Christ,I actually took the time to read the Bush quotes.
Russia has a genius and America has a moron.
Georgia: More Goltz On The Ground
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Re: Georgia: More Goltz On The Ground
by RYP » Thu Aug 28, 2008 8:10 pm
Of Georgia, Jamtland and the Texas Solution
by Thomas Goltz
I.D.: Goltz is an adjunct professor of Political Science at Montana State University, Bozeman, and author among other books of Georgia Diary: A Chronicle of Political Chaos and War in the Post-Soviet Caucasus, M.E. Sharpe, 2006, soon to be re-issued in paperback with a new Epilogue
Tbilisi/Baku, August 28, 2008
Well, it seems to be over, surprise, surprise, unless it turns into WW III, which I hope it does not.
The Caucasus War of 8.8.8 that is, the two-week (or two day) hurly burly in the mountainous southwest corner of the defunct Soviet Union that was a national debacle for West-obsessed Georgia and a crushing victory for a resurgent Russia.
For those of you who chose to watch the Beijing Olympics instead, which seemed to be timed almost purposely to create maximum distraction from the seismic events happening in the place that gave rise to the legend of Pandora’s Box getting re-opened, geo-politically speaking, let me fill you in on a fistful of details.
On August 8, in a coordinated land, air and sea assault, the pre-positioned military of the Russian Federation attacked the Republic of Georgia, theoretically to defend its citizens of Ossetian ethnicity from what it described as a genocidal campaign of ethnic cleansing at the hands of the Georgians. Those citizens under siege happened to live in a tiny, mountainous region known as South Ossetia (within Georgia), but which just happens to abut on the Autonomous Republic of North Ossetia (within the Russian Federation). South Ossetia, populated by around 60,000 Ossets and 40,000 Georgians, had enjoyed a fuzzy sort of independence since 1991, although efforts to peacefully re-integrate the territory back into Georgia have been going on for years. The reintegration process effectively ended when Moscow began distributing Russian passports to the Ossets living in the territory over the past year or two (but not the Georgians), thus making them Russian citizens on the spot, and deserving of Russian protection, even outside Russia’s borders. And so the war began.
By August 9 (and certainly the 10th), the one-sided contest was over for all intents and purposes, with the Russian side having thrown all American-trained Georgian military and police out of South Ossetia, taken over much of the rest of northern Georgia, and seemed poised to make an assault on the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, which was a mere 25 miles/40 kilometers away from the Russian front lines. Meanwhile, to the west, Russian tanks, troops and other gear were rushed to a second breakaway area of Georgia known as the Autonomous Republic of Abkhazia, lest the impetuous Georgians open a second front there, with the result that whatever Georgian military (and civilians) that remained in the territory were forced out, too, albeit with scarcely a shot getting fired.
By August 11, Georgia had in effect capitulated, and was begging for international diplomatic intervention. Russian tanks ruled the land, Russian aviation ruled the skies and Russian naval craft ruled the shores of the Black Sea. And Russian propaganda largely ruled the airwaves, too. That last victory might be summed up by the way the short war is usually represented even in the western media: namely, that the Russian counter-attack had been massively successful, and the man to blame for the mess was not Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin (and certainly not Russian President Dmitry Medvedev) but the mercurial Georgian President, Mikheil (Misha) Saakashvili.
Not.
A ‘counter attack’ assumes an initial attack, and the Georgians, while perhaps guilty of being lured into a trap, never attacked Russia. Rather, in the days prior to 8.8.8, Georgia had been responding to an escalating series of provocations inside South Ossetia and to a lesser extent in Abkhazia. That is how the war began, and how it should be remembered: it was and is a war of provocation followed by creeping annexation, and planned and executed with a surprising degree of efficiency, and complete audacity.
This was no where more in evidence than the decision by the Upper House of the Russian Duma on August 25th to recommend the recognition of both South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states, IE, to tear these territories away from Georgia, and forever. The parliamentary decision was next passed by the Lower House and then signed by President Medvedev within 24 hours of its initial getting tabled, to the joy of the Ossetians and Abkhaz, the shock and anguish of Georgia and the baffled cries of ‘foul play!’ in western capitals. A bed-rock of the international system of relations between countries in place since 1945, namely, the inviolability of the territorial integrity of existing states, had just been removed, and Pandora’s Box opened.
In some cynical circles, we call this The Texas Solution, because it so resembles the series of US provocations of Mexico that started with the Alamo and ended with the storming of the Halls of Montezuma and the creation of the (temporary) Texas Republic of 1840 before its annexation as the Lone Star State into the United States in 1845.
For an alternative history of that war, I would recommend The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. Although most of the book is devoted to Grant’s reduction of the Confederacy, it is the first part of the Memoirs that pertains to Russia’s creeping annexation of northern and western Georgia, namely, how a young Lt. Grant viewed President Polk’s Remember The Alamo! campaign against Mexico, starting with the sort of cross-border provocations that would force Mexico to retaliate, and young Grant’s participation in the entire campaign.
“The occupation, separation and annexation (of Texas by the US in 1845) were, from the inception of the movement until its consummation, a conspiracy to acquire territory out of which slave states might be formed for the American Union,” he wrote.
And more.
“The Southern Rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican War.(and) Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times.”
Grant declared himself bitterly opposed to the war, which he regarded as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.
What will the unintended consequences of Russia’s creeping annexation of the two Georgian autonomous territories be, when it has its own fair share of legally recognized sub-republics, such as Chechnya? Will a Russian lieutenant in the 58th Army in the war against Georgia of 8.8.8 one day write his memoirs about a distant, footnote in history?
I truly hope so, because the wash of propaganda coming out of Moscow right now needs correction, even fifty years hence.
As for the Georgian response to the disaster, only time will tell if Mr Saakashvili can survive; there is sufficient animosity growing against him both domestically and even in western capitals that would suggest that he cannot remain in power much longer, particularly after the ‘formal’ departure of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The Russians have made it absolutely clear that they will not tolerate any military adventures that Tbilisi might want to mount, and short of going into a stand-off that might lead us into WW III, no western power, however friendly to Georgia, is going to challenge Moscow on the matter with military might. Like ‘Old Mexico’ being forced to live with the reality of first an independent and then US state of Texas across the Rio Grande River, future generations of Georgians are apparently just have to get used to living without the chunks of their ancestral homeland once known as South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Other paradigms, all evoking the concept of the ‘phantom limb’ syndrome experienced by amputees, are the Kingdom of Jordan’s loss of the West Bank and Jerusalem through war with Israel in 1967, and then final renunciation of all Jordanian claims to that territory a decade later, or Syria’s now very passive, even plaintive whisper that the province of Iskenderoon, which became Turkey’s province of Hatay by quasi-rigged plebiscite in 1938, come home to the motherland some day.
Other observers of shifting frontiers will have their own favorite lost-limb stories, but mine concerns the Scandinavian regions known as Jamtland and Harjedalen, forcibly ceded by Norway to Sweden following the 1645 Peace of Bromsebro, a loss that was not even papered over by the union between those Nordic states during the friendlier period of 1814-1905. To this day, the King of Norway (and indeed all naval officers) keep two buttons unbuttoned on their dress togs remembering those two, obscure chunks of fjord and mountain, and hoping for their eventual return.
I shared that anecdote with Saakashvili at a late night meeting last week; he almost seemed to smile.
by Thomas Goltz
I.D.: Goltz is an adjunct professor of Political Science at Montana State University, Bozeman, and author among other books of Georgia Diary: A Chronicle of Political Chaos and War in the Post-Soviet Caucasus, M.E. Sharpe, 2006, soon to be re-issued in paperback with a new Epilogue
Tbilisi/Baku, August 28, 2008
Well, it seems to be over, surprise, surprise, unless it turns into WW III, which I hope it does not.
The Caucasus War of 8.8.8 that is, the two-week (or two day) hurly burly in the mountainous southwest corner of the defunct Soviet Union that was a national debacle for West-obsessed Georgia and a crushing victory for a resurgent Russia.
For those of you who chose to watch the Beijing Olympics instead, which seemed to be timed almost purposely to create maximum distraction from the seismic events happening in the place that gave rise to the legend of Pandora’s Box getting re-opened, geo-politically speaking, let me fill you in on a fistful of details.
On August 8, in a coordinated land, air and sea assault, the pre-positioned military of the Russian Federation attacked the Republic of Georgia, theoretically to defend its citizens of Ossetian ethnicity from what it described as a genocidal campaign of ethnic cleansing at the hands of the Georgians. Those citizens under siege happened to live in a tiny, mountainous region known as South Ossetia (within Georgia), but which just happens to abut on the Autonomous Republic of North Ossetia (within the Russian Federation). South Ossetia, populated by around 60,000 Ossets and 40,000 Georgians, had enjoyed a fuzzy sort of independence since 1991, although efforts to peacefully re-integrate the territory back into Georgia have been going on for years. The reintegration process effectively ended when Moscow began distributing Russian passports to the Ossets living in the territory over the past year or two (but not the Georgians), thus making them Russian citizens on the spot, and deserving of Russian protection, even outside Russia’s borders. And so the war began.
By August 9 (and certainly the 10th), the one-sided contest was over for all intents and purposes, with the Russian side having thrown all American-trained Georgian military and police out of South Ossetia, taken over much of the rest of northern Georgia, and seemed poised to make an assault on the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, which was a mere 25 miles/40 kilometers away from the Russian front lines. Meanwhile, to the west, Russian tanks, troops and other gear were rushed to a second breakaway area of Georgia known as the Autonomous Republic of Abkhazia, lest the impetuous Georgians open a second front there, with the result that whatever Georgian military (and civilians) that remained in the territory were forced out, too, albeit with scarcely a shot getting fired.
By August 11, Georgia had in effect capitulated, and was begging for international diplomatic intervention. Russian tanks ruled the land, Russian aviation ruled the skies and Russian naval craft ruled the shores of the Black Sea. And Russian propaganda largely ruled the airwaves, too. That last victory might be summed up by the way the short war is usually represented even in the western media: namely, that the Russian counter-attack had been massively successful, and the man to blame for the mess was not Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin (and certainly not Russian President Dmitry Medvedev) but the mercurial Georgian President, Mikheil (Misha) Saakashvili.
Not.
A ‘counter attack’ assumes an initial attack, and the Georgians, while perhaps guilty of being lured into a trap, never attacked Russia. Rather, in the days prior to 8.8.8, Georgia had been responding to an escalating series of provocations inside South Ossetia and to a lesser extent in Abkhazia. That is how the war began, and how it should be remembered: it was and is a war of provocation followed by creeping annexation, and planned and executed with a surprising degree of efficiency, and complete audacity.
This was no where more in evidence than the decision by the Upper House of the Russian Duma on August 25th to recommend the recognition of both South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states, IE, to tear these territories away from Georgia, and forever. The parliamentary decision was next passed by the Lower House and then signed by President Medvedev within 24 hours of its initial getting tabled, to the joy of the Ossetians and Abkhaz, the shock and anguish of Georgia and the baffled cries of ‘foul play!’ in western capitals. A bed-rock of the international system of relations between countries in place since 1945, namely, the inviolability of the territorial integrity of existing states, had just been removed, and Pandora’s Box opened.
In some cynical circles, we call this The Texas Solution, because it so resembles the series of US provocations of Mexico that started with the Alamo and ended with the storming of the Halls of Montezuma and the creation of the (temporary) Texas Republic of 1840 before its annexation as the Lone Star State into the United States in 1845.
For an alternative history of that war, I would recommend The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. Although most of the book is devoted to Grant’s reduction of the Confederacy, it is the first part of the Memoirs that pertains to Russia’s creeping annexation of northern and western Georgia, namely, how a young Lt. Grant viewed President Polk’s Remember The Alamo! campaign against Mexico, starting with the sort of cross-border provocations that would force Mexico to retaliate, and young Grant’s participation in the entire campaign.
“The occupation, separation and annexation (of Texas by the US in 1845) were, from the inception of the movement until its consummation, a conspiracy to acquire territory out of which slave states might be formed for the American Union,” he wrote.
And more.
“The Southern Rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican War.(and) Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times.”
Grant declared himself bitterly opposed to the war, which he regarded as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.
What will the unintended consequences of Russia’s creeping annexation of the two Georgian autonomous territories be, when it has its own fair share of legally recognized sub-republics, such as Chechnya? Will a Russian lieutenant in the 58th Army in the war against Georgia of 8.8.8 one day write his memoirs about a distant, footnote in history?
I truly hope so, because the wash of propaganda coming out of Moscow right now needs correction, even fifty years hence.
As for the Georgian response to the disaster, only time will tell if Mr Saakashvili can survive; there is sufficient animosity growing against him both domestically and even in western capitals that would suggest that he cannot remain in power much longer, particularly after the ‘formal’ departure of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The Russians have made it absolutely clear that they will not tolerate any military adventures that Tbilisi might want to mount, and short of going into a stand-off that might lead us into WW III, no western power, however friendly to Georgia, is going to challenge Moscow on the matter with military might. Like ‘Old Mexico’ being forced to live with the reality of first an independent and then US state of Texas across the Rio Grande River, future generations of Georgians are apparently just have to get used to living without the chunks of their ancestral homeland once known as South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Other paradigms, all evoking the concept of the ‘phantom limb’ syndrome experienced by amputees, are the Kingdom of Jordan’s loss of the West Bank and Jerusalem through war with Israel in 1967, and then final renunciation of all Jordanian claims to that territory a decade later, or Syria’s now very passive, even plaintive whisper that the province of Iskenderoon, which became Turkey’s province of Hatay by quasi-rigged plebiscite in 1938, come home to the motherland some day.
