Crawling from the Wreckage (17 page)

President George W. Bush has condemned Russia’s “disproportionate and dangerous” response, although there is no evidence that Russian
ground troops have violated the borders of Georgia proper. Nor are they likely to.

Much is made of Russian air attacks on targets inside Georgia, and especially of the inevitable misses that cause civilian casualties, but the vast majority of the two thousand civilians allegedly killed so far in this conflict were South Ossetians killed by Georgian shells, rockets and bombs. Some shooting and bombing will continue until all the Georgian troops are cleared out of South Ossetia—including the 40 per cent of its territory that they controlled before the war—but then it will stop.

Meanwhile, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili is playing on old Cold War stereotypes of the Russian threat in a desperate bid for Western backing: “What Russia is doing in Georgia is open, unhidden aggression and a challenge to the whole world. If the whole world does not stop Russia today, then Russian tanks will be able to reach any other European capital.” Nonsense. It was Georgia that started this war.

The chronology tells it all. Skirmishes between Georgian troops and South Ossetian militia grew more frequent over the past several months, but on Thursday, August 7, Saakashvili offered the separatist South Ossetian government “an immediate ceasefire and the immediate beginning of talks,” promising that “full autonomy” was on the table. Only hours later, however, he ordered a general offensive.

South Ossetian’s president, Eduard Kokoity, called Saakashvili’s ceasefire offer a “despicable and treacherous” ruse, which seems fair enough. Through all of Thursday night and Friday morning Georgian artillery shells and rockets rained down on the little city of Tskhinvali, South Ossetia’s capital, while Georgian infantry and tanks encircled it. Russian journalists reported that 70 percent of the city was destroyed, and by Friday afternoon it was in Georgian hands.

The offensive was obviously planned well in advance, but Saakashvili didn’t think it through. He knew that the world’s attention would be distracted by the Olympics, and he hoped that Russia’s reaction would be slow because Prime Minister Putin was off in Beijing. Given three or four days to establish full military control of South Ossetia, he could put a pro-Georgian administration in place and declare the problem solved. But his calculations were wrong.

There was no delay in the Russian response. A large Russian force was on its way from North Ossetia by midday on Friday, and Russian jets
began striking targets inside Georgia proper. By the time Putin reached the North Ossetian capital of Vladikavkaz on Saturday morning, the Georgian forces were already being driven out of Tskhinvali again.

By Saturday evening, Georgia was calling for a ceasefire and declaring that all its troops were being withdrawn from South Ossetia to prevent a “humanitarian catastrophe.” Saakashvili’s gamble had failed—and, as Putin put it, the territorial integrity of Georgia had “suffered a fatal blow.”

Not just South Ossetia has been lost for good. Georgia’s hope of ever recovering its other breakaway province, Abkhazia, has also evaporated. On Saturday, the Abkhazian government announced a military offensive to drive Georgian troops out of the Kodori gorge, the last bit of Abkhazian territory that they control. How much does all of this matter?

It matters a lot to the three hundred thousand Georgians who fled from Abkhazia and South Ossetia when the two ethnic enclaves, which were autonomous parts of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic in Soviet times, declared their independence after the old Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Georgia’s attempts to reconquer them in 1992–93 were bloody failures, and after this second failure, it is clear that the Georgian refugees will never go home.

There is reason to rejoice for most Abkhazians and Ossetians. Although they are Orthodox Christians like the far more numerous Georgians, they are ethnically distinct peoples with different languages, and they always resented Stalin’s decision to place them under Georgian rule. Whether they ultimately get full independence or simply join the Russian Federation, they will be happy with either outcome.

The Bush administration’s bizarre ambition to extend
NATO
into the Caucasus mountains is dead. Russians are pleased with the speed and effectiveness of their government’s response. And nobody else really cares.

There is no great moral issue here. What Georgia tried to do to South Ossetia is precisely what Russia did to Chechnya, but Georgia wasn’t strong enough and South Ossetia had a bigger friend. There is no great strategic issue either: apart from a few pipeline routes, the whole Transcaucasus is of little importance to the rest of the world. A year from now the Georgians will probably have dumped Saakashvili, and the rest of us may not even remember his foolish adventure.

