Crawling from the Wreckage

by Gwynne Dyer

  It’s equally questionable whether Russia is really an industrialized power anymore. The Russian economy resembles Nigeria’s or Iran’s more than those of its fellow G8 members: oil and gas account for 70 per cent of the country’s export earnings and 30 percent of its entire economy. Even after six years of Putin’s rule, Russian oil production has not risen back up to the level of the early nineties, and only the high price of oil worldwide gives Russia some prosperity at home and some clout abroad.

  Since the whole purpose of inviting Russia to join the G8 was to encourage the growth of democracy and a modern free-market economy in the ex-Communist giant, Russia’s fellow G8 members are filled with consternation at the way things have turned out. However, they are at a loss for how to deal with the cuckoo in their nest. Quiet persuasion doesn’t seem to work, but neither does noisy outrage.

  Putin simply doesn’t feel the need to listen—and neither do Russians in general. The remarkable thing about Putin’s rule is that after six years in office he continues to have the approval, according to reasonably reliable opinion polls, of 77 percent of his fellow citizens. Indeed, although Putin will obey the constitutional ban on a third consecutive presidential term and leave power after the 2008 election, there is huge popular support for changing the constitution to allow him to stay on for another four years (59 percent yes, 29 percent no). What’s the matter with the Russians? Doesn’t everybody want democracy?

  No, not everybody wants democracy. According to Leonid Sedov, a senior analyst at the VTSIOM-A polling agency, about 80 percent of Russians say they dislike democracy, although they are less clear on what they do like. Only 3 percent want the return of the tsars, some 16 percent want a tough authoritarian ruler like Stalin, and the rest are scattered all over the political map. But they like Putin because he has given them back stability, prosperity and self-respect.

  It’s a reaction to the chaotic process of de-Communization under Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s, which was misleadingly called “democratization,” and it doesn’t necessarily mean that Russians would dislike real democracy. (They were keen enough on it in 1989–91, before “democratization” impoverished most of them.)

  Russians are still among the best-educated populations on the planet, and once the middle class feels prosperous and secure enough, the demand for democracy is likely to re-emerge. But that may be years away, and what are the democratic majority in the G8 to do with this authoritarian cuckoo in their nest in the meantime?

  Put up with it, and pretend not to notice that it doesn’t really fit in. Nag it about its more severe human-rights abuses, and demand that it give at least lip service to its democratic principles, but don’t drive the regime out into the cold. When the tide finally turns in Russian society, the survival of formal democratic structures and the rule of law, however much abused in practice, will make the task of building a genuine democracy in Russia a lot easier.

  In effect, that is what the other seven members of the G8 have decided, and they are probably right. Of course, the fact that Russia has all that oil and gas to sell may have influenced their decision, too.

  I have only met Georgia’s President Mikheil Saakashvili once, and have no special insight into his character. (I was not in the region when the war broke out in 2008, and had no access to special sources of information.) So why was it obvious to me that it was the Georgians who had started the war, while the English-language news media, with a few honourable exceptions (the British Broadcasting Corporation, the English service of Al-Jazeera and one or two others), fell for the Georgian claim that they were being attacked by the Russians?

  All the early reports placed Georgian troops well inside South Ossetia, some of them right in Tskhinvali, the capital. What the hell were they doing there if the Russians had started the war? And yet the Western media fell for the old stereotypes of big bad Russia and gallant little Georgia that Saakashvili started pushing as soon as his little smash-and-grab operation went wrong.

  The Georgians’ greatest blunder was that they did not give absolute military priority to getting a blocking force into place at the exit from the Roki/Roksky Tunnel under the main Caucasus range, a 3.6-kilometre tunnel that connects North Ossetia, part of the Russian Federation, with the rebel Georgian province of South Ossetia. There were barely a thousand lightly armed Russian peacekeeping troops in South Ossetia when the Georgians attacked them, but leaving that tunnel open meant that they would be facing major Russian armoured forces within twenty-four hours. That is exactly what happened, and three days later the Georgian army broke and fled. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  August 10, 2008

  SOUTH OSSETIA: A MONUMENTAL MISCALCULATION

  The war in South Ossetia is essentially over, and the Georgians have lost. This was Georgia’s second attempt in eighteen years to conquer the breakaway territory by force, and now that option is gone for good. So are the country’s hopes of joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Yet sections of the Western media are carrying on as if the Russians started it, and are now threatening to invade Georgia itself.

  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.

  November 13, 2008

  REALISM IN UKRAINE

  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.

  11.

  IRAN

  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.

  June 25, 2005

  THE IRANIAN SURPRISE

  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.