditated) military actions of the Russian Federation during August must be strongly addressed. Furthermore, they are both correct in promising Georgia assistance for humanitarian and reconstruction purposes. After all, Georgia is an important ally in the region, and her friendship must not be abandoned.
However, that is not whole story.
The conflict that erupted in South Ossetia in August, very well could have started in Abkhazia earlier in the year. These regions have been involved in two very unique secession struggles with the central government in Tbilisi since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The fact that these regions continue to provide sparks of violence in the volatile Caucasus is testament to the failure of international and Georgian policies towards them.
The attempts to reunite Georgia according to its Soviet borders have over the last fifteen years have focused on 1) isolating South Ossetia and Abkhazia from the outside world, 2) refusing to recognize the legitimate concerns of the local populations, 3) incorrectly addressing the conflict as solely and primarily between Russia and Georgia, and by 4) stubbornly following dogmatic policies long after they have already shown themselves to be failures.
The next American president, together with the efforts from European allies, must address these failed strategies of the past in order to prevent the West (and Georgia for that matter) from stumbling into an expanded war in the Caucasus.
During the debate McCain told the American people a story regarding his trip to South Ossetia, where he described a billboard proclaiming Vladimir Putin "Our President." For those unfamiliar with the situation this may have been frighteningly demonstrative of the Russian aggression against the Georgian people. However, Saakashvili must not have explained to McCain that the Ossetians are first and foremost not ethnically a Georgian people, and furthermore, that they endured a horrendous war initiated by the Georgians in 1991. The latter of these reasons especially explains why South Ossetians hold the goal of reuniting not with the Georgian state, but rather with their ethnic brothers in North Ossetia, who happen to lie within the Russian Federation.
Furthermore, McCain-who has never been to Abkhazia-seems to lump together the differing goals of South Ossetian and Abkhaz leadership. In Abkhazia, you will not find posters proclaiming Putin as their president, and you will not hear the similar desires to join Russia. Abkhaz also fought a vicious war with the Georgians, and given their long and complicated past under Georgian leadership (including Josef Stalin) desire nothing less than their full independence. Joining Russia, with whom their past is equally tragic, is not an option for the Abkhaz.
McCain, however, believes that once South Ossetians and Abkhaz get a taste of freedom-which in his mind means living under the Georgian flag-they will realize they were wrong in their own ambitions all along. In his ignorance of history, though, McCain "fails to understand" the constant, perceived threat from Georgia that these territories live under.
An Abkhaz official once wrote to me, "There are two faces of Saakashvili: one is looking West and looks pretty, liberal, and nice. Another face is looking at Abkhazia and it is deceitful and aggressive."
Obama, for his part, twice raised the issue of Russian peacekeepers in the regions. He stated that Russian peacekeeping forces in Georgia prior to the conflict "made no sense whatsoever," and called for their replacement with a more international force. While the internationalization of peacekeepers in the conflict zones is not in and of itself a misguided proposal (although the peacekeepers in South Ossetia are already a mixed force), it has long been clear the Abkhaz and South Ossetians are more comfortable with Russian protection. Proposed changes in peacekeeping formats are seen as a way of removing their only shield of defense against Georgian military action.
He also proclaimed that the Russians must abide by the six-point ceasefire agreement, and pull out from South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The latter statement shows Obama is similar to McCain in not fully examining the conflicts' history, as they fully warrant. In the recent years, Russia has been the only supporting ally of the regions and now they seek to be under a Russian military umbrella-much like Georgia desires to be under NATO.
While the two candidates for president may be seemingly instep with each other on the American relationship with Georgia, their significant differences with respect towards the use of diplomacy would suggest that both would not continue the current approach in resolving the ongoing disputes Georgia holds with South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
McCain mirrors Saakashvili in choosing to deal only with one's allies. On the other hand, Obama is a proponent of inclusion and the utility of talking to adversaries. McCain's philosophy has been amply applied in the Caucasus over the last decade and a half, and the results were seen in August. The impact Obama's would have is, of course, unpredictable and yet to be seen.
Although, after fifteen years of failing to outreach to the Abkhaz and South Ossetians, Georgian dreams of a reunified country may have already been lost. What remains uncertain is whether an Obama presidency would attempt to open up to these regions in order to improve their living conditions-without the preconditions of them rejoining Georgia precipitously.