Other observers of shifting frontiers will have their own favorite lost-limb stories, but mine concerns the Scandinavian regions known as Jamtland and Harjedalen, forcibly ceded by Norway to Sweden following the 1645 Peace of Bromsebro, a loss that was not even papered over by the union between those Nordic states during the friendlier period of 1814-1905. To this day, the King of Norway (and indeed all naval officers) keep two buttons unbuttoned on their dress togs remembering those two, obscure chunks of fjord and mountain, and hoping for their eventual return.
I shared that anecdote with Saakashvili at a late night meeting last week; he almost seemed to smile.
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Re: Georgia: More Goltz On The Ground
by RYP » Sat Aug 30, 2008 5:33 pm
Dear Friends,
“The Texas Solution and Jamtland,” sent from Baku on August 27 or 28, was to have been my last file as part of the ‘Creeping Caucasus Catastrophe’ series that I initiated some weeks ago, but I take it all back because I have at least one more file to write before my departure back to the USA very early Monday morning (and via Moscow, or at least a seven hour forced layover…what fun).
This file will be a sort of wrap-up of impressions and recollections drawn from the entire two-week boondoggle and then end with certain observations of what I hope are the not-so-obvious implications of the Russian action in Georgia, and then an offering of predictions. I might cheat and just cut & paste an article written by the other party in my two-person book discussion club, (former) US ambassador to Azerbaijan, Stanley Escudero, for the US Chamber of Commerce in-house magazine in Baku. Stanley set up a lunch for the board of directors on August 28 after my arrival in Baku from Tbilisi the day before, with me as key-note pontificator mainly on the basis that our rather pessimistic/realistic views seem to be so much in line and that I would say things he wanted re-iterated. As for his analytical article, it probably makes a lot of folks uncomfortable. I do not see much I could add to it. I shall share the last graph right now, and then move back into my field of play.
“As for those of us who conduct business in Azerbaijan, we need to recognize that in this process we, even the largest among us, are not actors but are acted upon. This is a time for careful observation, for assessment and adaptation, for hedging our bets while advancing our business plans and continuing our businesses in ways which help both our bottom lines and the future of Azerbaijan.”
Azerbaijan?
But wasn’t this entire ‘creeping catastrophe’ stuff all about Russia and Georgia?
Read on, dear soul, read on…
*
For the past 24 hours, ensconced once again in Hijran’s garden apartment with a tiny side-view of the Bosphorus and Golden Horn, I have had the luxury of catching up on diverse emails that I had no time to file or process during my two-week long, seat-of-the-pants romp through Georgia. There is probably another stack of some 500 messages built up in my erstwhile primary email account goltz@wtp.net which fried about two days into the journey, and to which I still have no access. The server has still not bothered to inform me why they fried/froze the account, just when I needed it most. Ah, well. One of the things that this journey has taught me is the need for backing up everything associated with modern communications, and indeed life. Back up email systems, back up telephones, back up emergency evacuation plans, back up money, back up friends and back up clean shirts. And back up oil and gas delivery systems, if you are a country like Azerbaijan.
In any case, in the mass of built-up back-log on my computer, I ran into a message from an editor from the Wall Street Journal concerning a story idea I had back in mid-July. Essentially, I was proposing a quick trip from Istanbul to the eastern Turkish city of Kars to attend the grand inaugural ceremony of the Turkish leg of the Kars-Tbilisi-Baku ‘Steel Silk Road’ railway on the afternoon of July 14th.
While not as sexy as the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) main export pipeline that I rode my motorcycles down in the years 2000, 2001 and 2002 (and which finally opened in July of 2006), the KTB is a project I have long kept my eye on, from its initial ‘insane idea’ phase circa 2001 or 2002, through the various studies, the political back-lash (Armenian lobbyists in DCs demanding that Congress pass resolutions depriving credit to the project unless it included Armenia; the whole idea of the KTB was to further tighten the screws on that country by avoiding it, etc), the first ceremonial ground-breaking in Georgia (Azerbaijan floated an interest free loan to the Georgians to avoid the US Congressional demands altogether), and then finally, the meeting of the three presidents of Turkey, Georgia and Azerbaijan at Kars to symbolically slam in the spikes of the last 29 kilometers of track of the multi-millions USD project to be built from Kars to the Georgian frontier, which would link ‘London to the Great Wall of China’ (and other hyperbolic notions along that line) and thus massively increase trade and travel along a modern Silk Road, and bring prosperity to all (or at least to all participating in the project) when it finally came on line circa 2012 or so.
Now, why it would take six more years to complete 29 kilometers of train track was always a mystery to me; so was the routing namely, across the often restive part of southern Georgia usually referred to as Javakhkheti, which is populated mainly by (maybe separatist) Armenians who represented, one would think, some sort of security concern. The BTC pipeline planners very specifically avoided running through their neighborhood, and presumably with good reason. Be that as it may. The main point was that by belief and grit and the happy fact that Azerbaijan had the money to throw around without reference to the lending whims of the US Congress (and thus OPIC, the IMF, World Bank, etc), the KTB was getting done, and it seemed a natural story for me to go out and write about, and then proceed to have some pre-Fall Semester 2008 adventures in the Turkish east, such as a jaunt into Naxjivan, or possibly a quick plane ride to Baku aboard the newly initiated Baku-Kars flight on Azerbaijani Airlines.
Imagine that! An AzAl flight to Kars! The south Caucasus was really starting to take off, and with good ol’ Azerbaijan as the economic motor! My, how times have changed!
As it happened, the people at They Hate You airlines (THY, the national carrier) left me in the lurch, and a furious me flew south instead to spend a lovely five day period as the guest of Hugh and Jessica Pope (and god-daughter Scarlette) at their place in the hills outside Olympos, where we sat back and considered the fate of the Justice and Development (‘Islamist’) Party of Prime Minister Erdogan, talked life and literature and other issues. I could still have written an Istanbul-based OpEd on the KTB I guess, but it would not have felt right, and there were a dozen other things to do. But I never got back to the editor to tell him I would not write up the event (he had not commissioned it; he had merely expressed interest in taking a look once I got back from my non-trip).
Fast forward to a meeting I had in Baku last week with a number of highly intelligent individuals engaged in Azerbaijani foreign policy. While we are all old friends and could be content to speak about the weather, the obvious subject of interest was my impressions, evaluations and analysis of the situation in Georgia, and its impact on Azerbaijan. I tried to be honest. I said things like “If I were the president of this country, I would expand the annual ‘Azerbaijan Cultural Week’ in Moscow to the annual “Azerbaijan Cultural Month.” (chuckles) and “I would also bestow not just an honorary doctorate on Vladimir Putin from Slavyan University, but rename the university after him.” (more chuckles). And then I guess I said something wrong, because the main host became agitated, glared at me and then sort of declared the lunch to be over because he had an important meeting to attend. It may have been completely coincidental, but all this happened after I had said something like “And the Kars-Tbilisi-Baku railroad…has become a joke.”
Am I over-interpreting? It is possible.
But unlike the BTC, which is ‘safely’ under the ground, or most of it) the KTB is by definition on top of the ground and unfinished. And unlike the BTC, which was a consortium project led by BP, and thus part of a larger, international oil & gas network, the KTB is very specifically an Azerbaijani-initiated project put together by regional governments (Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey) that are now under threat by ‘resurgent Russia’ in a way that the BTC never was or will be. As such, it is a perfect pressure point, and I will go so far to say that not one piece or rolling stock much less millions of happy passengers will ever roll down that Silk Steel Road Line without explicit permission from Moscow. If that is true, then the KTB is also a perfect symbol of what the south Caucasus states (plus Turkey) will have to be dealing with in the future.
*
A few brief notes on my four days and nights in Az, and then on to the main subject of this epistle, Turkey.
I missed the whistle time at Tbilisi station because I had to stop off and have a deep-dark political conversation with my refugee sister pals Nunu and Nana Chachua before leaving town (readers of the Georgia book will recognize them and not be shocked at their attitude toward the current conflict; in essence, it is: ‘let the Russians come and bomb Tbilisi a bit so that the people here understand what we had to get used to in 1993 in Sukhumi, and then let the Russians occupy the country, demilitarize it and turn us into a neutralized satellite state. At least we will know where to sell our wine’…) and thus was obliged to catch the Iron Horse at the end of its 3 hour wait at the Georgian/Azerbaijani frontier. Nothing new about this; I have shown up without a ticket a half dozen times, handed the conductor a couple of bucks and presto! Gone on my way. But this time it was different. For starters, the conductor and guys working the passenger wagons were all Azerbaijani gals, or women, and they would have none of this ‘let me slip you a bill and give me a berth’ business. It took real convincing (speaking Azerbaijani of course helped) as well as the real promise that I would allow myself to get kicked off the train if there were no ticket to be had at the first station on the Azerbaijani side of the border. While I did not want to camp at the station, at the same time it was truly refreshing to note that yet another standard, little corruption in the Azerbaijani state system had become history.
The huge placard in the station, a famous saying by Heydar Aliyev, said it all: “I think that the railway system in Azerbaijan is really developing!” H.Aliyev…
The journey itself, after having acquired the ticket, was not interesting. It was night, hot, but not crowded or nasty aside from the communal toilet. Most of the passengers seemed to be Azerbaijani oil men working the diverse export points on the Georgian Black Sea coast that had been shut down by the war, and Georgians with something to do in Azerbaijan. I only mention this because there is indeed some weird Ali & Nino camaraderie between these two countries, living a sort of déjà vu of the 1918-21 period.
In the morning, my friend Yusuf Agayev picked me up at the station and we went through our standard realpolitik evaluation of the situation. As a military man and historian (readers will remember him from the Az Diary book as the Military Prosecutor in Karabakh who was wounded out of action three times, and nearly killed during the fall of Aghdam; he now works for Transparency International) Yusuf could only chortle cynically about any and all reports by non-military specialist reporters that Saakashvili had somehow initiated the crisis, and that the Russians had ‘merely’ made a disproportionate response. Then we scooted back to his place for me to wash the filth out of my clothes, have a quick breakfast, watch and compare Russian TV with the BBC reports on the Russian Duma Upper House decision to ask for recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states, after which I slept for a spell, and then went into town.
The next three days were a bit of a blur. Lunches, dinners, meetings, WiFi site discovery, bad crash pad selection, a new B & B managed by a burnt out veteran of the Karabakh war, meetings high and meetings low. Hot. Windy. Chance encounters with old friends. A sense that the place has been ruined by insane construction. A sense that a new generation has taken root. A sense that Azerbaijan has become an international cul de sac, and knows it. I will let Ambassador Escudero’s analysis serve as my own, and then return to Turkey after dinner.
Hijran is getting snarly; the reality is that I keep Soviet-style hours, waking at the crack of noon and grinding things out until 6 AM, which is usually when she wakes.
Thus, herewith the Stanley notes to end this file half-way through.
I will pick up with the Turkey content as a Part Two.
Bests
Thomas, Istanbul Aug 30 (Turkish Victory Day), 2008
Herewith the Stanley
THE RUSSIA/GEORGIA CONFLICT AND ENERGY SECURITY
After the energy security article in this magazine was already finished and “Impact” had gone to press the Russo-Georgian conflict erupted, proving my point about the futility of pipeline security in face of international conflict. Unfortunately, it proved the point rather sooner than I had expected. As I had already inflicted my opinions on you it seemed only right to compound my sins via this insert which tells where I think we are now and what it all means. When writing about current events for a magazine it is very difficult to avoid being overtaken by the pace of those events. But if everyone, including the Baku business community, is lucky, the pace of this drama will slow and this insert will still be relevant when you read it.
So, does the war between Russia and Georgia, ostensibly over South Ossetia, endanger the security of the BTC and Azerbaijan’s other pipelines? Of course. The extent of that danger depends upon the extent of Russian ambitions.
Within Russia there is a powerful faction which has never accepted the loss of the Near Abroad when the Soviet Union dissolved. An even larger segment of decision-makers resents the election of pro-American Mikheil Saakashvili to lead a country which they regard, with some justification, as well within Moscow’s sphere of influence. I would guess that virtually all of Russia’s leadership opposes the policy of developing an energy transportation corridor from the Caspian Basin through Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey to the West which moves oil and gas from former Soviet territories to western markets outside of Russian control. It seems to be a major goal of Russian foreign policy to gain control of the largest possible share of gas flowing to Europe, thereby obtaining extraordinary economic and political influence in European capitals.
When the West helped Kosovo to become independent Russia made its anger very plain. Russian diplomats even threatened a riposte, specifically mentioning South Ossetia as a possible focus for their reaction. They laid the groundwork for this by granting most citizens in South Ossetia Russian passports, thus making it possible in advance to claim that any future Russian military action in that province was taken in defense of Russian citizens. With all of this in mind the Georgians were exceedingly foolish to respond to violence from South Ossetia by sending in their army, reportedly against American advice. Not only was a strong Russian reaction predictable but the speed and scale of Russian military action suggest that Moscow had already prepared its strike and this in turn suggests that Saakashvili may have fallen into a clever Russian trap. Whatever the truth may be, Tbilisi now finds itself in a game in which Russia holds all the cards.
The West promptly made it clear that there will be no military rescue from that direction. In fact this was never a possibility. Europe, which had the capacity to intervene in the Balkans, did not and would not have considered intervening in Georgia even had it had the capacity. The United States is already committed in Iraq and Afghanistan (as is Europe), its President is unpopular, politically weak and at the point in his second term at which any American president finds it hardest to take dramatic foreign action. The American electoral process works against such steps at this point in the campaign and the new Administration, seeing how badly the Republicans have suffered politically over the Iraq affair, is likely to regard any new foreign adventure with great caution. The Russian veto in the Security Council will preclude the United Nations from taking any meaningful action in support of Georgia, even if it wished to. And, given the relative power and importance of Russia versus that of Georgia not to mention Russia’s immediate military and geographic advantages, no such intervention should be contemplated. If Russia stops at separation of South Ossetia and Abkazia, the most that can be expected are public statements such as those already made by President Bush and by Europeans leaders, given substance by the valiant efforts of the French, which succeeded in bringing about a ceasefire. But, at least in the short term, the success of the ceasefire and the terms and extent of any subsequent solution are almost entirely dependent on what the Russians are willing to permit to happen.
