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Even Positive Gestures Can Cause Trouble In Caucasus

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  • Even Positive Gestures Can Cause Trouble In Caucasus

    EVEN POSITIVE GESTURES CAN CAUSE TROUBLE IN CAUCASUS
    By Scott Taylor

    The Chronicle Herald. Nova Scotia
    Oct 19 2009
    Canada

    IT WAS LAST YEAR around this time that I made an extensive reporting
    trip to the volatile Caucasus region. This strategically vital
    territory between the Black and Caspian seas is a veritable hornet's
    nest of mutually hostile former Soviet republics and breakaway ethnic
    enclaves. Although the distances are not vast, my travels were made
    extremely problematic due to the number of closed borders, frozen
    conflicts and not so frozen conflicts.

    In August 2008, the world's attention had been briefly diverted
    away from the Beijing Olympics to news reports of conflict in South
    Ossetia. Very few pundits really understood the underlying cause
    of the clash, namely that ethnic Georgian forces had attempted to
    forcibly reclaim the tiny, self-declared independent territory back
    into its own sovereign authority.

    When Russian troops subsequently intervened on behalf of the South
    Ossetians, western military analysts reverted to their well-worn Cold
    War playbooks to denounce Russia's "aggression." It mattered not
    that Georgian troops had initiated the attack, and had been guilty
    of widespread slaughter of civilians and ethnic cleansing prior to
    the Russian intervention. The sight of columns of T-72 Russian tanks
    rolling through the North Ossetian mountain pass caused U.S. Senator
    John McCain to make the bizarre declaration that "today we are all
    Georgians."

    As events unfolded, World War Three did not erupt, Russia did not annex
    Georgia, as many had feared, and after France successfully negotiated
    a ceasefire, the Caucasus returned to the status of being a wobbly
    stack of short-fused powder kegs. With the crisis thus averted,
    the western media coverage quickly returned to the Olympic Games.

    Never fully examined was the devastating domino effect that could
    have plunged the entire region into yet another round of vicious
    bloodletting. For centuries, there have been eruptions of violence
    between the three major Caucasus occupants -- Georgians, Armenians and
    Azeris -- as well as the smaller minorities such as the Abkhazians,
    Ossetians and Circassians.

    Forcibly united under the Bolshevik umbrella of the Soviet Union
    following the First World War, the old hatreds continued to simmer.

    When the Soviet Union took the first stumbling steps towards
    collapse in the late 1980s, the nationalist factions were already
    arming themselves and battling each other in preparation for the
    conflagration they all sensed would soon erupt.

    By 1991, the defunct Soviet Union had formally granted the republics
    of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan their independence. What had
    been sporadic local fighting between ethnic factions developed
    into a full-scale albeit undeclared series of wars. Abkhazians and
    Ossetians fought to wrest independent homelands from Georgia and,
    in the most savage fighting, ethnic Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh
    established their own republic, independent from the recognized
    sovereign authority of Azerbaijan.

    Backed by volunteers from Armenia and funded by their wealthy
    international diaspora, the Armenian forces not only secured
    Nagorno-Karabakh but, by the time a ceasefire was declared in 1994,
    they had captured seven additional Azeri provinces and completely
    ethnically cleansed this region of its 800,000 ethnic Azeri
    inhabitants. Turkey had supported the Turkic Azeris in this conflict,
    and closed their border with Armenia at the onset of hostilities.

    For the past 15 years, with the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict frozen
    but unresolved, this border has remained closed, leaving landlocked
    Armenia dependant on just two supply lines through Georgia and Iran.

    As Russia is Armenia's biggest regional supporter economically
    and militarily, the summer 2008 conflict with Georgia served to
    illustrate just how vulnerable and isolated Armenia is under the
    current restrictions.

    In 2006, the Baku (Azerbaijan), Tbilisi (Georgia) and Ceyhan (Turkey)
    BTC oil pipeline was completed, and it now pumps nearly one million
    barrels of crude daily from Azerbaijan's oil-rich offshore rigs in
    the Caspian Sea to European markets via the port of Ceyhan. If anyone
    glances at a map, that pipeline could have been shortened by hundreds
    of kilometres had it been built on a more direct route through Armenia
    rather than through Georgia.

    Last year, when I interviewed senior Armenian officials in Yerevan,
    the pragmatic among them recognized that a rapprochement with Turkey
    was the only way for their tiny nation to move forward economically.

    The hardliners, particularly those of the Armenian diaspora and those
    residing in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, demanded that
    Turkey must first officially admit that the Ottoman Empire committed
    genocide against the Armenians in Eastern Anatolia in 1915. The
    Turks -- with good reason -- dispute that claim and maintain that
    the undenied tragedy that killed hundreds of thousands of Armenians
    was due in no small part to the devastating wartime conditions.

    Azerbaijan and the Turkish hardliners have insisted that no peace
    overtures should be made until the Armenians have withdrawn from
    the seven occupied Azeri provinces around Nagorno-Karabakh -- in
    accordance with the four UN Resolutions passed to that effect --
    and the 800,000 displaced Azeris are resettled.

    Last week, at a secret meeting in Zurich, U.S. Secretary of State
    Hillary Clinton helped coerce the foreign ministers of Armenia and
    Turkey into signing two protocols that will put these two states
    on the path toward opening their border without either of those
    preconditions having been met.

    Azerbaijan's Foreign Ministry immediately denounced the protocols,
    and Armenian President Serge Sarkisian required police protection in
    Paris where angry Armenian expatriates decried him as a traitor.

    The Caucasus situation has been described as a multiple person Mexican
    standoff, with every stakeholder holding cocked guns to each other's
    heads. As such, even the seemingly positive gesture of Turkey and
    Armenia easing their fingers off their triggers may only serve to
    upset the fragile balance.
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