Comments
Isn't the situation a simpler one than described above? A brutal civil war ending with ethnic cleansing 15 years ago produced a South Ossetia which remains to this day. Although not recognised it seems an enduring entity reflecting the wishes of its population. It cannot be reunited with Georgia other than by re-opening the brutal conflict of 15 years ago. If, as I read, that was Shaakasvilli's election pledge then the events which followed were tragically both inevitable and avoidable.
It seems to me that something of the pragmatic approach to the status of border states which existed in the Cold War - (and earlier adn more expansively through the Monroe Doctrine) needs to be re-instated. The only absolute which should be applied is the absolute priority to work towards the avoidance of conflict between great or more specifically nuclear, powers. There should be some kind of recognition given to those defacto situations which have demonstrated that they are enduring and meet the wishes of their peoples. And of course sanctions against any external power attempting to impose a change on that arrangement. Taiwan and Cyprus are similarly placed. It would be so to speak analogous to a common law marriage - not the full thing (as full recognition) but conferring certain rights and duties. It is otherwise like accepting that a dispute between neighbours could set an entire town ablaze.
Bush’s orphans in Caucasus move towards trapping Obama
The news: Russia's Foreign Ministry expresses grave concerns over Georgia's continued military deployments to the borders of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. In a statement released on Friday, the ministry said the Georgian military and police presence in the area needed "special attention on the part of the UN and other international organizations operating in the region."
The statement came a week after Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov quoted EU monitors in areas near South Ossetia and Abkhazia as reporting a buildup of Georgian military units and Special Forces near the borders with South Ossetia and Abkhazia. "Our 'technical devices' have also recorded this. Provocations also occur sporadically. We are concerned by this," he added.
On Thursday, Moscow lashed out at Tbilisi for not allowing Russian inspectors access to military installations on its territory. Earlier, Russia asked Georgia to admit its experts into Georgian military installations for evaluation and verification checks in accordance with a 1999 Vienna OSCE document on confidence and security-building measures. Georgia rejected both requests.
And behind the scene: The year 2008, the last year of Bush administration, was when the aggressive anti-Russian strategy of the former President of the United States has been openly unfolded and has been intensified. Washington has being escalating the tension at the utmost, with the war speculator Dick Chaney and the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, as its principal actors. The Minister of Foreign Affairs, from her years in the University until now, has never stopped seeing the phantom of the Soviet Union and has never stopped fighting windmills with it. Washington has tried to establish the NATO enlargement towards the east, at the north-Atlantic Convention of Bucharest, but it failed at the last moment due to voices of logic and political realism from the “old” Europe, have predominated. The agreements for the so-called “antimissile shield” were completed, bringing the military threat to the borders of the Russian Federation. And the peak came last August, with the adventurism of South Ossetia. The Georgian regime of Saakashvili, has been used to try the endurance and the tolerance of Russia in a military challenge, which has put in the vortex of disequilibrium the whole region of Caucasus. The intention of integrating the region of Caucasus in the American sphere of influence was not of course an inspiration of one single moment. The “orange revolutions” in Ukraine and Georgia, which have been financed and headed by Washington, represented the first phase of the plan. Other things have followed: the intensive armament of the Saakashvili regime, the development of an extreme anti-Russian rhetoric from the Ukrainian President Yushchenko, the formation of an ad hoc (and military) axis between Kiev and Tbilisi and the advancement of the procedure for their accession to NATO. The objective was clear. The completion of the geopolitical encirclement of Russia from the south, the blockade of its armada from the Black Sea and from the corridor in the warm seas of the Mediterranean and the absolute control of the crucial energy corridors which bring the Russian natural gas in the Western Europe. The military and the political reaction of Russia and the unwillingness of the leader countries of the European Union to serve a scenario that subverted their interests and safety, have led Bush’s plans for the Caucasus region in an absolute deadlock. Now, South Ossetia and Abkhazia have already declared their independence (that has been officially recognized by Russia), the military mechanism of Saakashvili has collapsed, the Russian fleet not only remains in Crimea but also has attained another base of anchoring in the Sukhumi of Abkhazia, the accession of Ukraine and Georgia in NATO has been evolved in a political anecdote and in Kiev the anti-Russian “orange coalition” has fallen apart. The faithful follower of Bush, President Yushchenko, has lost control; he faces the defeat in the next elections and sees his former ally Yulia Timoshenko to keep distances from his own Atlantic extremism and to approach Moscow. It seems, in the end, that there exist two men in the planet – apart from Laura Bush - that feel even more pity for the change of the guard in the White House! Mikhail Saakashvili and Victor Yushchenko. Bush’s orphans in the Caucasus region that have remained without a protector are worn-out, used and useless for a new American strategy in the region. They do know that. And this is why; they move now towards trapping Obama into a new escalation within the strategy of tension.