In my view this affair is an exercise in nineteenth-century balance of power politics in which it continues to be the case that the strong do what they can while the weak suffer what they must. And brilliantly played by Moscow so far.
In the short term the Russians are going to win this one. The question is, “What exactly do they want to win?” If what they seek is to institutionalize the separation of South Ossetia and Abkazia from Georgia proper, I believe that the West will reluctantly acquiesce, in fact if not in name. There is no choice. The present Georgian government insists that it will never accept separation but, in the end, what can it do about it? Public acceptance would doubtless prove politically fatal to Saakashvili but the ceasefire itself was built on the time-honored diplomatic tactic of constructive uncertainty and it is the essence of good diplomacy to devise those polite fictions which enable even the reluctant to disguise the inevitable.
But Russian ambitions may well extend to regime change in Georgia. Russian diplomats have said as much to US officials and in public, where they have declared themselves unwilling to negotiate the details of the resolution of the conflict with a Georgian government headed by Saakashvili. Not surprisingly, President Saakashvili insists that regime change is Moscow’s primary goal and the leaders of both countries have exchanged public insults. As this is written TV news reports Russian withdrawal from Georgia proper except for an “administrative” strip along the southern borders of South Ossetia and Abkazia, the retention of checkpoints in Gori and a military presence in Poti, which remains closed
There are any number of hypothetical scenarios which could produce regime change in Georgia but, fortunately, the Kremlin seems to have decided not to follow the most direct one – simply conquering the country and replacing the government by main force. One likely scenario for coming days has the Russians insisting on maintaining substantial armed force within Georgia until the arrival and emplacement of the international peacekeepers envisaged by the ceasefire agreement on grounds that internal Georgian security cannot otherwise be assured. Afterwards it seems probable that Moscow will permanently re-enforce the numbers and military capacities of its peacekeepers within South Ossetia and Abkazia and conduct occasional armed probes into Georgian territory on one security ground or another.
These and other measures could be intended to increase internal Georgian dissatisfaction with Saakashvili’s regime, creating conditions in which a Russian-backed but publicly deniable movement to replace him could succeed. Stranger things have happened. But any scenario which involves regime change in Georgia, and thus dramatically increased Russian influence over the east-west flow of oil and gas, significantly raises the stakes for the West, Russia, Georgia and the South Caucasus. And that leads one to ask what, questions of payback for Kosovo and national prestige aside, would Russia hope to gain by having a government in Tbilisi more responsive to its wishes?
This brings us back to Pipeline security and the export of Caspian Basin oil and gas, especially the latter. Note that the BTC pipeline ( now functioning again) was recently blown in Turkey by “terrorists” who may or may not have been Kurdish. I find the timing suspicious. Then there were news reports, still unconfirmed as of this writing, that Russian aircraft attempted to bomb the pipeline within Georgia. The Russians and BP deny this. At the same time the Russians have shut down the northern pipeline to Novorossiysk for “maintenance,” another suspicious coincidence. I understand that rail transport, and thus the export of some Azerbaijani oil via rail to Batumi, has ceased to function because the Russians blew up a railroad bridge east of the Georgian town of Kapisi. And the press reports that, as an understandable precautionary measure, BP has halted export of oil via the smaller pipeline to Supsa, though the pumping of gas into the Baku-Tbililsi-Erzerum pipeline, also halted during the fighting, may soon resume. Clearly pressure on Azerbaijan has already begun.
Georgia, in the colorful phrase of Z. Brezhinski, is “the cork in the bottle” of the Caspian Basin. A Georgian government more subservient to Moscow could increase the costs of oil transiting the pipeline, demand renegotiation of the terms of pipeline ownership or operation, pose obstacles to the increase of the capacity of the BTC line, construction of a parallel line or construction and operation of the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzerum gas pipeline or, in extremis, shut the things down altogether. A subservient Georgian government could be the key to a Russian victory over the US and Europe in the current round of the Great Game for control of export of the energy resources of the Caspian Basin and Central Asia. It could make construction of an undersea gas pipeline from the east coast of the Caspian to Azerbaijan irrelevant. It could prevent construction of the planned Nabucco undersea gas pipeline from Turkey to the Balkans by denying the gas to fill that pipeline. Along with the gas already provided to Western Europe from Russia and Gazprom’s efforts to purchase control of the gas produced by Algeria and Libya and currently sold to Europe, its could assure Moscow’s control of the vast majority of Europe’s gas supplies, gaining Russia immense political and economic influence within Europe. At the very least it would give Russia a much stronger hand to play as the Great Game progresses.
The risks to the West stemming from regime change in Georgia would virtually ensure western counter measures to damage Russian interests. The French, Germans, Poles, Ukrainians and the Baltic nations have demonstrated their support for the Tbilisi government. But the more severe the counter measures under consideration, the less likely it is that the Europeans (well aware of their energy dependence) will be unified in supporting their imposition or their implementation. NATO, for example, has so far shown itself incapable of anything more than a relatively mild statement of disapproval on the invasion. The Europeans are planning to meet further on this crisis and the Americans are talking of (unspecified) dire consequences for bilateral relations. However, while the US will deliver humanitarian aid and rebuild some of the damage in Georgia and perhaps even help to rebuild the Georgian military, the regional power imbalance suggests that any western response would be non-military and directed primarily at Russian interests elsewhere, outside of the Caucasus. The invasion accelerated signature of the long-planned US-Poland agreement on stationing antimissile batteries on Polish soil over strong Russian opposition. Russia has been denied participation in regularly-scheduled NATO military exercises. Future Western steps could include bringing Ukraine into NATO (with consequences for Russian use of Ukrainian ports in the Black Sea), removing Russia from the G-8, rejecting or delaying its application for entry into the World Trade Organization or denying Russia its hosting of a future Olympics Games in Sochi.
The West will try to keep its response proportional to Russian actions so, if Russia can be satisfied with the gains in regional prestige it has already achieved along with the separation of South Ossetia and Abkazia, as opposed to regime change or something more, the chill in the Russo-Western relationship will be less deep and of shorter duration. At some point, before the process of action and counter action sets too many teeth agrind, Russia, the US and, one hopes, a unified Europe need to sit down for a no-holds-barred discussion of their respective interests and how they can be mutually accommodated.
More immediately the whole crisis and the possibilities that flow from it suggest that Azerbaijan and those of us who live and work here are entering a very delicate period in which Azerbaijani oil and gas passing through Georgia will be as secure as Russia wants it to be. No matter how it turns out, Russia has made a compelling statement regarding its perception of the scope of its interests, its willingness to act on that perception and the limits of Western opposition to such action. None of this will be lost on regional governments.
There is also a speculative possibility that Armenia, which for over a century has served as something of a Russian catspaw in the Caucasus, will be emboldened by Russian actions in Georgia. With or without Moscow’s encouragement this could lead Armenia, which is growing progressively weaker in comparison to Baku, to seize this moment to threaten the oil flow, demand cession of majority Armenian portions of Georgia or otherwise further destabilize the region.
This period will call for extremely deft management of Azerbaijan’s role within what I call the Quadrilateral Balance. Think of Azerbaijan as a point within a square defined at its four corners by Russia, Iran, Turkey and the West (the US and Europe). The Azeri point can never move too close or too far away from any of the four corners but must periodically adjust its position within the square in response to developments at the four corners. Easy to describe but very hard to do. Fortunately, President Ilham Aliyev is very, very good at this. We can be sure that he is paying the closest attention to events and should all have confidence in his sure-handed ability to guide Azerbaijan through this suddenly troubled period. The Azeri government has already issued a statement supporting Georgia’s territorial integrity. This was a courageous step in view of the obvious risks but Baku could do no less, as territorial integrity is the very heart of its position demanding the freedom of Nagorno Karabakh and the other seven provinces from Armenian aggression and occupation.
As for those of us who conduct business in Azerbaijan, we need to recognize that in this process we, even the largest among us, are not actors but are acted upon. This is a time for careful observation, for assessment and adaptation, for hedging our bets while advancing our business plans and continuing our businesses in ways which help both our bottom lines and the future of Azerbaijan.
Finally, I cannot state too unequivocally that the views expressed here are entirely my own. They do not reflect the opinions of the American Chamber of Commerce in Azerbaijan, the Government of the United States or those of any other government, institution or entity.
END
“The Texas Solution and Jamtland,” sent from Baku on August 27 or 28, was to have been my last file as part of the ‘Creeping Caucasus Catastrophe’ series that I initiated some weeks ago, but I take it all back because I have at least one more file to write before my departure back to the USA very early Monday morning (and via Moscow, or at least a seven hour forced layover…what fun).
This file will be a sort of wrap-up of impressions and recollections drawn from the entire two-week boondoggle and then end with certain observations of what I hope are the not-so-obvious implications of the Russian action in Georgia, and then an offering of predictions. I might cheat and just cut & paste an article written by the other party in my two-person book discussion club, (former) US ambassador to Azerbaijan, Stanley Escudero, for the US Chamber of Commerce in-house magazine in Baku. Stanley set up a lunch for the board of directors on August 28 after my arrival in Baku from Tbilisi the day before, with me as key-note pontificator mainly on the basis that our rather pessimistic/realistic views seem to be so much in line and that I would say things he wanted re-iterated. As for his analytical article, it probably makes a lot of folks uncomfortable. I do not see much I could add to it. I shall share the last graph right now, and then move back into my field of play.
“As for those of us who conduct business in Azerbaijan, we need to recognize that in this process we, even the largest among us, are not actors but are acted upon. This is a time for careful observation, for assessment and adaptation, for hedging our bets while advancing our business plans and continuing our businesses in ways which help both our bottom lines and the future of Azerbaijan.”
Azerbaijan?
But wasn’t this entire ‘creeping catastrophe’ stuff all about Russia and Georgia?
Read on, dear soul, read on…
*
For the past 24 hours, ensconced once again in Hijran’s garden apartment with a tiny side-view of the Bosphorus and Golden Horn, I have had the luxury of catching up on diverse emails that I had no time to file or process during my two-week long, seat-of-the-pants romp through Georgia. There is probably another stack of some 500 messages built up in my erstwhile primary email account goltz@wtp.net which fried about two days into the journey, and to which I still have no access. The server has still not bothered to inform me why they fried/froze the account, just when I needed it most. Ah, well. One of the things that this journey has taught me is the need for backing up everything associated with modern communications, and indeed life. Back up email systems, back up telephones, back up emergency evacuation plans, back up money, back up friends and back up clean shirts. And back up oil and gas delivery systems, if you are a country like Azerbaijan.
In any case, in the mass of built-up back-log on my computer, I ran into a message from an editor from the Wall Street Journal concerning a story idea I had back in mid-July. Essentially, I was proposing a quick trip from Istanbul to the eastern Turkish city of Kars to attend the grand inaugural ceremony of the Turkish leg of the Kars-Tbilisi-Baku ‘Steel Silk Road’ railway on the afternoon of July 14th.
While not as sexy as the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) main export pipeline that I rode my motorcycles down in the years 2000, 2001 and 2002 (and which finally opened in July of 2006), the KTB is a project I have long kept my eye on, from its initial ‘insane idea’ phase circa 2001 or 2002, through the various studies, the political back-lash (Armenian lobbyists in DCs demanding that Congress pass resolutions depriving credit to the project unless it included Armenia; the whole idea of the KTB was to further tighten the screws on that country by avoiding it, etc), the first ceremonial ground-breaking in Georgia (Azerbaijan floated an interest free loan to the Georgians to avoid the US Congressional demands altogether), and then finally, the meeting of the three presidents of Turkey, Georgia and Azerbaijan at Kars to symbolically slam in the spikes of the last 29 kilometers of track of the multi-millions USD project to be built from Kars to the Georgian frontier, which would link ‘London to the Great Wall of China’ (and other hyperbolic notions along that line) and thus massively increase trade and travel along a modern Silk Road, and bring prosperity to all (or at least to all participating in the project) when it finally came on line circa 2012 or so.
Now, why it would take six more years to complete 29 kilometers of train track was always a mystery to me; so was the routing namely, across the often restive part of southern Georgia usually referred to as Javakhkheti, which is populated mainly by (maybe separatist) Armenians who represented, one would think, some sort of security concern. The BTC pipeline planners very specifically avoided running through their neighborhood, and presumably with good reason. Be that as it may. The main point was that by belief and grit and the happy fact that Azerbaijan had the money to throw around without reference to the lending whims of the US Congress (and thus OPIC, the IMF, World Bank, etc), the KTB was getting done, and it seemed a natural story for me to go out and write about, and then proceed to have some pre-Fall Semester 2008 adventures in the Turkish east, such as a jaunt into Naxjivan, or possibly a quick plane ride to Baku aboard the newly initiated Baku-Kars flight on Azerbaijani Airlines.
Imagine that! An AzAl flight to Kars! The south Caucasus was really starting to take off, and with good ol’ Azerbaijan as the economic motor! My, how times have changed!
As it happened, the people at They Hate You airlines (THY, the national carrier) left me in the lurch, and a furious me flew south instead to spend a lovely five day period as the guest of Hugh and Jessica Pope (and god-daughter Scarlette) at their place in the hills outside Olympos, where we sat back and considered the fate of the Justice and Development (‘Islamist’) Party of Prime Minister Erdogan, talked life and literature and other issues. I could still have written an Istanbul-based OpEd on the KTB I guess, but it would not have felt right, and there were a dozen other things to do. But I never got back to the editor to tell him I would not write up the event (he had not commissioned it; he had merely expressed interest in taking a look once I got back from my non-trip).
