Friday, November 14, 2008

Window on Eurasia: Toward a Dangerous New Era of Partially Recognized States in the Post-Soviet Space?

Paul Goble

London, November 14 – Moscow’s decision to extend diplomatic recognition to the breakaway republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, a step only one other country has followed so far, raises the possibility that other countries may recognize an entity that no other state is likely to, a development that could usher in a dangerous era of partially recognized states.
One place where this could happen, according to Yuri Sigov, a Washington correspondent for “Delovaya nedelya,” is Nagorno-Karabakh, a breakaway region that he suggests could “follow the example of Tskhinvali and Sukhumi, but besides Armenia, no one would like” (www.iamik.ru/?op=full&what=content&ident=40886).
Moscow’s claim that what it has done with Abkhazia and South Ossetia is nothing more than what the West has done with Kosovo is disingenuous. While many countries have refrained from recognizing the latter, vastly more have done so than have followed Moscow’s example in the southern Caucasus.
In fact, the relevant case is Turkey’s lone recognition of Northern Cyprus, an action no one else has followed but one that has frozen that conflict for several decades, thus providing a possible model for other countries especially now that Moscow has acted and making Sigov’s analysis both timely and disturbing.
In Sigov’s view, all the so-called frozen conflict on the territory of the former Soviet Union have the potential to break out at any time and thus “radically change the entire system of security which now exists along the perimeter of the former Soviet borders,” all the more so because various powers have an interest in destabilizing the situation.
The most immediately obvious and hence most dangerous of these conflicts, he suggests, is over Nagorno-Karabakh, which most of the parties are interested in avoiding entering a new hot phase but which is one that could nonetheless do so if anyone of the parties acts in a way different than the others expect.
That explains why, Sigov says, Moscow got involved as a supplement to the Minsk Group. But “the diametrically opposed positions” of the sides mean that neither Azerbaijan nor Yerevan can back down, the first from a position based on the territorial integrity of states and the latter on the right of nations to self-determination.
And that is something that nationalist activists in Karabakh itself, as well as in Armenia, understand fully and are prepared to act upon, the Moscow correspondent in Washington suggests.
What then could happen next? One possible answer is the holding of a referendum in Karabakh, where the residents, almost all of them are Armenians will vote for unity with Armenia or independence, either of which could set off a conflict in the south Caucasus that neither Russia, nor the United States and the West, nor Armenia or Azerbaijan want.
Because of these dangers, all the sides “fear the holding of referendum in Karabakh.” If one were held and it called for independence, “no one, “except perhaps Armenia” would recognize it, a situation that would resemble the one that Abkhazia and South Ossetia now find themselves in,” with like those an outside power having taken a position.
Such Armenian recognition, as incomplete as it might appear, would likely delay American and even Western involvement in this issue beyond the summer of next year, the first time that Washington is likely to get involved in any case, given the change in administrations there, Sigov says.
Thus, “it remains unclear what to do if Nagorno-Karabakh declares its independence,” Sigov says. For neither South Ossetia nor Abkhazia is the world community prepared to recognize and not a little amount of time must pass until the positions of these countries will somehow change.”
The American don’t want a violent conflict in the region, especially after the war in Georgia, but the dangers that arise from the partial recognition of a so-called self-proclaimed republic are sufficiently dangerous that everyone involved should think about what they might mean for the future of this and other conflicts.
As a result, Sigov suggests, Moscow’s moves in Georgia will have an even larger set of consequences on the region than people are now thinking, possibly freezing some conflicts for a long time to come as happened in Cyprus or igniting a new conflict in a region where any action has the chance of setting off a new conflagration.
And because there are other places in the former Soviet space, which are left over from Stalin’s ethnic engineering, it is entirely possible that the recognition of one or more of them by one state but not more could complicate the resolution of that conflict or even all of them well into the future.

Window on Eurasia: Russian Military Boards Increasingly Violate Rights of Draftees