I wrote that article only sixty hours after the fighting started late on August 7, 2008, and I got a few things wrong. The civilian death toll in South Ossetia was in the low hundreds, not two thousand as first reported. Russian troops did subsequently push thirty or forty kilometres into Georgian territory for a while, to destroy military supply dumps and the like, but they left again. And Saakashvili, astonishingly, is still in power despite his huge blunder
.

A year after the war ended, a special commission set up by the European Union concluded that Georgia started the war, but the Georgian government still insists that it was an unprovoked Russian invasion. It is taking quite a while for the post-Soviet space to settle down, but at least the tense Ukrainian-Russian relationship seems on the way to a sensible resolution
.

The brawl in the Ukrainian parliament last Tuesday was an undignified ending to the country’s two-month political crisis, but something important has changed. In the immediate aftermath of the Orange Revolution of 2004, the more extreme Ukrainian nationalists fantasized that the country could break all its links with Russia and become an entirely Western state, but now realism is starting to prevail.

To the extent that abstract generalizations play a role in Ukrainian politics, they are mainly generalizations about Russia. Is it a friendly neighbour, close to Ukrainians in language, culture and history, or is it a perpetual threat to Ukraine’s independence? The answer people give depends mainly on whether they speak Ukrainian or Russian at home (and about half of Ukraine’s citizens do speak Russian at home).

The more extreme nationalists would deny that, insisting that the great majority of the country’s citizens speak Ukrainian, but that is a wish rather than a fact, as a walk down the streets of any big Ukrainian city, except Lviv in the far west of the country, will quickly reveal. Centuries of Russian political domination mean that Russian is the dominant language of urban culture almost everywhere in Ukraine, and in the heavily industrialized east of the country even the ethnic Ukrainians mostly speak Russian.

Many, perhaps most, Ukrainian nationalists believe that Ukraine can safeguard its independence only through integration with major Western
institutions. Since the old ex-Communist elite was finally forced from power by the Orange Revolution in 2004, President Viktor Yushchenko, the leader of that non-violent revolution, has been pushing hard for membership in the European Union and
NATO
. But not all the leaders of that revolution agree with this strategy.

Yulia Tymoshenko, with her trademark braided hair, became almost as famous as Yushchenko during the events of 2004 and, afterwards, she became prime minister. She subsequently fell out with Yushchenko, but was back as prime minister by December of last year. She is unquestionably a Ukrainian nationalist, but she was uncharacteristically silent when the conflict between Georgia and Russia blew up last August.

President Viktor Yushchenko, now her bitterest rival, was outspoken in his backing of Georgia against the Russian “invasion,” and urged the European Union and
NATO
to speed up their response to Ukraine’s applications for membership. But Ukraine is deeply divided on those questions, with around half the population opposing
NATO
membership. In the end, neither Western organization responded to the applications with an unequivocal yes.

Tymoshenko didn’t say much about that, either, and then in September her party in parliament voted along with the pro-Russian Party of the Regions in a move to curb the president’s powers. President Yushchenko saw this as a betrayal, since Tymoshenko’s party and his own “Our Ukraine” group were in a coalition in parliament.

Quite a few people in Ukraine suspect that Tymoshenko has made a secret deal with the Russians. She intends to run for the presidency against Yushchenko next year, and the theory is that she promised to keep quiet about Georgia and not push for Ukrainian membership in the European Union and
NATO
in return for Moscow’s tacit support in the presidential election.

Tymoshenko was quite right not to offer Georgia her automatic support, since it was the Georgians who started the war. She is right not to push
NATO
membership for Ukraine either, since that would infuriate Moscow and split Ukraine right down the middle. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t make that secret deal with the Russians. In fact, she probably did.

Moscow is very unhappy with the openly anti-Russian stance of President Yushchenko, and the September vote to curb his powers was just what it wanted to see. It couldn’t have passed without Tymoshenko’s
support, and many see it as proof that she has made her deal. She is positioning herself as a Ukrainian nationalist who is not anti-Russian, and that may be enough to win her the presidency next year. But it unleashed two months of political chaos in Ukraine.