Fast forward to a meeting I had in Baku last week with a number of highly intelligent individuals engaged in Azerbaijani foreign policy. While we are all old friends and could be content to speak about the weather, the obvious subject of interest was my impressions, evaluations and analysis of the situation in Georgia, and its impact on Azerbaijan. I tried to be honest. I said things like “If I were the president of this country, I would expand the annual ‘Azerbaijan Cultural Week’ in Moscow to the annual “Azerbaijan Cultural Month.” (chuckles) and “I would also bestow not just an honorary doctorate on Vladimir Putin from Slavyan University, but rename the university after him.” (more chuckles). And then I guess I said something wrong, because the main host became agitated, glared at me and then sort of declared the lunch to be over because he had an important meeting to attend. It may have been completely coincidental, but all this happened after I had said something like “And the Kars-Tbilisi-Baku railroad…has become a joke.”
Am I over-interpreting? It is possible.
But unlike the BTC, which is ‘safely’ under the ground, or most of it) the KTB is by definition on top of the ground and unfinished. And unlike the BTC, which was a consortium project led by BP, and thus part of a larger, international oil & gas network, the KTB is very specifically an Azerbaijani-initiated project put together by regional governments (Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey) that are now under threat by ‘resurgent Russia’ in a way that the BTC never was or will be. As such, it is a perfect pressure point, and I will go so far to say that not one piece or rolling stock much less millions of happy passengers will ever roll down that Silk Steel Road Line without explicit permission from Moscow. If that is true, then the KTB is also a perfect symbol of what the south Caucasus states (plus Turkey) will have to be dealing with in the future.
*
A few brief notes on my four days and nights in Az, and then on to the main subject of this epistle, Turkey.
I missed the whistle time at Tbilisi station because I had to stop off and have a deep-dark political conversation with my refugee sister pals Nunu and Nana Chachua before leaving town (readers of the Georgia book will recognize them and not be shocked at their attitude toward the current conflict; in essence, it is: ‘let the Russians come and bomb Tbilisi a bit so that the people here understand what we had to get used to in 1993 in Sukhumi, and then let the Russians occupy the country, demilitarize it and turn us into a neutralized satellite state. At least we will know where to sell our wine’…) and thus was obliged to catch the Iron Horse at the end of its 3 hour wait at the Georgian/Azerbaijani frontier. Nothing new about this; I have shown up without a ticket a half dozen times, handed the conductor a couple of bucks and presto! Gone on my way. But this time it was different. For starters, the conductor and guys working the passenger wagons were all Azerbaijani gals, or women, and they would have none of this ‘let me slip you a bill and give me a berth’ business. It took real convincing (speaking Azerbaijani of course helped) as well as the real promise that I would allow myself to get kicked off the train if there were no ticket to be had at the first station on the Azerbaijani side of the border. While I did not want to camp at the station, at the same time it was truly refreshing to note that yet another standard, little corruption in the Azerbaijani state system had become history.
The huge placard in the station, a famous saying by Heydar Aliyev, said it all: “I think that the railway system in Azerbaijan is really developing!” H.Aliyev…
The journey itself, after having acquired the ticket, was not interesting. It was night, hot, but not crowded or nasty aside from the communal toilet. Most of the passengers seemed to be Azerbaijani oil men working the diverse export points on the Georgian Black Sea coast that had been shut down by the war, and Georgians with something to do in Azerbaijan. I only mention this because there is indeed some weird Ali & Nino camaraderie between these two countries, living a sort of déjà vu of the 1918-21 period.
In the morning, my friend Yusuf Agayev picked me up at the station and we went through our standard realpolitik evaluation of the situation. As a military man and historian (readers will remember him from the Az Diary book as the Military Prosecutor in Karabakh who was wounded out of action three times, and nearly killed during the fall of Aghdam; he now works for Transparency International) Yusuf could only chortle cynically about any and all reports by non-military specialist reporters that Saakashvili had somehow initiated the crisis, and that the Russians had ‘merely’ made a disproportionate response. Then we scooted back to his place for me to wash the filth out of my clothes, have a quick breakfast, watch and compare Russian TV with the BBC reports on the Russian Duma Upper House decision to ask for recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states, after which I slept for a spell, and then went into town.
The next three days were a bit of a blur. Lunches, dinners, meetings, WiFi site discovery, bad crash pad selection, a new B & B managed by a burnt out veteran of the Karabakh war, meetings high and meetings low. Hot. Windy. Chance encounters with old friends. A sense that the place has been ruined by insane construction. A sense that a new generation has taken root. A sense that Azerbaijan has become an international cul de sac, and knows it. I will let Ambassador Escudero’s analysis serve as my own, and then return to Turkey after dinner.
Hijran is getting snarly; the reality is that I keep Soviet-style hours, waking at the crack of noon and grinding things out until 6 AM, which is usually when she wakes.
Thus, herewith the Stanley notes to end this file half-way through.
I will pick up with the Turkey content as a Part Two.
Bests
Thomas, Istanbul Aug 30 (Turkish Victory Day), 2008
Herewith the Stanley
THE RUSSIA/GEORGIA CONFLICT AND ENERGY SECURITY
After the energy security article in this magazine was already finished and “Impact” had gone to press the Russo-Georgian conflict erupted, proving my point about the futility of pipeline security in face of international conflict. Unfortunately, it proved the point rather sooner than I had expected. As I had already inflicted my opinions on you it seemed only right to compound my sins via this insert which tells where I think we are now and what it all means. When writing about current events for a magazine it is very difficult to avoid being overtaken by the pace of those events. But if everyone, including the Baku business community, is lucky, the pace of this drama will slow and this insert will still be relevant when you read it.
So, does the war between Russia and Georgia, ostensibly over South Ossetia, endanger the security of the BTC and Azerbaijan’s other pipelines? Of course. The extent of that danger depends upon the extent of Russian ambitions.
Within Russia there is a powerful faction which has never accepted the loss of the Near Abroad when the Soviet Union dissolved. An even larger segment of decision-makers resents the election of pro-American Mikheil Saakashvili to lead a country which they regard, with some justification, as well within Moscow’s sphere of influence. I would guess that virtually all of Russia’s leadership opposes the policy of developing an energy transportation corridor from the Caspian Basin through Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey to the West which moves oil and gas from former Soviet territories to western markets outside of Russian control. It seems to be a major goal of Russian foreign policy to gain control of the largest possible share of gas flowing to Europe, thereby obtaining extraordinary economic and political influence in European capitals.
When the West helped Kosovo to become independent Russia made its anger very plain. Russian diplomats even threatened a riposte, specifically mentioning South Ossetia as a possible focus for their reaction. They laid the groundwork for this by granting most citizens in South Ossetia Russian passports, thus making it possible in advance to claim that any future Russian military action in that province was taken in defense of Russian citizens. With all of this in mind the Georgians were exceedingly foolish to respond to violence from South Ossetia by sending in their army, reportedly against American advice. Not only was a strong Russian reaction predictable but the speed and scale of Russian military action suggest that Moscow had already prepared its strike and this in turn suggests that Saakashvili may have fallen into a clever Russian trap. Whatever the truth may be, Tbilisi now finds itself in a game in which Russia holds all the cards.
The West promptly made it clear that there will be no military rescue from that direction. In fact this was never a possibility. Europe, which had the capacity to intervene in the Balkans, did not and would not have considered intervening in Georgia even had it had the capacity. The United States is already committed in Iraq and Afghanistan (as is Europe), its President is unpopular, politically weak and at the point in his second term at which any American president finds it hardest to take dramatic foreign action. The American electoral process works against such steps at this point in the campaign and the new Administration, seeing how badly the Republicans have suffered politically over the Iraq affair, is likely to regard any new foreign adventure with great caution. The Russian veto in the Security Council will preclude the United Nations from taking any meaningful action in support of Georgia, even if it wished to. And, given the relative power and importance of Russia versus that of Georgia not to mention Russia’s immediate military and geographic advantages, no such intervention should be contemplated. If Russia stops at separation of South Ossetia and Abkazia, the most that can be expected are public statements such as those already made by President Bush and by Europeans leaders, given substance by the valiant efforts of the French, which succeeded in bringing about a ceasefire. But, at least in the short term, the success of the ceasefire and the terms and extent of any subsequent solution are almost entirely dependent on what the Russians are willing to permit to happen.
In my view this affair is an exercise in nineteenth-century balance of power politics in which it continues to be the case that the strong do what they can while the weak suffer what they must. And brilliantly played by Moscow so far.
In the short term the Russians are going to win this one. The question is, “What exactly do they want to win?” If what they seek is to institutionalize the separation of South Ossetia and Abkazia from Georgia proper, I believe that the West will reluctantly acquiesce, in fact if not in name. There is no choice. The present Georgian government insists that it will never accept separation but, in the end, what can it do about it? Public acceptance would doubtless prove politically fatal to Saakashvili but the ceasefire itself was built on the time-honored diplomatic tactic of constructive uncertainty and it is the essence of good diplomacy to devise those polite fictions which enable even the reluctant to disguise the inevitable.
But Russian ambitions may well extend to regime change in Georgia. Russian diplomats have said as much to US officials and in public, where they have declared themselves unwilling to negotiate the details of the resolution of the conflict with a Georgian government headed by Saakashvili. Not surprisingly, President Saakashvili insists that regime change is Moscow’s primary goal and the leaders of both countries have exchanged public insults. As this is written TV news reports Russian withdrawal from Georgia proper except for an “administrative” strip along the southern borders of South Ossetia and Abkazia, the retention of checkpoints in Gori and a military presence in Poti, which remains closed
There are any number of hypothetical scenarios which could produce regime change in Georgia but, fortunately, the Kremlin seems to have decided not to follow the most direct one – simply conquering the country and replacing the government by main force. One likely scenario for coming days has the Russians insisting on maintaining substantial armed force within Georgia until the arrival and emplacement of the international peacekeepers envisaged by the ceasefire agreement on grounds that internal Georgian security cannot otherwise be assured. Afterwards it seems probable that Moscow will permanently re-enforce the numbers and military capacities of its peacekeepers within South Ossetia and Abkazia and conduct occasional armed probes into Georgian territory on one security ground or another.
These and other measures could be intended to increase internal Georgian dissatisfaction with Saakashvili’s regime, creating conditions in which a Russian-backed but publicly deniable movement to replace him could succeed. Stranger things have happened. But any scenario which involves regime change in Georgia, and thus dramatically increased Russian influence over the east-west flow of oil and gas, significantly raises the stakes for the West, Russia, Georgia and the South Caucasus. And that leads one to ask what, questions of payback for Kosovo and national prestige aside, would Russia hope to gain by having a government in Tbilisi more responsive to its wishes?
This brings us back to Pipeline security and the export of Caspian Basin oil and gas, especially the latter. Note that the BTC pipeline ( now functioning again) was recently blown in Turkey by “terrorists” who may or may not have been Kurdish. I find the timing suspicious. Then there were news reports, still unconfirmed as of this writing, that Russian aircraft attempted to bomb the pipeline within Georgia. The Russians and BP deny this. At the same time the Russians have shut down the northern pipeline to Novorossiysk for “maintenance,” another suspicious coincidence. I understand that rail transport, and thus the export of some Azerbaijani oil via rail to Batumi, has ceased to function because the Russians blew up a railroad bridge east of the Georgian town of Kapisi. And the press reports that, as an understandable precautionary measure, BP has halted export of oil via the smaller pipeline to Supsa, though the pumping of gas into the Baku-Tbililsi-Erzerum pipeline, also halted during the fighting, may soon resume. Clearly pressure on Azerbaijan has already begun.
Georgia, in the colorful phrase of Z. Brezhinski, is “the cork in the bottle” of the Caspian Basin. A Georgian government more subservient to Moscow could increase the costs of oil transiting the pipeline, demand renegotiation of the terms of pipeline ownership or operation, pose obstacles to the increase of the capacity of the BTC line, construction of a parallel line or construction and operation of the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzerum gas pipeline or, in extremis, shut the things down altogether. A subservient Georgian government could be the key to a Russian victory over the US and Europe in the current round of the Great Game for control of export of the energy resources of the Caspian Basin and Central Asia. It could make construction of an undersea gas pipeline from the east coast of the Caspian to Azerbaijan irrelevant. It could prevent construction of the planned Nabucco undersea gas pipeline from Turkey to the Balkans by denying the gas to fill that pipeline. Along with the gas already provided to Western Europe from Russia and Gazprom’s efforts to purchase control of the gas produced by Algeria and Libya and currently sold to Europe, its could assure Moscow’s control of the vast majority of Europe’s gas supplies, gaining Russia immense political and economic influence within Europe. At the very least it would give Russia a much stronger hand to play as the Great Game progresses.
The risks to the West stemming from regime change in Georgia would virtually ensure western counter measures to damage Russian interests. The French, Germans, Poles, Ukrainians and the Baltic nations have demonstrated their support for the Tbilisi government. But the more severe the counter measures under consideration, the less likely it is that the Europeans (well aware of their energy dependence) will be unified in supporting their imposition or their implementation. NATO, for example, has so far shown itself incapable of anything more than a relatively mild statement of disapproval on the invasion. The Europeans are planning to meet further on this crisis and the Americans are talking of (unspecified) dire consequences for bilateral relations. However, while the US will deliver humanitarian aid and rebuild some of the damage in Georgia and perhaps even help to rebuild the Georgian military, the regional power imbalance suggests that any western response would be non-military and directed primarily at Russian interests elsewhere, outside of the Caucasus. The invasion accelerated signature of the long-planned US-Poland agreement on stationing antimissile batteries on Polish soil over strong Russian opposition. Russia has been denied participation in regularly-scheduled NATO military exercises. Future Western steps could include bringing Ukraine into NATO (with consequences for Russian use of Ukrainian ports in the Black Sea), removing Russia from the G-8, rejecting or delaying its application for entry into the World Trade Organization or denying Russia its hosting of a future Olympics Games in Sochi.
