IASPS - News Behind the News
Georgia As a Testing Ground of Putin’s International Conduct
by Vladimir Socor, of the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies.
This presentation seeks to bring the necessary perspective to the latest complications in Russia-Georgia relations. The Pankisi problem, for all its urgency and its explosive potential, is an almost incidental complicaton to a far broader, deeper, set of chronic problems. Now that the Georgian authorites are bringing the situation in Pankisi under control, it is time for Georgia’s Western friends to refocus political attention on those larger, festering problems.
Since taking over as president of Russia, Mr. Vladimir Putin has successfully streamlined and centralized the decision-making processes, especially in foreign and security policies. This president has also put an end to unauthorized initiatives by various governmental departments in the “near abroad,” and has installed his trusted personal associates in the top posts. Mr. Putin, moreover, has established Kremlin control over the Duma. The pressures on Georgia, which earlier had often been imputed to various Russian agencies acting purportedly on their own, became more systematic and more dangerous under Mr. Putin’s presidency than they had been during Boris Yeltsin’s final years. President Putin escalated the pressures on Georgia well before the Pankisi problem came up. His own statements left little doubt that bringing Georgia to heel was one of his personal projects from the outset of his presidency.
Pankisi is a problem in its own right, requiring and receiving its solution in Georgia by Georgians, in ways that stabilize the situation, instead of blowing it up in the Gorge and on the Russia-Georgia border. When the United States launched the Train-and-Equip Program in Georgia, Mr. Putin chose—as he had in Central Asia—not to stand in the way. Since then, however, he and his close lieutenants have been seeking to take the matter of antiterrorism in Georgia into their own hands, with or even without Georgian and international consent.
Moscow’s recent fixaton on Pankisi has served to distract international attention from other actions that aim to keep Georgia weak, unstable, divided against itself, underdeveloped, and thus vulnerable to resubjugation. This paper will identify six main features of Moscow’s policy on Georgia.
1. Backtracking on earlier commitments regarding base closures and troop withdrawal.
Russia’s military presence in Georgia lacks a legal basis and contravenes Georgia’s oft-expressed will. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe at its 1999 summit required Russia to close down the Gudauta base by July 2001, and to negotiate with Georgia regarding the Batum and Akhalkalak bases. All of the OSCE member countries including Russia subscribed to those summit decisions, shortly before Mr. Putin became president of Russia. Mr. Putin signaled his intention to repudiate those commitments shortly after he came to power.
Russia retains the Gudauta base to this day, more than a year after the deadline for its closure. Some of the heavy weaponry has been withdrawn from Gudauta to Russia; but no one really knows what weaponry went, what has stayed, and what arms may have been reserved for the Abkhaz. The Russian side has blocked OSCE inspections at Gudauta, although the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe stipulates such inspections as mandatory.
On the Batum and Akhalkalak bases, Moscow now demands an absurdly long 11- year term for closing them, with a corresponding agreement on the bases’ operation. This in effect would mean an 11-year extension and the appearance of legalizaton of these bases. Meanwhile, Russia has unilaterally suspended the negotiations on military issues with Georgia.
On the other hand, Moscow has said that it wants Western countries to defray at least some of the costs of relocating the troops from Georgia to Russia. Georgia’s Western friends should give this idea urgent favorable consideraton, so as to initiate the troop withdrawal process without any further delays. Western countries were right to help build accomodation in Russia for some of the troops that withdrew from Germany and the Baltic states during the 1990s. Subsidizing the withdrawal of Russian troops from Georgia would: a) cost far less, compared to those earlier cases which involved much larger Russian forces; and b) help secure Georgia’s independence and Western orientation, the strategic and economic payoff of which is of course worth infinitely more than the cost of relocating those troops to Russia. Such Western subsidizing should be firmly linked to clear deadlines for the departure of troops and the closure of bases.