So Tymoshenko and Moscow win—but so, perhaps, does Ukraine, for the extreme pro-Western and anti-Russian positions taken up by Yushchenko were not wise. Moscow does not appear to harbour any ambition to regain the control over Ukraine it had in Soviet and Tsarist times, but it would see a Ukrainian government that joined
NATO
as an enemy of Russia. Ukraine’s independence is probably safer outside
NATO
than it would be inside it.

In fact, Tymoshenko didn’t win the 2010 presidential election. She lost narrowly to another pro-Russian candidate, Viktor Yanukovych. Foreign observers judged the election to be fair: Ukrainian voters were just facing up to reality. Ukraine’s relationship with Russia is in many ways like Canada’s with the United States—the shared history and geography, the economical and cultural ties and the huge disparity in power—so it was always a bad idea for Ukraine to talk about joining NATO. (Imagine what would have happened during the Cold War if Canada had started talking about joining the Warsaw Pact.)

Ukraine doesn’t have to be a Russian satellite but if its government completely ignores Russian concerns it will have problems, even with a substantial proportion of its own citizens
.

Relations between Iran and the West started getting really bad in 2005, because that’s when the man with the mouth, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, won the presidency. He really did win it, too, even though nobody saw it coming. And all the domestic and international tensions of the next five years followed almost automatically
.

It doesn’t make sense. In the previous two presidential elections, in 1997 and 2001, Iranians voted more than two-to-one for the reformist candidate, Mohammad Khatami. It did them little good: the Islamist clerics who have veto power over the elected parts of the Iranian government blocked Khatami’s attempts to liberalize the system. But it seemed clear
that younger Iranians in particular were fed up with clerical domination of politics. Since the 2001 election, unemployment has gotten worse and the poor have gotten poorer. So why have Iranian voters now elected the hardest of hard-liners, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to the presidency with a two-thirds majority?

There’s no point in pretending that Ahmadinejad didn’t really win. There may have been some stuffed ballot boxes in the first round of the presidential election on June 17, when half a dozen candidates were running, but last Friday’s runoff was decisive: more than seventeen million votes for Ahmadinejad and ten million for his opponent, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. They didn’t stuff that many ballot boxes.

Ahmadinejad is a staunch supporter of the Islamic state, an instructor in the Basij, the voluntary youth militia that monitors people’s dress and behaviour, and a close associate of the Supreme Ruler, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He is definitely not a “reformer,” though he does promise to attack corruption. Why did he win?

Iran’s partial democracy first came under serious attack in last year’s parliamentary election, when the ruling clerical elite concluded that the reformers were growing too popular. The Guardian Council disqualified three thousand parliamentary candidates from running on the grounds that they were not Islamic enough, including eighty sitting members of parliament (out of 290). President Khatami’s feeble protests were ignored, parliament fell under Islamist control, and Iranians who opposed the regime began to lose faith in electoral politics.

The Guardian Council tried to pull the same trick with this year’s presidential election, disqualifying all the reformist candidates, but the opposition responded by threatening to boycott the election, which would have reduced it to a farce. Ayatollah Khamenei intervened, and two reformist candidates were allowed to run together with one “moderate” (Rafsanjani, formerly president between 1989 and 1997 and a cleric himself) and four hard-liners.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was one of the hard-liners, but only three weeks ago, the opinion polls gave him a scant 5 percent of the vote. Then, suddenly, a miracle: he was ahead of all the other hard-liners and catching up with Rafsanjani and the reformist candidates.

On June 17, the moderate Rafsanjani came first, with 21 percent of the votes, but Ahmadinejad came a close second with 19.5 percent.
There may have been some skulduggery at the polls, but the main reason for his relative success is that the Islamic authorities, fearing that no pro-regime candidate would make it into the runoff, ordered their loyal supporters in the armed forces, the Revolutionary Guard and the Basij militia, to swing all their votes to Ahmadinejad.