The West will try to keep its response proportional to Russian actions so, if Russia can be satisfied with the gains in regional prestige it has already achieved along with the separation of South Ossetia and Abkazia, as opposed to regime change or something more, the chill in the Russo-Western relationship will be less deep and of shorter duration. At some point, before the process of action and counter action sets too many teeth agrind, Russia, the US and, one hopes, a unified Europe need to sit down for a no-holds-barred discussion of their respective interests and how they can be mutually accommodated.
More immediately the whole crisis and the possibilities that flow from it suggest that Azerbaijan and those of us who live and work here are entering a very delicate period in which Azerbaijani oil and gas passing through Georgia will be as secure as Russia wants it to be. No matter how it turns out, Russia has made a compelling statement regarding its perception of the scope of its interests, its willingness to act on that perception and the limits of Western opposition to such action. None of this will be lost on regional governments.
There is also a speculative possibility that Armenia, which for over a century has served as something of a Russian catspaw in the Caucasus, will be emboldened by Russian actions in Georgia. With or without Moscow’s encouragement this could lead Armenia, which is growing progressively weaker in comparison to Baku, to seize this moment to threaten the oil flow, demand cession of majority Armenian portions of Georgia or otherwise further destabilize the region.
This period will call for extremely deft management of Azerbaijan’s role within what I call the Quadrilateral Balance. Think of Azerbaijan as a point within a square defined at its four corners by Russia, Iran, Turkey and the West (the US and Europe). The Azeri point can never move too close or too far away from any of the four corners but must periodically adjust its position within the square in response to developments at the four corners. Easy to describe but very hard to do. Fortunately, President Ilham Aliyev is very, very good at this. We can be sure that he is paying the closest attention to events and should all have confidence in his sure-handed ability to guide Azerbaijan through this suddenly troubled period. The Azeri government has already issued a statement supporting Georgia’s territorial integrity. This was a courageous step in view of the obvious risks but Baku could do no less, as territorial integrity is the very heart of its position demanding the freedom of Nagorno Karabakh and the other seven provinces from Armenian aggression and occupation.
As for those of us who conduct business in Azerbaijan, we need to recognize that in this process we, even the largest among us, are not actors but are acted upon. This is a time for careful observation, for assessment and adaptation, for hedging our bets while advancing our business plans and continuing our businesses in ways which help both our bottom lines and the future of Azerbaijan.
Finally, I cannot state too unequivocally that the views expressed here are entirely my own. They do not reflect the opinions of the American Chamber of Commerce in Azerbaijan, the Government of the United States or those of any other government, institution or entity.
END
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RYP - Ownerus Websiteus Authorus
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Re: Georgia: More Goltz On The Ground
by RYP » Mon Sep 01, 2008 6:28 pm
Talking Turkey, or Oil Is Money But Gas Is Power
Istanbul, September 1st, 2008
On the glorious last day of summer, August 31st, Hijran and I took a drive up the coastal road on the European side of the Bosphorus, from the entrance of the Golden Horn overlooking the Topkapi Palace and the Sea of Marmara, to the mouth of the straits on the Black Sea at a working fishing town/harbor called Rumeli Fener, or ‘European Lighthouse.’
It being Sunday, traffic was thick for most of the journey, and seemed to increase at exactly those places where the channel itself narrows into choke-points, possibly because this is where most of the urban build-up also occurs: Ortakoy, Bebek and Istinye, all lovely erstwhile ‘villages’ on the upper Bosphorus which have now been stitched together in the general urban sprawl of this city of some 14 million souls, the primary cultural and industrial center in this often contradictory country of some 70 million. The tonier areas of Istanbul on the Bosporus boast yachts large and small (and huge) bobbing at buoys, brand-new SUVs and 2008-model sports-cars, luxury apartments and gated communities stitched into the wooded hillsides overlooking the channel that divides Europe from Asia. Swarms of folks strut along the parks and boardwalks or stuff their faces in hundreds of open air restaurants, or grill rustic kebab in the public places lining the waterway where they can, if of the less-than-wealthy persuasion).
Our destination was a gated community in a place called Zekeriya Village, to join our old friends Cengiz and Laura and their three kids for a late lunch and the usual intensely interesting discussion about energy issues, politics, literature, but for some reason we skipped the turn-off from the upper-Bosphorus municipality called Sariyer (which has a Heydar Aliyev Park, replete with a statue of my old pal looking north up a big turn in the Bosphorus toward the Black Sea) and kept on driving, thinking we might stop and grab some fried mussels and a beer at a restaurant in Rumeli Kavak (‘European Tree That Grows on a Steep Cliff’) but then just sort of went with the flow and went further, following signs to the aforementioned Rumeli Fener (‘European Lighthouse’) which neither of us had ever been to before. The town itself turned out to be sort of a pleasant, frumpy extended village set on a premonitory overlooking both the entrance to the Bosphorus as well as the vast reach of the Black Sea itself, with dozens of ships of vastly different tonnage and purpose container vessels, oil and gas tankers, rust-bucket tramps, etc--at anchor or moving toward the straits (we apparently had caught traffic in down-stream mode) to negotiate the famously treacherous currents and right-angle turns before emerging at the entrance of the Sea of Marmara some 30 kilometers later, where we had begun our Sunday drive.
It was, all told, a very special surprise, and so we temporarily jettisoned our plans to join Gengiz & clan for lunch and ordered up some tasty morsels from the sea at a wind-swept restaurant run by two sisters atop the breakwater harbor that gave shelter to a veritable fleet of fishing vessels, large and small. As large, beryline-blue waves crashed against the natural and man-made barrier, we tucked into a delicious batch of fried mussels and kalamari, washed down by cold beer, and reflected on the nature of the straits and how they have defined Turkey in all of its historical identities, ever since the end of the last Ice Age some 10,000 (or 20,000?) years ago, when the glaciers melted, filling the Atlantic to the point where the rising waters crashed through Gibraltar, re-filled a partially dried-out Mediterranean until it in turn rushed through the Dardanelles, inundated the Sea of Marmara and then came roaring up the Bosphorus until it spilled over whatever land barrier had stretched across the mouth of the straits to the ‘Asian’ side, and then catastrophically swallowed up the area we now know as the Black Sea, which had formerly been a distant lake. Some think this is the real basis of the story of Noah’s Flood. That was the natural catastrophe that in effect created Asia as a separate continent from ‘Europe,’ and defined ‘Istanbul’ in its various manifestations as being the ‘cork in the bottle’ between the Black Sea (and Asia beyond) and the Mediterranean and Europe and Africa, and the reason why the city once known as Byzantium and then Constantinople and now Istanbul has been coveted by everyone from its official founding by Constantine the Great as the New Rome in the 4th century AD. There were the Persians then the Arabs, diverse Huns, the Latin sack of the 13th century, the Ottoman Turks, the Russians and, following WWII and the creation of NATO, the Americans, and now, thanks to the ‘seismic’ shifts in the post-Soviet world order and the current crisis in Georgia, Russia, again.
A mouthful to chew on while munching on fried mussels, but true nonetheless.
To shift cultures for a moment, allow me to describe the Turkish dilemma with the help of a colorful ‘wise saying’ from KiSwahili:
‘He who rides two donkeys rips his ass.’
What I mean by this is that Turkey is so hamstrung with conflicting interests in the current Georgia-generated NATO/EU-Resurgent Russia conflict that its very geographic, ethnic and economic centrality to the event has reduced it to almost complete powerlessness, which is not the way the wanna-be regional leader/powerhouse wants to see itself or be perceived. You might even say that Turkey is riding five donkeys at once.
Ouch!
On the one hand, Turkey has been a loyal member of NATO for over 50 years, and presumably would like to remain so for the next fifty more; indeed it was membership in that alliance that specifically provided Turkey with an umbrella of necessary collective security in the post WWII period when the USSR, under Stalin, threatened to reclaim large swaths of eastern Turkey and neutralize Turkish military control of the Bosphorus itself, as established under the 1936 Treaty of Montreaux. Now, suddenly, it is Russia that is evoking Montreaux and demanding that Turkey abide by its terms to keep US and other non-riparian naval forces out of the Black Sea. Complicating this issue (and arguably in Russia’s favor) has been the American (or more specifically, the Bush White House) cavalier attitude toward the treaty. When the USA finally had to do something, even just symbolically, to aid Georgia in its hour of need, it declared that it was sending in humanitarian aid, but aboard a US naval ship that exceeded the ‘free navigation’ provisions of Montreaux for military vessels. These provisions, set in 1936, defined such things as the total tonnage of war-ships allowed into the body of water and any given time (around 72 thousand tons, I believe), how war ships over a certain tonnage have to notify Turkey 15 days in advance of said ship’s passage through the straits so that Turkey can then can notify other interested parties in the Black Sea, etc. In 1936, that meant notifying the USSR; in 2008 it means notifying Russia, in real terms.
(For those on an historical turn of mind, all the arcane provisions were echoes of the event that dragged the Ottoman Empire into WWI on the side of Germany against England, France and Czarist Russia: two German cruisers, the Goeben and Breslau, were fleeing the English fleet in the eastern Mediterranean and managed to get to Istanbul/Constantinople and deliver themselves as ‘gifts’ from the Kaiser to the Sultan, where upon they got re-flagged and had all the officers and crew seconded to the Ottoman Turkish navy, whereupon they steamed up Bosphorus past the point Hijran and I were sitting at Rumeli Fener and into the Black Sea to start bombing Russian coastal positions in the Crimea and elsewhere.)
In any case, when the USA announced its aid package to be delivered to Georgia aboard US Navy vessels, it did not bother to consult the Turks. Not only was this just plain stupid diplomatically, but also served to further alienate Turkish public opinion (described by my old friend Semih Idiz in a recent article as “almost pathologically anti-American”; Cf his “Turkey's location, a blessing or a curse?” - Turkish Daily News Aug 29, 2008) from backing any sort of US action plan in the region. Making things worse was the Russian suggestion that the US ships were possibly carrying more than just bottled water, blankets and SlimFast noodles to Georgian refugees via the port of Batumi.
In the event, the current government of Prime Minister Tayyib Erdogan did eventually sanction the passage, but not without sever criticism from Russia, and with a price: a massive slow down of Turkish exports through Russian ports, theoretically because Turkey, as a country of origin, was a ‘high risk’ and thus subject to a huge inspection slow-down to check for smuggled goods even though the $2.5 billion in annual exports from Turkey to Russia (not to speak of the countries of Central Asia) are very clearly marked goods such as food stuffs to detergents, white goods (refrigerators, ovens, etc), textiles and other light industrial stuff. Turkish labor is another export. Although it has diminished since the halcyon days of the mid-1990s, when Turkish construction firms picked up huge orders to build everything in post-Soviet Russia from military barracks to malls, this is still an important income generator for giant Turkish construction firms, who are not afraid to throw around their political weight in the domestic arena. Turkish manufacturers began to complain (or whine) almost immediately, and demanded (or beg) Prime Minister Erdogan to sit down with his good friend Vladimir Putin and resolve the issue or else.
Or else what?
Kick out or somehow reduce the number of Russian tourists who now arrive in the country each year for fun & sun? The 2.5 million Ruskie tourists now flopping around on the beaches of the Turquiose Riviera are not the impoverished ‘suitcase traders’ of the early 1990s, who came to stuff T-shirts and blue jeans in plastic bags to drag back to Siberia to hawk for a tiny profit, or the ‘Natasha’ prostitutes camped in dingy hotels around the country, no. The current crowd of Russian visitors are big-spending folks who are buying million dollar villas around the Mediterranean city of Antalya or renting rooms in luxury hotels. Quantifying how much they spend is difficult, but a recent trip down south suggested that every other chartered airliner arriving at Antalya’s newly expanded international airport came from somewhere in Russia, and local merchants were starting to translate the shingles advertising their services (rental cars, villas, carpets, restaurant menus, sailboat cruises, etc) from German into Russian, and no doubt with good reason profit.
But the main reason for Turkish impotence in ‘retaliating’ to Russian economic meddling in its export affairs is much more obvious than that. And it is in the numbers. Against the $2.5 billion in exports to Russia, today imports some $27.5 billion annually, and it is not in vodka and black bread, but another commodity that has become Ankara’s Achilles Heel: gas.
Starting in the 1980s, but rapidly accelerating in the post-Soviet 1990s and certainly today, Turkey began signing gas deal after gas deal with Moscow. Initially, they were off-set deals wherein Turkish construction firms would build things in exchange for the agreed upon value of the hydro-carbons. Slowly but surely, however, ‘friendship’ and ‘sweetheart’ deals began to be replaced by gasp! market price, and Turkey’s trade balance with Russia began to grow in the latter’s favor. The days when Turkish cities were blighted by sulfur-laden air during winter due to the burning of cheap coal to heat home and office might have turned into a distant memory because more than half of all energy produced in Turkey comes from natural gas. But two thirds (2/3rds) of that gas comes from Russia, and now a Russia that has already proven itself capable of making ‘supply adjustments’ when it is politically expedient to do so, such as the reducing the supply to western Europe via Ukraine last year, as well as the total cut off of supply of Russian gas to Georgia on New Year’s Eve of 2003/2004.