Paul Goble

Tallinn, November 14 – Confronted by the need to draft a far higher percentage of the country’s draft-age cohort, Russian military committees this fall often have refused to recognize deferments, ignored the findings of medical examinations, or demanded and received bribes from many others, according to an investigation by the Union of Soldiers’ Mothers Committees.
An article in “Novyye izvestiya” reported on both why such violations appear to have increased this fall and on the significant variations in the way different voenkomaty, as draft boards are known in Russian, have been behaving even within the Russian capital itself (www.newizv.ru/news/2008-11-10/101183/).
The reason these officials feel squeezed to fulfill their quotas “at any price” is that this fall they were expected to draft almost twice as many men as last spring, 219,000 compared to 133,000, at a time when the number of 18 year old Russians is declining and projected to fall significantly further in 2009 and 2010.
Valentina Mel’nikova, a senior official at the Union of Soldiers’ Mothers Committees, said that her group has compiled “a black list” of those voenkomaty “which have ‘lost’ or removed from the files of draftees documents about those who are ill” or about those who should not be drafted for other reasons.
Some draft boards are putting pressure doctors who have given a diagnosis that would allow potential soldiers to avoid service and then going ahead and drafting the individuals anyway who thought they had been exempted. This has become a larger problem now that young people have the right to select their own doctors (if they can pay) for such examinations.
Moreover, the voenkomaty frequently engage in various forms of psychological pressure on potential draftees and “refuse to recognize existing exemptions” for education or family responsibilities, problems that are compounded by the willingness of some military officials to take bribes and especially by shortcomings in the Russian legal code in this area.
Among the other problems the Union of Soldiers’ Mothers Committees identified was the failure of the law to specify whether those enrolled in masters’ degree programs are continuing their higher education – in which case, they are entitled to deferrals – or starting a new educational program – in which case, they are not.
Moreover, the Union says, the relevant ministry “has still not developed an official form” that potential draftees who have the responsibility for looking after relatives who are invalids can fill in. As a result, these young men have to offer their own documentation, which some voenkomaty accept and others do not.
The Union’s Mel’nikova says that those who are refused a deferment in such cases should file suit because the courts are “the only possibility for someone subject to the draft to defend his rights,” although history suggests that Russian courts vary widely in their willingness to find for those hoping for a defense of their rights.
Given all the other problems the Russian military has and especially the resistance of many senior commanders to plans for radical reform and downsizing of the officer corps, such problems, long a fact of life in the Russian Federation, may seem to be a small problem, but there are three reasons for thinking otherwise.
First, because various voenkomaty treat those subject to the draft not according to one yardstick but according to widely varying ones, these problems with the draft are likely to exacerbate tensions between regions where draftees are treated fairly and those where many suspect some are avoiding service for entirely arbitrary reasons.
Second, the corruption in a part of the system that touches the lives of so many Russian families will also only intensify class-based tensions, especially among those who feel that someone else or someone else’s child is avoiding military service while they or their offspring are having to go.
And third, such feelings, if they grow, could mean that the military will be a less than totally reliable instrument of the state if Moscow should be confronted, as several analysts have recently suggested, by the kind of social protests like those which took place in Novocherkassk 46 years ago.
Should that prove to be the case or should the draft-based Russian military prove as unskillful as it did in Georgia – Russian forces won there only because they so vastly outnumbered Georgian personnel – Moscow’s failure to address these problems with the draft could prove to be one of its most serious mistakes.

Window on Eurasia: Moscow’s Moves in Georgia Open Door for Pan-Turkist Projects in North Caucasus

Paul Goble

Tallinn, November 14 – By recognizing Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Moscow has opened the door for an expansion of pan-Turkist activity in the North Caucasus, thus falling into a trap set by Western countries when they recognized Kosovo in the former Yugoslavia and setting the stage for a new “parade of sovereignties” in the North Caucasus.
And consequently, however much the Russian moves in Georgia corresponded to Russia’s national interests in the short term, commentator Igor Bokov argues in an essay posted online this week, they could prove fatal to Russian control of the broader region unless Moscow takes preventive measures (www.apn.ru/publications/article20992.htm).
In recent months, many analysts have focused on the growing activism of Circassian groups in the North Caucasus not only because of their support for the independence of Abkhazia and opposition to the Sochi Olympics but also because of the large and influential Circassian diasporas in Turkey and Jordan.
Much less attention has been given to the Turkic language groups in the region, which include the Karachay, Balkars, Nogays and Kumyks, but because of their location near Russia’s southern border and the activities of Turks abroad, they may prove even more important in the political development of the Caucasus in the coming months, the Moscow researcher argues.
Like many Russian analysts, Bokov discusses these trends in terms of what he sees as a broader effort by the West to promote the disintegration of multi-national states like the Russian Federation in order to strengthen the power of capitalist economics by weakening any alternative political arrangements.
But despite that, his article represents an intriguing contribution to the understanding of the Caucasus not only because of what he writes about two major Turkic groups in the North Caucasus but also because of what he says about the “unofficial” efforts by Turkey and other countries to reach out to them.
The Turkic-speaking Balkars, who form 10 percent of the population of Kabardino-Balkaria, have nonetheless formed a Council of Elders of the Balkar People and demanded that the constitution of that republic be amended to give them equal representation in the parliament to the much larger Kabardinian (Circassian) and Russian communities.
If that does not happen by January 31, 2009, this group says, the Council of Elders has declared, then it will proclaim the independence of Balkaria, an action that would undermine not only all the other multi-national republics in the North Caucasus but create a new hotspot for Moscow there.
What makes this movement intriguing, Bokov says, is not just the small size of the Balkar community but the fact that most of the leaders of the Balkar Council of Elders are militia officers who were fired after Arsen Kanokov became president of the republic and who seek to return to power and a new element in their ideology.
For the first time ever, the Balkars are saying “we are not simply a minority, there are 500 million of us” – “the first time in history of Russia or at least post-Soviet Russia,” the Moscow analyst says, when an openly “pan-Turkist” ideological agenda was articulated in the region with such vigor.
The situation in neighboring Karachayevo-Cherkessia represents another Turkic challenge, Bokov suggests. There, “the Turkic ethnos, the Karachay, is the dominant one, and the Cherkess [Circassians] the minority. But again the Turkic group is advancing its interests by ignoring the practice of giving the second most powerful position in the republic to a Cherkess.
Bokov argues that Turkey and other countries interested in weakening Russia. While Ankara carefully avoids public support of such groups lest it offend the Europeans or stimulate its own Kurdish minority, various groups in Turkey are increasingly active because “what is impossible at the official level is completely permissible at others.”
He points to groups like TIKA, the Turkish Agency for Cooperation and Development, Turksoy, an organization involved in cultural ties with Turkic peoples abroad, and Tusam, an information-analytic center supported by the metal workers union, as being especially active in this regard.
But he suggests that pan-Turkist ideas are being pushed not only by Turkey but by various Western countries and by both Georgia and Ukraine, who have an obvious interest in weakening Moscow’s influence and power in the region. And he concludes by arguing that Moscow must be prepared to counter all these groups.