Let’s talk about the core of Caucasus issue. And let’s talk seriously, with evidence and references: Who really is Mikhail Saakashvili? Find the answer in the following text, by F. William Engdahl (http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/).
«The controversy over the Georgian surprise military attacks on South Ossetia and Abkhazia on 8.8.08 makes a closer look at the controversial Georgian President and his puppet masters important. An examination shows 41 year old Mikhail Saakashvili to be a ruthless and corrupt totalitarian who is tied to not only the US NATO establishment, but also to the Israeli military and intelligence establishment. The famous 'Rose Revolution of November 2003 that forced the ageing Edouard Shevardnadze from power and swept the then 36 year old US university graduate into power was run and financed by the US State Department, the Soros Foundations, and agencies tied to the Pentagon and US intelligence community.
Mihkail Saakashvili was deliberately placed in power in one of the most sophisticated US regime change operations, using ostensibly private NGOs (Non Governmental Organizations) to create an atmosphere of popular protest against the existing regime of former Soviet Foreign Minister Edouard Shevardnadze, who was no longer useful to Washington when he began to make a deal with Moscow over energy pipelines and privatizations.
Saakashvili was brought to power in a US-engineered coup run on the ground by US-funded NGO's, in an application of a new method of US destabilization of regimes it considered hostile to its foreign policy agenda. The November 24 2003 Wall Street Journal explicitly credited the toppling of Shevardnadze's regime to the operations of "a raft of non-governmental organizations . . . supported by American and other Western foundations." These NGOs, said the Journal, had "spawned a class of young, English-speaking intellectuals hungry for pro-Western reforms" who were instrumental laying the groundwork for a bloodless coup.
Coup by NGO
But there is more. The NGOs were coordinated by the US Ambassador to Georgia, Richard Miles, who had just arrived in Tbilisi fresh from success in orchestrating the CIA-backed toppling of Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade, using the same NGOs. Miles, who is believed to be an undercover intelligence specialist, supervised the Saakashvili coup.
It involved US billionaire George Soros' Open Society Georgia Foundation. It involved the Washington-based Freedom House whose chairman was former CIA chief James Woolsey. It involved generous financing from the US Congress-financed National Endowment for Democracy, an agency created by Ronald Reagan in the 1980's to "do privately what the CIA used to do," namely coups against regimes the US Government finds unfriendly.
George Soros' foundations have been forced to leave numerous eastern European countries including Russia as well as China after the 1989 student Tiananmen Square uprising. Soros is also the financier together with the US State Department of the Human Rights Watch, a US- based and run propaganda arm of the entire NGO apparatus of regime coups such as Georgia and Ukraine's 2004 Orange Revolution. Some analysts believe Soros is a high-level operative of the US State Department or intelligence services using his private foundations as cover.
The US State Department funded the Georgia Liberty Institute headed by Saakashvili, US approved candidate to succeed the no-longer cooperative Shevardnadze. The Liberty Institute in turn created "Kmara!" which translates "Enough!" According to a BBC report at the time, Kmara! Was organized in spring of 2003 when Saakashvili along with hand-picked Georgia student activists were paid by the Soros Foundation to go to Belgrade to learn from the US-financed Otpor activists that toppled Milosevic. They were trained in Gene Sharp's "non-violence as a method of warfare" by the Belgrade Center for Nonviolent Resistance.
Saakashvili as mafioso President
Once he was in place in January 2004 as Georgia's new President, Saakashvili proceeded to pack the regime with his cronies and kinsmen. The death of Zurab Zhvania, his prime minister in February, 2005, remains a mystery. The official version-poisoning by faulty gas heater-was adopted by American FBI investigators within two weeks of the killing. That has never seemed credible to those familiar with Georgia's gangland slayings, crime, and other manifestations of social decay. Zhvania's death was followed closely by a functionary of the Premier's apparat, Georgi Khelashvili, who allegedly shot himself the day after his chief's demise. The head of Zhvania's research staff was later found dead as well.