Europe, too, suffers from the same exact exposure to Russian energy blackmail. But unlike Europe, Turkey is actually a passive participant in the process for having harbored dreams of making itself into a regional energy hub, and securing great profit by transiting other countries’ hydrocarbons to world market. Despite Russian objections, Turkey was a primary partner in the construction of first the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan crude oil line that now feeds Azerbaijani oil to the eastern Mediterranean, and was also a major backer of the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum line, that would (and still may) bring Azerbaijani natural gas to European markets after entering the Turkish pipeline system. The BTC, along with all other smaller gauge pipeline and tanker-train systems across Georgia, were shut down during the so-called ‘Olympics’ War’ between Georgia and Russia, and became the subject of the most intense interest in western media and policy circles, out-stripping, it often seemed, western media and policy interests in the fate of Georgia itself. ‘What will happen to the East-West Alternative Energy Corridor?’ many a worried pundit opined.
Well, the BTC has now reportedly started flowing again, to the great relief of Azerbaijan and Turkey (as well as Georgia, which also picks up transit fees from that line). But only with the unspoken permission of Moscow, which, having proven that the East-West corridor is ‘inherently’ vulnerable, could find a number of different means to shut down the Show Case pipeline any time it wants: Kurdish or Armenian ‘sabotage’ would seem to be the most obvious methods to be used, although the agile mind could come up with a whole host of alternative, nefarious methods to interdict contracted flow. Whether Moscow will ever chose to do this is open to question, however, because it seems to be content to allow the Azerbaijanis their oil income (and the Turks and even Georgians their transit income) so long as they behave and not try to shoulder in on the real item that Moscow wants to control, namely gas.
In the words of a new friend in Baku who claims he did not coin the phrase, “Oil is Money but Gas is Power,” and that is what Moscow wants--power. And all indications are that that is what Moscow is getting. A few months ago, Gazprom went to Turkmenistan, which was hopefully going to start committing its massive gas reserves to a trans-Caspian pipeline route to Azerbaijan to link in to the BTE line, and wrapped up a contract at market prices (as opposed to the old discounted purchases) to buy and then on-sell Turkmen gas via the Russian pipeline system. A similar offer was recently made to Azerbaijan, albeit before the Georgia crisis. The Azerbaijanis initially rejected the proposal; now they say that they must ‘consider the market.’ Translation: if Azerbaijan is not getting sufficient political protection for routing its gas through Turkey at lesser profit but some perceived political gain, then it will indeed make most sense to sell into the Russian system, leaving Turkey in the lurch.
Where else can Turkey get gas, either for internal use to off-set the lop-sided reliance on Russian product, or for on-routing to a thirsty Europe? Russia is already doing some very tidy deals with Egypt, Algeria and Libya, and so those sources (LNG, in fact, that comes via boat) are drying up. The last source country in the neighborhood is the one that the USA consistently tries to block anyone from doing business with: the Islamic Republic of Iran. But even there, winter conditions last year led the Iranians to cut back on delivers of the gas contracted for, creating a mini-energy crisis in Turkey. Translation of all of the above? Turkey will remain highly dependent on Russian gas and thus be subject to the same or even heavier levels of Russian political pressures in Georgia and the Black Sea region for the immediate and mid-term future.
And the economic leverage does not end there. Flush with oil and gas cash, the giant LukOil is now snapping up whole filling-station chains in Turkey, and expanding its self into the lucrative ‘down-stream’ parts of the market. Interesting, LukOil and other Russian giants are also expanding their subtle control of other sectors in Turkey and Azerbaijan, too. The most interesting was the purchase by the Russian beer maker Baltika of the French/Azerbaijani ‘national’ beer producer Xirdalan.
(Let me hasten to say that this sort of New Russian capitalist activity is not restricted to the Caucasus or Turkey, but even includes the Norilsk-owned Stillwater Mine some 40 miles east of my hometown of Livingston, Montana. Norilsk/Siberia was a slave-labor, nickel, platinum and palladium mine in the Artic Circle and a KGB cash-cow during Soviet Times. Its sole strategic-metals rival was the Stillwater until the collapse of the USSR in 1991. Then Norilsk flooded the market with its materials, watched the Stillwater price drop from a hundred bucks a share to around a dollar, and snapped the place up. Thanks, stock-market.)
Russia is also using several social pressure points as it plays its cat and mouse game with ‘traditional rival, Turkey.’
From the outside, Turkey might look like a monolithic state. But in many ways, it is an ethnic truly an ethnic mosaic, with a plethora of agenda-driven, single-issue action groups that have a surprising impact on government policy. One group that has been particularly active (and effective) in Turkish foreign policy circles over the past fifteen years or so are the so-called Circassians (Chekez), the descendants of those Caucasus Muslims forced into Ottoman exile by Czarist Russia during its conquest of the North Caucasus region during the 18th and 19th century (Adagies, Abkhaz, Chechens, Ingush, Kabardins, Muslim Ossets, etc). It makes no difference if logic would suggest that the focus of enmity among the Circassians should logically be the descendants of Czarist imperial policy, the New Russians, or even the post-Soviet Russians who committed such barbarity in Chechnya. What matters is that the Circassians have, to an almost exclusive extent, ‘transferred’ that enmity toward the Georgians, and justify that enmity by pointing to the ultra-nationalist governments of the early 1990s that tried to dissolve the ‘autonomous’ status enjoyed by their ethnic kin in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Even northern Cyprus has gotten involved in the act, and is celebrating the ‘independence’ of the two Georgian entities because the process looks so much like how they obtained their own non-state status in 1974, following the Turkish invasion to save them from the Greeks. The weirdest newsoid I heard in this regard was that Armenia was considering recognizing Northern Cyprus, which would thus (theoretically) pave the way for recognition of its seized state-lette, The Republic of Mountain Garabagh, better known as ‘Nagorno Karabakh.’ I forget where I heard or read this piece of non-news, and dismiss it as an impossibility for all sorts of reasons, but find it of keen interest that it got floated at all, and how complex this business of the Age of the Microstates is rapidly becoming. And lest I forget, what everyone is in general agreement on is that that age began in 1999 with the NATO action against Serbia over Kosovo; that Russia was dead set against it and warned of consequences; and that no one in the West apparently believed or wanted to take Russia at its word. Then, after European capitals (and the United States) announced their intention to recognize Kosovo independence earlier this year, it was in fact Ankara that got its name into the historical registrar as actually being the first to recognize…
Hurrah!
So, aside from rhetoric, what has Ankara’s policy been?
Confusion, stasis, silence until finally, after being accused of doing nothing, the most ridiculous empty but dangerous action imaginable. On August 18th (or was it the 19th?) Prime Minister Erdogan flew to Sochi, Russia to meet with Prime Minister Putin and announce that as an interested party, he wanted to develop a regional forum for peace called the ‘Caucasus Stability Pact/Platform,’ an entity that would include Turkey, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Russia, with the last as the real guarantor of stability in the region. Anyone outside the pro-government press immediately derided this idea as nothing more than mere theater designed to tell the world (or someone) that Turkey was at least and at last doing SOMETHING, but this was one of those times when doing nothing, however embarrassing, would have been better than any other option. The Georgians have already said that they will not be part of anything Russia is part of until Russia withdraws according to the French Plan (etc), and Russia will not have anything to do with any Georgian government that is headed by Misha Saakashvili…The newly recognized states (by Russia) of South Ossetia and Abkhazia will presumably be included in the Pact/Platform, but it is hard to imagine their agreeing to do so as any sort of entities associated with the Georgian state they have just officially left. And, if we are dealing with states and sub-states and micro-states in the region, what about Karabakh, the secessionist entity in western Azerbaijan, the Armenian-occupation of which caused Ankara to slap a (rather porous) economic embargo on Armenia in order to bring Yerevean to its (economic) senses?
In fact, there is only one party who has shown any enthusiasm whatsoever for the said ‘Stability Pact/Platform,’ and that is Armenia, and for the very good reason that any progress in the pact would no doubt result in Turkey’s lifting its embargo and opening its border to Yerevan to the great distress of Azerbaijan. And here comes the weirdest moment. Although the invitation was issued before the ‘Olympics’ War’ of mid-August, Turkey is currently all abuzz and deeply divided about what President Abdullah Gul should do with Armenian President Serge Sargissian’s invitation to the Turkish president to attend a World Cup Qualifying match in Yerevan on September 6th. This, coupled with the revelation of semi-secret talks between senior Turkish and Armenian diplomats in recent months about ‘normalizing’ relations and even opening the frontier between the two states, has liberal Turks dreaming of a new era between traditional enemies. And it sets the teeth of nationalist Turks (and those that have no time for Erdogan or Gul due to their Islamist-leanings) up in arms, and expressing ever deeper concerned about the future relations with ‘fraternal’ Azerbaijan should Ankara lift the one major pressure point on Armenia that might result in the return of Azerbaijani land.
“Burn the blanket to kill the flea,” says the Turkish proverb.
The Caucasus continues its slow seismic shift, while I watch the boats enter the Bosphorus from my perch above the Black Sea, and wonder where this all goes from here.
We call for the bill, wander over to the battered old fort overlooking the ships at anchor and moving down stream, and then drive through the Belgrade forest over to Cengiz and Laura’s joint to have a late late lunch of kebab and jaw about all of this, get caught in a massive traffic jam caused by some One Million Mile March that has included Istanbul on the way home, and a zero/zero game result of Hijran’s favorite football team, Galatasaray. Her disappointment is palpable.
Ah, well…
So today, September 1st, and the first day of the Holy Month of Ramadan, I made my final preparations for my return to Montana and my teaching duties at MSU, where I will literally skid in to my new class on the Middle East, albeit fresh from the Caucasus front of the new ‘Luke-warm War,’ which is not my phrase but about as close to a decent replacement of ‘Cold War’ as I have found.
My routing back following my ‘Summer Vacation’ is via Moscow, at 2 AM tonight. Ironically, it is the only way out of Istanbul to the US in my class of Delta ticket. I shall send an extra message if the seven hour lay-over (or anything on the plane) is of interest. .
Bests
Thomas Goltz, quasi-blogger
September 1, 2008
PS: Apparently there is some discussion about the history of Norway as represented in my "King Harald's Buttons" piece, the most interesting crit being the fact that what I declared as Norway might better have been framed as "Norway," as it was a state and then not a state and then a joint state, etc. I could only chuckle at the crit because the same thing applies to other well-known international entities, ranging from Poland to Mexico, and certainly "Georgia," the center of today's crisis, which has existed/ceased to exist in diverse forms for much of the past 2000 years.
Istanbul, September 1st, 2008
On the glorious last day of summer, August 31st, Hijran and I took a drive up the coastal road on the European side of the Bosphorus, from the entrance of the Golden Horn overlooking the Topkapi Palace and the Sea of Marmara, to the mouth of the straits on the Black Sea at a working fishing town/harbor called Rumeli Fener, or ‘European Lighthouse.’
It being Sunday, traffic was thick for most of the journey, and seemed to increase at exactly those places where the channel itself narrows into choke-points, possibly because this is where most of the urban build-up also occurs: Ortakoy, Bebek and Istinye, all lovely erstwhile ‘villages’ on the upper Bosphorus which have now been stitched together in the general urban sprawl of this city of some 14 million souls, the primary cultural and industrial center in this often contradictory country of some 70 million. The tonier areas of Istanbul on the Bosporus boast yachts large and small (and huge) bobbing at buoys, brand-new SUVs and 2008-model sports-cars, luxury apartments and gated communities stitched into the wooded hillsides overlooking the channel that divides Europe from Asia. Swarms of folks strut along the parks and boardwalks or stuff their faces in hundreds of open air restaurants, or grill rustic kebab in the public places lining the waterway where they can, if of the less-than-wealthy persuasion).
Our destination was a gated community in a place called Zekeriya Village, to join our old friends Cengiz and Laura and their three kids for a late lunch and the usual intensely interesting discussion about energy issues, politics, literature, but for some reason we skipped the turn-off from the upper-Bosphorus municipality called Sariyer (which has a Heydar Aliyev Park, replete with a statue of my old pal looking north up a big turn in the Bosphorus toward the Black Sea) and kept on driving, thinking we might stop and grab some fried mussels and a beer at a restaurant in Rumeli Kavak (‘European Tree That Grows on a Steep Cliff’) but then just sort of went with the flow and went further, following signs to the aforementioned Rumeli Fener (‘European Lighthouse’) which neither of us had ever been to before. The town itself turned out to be sort of a pleasant, frumpy extended village set on a premonitory overlooking both the entrance to the Bosphorus as well as the vast reach of the Black Sea itself, with dozens of ships of vastly different tonnage and purpose container vessels, oil and gas tankers, rust-bucket tramps, etc--at anchor or moving toward the straits (we apparently had caught traffic in down-stream mode) to negotiate the famously treacherous currents and right-angle turns before emerging at the entrance of the Sea of Marmara some 30 kilometers later, where we had begun our Sunday drive.