2. Sponsorship of armed ethnic secession and rogue statelets.
In Abkhaza, a political and humanitarian problem of ethnic cleansing stands, unresolved and barely if at all addressed, before the international community. The refugee problem is a heavy economic burden and a political fuse waiting to be lit. Russian military intervention had created these problems in the first place. It also created the Abkhaz and South Ossetan forces.
When Mr. Putin singled out Georgia for abolishing visa-free travel arrangements, he preserved those arrangements for residents of Abkhaza and South Osseta, thereby not only discriminating among citizens of Georgia, but drawng those two secessonist areas closer to Russia. Most recently, Russia has been handing out its citizenship to Abkhaza’s and South Osseta’s residents. South Osseta’s new leader is a citizen of the Russian Federation, a long-time resident in St. Petersburg. Another St. Petersburg Chekist, perhaps? The Abkhaz leaders have of course all along held Russian citizenship, and some of them even ranks in Russian military or security agencies, just like their colleagues who rule the Transnistra region of Moldova. Meanwhile, Russia’s Kremlin-controlled majority has passed legislation that, on paper at least, authorizes the Russian Federation to “admit” other states or parts of other states into the Russian Federation as its constituent units. And in another recent development, Russian ministerial delegations on visits to Abkhaza discuss inter alia the possible acquisition of what is legally Georgian state property by Russian entities. In light of all this, it is high time to ask Mr. Putin whether, in his view, international law still applies to Russia-Georgia relations.
3. Appropriation of “peacekeeping.”
In Abkhaza and South Osseta (as in Moldova’s Transnistra region), Russia seeks acceptance of an exclusive role as military “peacekeeper” in post-Soviet areas. In parallel, it insists on a leading role as diplomatic mediator in the local conflicts that it had itself sparked and continues to exploit. Fortunately, Russia has not obtained any official recognition of that special role, though it enjoys a measure of acceptance de facto. Any formalized acceptance, or prolonged tacit tolerance, would constitute a significant element in the creation of regional spheres of Russian influence rooted in the Soviet past.
The Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), which lends its name to Russia’s “peacekeepng” operation in Abkhaza, has no legal authority to issue or prolong peacekeeping mandates. The ongoing Russian operation n Abkhaza (to consider just this case) does not meet any of the internationally accepted standards for peacekeeping operations. Although the need to internationalize that operation is generally recognized, Western countries have acted half-heartedly on this matter, and have been thwarted by Mr. Putin’s diplomats. At present, as NATO looks for new missions—indeed for nothing less than new raisons d’etre—peacekeeping and conflict resolution on Europe’s doorstep are an obvious part of the answer.
4. Short shrift to international organizations.
Last year and this, OSCE observers reported a number of air raids carried out by Russian planes in Georgia. Yet Russian officials denied the facts even after the OSCE had reported them. The situation at Gudauta also shows Moscow’s disdain of the OSCE. At the U.N. in April of this year, Defense Minister Serge Ivanov claimed that Georgia, the United Nations Observer Mission in Georgia (UNOMIG) and U.N. special envoy Deter Boden had, each and all of them, authorized the Russian troops’ incursion into Georgia’s Kodor Gorge. Serge Ivanov’s claim, utterly implausible to begin with, was conclusively and irrefutably laid to rest by Ambassador Boden, other U.N. officials, and by Tbilisi. That Russian incursion came withn a hair’s breadth of provoking a battle with Georgian forces. Serge Ivanov, author of that deception and initiator of the raid, is known to be Mr. Putin’s closest confidant.
5. An instrumental approach to the issue of international terrorism.
Shaml Basaev, Ruslan Gelaev, and many hundreds of Chechen fighters were armed, trained and deployed by the Russian military in the Abkhaz war aganst Georgia. They were not classified as “international terrorists” by Moscow when they served as its proxies.