Figures allied with Saakashvili reportedly had a hand in the premier's death. Russian journalist Marina Perevozkina quoted Gia Khurashvili, a Georgian economist. Prior to the fatal incident, Mr. Khurashvili had published an article in Resonans newspaper opposing the privatization and sale of Georgia's main gas pipeline. Ten days before the prime minister's body was found, Khurashvili was attacked and his editor-in-chief-citing pressure from 'security service' figures he refused to name-issued him a warning.
The late premier's position on the pipeline issue was believed the direct reason for the murder of Zhvania. Zhvania's brother, Georgi, also told Perevozkina that not long before Zhvania's death he received a warning that someone was preparing to kill his brother. Saakashvili was reportedly livid when the US State Department invited Zhvania to Washington to win a Freedom Medal from the US Government's National Democratic Institute. Saakashvili tolerates no rivals for power it seems.
Saakashvili, who cleverly marketed himself as "anti-corruption," appointed several of his family members to lucrative posts in government, giving one of his brothers a position as chief adviser on domestic issues to the Baku-Ceyhan Pipeline project, backed by British Petroleum and other oil multinationals.
Since coming to power in 2004 with US aid, Saakashvili has led a policy of mass-scale arrests, imprisonment, torture and deepened corruption. Saakashvili has presided over the creation of a de facto one-party state, with a dummy opposition occupying a tiny portion of seats in the parliament, and this public servant is building a Ceaucescu-style palace for himself on the outskirts of Tbilisi. According to the magazine, Civil Georgia (Mar. 22, 2004) until 2005, the salaries of Saakashvili and many of his ministers were reportedly paid by the NGO network of New York-based currency speculator Soros- along with the United Nations Development Program.»
About the roots of the current situation in Caucasus, the so called Orange Revolution in Ukraine and Rose Revolution in Georgia, find the answers in the following text. It’s taken from the most common open source, Wikipedia. Try www.wikipedia.org.Especially the references are really tell-tale. «Many analysts believe the Orange Revolution was built on a pattern first developed in the ousting of Slobodan Milošević in Serbia four years earlier, and continuing with the Rose Revolution in Georgia. Each of these victories, though apparently spontaneous, was the result of extensive grassroots campaigning and coalition-building among the opposition. Each included election victories followed up by public demonstrations, after attempts by the incumbent to hold onto power through electoral fraud.Each of these social movements included extensive work by student activists. The most famous of these was Otpor, the youth movement that helped bring in Vojislav Koštunica. In Georgia the movement was called Kmara. In Ukraine the movement has worked under the succinct slogan Pora ("It's Time"). Chair of Georgian Parliamentary Committee on Defense and Security Givi Targamadze, former member of the Georgian Liberty Institute, as well as some members of Kmara, were consulted by Ukrainian opposition leaders on techniques of nonviolent struggle. Georgian rock bands Zumba, Soft Eject and Green Room, which earlier had supported the Rose Revolution, organized a solidarity concert in central Kiev to support Yushchenko’s cause in November 2004.[14]Activists in each of these movements were funded and trained in tactics of political organization and nonviolent resistance by a coalition of Western pollsters and professional consultants funded by a range of Western government and non-government agencies. According to The Guardian, these include the U.S. State Department and USAID along with the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, the International Republican Institute, the Bilderberg Group, the NGO Freedom House and George Soros's Open Society Institute. The National Endowment for Democracy, a foundation supported by the U.S. government, has supported non-governmental democracy-building efforts in Ukraine since 1988.[15] Writings on nonviolent struggle by Gene Sharp formed the strategic basis of the student campaigns.Former president Leonid Kravchuk accused Russian oligarch, Boris Berezovsky, of financing Yushchenko's campaign, and provided copies of documents showing money transfers from companies he said are controlled by Berezovsky to companies controlled by Yuschenko's official backers. Berezovsky has confirmed that he met Yushchenko's representatives in London before the election, and that the money was transferred from his companies, but he refused to confirm or deny that the companies that received the money were used in Yushchenko's campaign. Financing of election campaigns by foreign citizens is illegal in Ukraine.[16] According to BBC's The Russian Godfathers[17], Berezovsky poured millions of dollars into sustaining the spontaneous demonstrations and was in daily contact with the key opposition leaders.»
Post new comment