It was, all told, a very special surprise, and so we temporarily jettisoned our plans to join Gengiz & clan for lunch and ordered up some tasty morsels from the sea at a wind-swept restaurant run by two sisters atop the breakwater harbor that gave shelter to a veritable fleet of fishing vessels, large and small. As large, beryline-blue waves crashed against the natural and man-made barrier, we tucked into a delicious batch of fried mussels and kalamari, washed down by cold beer, and reflected on the nature of the straits and how they have defined Turkey in all of its historical identities, ever since the end of the last Ice Age some 10,000 (or 20,000?) years ago, when the glaciers melted, filling the Atlantic to the point where the rising waters crashed through Gibraltar, re-filled a partially dried-out Mediterranean until it in turn rushed through the Dardanelles, inundated the Sea of Marmara and then came roaring up the Bosphorus until it spilled over whatever land barrier had stretched across the mouth of the straits to the ‘Asian’ side, and then catastrophically swallowed up the area we now know as the Black Sea, which had formerly been a distant lake. Some think this is the real basis of the story of Noah’s Flood. That was the natural catastrophe that in effect created Asia as a separate continent from ‘Europe,’ and defined ‘Istanbul’ in its various manifestations as being the ‘cork in the bottle’ between the Black Sea (and Asia beyond) and the Mediterranean and Europe and Africa, and the reason why the city once known as Byzantium and then Constantinople and now Istanbul has been coveted by everyone from its official founding by Constantine the Great as the New Rome in the 4th century AD. There were the Persians then the Arabs, diverse Huns, the Latin sack of the 13th century, the Ottoman Turks, the Russians and, following WWII and the creation of NATO, the Americans, and now, thanks to the ‘seismic’ shifts in the post-Soviet world order and the current crisis in Georgia, Russia, again.
A mouthful to chew on while munching on fried mussels, but true nonetheless.
To shift cultures for a moment, allow me to describe the Turkish dilemma with the help of a colorful ‘wise saying’ from KiSwahili:
‘He who rides two donkeys rips his ass.’
What I mean by this is that Turkey is so hamstrung with conflicting interests in the current Georgia-generated NATO/EU-Resurgent Russia conflict that its very geographic, ethnic and economic centrality to the event has reduced it to almost complete powerlessness, which is not the way the wanna-be regional leader/powerhouse wants to see itself or be perceived. You might even say that Turkey is riding five donkeys at once.
Ouch!
On the one hand, Turkey has been a loyal member of NATO for over 50 years, and presumably would like to remain so for the next fifty more; indeed it was membership in that alliance that specifically provided Turkey with an umbrella of necessary collective security in the post WWII period when the USSR, under Stalin, threatened to reclaim large swaths of eastern Turkey and neutralize Turkish military control of the Bosphorus itself, as established under the 1936 Treaty of Montreaux. Now, suddenly, it is Russia that is evoking Montreaux and demanding that Turkey abide by its terms to keep US and other non-riparian naval forces out of the Black Sea. Complicating this issue (and arguably in Russia’s favor) has been the American (or more specifically, the Bush White House) cavalier attitude toward the treaty. When the USA finally had to do something, even just symbolically, to aid Georgia in its hour of need, it declared that it was sending in humanitarian aid, but aboard a US naval ship that exceeded the ‘free navigation’ provisions of Montreaux for military vessels. These provisions, set in 1936, defined such things as the total tonnage of war-ships allowed into the body of water and any given time (around 72 thousand tons, I believe), how war ships over a certain tonnage have to notify Turkey 15 days in advance of said ship’s passage through the straits so that Turkey can then can notify other interested parties in the Black Sea, etc. In 1936, that meant notifying the USSR; in 2008 it means notifying Russia, in real terms.
(For those on an historical turn of mind, all the arcane provisions were echoes of the event that dragged the Ottoman Empire into WWI on the side of Germany against England, France and Czarist Russia: two German cruisers, the Goeben and Breslau, were fleeing the English fleet in the eastern Mediterranean and managed to get to Istanbul/Constantinople and deliver themselves as ‘gifts’ from the Kaiser to the Sultan, where upon they got re-flagged and had all the officers and crew seconded to the Ottoman Turkish navy, whereupon they steamed up Bosphorus past the point Hijran and I were sitting at Rumeli Fener and into the Black Sea to start bombing Russian coastal positions in the Crimea and elsewhere.)
In any case, when the USA announced its aid package to be delivered to Georgia aboard US Navy vessels, it did not bother to consult the Turks. Not only was this just plain stupid diplomatically, but also served to further alienate Turkish public opinion (described by my old friend Semih Idiz in a recent article as “almost pathologically anti-American”; Cf his “Turkey's location, a blessing or a curse?” - Turkish Daily News Aug 29, 2008) from backing any sort of US action plan in the region. Making things worse was the Russian suggestion that the US ships were possibly carrying more than just bottled water, blankets and SlimFast noodles to Georgian refugees via the port of Batumi.
In the event, the current government of Prime Minister Tayyib Erdogan did eventually sanction the passage, but not without sever criticism from Russia, and with a price: a massive slow down of Turkish exports through Russian ports, theoretically because Turkey, as a country of origin, was a ‘high risk’ and thus subject to a huge inspection slow-down to check for smuggled goods even though the $2.5 billion in annual exports from Turkey to Russia (not to speak of the countries of Central Asia) are very clearly marked goods such as food stuffs to detergents, white goods (refrigerators, ovens, etc), textiles and other light industrial stuff. Turkish labor is another export. Although it has diminished since the halcyon days of the mid-1990s, when Turkish construction firms picked up huge orders to build everything in post-Soviet Russia from military barracks to malls, this is still an important income generator for giant Turkish construction firms, who are not afraid to throw around their political weight in the domestic arena. Turkish manufacturers began to complain (or whine) almost immediately, and demanded (or beg) Prime Minister Erdogan to sit down with his good friend Vladimir Putin and resolve the issue or else.
Or else what?
Kick out or somehow reduce the number of Russian tourists who now arrive in the country each year for fun & sun? The 2.5 million Ruskie tourists now flopping around on the beaches of the Turquiose Riviera are not the impoverished ‘suitcase traders’ of the early 1990s, who came to stuff T-shirts and blue jeans in plastic bags to drag back to Siberia to hawk for a tiny profit, or the ‘Natasha’ prostitutes camped in dingy hotels around the country, no. The current crowd of Russian visitors are big-spending folks who are buying million dollar villas around the Mediterranean city of Antalya or renting rooms in luxury hotels. Quantifying how much they spend is difficult, but a recent trip down south suggested that every other chartered airliner arriving at Antalya’s newly expanded international airport came from somewhere in Russia, and local merchants were starting to translate the shingles advertising their services (rental cars, villas, carpets, restaurant menus, sailboat cruises, etc) from German into Russian, and no doubt with good reason profit.
But the main reason for Turkish impotence in ‘retaliating’ to Russian economic meddling in its export affairs is much more obvious than that. And it is in the numbers. Against the $2.5 billion in exports to Russia, today imports some $27.5 billion annually, and it is not in vodka and black bread, but another commodity that has become Ankara’s Achilles Heel: gas.
Starting in the 1980s, but rapidly accelerating in the post-Soviet 1990s and certainly today, Turkey began signing gas deal after gas deal with Moscow. Initially, they were off-set deals wherein Turkish construction firms would build things in exchange for the agreed upon value of the hydro-carbons. Slowly but surely, however, ‘friendship’ and ‘sweetheart’ deals began to be replaced by gasp! market price, and Turkey’s trade balance with Russia began to grow in the latter’s favor. The days when Turkish cities were blighted by sulfur-laden air during winter due to the burning of cheap coal to heat home and office might have turned into a distant memory because more than half of all energy produced in Turkey comes from natural gas. But two thirds (2/3rds) of that gas comes from Russia, and now a Russia that has already proven itself capable of making ‘supply adjustments’ when it is politically expedient to do so, such as the reducing the supply to western Europe via Ukraine last year, as well as the total cut off of supply of Russian gas to Georgia on New Year’s Eve of 2003/2004.
Europe, too, suffers from the same exact exposure to Russian energy blackmail. But unlike Europe, Turkey is actually a passive participant in the process for having harbored dreams of making itself into a regional energy hub, and securing great profit by transiting other countries’ hydrocarbons to world market. Despite Russian objections, Turkey was a primary partner in the construction of first the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan crude oil line that now feeds Azerbaijani oil to the eastern Mediterranean, and was also a major backer of the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum line, that would (and still may) bring Azerbaijani natural gas to European markets after entering the Turkish pipeline system. The BTC, along with all other smaller gauge pipeline and tanker-train systems across Georgia, were shut down during the so-called ‘Olympics’ War’ between Georgia and Russia, and became the subject of the most intense interest in western media and policy circles, out-stripping, it often seemed, western media and policy interests in the fate of Georgia itself. ‘What will happen to the East-West Alternative Energy Corridor?’ many a worried pundit opined.
Well, the BTC has now reportedly started flowing again, to the great relief of Azerbaijan and Turkey (as well as Georgia, which also picks up transit fees from that line). But only with the unspoken permission of Moscow, which, having proven that the East-West corridor is ‘inherently’ vulnerable, could find a number of different means to shut down the Show Case pipeline any time it wants: Kurdish or Armenian ‘sabotage’ would seem to be the most obvious methods to be used, although the agile mind could come up with a whole host of alternative, nefarious methods to interdict contracted flow. Whether Moscow will ever chose to do this is open to question, however, because it seems to be content to allow the Azerbaijanis their oil income (and the Turks and even Georgians their transit income) so long as they behave and not try to shoulder in on the real item that Moscow wants to control, namely gas.
In the words of a new friend in Baku who claims he did not coin the phrase, “Oil is Money but Gas is Power,” and that is what Moscow wants--power. And all indications are that that is what Moscow is getting. A few months ago, Gazprom went to Turkmenistan, which was hopefully going to start committing its massive gas reserves to a trans-Caspian pipeline route to Azerbaijan to link in to the BTE line, and wrapped up a contract at market prices (as opposed to the old discounted purchases) to buy and then on-sell Turkmen gas via the Russian pipeline system. A similar offer was recently made to Azerbaijan, albeit before the Georgia crisis. The Azerbaijanis initially rejected the proposal; now they say that they must ‘consider the market.’ Translation: if Azerbaijan is not getting sufficient political protection for routing its gas through Turkey at lesser profit but some perceived political gain, then it will indeed make most sense to sell into the Russian system, leaving Turkey in the lurch.
Where else can Turkey get gas, either for internal use to off-set the lop-sided reliance on Russian product, or for on-routing to a thirsty Europe? Russia is already doing some very tidy deals with Egypt, Algeria and Libya, and so those sources (LNG, in fact, that comes via boat) are drying up. The last source country in the neighborhood is the one that the USA consistently tries to block anyone from doing business with: the Islamic Republic of Iran. But even there, winter conditions last year led the Iranians to cut back on delivers of the gas contracted for, creating a mini-energy crisis in Turkey. Translation of all of the above? Turkey will remain highly dependent on Russian gas and thus be subject to the same or even heavier levels of Russian political pressures in Georgia and the Black Sea region for the immediate and mid-term future.
And the economic leverage does not end there. Flush with oil and gas cash, the giant LukOil is now snapping up whole filling-station chains in Turkey, and expanding its self into the lucrative ‘down-stream’ parts of the market. Interesting, LukOil and other Russian giants are also expanding their subtle control of other sectors in Turkey and Azerbaijan, too. The most interesting was the purchase by the Russian beer maker Baltika of the French/Azerbaijani ‘national’ beer producer Xirdalan.
(Let me hasten to say that this sort of New Russian capitalist activity is not restricted to the Caucasus or Turkey, but even includes the Norilsk-owned Stillwater Mine some 40 miles east of my hometown of Livingston, Montana. Norilsk/Siberia was a slave-labor, nickel, platinum and palladium mine in the Artic Circle and a KGB cash-cow during Soviet Times. Its sole strategic-metals rival was the Stillwater until the collapse of the USSR in 1991. Then Norilsk flooded the market with its materials, watched the Stillwater price drop from a hundred bucks a share to around a dollar, and snapped the place up. Thanks, stock-market.)
Russia is also using several social pressure points as it plays its cat and mouse game with ‘traditional rival, Turkey.’
From the outside, Turkey might look like a monolithic state. But in many ways, it is an ethnic truly an ethnic mosaic, with a plethora of agenda-driven, single-issue action groups that have a surprising impact on government policy. One group that has been particularly active (and effective) in Turkish foreign policy circles over the past fifteen years or so are the so-called Circassians (Chekez), the descendants of those Caucasus Muslims forced into Ottoman exile by Czarist Russia during its conquest of the North Caucasus region during the 18th and 19th century (Adagies, Abkhaz, Chechens, Ingush, Kabardins, Muslim Ossets, etc). It makes no difference if logic would suggest that the focus of enmity among the Circassians should logically be the descendants of Czarist imperial policy, the New Russians, or even the post-Soviet Russians who committed such barbarity in Chechnya. What matters is that the Circassians have, to an almost exclusive extent, ‘transferred’ that enmity toward the Georgians, and justify that enmity by pointing to the ultra-nationalist governments of the early 1990s that tried to dissolve the ‘autonomous’ status enjoyed by their ethnic kin in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Even northern Cyprus has gotten involved in the act, and is celebrating the ‘independence’ of the two Georgian entities because the process looks so much like how they obtained their own non-state status in 1974, following the Turkish invasion to save them from the Greeks. The weirdest newsoid I heard in this regard was that Armenia was considering recognizing Northern Cyprus, which would thus (theoretically) pave the way for recognition of its seized state-lette, The Republic of Mountain Garabagh, better known as ‘Nagorno Karabakh.’ I forget where I heard or read this piece of non-news, and dismiss it as an impossibility for all sorts of reasons, but find it of keen interest that it got floated at all, and how complex this business of the Age of the Microstates is rapidly becoming. And lest I forget, what everyone is in general agreement on is that that age began in 1999 with the NATO action against Serbia over Kosovo; that Russia was dead set against it and warned of consequences; and that no one in the West apparently believed or wanted to take Russia at its word. Then, after European capitals (and the United States) announced their intention to recognize Kosovo independence earlier this year, it was in fact Ankara that got its name into the historical registrar as actually being the first to recognize…
Hurrah!
So, aside from rhetoric, what has Ankara’s policy been?