Later, Igor Gorgadze, the suspected organizer of the 1995 assassination attempt on President Shevardnadze, was spirited away to Moscow. That was one of several attempts traced to Russian territory and supportive structures. Mr. Gorgadze is wanted ever since for legal proceedings in Georgia. To this day, Russian media includng Kremlin-controlled state television keep interviewing Mr. Gorgadze, even as Russia’s intelligence agencies—Mr. Putin’s home base—claim to be unaware of Igor Gorgadze’s whereabouts. The post-September 11 international political consensus on the issue of terrorism has not impinged on Mr. Gorgadze’s safe haven n Moscow. On the contrary, he has received added visibility in the Russian media’s latest anti-Georgian campaign.
6. Disinformatsya through mass meda.
Russia’s media have, under Mr. Putin, lost a good deal of the freedom they had enjoyed previously. The Kremlin and its political allies now control or influence much of the media output. Officially-inspired coverage of Georgia and of Russia-Georgia relations is programmatically misinforming. It is designed to excuse the Russian military’s setbacks in the Chechnya war, back up the threats of force against Georgia, generate anti-Georgian sentiment among the Russian public and prepare the political atmosphere for possible military actions on Georgian territory. Mr. Putin’s chief spokesman Serge Yastrzhembsky, other members of the Putin team, television commentators close to the president, and occasionally Mr. Putin himself set the tone of this campaign.
Such misuse of the media illustrates the truism that neo-imperial ambitions are destructive of democracy at home. It would be impossible to name a democratic country in which the government would or could enlist almost all of the mass media--and all of those with a country-wide impact—in a daily campaign of misinformation and incitement, as we now witness in Russia at the top leadership’s behest, and with the intelligence agencies inspiring news coverage and editorial policy.
The six features, identified above, add up to a mode of conduct which is not unique to Mr. Putin’s period in office or to policy toward Georgia. Various components of this mode of Russian conduct have been in evidence during the post-Soviet period in various areas of the “near abroad.” In Georgia, however, all of these components have been in evidence, compounded by constant threats of military intervention. Russia has, to all intents and purposes, suspended the operation of international law in Russia-Georgia relations. It is American steadfastness that has shielded Georgia from the worst.
Moreover, major Western interests are at stake in Georgia regarding the transport of Caspian oil and gas and the commercial access of Western Europe to Central Asia. By threatening and destabilizing Georgia, the Russian policy is also jeopardizing those Western interests. For all these reasons, Georgia should be regarded as a touchstone of Mr. Putin’s willingness to accept the post-Soviet countries’ independence and their choice of a Western orientation. Georgia is also the place where the Kremlin can show whether it supports U.S.-led anti-terrorism efforts as a matter of principle, or it would instrumentalize this issue and seek country-for-country tradeoffs. In sum, Georgia is the testing ground of Mr. Putin’s international conduct.
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The above paper was delivered by
IASPS analyst Vladimir Socor at the America-Georgia
Business Council’s Fifth Annual Conference, entitled
Building Economic Security for Georgia, held in Tbilisi,
October 10-11, 2002, as per the following schedule:
Opening Remarks: Paul Henze,
AGBC/RAND Corporation
Address By Eduard Shevardnadze, President of Georgia
Address By William Lash, Assistant Secretary of
Commerce, USA
FIRST PANEL: National Security Challenges for Georgia
Panel Chair: Paul Henze, AGBC/RAND Corporation
Speakers:
US Government Perspective
By Richard Miles, US Ambassador to Georgia
Georgian Perspective
By Tedo Japaridze, National Security Advisor for
President Shevardnadze
Security Challenges for Georgia
By Gregory Olmstead, Regional Security Officer, Embassy
of USA in Georgia
Georgia - A Testing Ground of Putin's International
Conduct
By Vladimir Socor, Senior Fellow, Institute for Advanced
Strategic and Political Studies
Regional Instability and Threats to Georgia's Security
By Svante Cornell, Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, SAIS
Mr. Socor is a Senior Fellow of the Washington-based Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies.