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THE CAUCASUS & GLOBALIZATION
Svetlana < <c z z o > CC LU X u
Professor, Chair of Ethnology, History Department, Nicolaus Copernicus University (Torun, Poland).
THE NEW INDEPENDENT STATES OF
THE CENTRAL CAUCASUS:
THE ACHILLES’ HEEL OF
THEIR NATIONAL POLICIES Abstract
The author analyzes some general eth-nopolitical patterns that have emerged across the post-Soviet expanse to identify the strong and weak sides of the
national policies being pursued by the new independent states and of the relations between the titular nations and the ethnic minorities.
I n t r o d u c t i o n
I have posed myself the task of looking beyond the surface of the ethnonational problems that have been pestering Georgia for some time now. I have in mind the separatist movements in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the still unresolved problem of letting the Meskhetian Turks return to their historical homeland, the claims formulated by the Armenian minority, and other complex and even dramatic developments of the last two decades. These issues are naturally much wider than the region under discussion. They echo in Ukraine, Moldova, the Baltic, and the Central Asian states. The article concentrates on the Caucasian knot of problems—Georgia’s “nerve plexus” in particular—as well as other painful spots of the Caucasus.
Ethnopolitical Problems of the Newly Independent Eurasian States
Georgia is not the only country confronted by separatist movements on its territory: in fact it perfectly fits the overall panorama of the post-Soviet states and, wider still, the vast East European and Asian expanses of the former Eastern Bloc. Nearly every country has its private “headaches” induced by ethnic minorities. For example, Rumania (to borrow the famous words Jean-Jacques Rousseau said about Russia which partitioned Poland)1 “has swallowed” but not yet “digested”
1 “Vous ne sauriez empecher qu’ils ne vous engloutissent, faites au moins qu’ils ne puissent vous digerer” (J.-J. Rousseau, “Considerations sur le gouvernement de Pologne et sur sa reformation projettee (1772),” in: Oeuvres completes, Vol. 3, Paris, 1964, p. 959).
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Transylvania with its over 1 million-strong Hungarian population; and Moldova has its troubles with the autonomy of the Gagauzes and Transnistria. The Central Asian and Central Caucasian states have their share of troubles relating to national minorities. Some of the problems remain pending; others were resolved either inconsistently, by force, or were frozen. All of them, however, remain highly volatile. The tragedy of Azerbaijan, for example, was caused by the occupation of 20 percent of its territory by Armenia that drove away not only the local Azeri population but also Azeris from its own territory. This is, in turn, a result of the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh initiated by Erevan. The Baltic states have their share of problems that are not limited to the Russians in Latvia and Estonia, the sad result of the Soviet occupation and colonization that made Russians nothing short of an ethnic majority in both countries. They are aggressive and disloyal to the new powers and the titular nations; the so-called Polish Question in Lithuania has cutting edges. In fact, nearly mono-ethnic Poland2 finds it hard to cope with the national minorities on its territory (Germans, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and Jews) mainly due to the Poles’ psychological, cultural, and political characteristics which make them intolerant and unforgiving when it comes to dealing with the enemies of the past.
It is much easier to enumerate the Eurasian countries that have no real or potential conflicts with national minorities than to list those where conflicts are either simmering or boiling or frozen only to be defrosted sometime in future. They are the misfortune of all states that have freed themselves completely or partly from communist dictatorship. It is much more important to identify the common causes and patterns that push nearly all the new independent states to the dangerous political reefs of disloyalty and hostility demonstrated by their own ethnic minorities than to look at the specific features of each national tragedy and its historical roots.
The riots of “smaller brothers,”3 which not infrequently developed into clashes (especially frequently at the turn of the 1990s and throughout that decade), caught many of the national communities and their elites unawares. This was conducive to the generally accepted opinion in the public, the media, and even part of the academic community that the riots were all designed and provoked by “enemies.” The choice of enemies was practically unlimited within the political and ideological as well as ethnic or super-ethnic ranges. Some people looked for the roots in neighboring states (in Azerbaijan there is a fairly widespread conviction that Armenia provoked the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh to start building Greater Armenia) or among the great powers seeking domination or at least influence in certain (mineral-rich) regions; Zionism, pan-Turkism, Islamic terrorism, the Christian churches, and political forces wishing to destroy this or that country are also contemplated as enemies. Communists and the leftist forces are still convinced that the so-called democrats on the payroll of American imperialism and acting under its command destroyed the great Soviet Union and let the genie of destructive nationalism of large and small peoples out of the bottle. On the other hand, the leaders of rightist movements and the popular masses of many newly independent states are deeply convinced that the ethnic conflicts and separatist movements in their countries are induced by the
2 In 2002, 96.74 percent of those living in Poland described themselves as Poles and Polish as their native language; during the same population census 1.23 percent stated that they belonged to national minorities; 2.03 percent were undecided (see: Raport z wynikow Spisu Powszechnego Ludnosci i Mieszkan 2002, Glowny Urz^d Statystyczny, Warszawa, 2003).
3 In the late 1980s Russian political science and ethnology borrowed informal terms (that smacked of rather specific political humor and jargon) which divided the subjects of the Soviet state into three groups. The “elder brother”—the Center, the Kremlin, the central government, and sometimes Russia and the Russians associated with the Center; the “middle brothers”—the union republics (sometimes all 15 of them or minus the Russian Federation), their titular na-tions—the peoples associated with the quasi-statehood inside the Soviet Union; and the “younger brothers”—the peoples deprived of a highly relative and formal statehood inside the Soviet Union. Their “self-determination” was limited to autonomies of various types (autonomous republic, autonomous region, autonomous okrug, national district); in many cases the peoples had no officially recognized institutions and remained minorities within republics. Their numerical strength was registered by population censuses.
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Communists, who placed a delayed action bomb under the foundation of their statehoods. They operate on Russia’s money, which also supplies military assistance and personnel for the puppet regimes with the single aim of weakening these countries.
These contradictory or even mutually exclusive theories, versions, and widely accepted stereotypes stem from underestimation of the movement of ethnic minorities as independent and selfsufficient or from complete ignorance of the facts. It should be said that the conviction that the movements are induced from the outside is not groundless, it relies on an analysis of real political practices of various countries, however it cannot be described as completely adequate. In actual fact, the national minorities’ initiative and their will and desire to realize their self-determination in one of its forms and establish their own political order on their land are also important or even all-important.
The public, which tends to ignore the will of national minorities involved in separatist movements and conflicts, is dedicated to another, even firmer and much less adequate paradigm. National majorities put the blame for the shocks, bloodshed, and tragedies of the distant and recent past on the “younger brothers” allegedly unable to appreciate everything that was done for them.
At all times history has been and remains an entanglement of factors, causes and effects. This is especially true of the epoch of globalization, therefore they should all be taken into account for the purpose of analysis. Georgia is one of the pertinent examples. The current developments in Georgia cannot be explained without taking into account Russia’s provocations, its military aggression (the August march on Tbilisi is merely the tip of the iceberg, the highest point of the permanent aggression that started on 9 April, 1989 on Shota Rustaveli Square and continued in the form of the destructive war in Abkhazia in 1992-1993), without the Kremlin’s policy of granting Russian citizenship to people in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Those wishing to find a way out of the present impasse should take the above into account; they should not ignore the role the leaders of the Abkhazian national forum Aydgylar and South Ossetia’s Adamon Nykhas (who later divided the ministerial posts in the puppet cabinets between them) have voluntarily and enthusiastically shouldered. The positions of the neighboring countries and Georgia’s national minorities (Armenian, Azeri, and Greek), churches, international observers, the media, and international law experts insisting on two mutually exclusive conceptions—the right of nations to self-determination and state integrity—as well as the way public figures, structures, and forces behaved under certain circumstances should be taken into account before the world community pronounces its verdict.
We should identify among the numerous components enumerated above what can be called the Achilles’ Heel of the politics of the young independent state in relation to its national minorities. The Georgians found themselves in challenging circumstances and fell victim to a conflict yet the Georgian state, too, was guilty of blunders and one-sided approaches when dealing with the national minorities within its borders. Here I particularly have in mind the quandary into which the Meskhetian Turks deported from Georgia in 1944 were plunged when they were allowed to go back to their homeland, the Akhaltsikhe pashalak, where this ethnic group formed in the distant past. Their hopes and dreams remain unfulfilled because Georgia has not yet found a place for them within its borders; it has not yet found an answer to the problem. It is piling up falsehoods and warns against allegedly inevitable complications with the local Armenians or hypothesizing that Moscow or Ankara might set the Meskhetian Turks against Georgia. The fact that neither Soviet Georgia, nor the new Georgian state before and after the Rose Revolution proved able to address the problem in a constructive way (which excludes dispersion of the Meskhetian Turks across the country, thus eventually depriving them of their ethnic identity, or the humiliating and completely undemocratic demand that the Meskhetian Turks admit that they are Georgian Muslims) shows that there is no political will. The Georgian leaders, who stubbornly refuse to address the problems of this national minority, have the full support of the electorate.
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The strange unwillingness to heed the needs of the national minorities and autochthonous peoples of the new independent states looks strange to observers and will look even stranger to future researchers. Having experienced the horrors of national un-freedom, the nations, which for a long time were chained to the chariot of an alien and stronger state that usurped the right to seal the fates of the oppressed peoples, should have been sensitive to the strivings of other peoples to defend their sovereignty once they became free from Communist totalitarian oppression. Sensitivity stops at the borders of one’s own state, the field of ethnocentrism in which democratic and humanistic principles and approaches are replaced with rigid slogans of the “Georgia for Georgians,” “Lithuania for Lithuanians,” “Ukraine for Ukrainians,” “Poland for the Poles” type.
The still half-baked political culture and the still inadequate experience of state development in the states that date their independence to 1990-1991 cannot justify the above. In many cases the world is dealing with young states that, having gained state independence after many years of oppression, have not acquired enough experience and are wallowing in the sweet fruits of liberty. This cannot be applied to those nations which Prof. A. Kappeler calls “old” (noble) nations as opposed to “young” peasant nations.4 Today, however, the “old” nations can compete with the “young” ones when it comes to snobbism and demonstrative ignoring of national minorities’ interests. The Georgians, who created a brilliant elite, philosophy, science, and culture that reached the summits of world achievements, today are acting within the primitive paradigm of “challenge-response-challenge” and “an eye for an eye,” which are much more suited to nations with no state experience (in the European sense) behind them and which have never gone beyond common law, clans, and blood feud.
Without aspiring to cover every side of this paradox and going to the roots of this phenomenon I shall concentrate on certain circumstances that aggravate these contradictions and tighten them into a knot.
Manipulating the National Minority Movements in Geopolitical Interests
Manipulation of the national movements of the “younger brothers” was an important part of the Soviet Union’s imperial policies (Russia declared itself to be the legal successor of the now dead state). The apprehensions voiced by the new independent states and their democratic public that Russia would begin advancing on these states under the guise of defending the rights of national minorities were confirmed by numerous provocations and the August 2008 march on Tbilisi. Their scope is wide: they have already reached every nook and cranny of the former Soviet Union. The imperial-minded Kremlin refused to leave any of the national minorities, no matter how small, in peace. It tried to use them to promote its influence and undermine stability in all the CIS countries, in the Baltics and other regions.
In certain respects it was ridiculous: the top officials and party functionaries of the dying state suddenly displayed an avid interest in the country’s ethnic composition and hastened to fill in the gaps in their education. They developed an avid interest in the previously ignored nations and ethnic groups.
Last of the Soviet KGB chairmen Vadim Bakatin, a well-informed ex officio about Moscow’s plans, wrote in his book Izbavlenie otKGB (Getting Rid of the KGB): “The State Security Committee was behind the ‘international fronts’ in those union republics that put up resistance to the center. The
4 A. Kappeler, Russland als Vielvdlkerreich: Entstehung, Geschichte, Zerfall, Munchen, 1993.
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flawed logic of ‘divide and rule’ split society in these republics into two camps and sent social tension up... The Center offered an ultimatum: ‘either comply or face the international front, which will call for strikes, raise border issues, and doubt the legality of the elected power structures.’” The KGB described this as manifestation of the “will of people.”5
This is probably the most important aspect of the problem that frequently determined the behavior of national minorities (the younger brothers) who knew what was expected of them in Moscow. The same is true of the way the national majorities of the former union republics responded to the actions of the minorities and the “fronts.” Convinced that the truth was on its side the majority was nevertheless despondent and mistrusted both the forces behind the provocations and their instruments (national minorities) closer to home.
This is not all: the drama that has been going on the historical scene involved at least three independent entities: the Kremlin, the organized, in one way or another, national minority movements, and the national majority and leaders of the new independent states (heads of the national fronts and republican national movements at the earlier stage).
Responsibility of the Minorities for the Strategy of their National Movements. Unique Experience of the Crimean Tartars
The local varieties apart, the national minorities and autochthonous peoples follow a more or less common strategy. They mistrust the new state and cherish fond memories of the Soviet past allegedly free from ethnic conflicts (the delusion caused by the atrophied historical memory of sorts). The programs of the national movements of the peoples (conventionally called here the “younger brothers”) demonstrated an obvious lack of political loyalty to the new independent states. Let me repeat: I have in mind the movements of great masses of people rather than puppet structures set up for propaganda purposes. As a rule national minorities set the ball rolling by challenging the government; they demonstrate lack of confidence and initiate challenges. Politics is a cruel game which sooner or later ends in a national catastrophe. The victors are usually smug and complacent, therefore the news about others not rejoicing together with them and wishing to follow in their footsteps to gain sovereignty and revive their statehood comes as a bolt out of the blue. Amazement develops into irritation, then into indignation, and finally into the determination to “bomb Chechnia” (the intention Vice-President Rutskoi first voiced in the fall of 1991 and which was realized four years later by President Yeltsin and Defense Minister Grachev). This fully applies to the decision to carry out military operations in the Gali and Ochamchira districts the State Council of Georgia passed in August 1992.
On many occasions such conflicts turned into tragedies for the national minorities yet invariably it was their leaders who challenged the new power and new states. Post-Soviet history knows only one national movement that based its strategy on cooperation with the new power and the national majority of the new state rather than on confrontation.6 I have in mind the strategy the Kurultai and Mejlis of the Crimean Tartars headed by Mustafa Jemilev adopted in the early 1990s. So far none of the
5 V. Bakatin, Izbavlenie ot KGB, Moscow, 1992, p. 49.
6 The Vatan organization of the Meskhetian Turks working in Russia, Azerbaijan, and other states and its position in relation to Georgia is another pertinent example. Its experience, however, is rather limited because it operates far beyond the Republic of Georgia.
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enemies of independent Ukraine, be they the last supporters of the communist regime or the supporters of the new imperial chauvinist ideology, convinced that Ukraine (Small Russia) is nothing more than an appendix of Great Russia, have managed to channel the energy of the Crimean Tartars’ national movement against the Ukrainian state. It should be said that the Ukrainian leaders themselves did not always justify the hopes of the Crimean Tartars who associated their future with them. This is true not merely of the past when Kravchuk and then Kuchma were presidents but also of President Yushchenko. He owes his victory to their resolute support: after all, the Crimean Tartars are the second largest autochthonous ethnic group after the Ukrainians. His policy disappointed the Tartars to the extent that they later supported his rival Yanukovich.
The hard road covered by the Crimean Tartars has not yet been studied in all its (positive and negative) details; the world public knows next to nothing about it. So far the autochthonous peoples and ethnic minorities in the post-Soviet expanse have not armed themselves with this experience. These movements are still proceeding from the highly dangerous delusion that they can either betray the interests of their peoples or defend them by fighting the new state seen as an enemy. They are either ignorant of any other option or driven to despair. They refuse to seek an alliance with the patriotic and democratic forces of the national majority, and so far they have failed to accept the model based on the struggle “For our and your freedom.” Their despondency acquires regrettable, if not to say, tragic forms: they are unscrupulous when it comes to allies; they are not fastidious when it comes to accepting help. They are prepared to go to all length to deliver a blow at a hateful state. There are numerous examples of this: the Chechens who fight Russia accept help, if not from al-Qaeda, from the most reactionary and aggressive terrorist organizations; the Poles of Lithuania (not all of them but only some prominent figures of their national Council) stained themselves by cooperating with the GKChP. The leaders of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two states that recently declared independence, live on Russian money.
“Positive Discrimination”: the Unassimilated Ideal Model
None of the states that formerly belonged to the Soviet bloc (including the most progressive of them that do not violate the rights of the national minorities and meet all the formal democratic requirements that ensured them EU membership) never elaborated and never realized the model that can be described as the policy of preventive positive discrimination of the national minorities. Any numerically small peoples that found themselves for historical reasons on the territory of another state and that left behind many years of oppression, genocide, deportations, and other tragedies need more than civil equality with the national majority. They need a wider range of measures designed to revive their ethnic culture, develop their language, promote their media, education, etc. It is expected that the national minority will receive not merely an equal, but a much greater share of the privileges per capita. This inequality alone (positive discrimination) can be described as genuine fairness in relation to those who knew no prosperity and were victims of negative discrimination. This is hard to realize in the new independent countries of Eastern Europe and Asia that inherited a deformed economy, technical backwardness, and total poverty from the communist regime. So far they can offer adequate conditions neither to the national majority nor to the ethnic minorities. It is even harder to plant the idea in people’s minds. The Lithuanians find it hard to accept the idea that the Poles in their land deserve more attention and care than the Lithuanians themselves. The Georgians, among whom there are hundreds of thousands of Georgian refugees from Tskhinvali, Sukhumi, and Gagra, will hardly agree with those who try to convince them to love the Abkhazians and Ossets more than themselves even if the admonition comes from wise Patriarch Ilia II.
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C o n c l u s i o n
I want to complete my far from optimistic article with a story from an Old Russian Lavrentiy Chronicle. In 985, when Grand Prince of Kiev Vladimir defeated the Volga Bulgars (the ancestors of today’s Kazan Tartars), his commander Dobrynia, who had been inspecting a group of prisoners, pointed out to the prince that since all of them wore boots they would probably refuse to pay tribute to Rus. Convinced by this argument the prince invited the Bulgars to enter a peace treaty yet the proud Bulgars answered: “There will be no peace among us until a stone floats and hops sink in water.”7 We hope that technical and spiritual progress will somewhat tone down this pessimistic conclusion: peoples living side by side in one country will probably learn to listen to and understand each other even though this is much harder than making a stone float or hops sink with the help of high technology.
7 Polnoe sobranie russkikh letopisei, Vol. 1, Moscow, 1962, p. 84.