Confusion, stasis, silence until finally, after being accused of doing nothing, the most ridiculous empty but dangerous action imaginable. On August 18th (or was it the 19th?) Prime Minister Erdogan flew to Sochi, Russia to meet with Prime Minister Putin and announce that as an interested party, he wanted to develop a regional forum for peace called the ‘Caucasus Stability Pact/Platform,’ an entity that would include Turkey, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Russia, with the last as the real guarantor of stability in the region. Anyone outside the pro-government press immediately derided this idea as nothing more than mere theater designed to tell the world (or someone) that Turkey was at least and at last doing SOMETHING, but this was one of those times when doing nothing, however embarrassing, would have been better than any other option. The Georgians have already said that they will not be part of anything Russia is part of until Russia withdraws according to the French Plan (etc), and Russia will not have anything to do with any Georgian government that is headed by Misha Saakashvili…The newly recognized states (by Russia) of South Ossetia and Abkhazia will presumably be included in the Pact/Platform, but it is hard to imagine their agreeing to do so as any sort of entities associated with the Georgian state they have just officially left. And, if we are dealing with states and sub-states and micro-states in the region, what about Karabakh, the secessionist entity in western Azerbaijan, the Armenian-occupation of which caused Ankara to slap a (rather porous) economic embargo on Armenia in order to bring Yerevean to its (economic) senses?
In fact, there is only one party who has shown any enthusiasm whatsoever for the said ‘Stability Pact/Platform,’ and that is Armenia, and for the very good reason that any progress in the pact would no doubt result in Turkey’s lifting its embargo and opening its border to Yerevan to the great distress of Azerbaijan. And here comes the weirdest moment. Although the invitation was issued before the ‘Olympics’ War’ of mid-August, Turkey is currently all abuzz and deeply divided about what President Abdullah Gul should do with Armenian President Serge Sargissian’s invitation to the Turkish president to attend a World Cup Qualifying match in Yerevan on September 6th. This, coupled with the revelation of semi-secret talks between senior Turkish and Armenian diplomats in recent months about ‘normalizing’ relations and even opening the frontier between the two states, has liberal Turks dreaming of a new era between traditional enemies. And it sets the teeth of nationalist Turks (and those that have no time for Erdogan or Gul due to their Islamist-leanings) up in arms, and expressing ever deeper concerned about the future relations with ‘fraternal’ Azerbaijan should Ankara lift the one major pressure point on Armenia that might result in the return of Azerbaijani land.
“Burn the blanket to kill the flea,” says the Turkish proverb.
The Caucasus continues its slow seismic shift, while I watch the boats enter the Bosphorus from my perch above the Black Sea, and wonder where this all goes from here.
We call for the bill, wander over to the battered old fort overlooking the ships at anchor and moving down stream, and then drive through the Belgrade forest over to Cengiz and Laura’s joint to have a late late lunch of kebab and jaw about all of this, get caught in a massive traffic jam caused by some One Million Mile March that has included Istanbul on the way home, and a zero/zero game result of Hijran’s favorite football team, Galatasaray. Her disappointment is palpable.
Ah, well…
So today, September 1st, and the first day of the Holy Month of Ramadan, I made my final preparations for my return to Montana and my teaching duties at MSU, where I will literally skid in to my new class on the Middle East, albeit fresh from the Caucasus front of the new ‘Luke-warm War,’ which is not my phrase but about as close to a decent replacement of ‘Cold War’ as I have found.
My routing back following my ‘Summer Vacation’ is via Moscow, at 2 AM tonight. Ironically, it is the only way out of Istanbul to the US in my class of Delta ticket. I shall send an extra message if the seven hour lay-over (or anything on the plane) is of interest. .
Bests
Thomas Goltz, quasi-blogger
September 1, 2008
PS: Apparently there is some discussion about the history of Norway as represented in my "King Harald's Buttons" piece, the most interesting crit being the fact that what I declared as Norway might better have been framed as "Norway," as it was a state and then not a state and then a joint state, etc. I could only chuckle at the crit because the same thing applies to other well-known international entities, ranging from Poland to Mexico, and certainly "Georgia," the center of today's crisis, which has existed/ceased to exist in diverse forms for much of the past 2000 years.
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Re: Georgia: More Goltz On The Ground
by RYP » Tue Sep 02, 2008 8:54 pm
Georgia invasion 'planned since April'
Alan Philps, Associate Editor
* Last Updated: August 16. 2008 6:43PM UAE / August 16. 2008 2:43PM GMT
The Russian invasion of Georgia was not a spontaneous response to what Moscow called “genocide” in South Ossetia but had been planned in detail since April, according to Russia’s leading independent defence analyst.
The plans all but ensured that fighting would break out before the end of August, though the exact timing depended on how readily the Georgian government could be provoked into starting it, Pavel Felgenhauer states in a new analysis of the conflict.
It is generally agreed that the spark for the war was the Nato summit meeting in Bucharest in April at which Georgia was promised eventual membership of the western alliance, in the teeth of opposition from the Russians.
According to Mr Felgenhauer, Vladimir Putin, who was president of Russia at the time but now serves as prime minister, set in motion a range of measures to support the two separatist territories in Georgia – South Ossetia and Abkhazia – and prepare for a military incursion.
By the start of August, Russian military engineers repaired the railway linking Russia to Abkhazia, allowing the sudden appearance of tanks and other heavy military equipment that was later used to attack and loot the Georgian army base at Senaki, Mr Felgenhauer wrote in Novaya Gazeta, one of the few Moscow newspapers outside the control of the Kremlin.
In South Ossetia, as the Russian-backed separatists stepped up attacks on Georgian police and military, the Russian army began to bring in some heavy weapons to supplement their existing, lightly armed troops who were there as internationally sanctioned peacekeepers.
Russia’s Black Sea fleet, as well as paratroopers and marines, were mobilised in the area for summer exercises titled “Kavkaz-2008”, which concluded on Aug 2.
The incursion had to start by the end of August, as the troops could not be kept on full alert endlessly and the pass through the Caucasus Mountains to South Ossetia would be snowed in by October, leaving only the Roki tunnel, which is so narrow it is reduced to one-way traffic when heavy military equipment is brought in.
Mr Felgenhauer said that, if the Georgian army was not provoked to attack South Ossetia, then the Russians would ensure that fighting broke out in Abkhazia, with the separatists trying to take the Kodori Gorge, the last remaining territory still under Georgian government control.
In the end, the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, responded to a series of shooting incidents and roadside bombs with a full-scale assault to recapture the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali.
Against this background, it is not surprising that Mr Putin, in Beijing for the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, responded speedily to the Georgian assault with the accusation of “genocide” – the charge Nato used to justify its assault on Serbia after the Serbian army forced a mass exodus from the province of Kosovo in 1999.
The Russian preparations did not pass unnoticed to the Georgians, but – to their increasing frustration – they found little interest abroad in their warnings of an impending Russian assault.
In particular, European diplomats in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, were saying privately that the West was too busy with Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan to pay attention to the possibility that the Georgian conflicts, frozen for 16 years, might be about to heat up.
The Russians were encouraged when one of their MiG-29 fighters shot down a unmanned Georgian spy plane on April 20, to only muted western reaction. The Russian air force denied shooting down the drone, even though live video showed it was clearly a MiG-29.
Speaking on Friday, Mr Saakashvili laid the blame for the conflict squarely on the European countries that failed to speak out against the Russian air force.
“No European country said anything about it,” he said during a visit by Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state. “So who invited the trouble here? Who invited this arrogance here? Who invited these innocent deaths here? It is not only those people who perpetrate them who are responsible, but also those people who failed to stop them.”
Mr Saakashvili said the West had ignored the rebuilding of the railway in Abkhazia, which was supposedly done for “humanitarian reasons”.
Although Mr Saakashvili’s armed response to the preparations by the Russians and the separatists is often seen in the West as a disastrous miscalculation, it could have been a desperate attempt to internationalise the separatist problem in the face of world indifference.
He has certainly drawn international attention to his country, but few would agree that the problems are any closer to resolution. The Russian contention that the people of Abkhazia and South Ossetia never want to live under Georgian rule seems irrefutable at the moment.
For their part, the Russians reject any suggestion that they planned the invasion to prevent Georgia from joining Nato or to unseat Mr Saakashvili, whose disagreements with Mr Putin have descended to a bitter, personal level. For them it is a “peace enforcement” operation.
An intriguing explanation of the war has emerged from Sergei Markov, a commentator close to the Kremlin who is a member of the ruling party, United Russia.
Mr Markov sees the war as a plot by Dick Cheney, US vice president, to boost the chances of John McCain, the Republican contender in the presidential election.
“The neoconservatives don’t give a damn about South Ossetia,” Mr Markov writes.
“Their aim in ordering Saakashvili to begin the war was to provoke Russia to military action and then to unleash anti-Russian hysteria and bring about a sort of new Cold War between the West and Russia. McCain would ride this wave to victory in the presidential elections.”
Mr McCain has indeed distinguished himself with his tough stance on Georgia, saying: “We are all Georgians now.” But history will probably put more weight on the Russian army’s preparations.
aphilps@thenational.ae
Alan Philps, Associate Editor
* Last Updated: August 16. 2008 6:43PM UAE / August 16. 2008 2:43PM GMT
The Russian invasion of Georgia was not a spontaneous response to what Moscow called “genocide” in South Ossetia but had been planned in detail since April, according to Russia’s leading independent defence analyst.
The plans all but ensured that fighting would break out before the end of August, though the exact timing depended on how readily the Georgian government could be provoked into starting it, Pavel Felgenhauer states in a new analysis of the conflict.
It is generally agreed that the spark for the war was the Nato summit meeting in Bucharest in April at which Georgia was promised eventual membership of the western alliance, in the teeth of opposition from the Russians.
According to Mr Felgenhauer, Vladimir Putin, who was president of Russia at the time but now serves as prime minister, set in motion a range of measures to support the two separatist territories in Georgia – South Ossetia and Abkhazia – and prepare for a military incursion.
By the start of August, Russian military engineers repaired the railway linking Russia to Abkhazia, allowing the sudden appearance of tanks and other heavy military equipment that was later used to attack and loot the Georgian army base at Senaki, Mr Felgenhauer wrote in Novaya Gazeta, one of the few Moscow newspapers outside the control of the Kremlin.
In South Ossetia, as the Russian-backed separatists stepped up attacks on Georgian police and military, the Russian army began to bring in some heavy weapons to supplement their existing, lightly armed troops who were there as internationally sanctioned peacekeepers.
Russia’s Black Sea fleet, as well as paratroopers and marines, were mobilised in the area for summer exercises titled “Kavkaz-2008”, which concluded on Aug 2.
The incursion had to start by the end of August, as the troops could not be kept on full alert endlessly and the pass through the Caucasus Mountains to South Ossetia would be snowed in by October, leaving only the Roki tunnel, which is so narrow it is reduced to one-way traffic when heavy military equipment is brought in.
Mr Felgenhauer said that, if the Georgian army was not provoked to attack South Ossetia, then the Russians would ensure that fighting broke out in Abkhazia, with the separatists trying to take the Kodori Gorge, the last remaining territory still under Georgian government control.
In the end, the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, responded to a series of shooting incidents and roadside bombs with a full-scale assault to recapture the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali.
Against this background, it is not surprising that Mr Putin, in Beijing for the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, responded speedily to the Georgian assault with the accusation of “genocide” – the charge Nato used to justify its assault on Serbia after the Serbian army forced a mass exodus from the province of Kosovo in 1999.
The Russian preparations did not pass unnoticed to the Georgians, but – to their increasing frustration – they found little interest abroad in their warnings of an impending Russian assault.
In particular, European diplomats in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, were saying privately that the West was too busy with Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan to pay attention to the possibility that the Georgian conflicts, frozen for 16 years, might be about to heat up.
The Russians were encouraged when one of their MiG-29 fighters shot down a unmanned Georgian spy plane on April 20, to only muted western reaction. The Russian air force denied shooting down the drone, even though live video showed it was clearly a MiG-29.
Speaking on Friday, Mr Saakashvili laid the blame for the conflict squarely on the European countries that failed to speak out against the Russian air force.
“No European country said anything about it,” he said during a visit by Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state. “So who invited the trouble here? Who invited this arrogance here? Who invited these innocent deaths here? It is not only those people who perpetrate them who are responsible, but also those people who failed to stop them.”
Mr Saakashvili said the West had ignored the rebuilding of the railway in Abkhazia, which was supposedly done for “humanitarian reasons”.
Although Mr Saakashvili’s armed response to the preparations by the Russians and the separatists is often seen in the West as a disastrous miscalculation, it could have been a desperate attempt to internationalise the separatist problem in the face of world indifference.
He has certainly drawn international attention to his country, but few would agree that the problems are any closer to resolution. The Russian contention that the people of Abkhazia and South Ossetia never want to live under Georgian rule seems irrefutable at the moment.
For their part, the Russians reject any suggestion that they planned the invasion to prevent Georgia from joining Nato or to unseat Mr Saakashvili, whose disagreements with Mr Putin have descended to a bitter, personal level. For them it is a “peace enforcement” operation.
An intriguing explanation of the war has emerged from Sergei Markov, a commentator close to the Kremlin who is a member of the ruling party, United Russia.
Mr Markov sees the war as a plot by Dick Cheney, US vice president, to boost the chances of John McCain, the Republican contender in the presidential election.
“The neoconservatives don’t give a damn about South Ossetia,” Mr Markov writes.
“Their aim in ordering Saakashvili to begin the war was to provoke Russia to military action and then to unleash anti-Russian hysteria and bring about a sort of new Cold War between the West and Russia. McCain would ride this wave to victory in the presidential elections.”
Mr McCain has indeed distinguished himself with his tough stance on Georgia, saying: “We are all Georgians now.” But history will probably put more weight on the Russian army’s preparations.
aphilps@thenational.ae
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