“War in South Ossetia: Georgia started it”

Thus did today’s editorial in Britain’s Guardian say what almost the entire US media elite refused to do last summer. It referred to the comprehensive EU investigation that found the war to have been started by Georgia and not Russia, but could just as easily have been quoting this humble blog.

In a series of articles in August 2008, FPA Russia Blog exposed the blatant pro-Georgian bias of the US political class and  near hysterical anti-Russian propaganda spewed by mainstream news organs, when “the press’s credulity of official US government positions, easy embrace of jingoism and susceptibility to hawkishness reminded me queasily of its very similar performance in run up to the Iraq war”.

In an excellent commentary on the media’s complicity in the war, Glenn Greenwald denounced those “deceitful methods that permeate our political discourse, especially when it comes to demonizing America’s Enemy du jour“, methods which, as I pointed out last August, reinforced “to the uninformed viewer that it was Russia, not Georgia, which used the cover of the Olympic games to invade”.

Much of the media’s bias towards Georgia, whatever the true facts on the ground, was due to its love affair with the telegenic, fluent and media savvy president. Yet, as the Guardian shrewdly notes, “the ability to jump in front of a CNN camera does not confer on the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, the gifts of a democrat”. Not surprisingly, however, his crackdown on civil society groups and political opposition received little mention.

For example when CNN’s White House correspondent Ed Henry breathlessly delivered the following lines (with a straight face):

“…What’s really going on is that Russia is trying essentially to reconstitute the old soviet union.bring back the old spheres of influence. if you take over Georgia today, what’s next? Could they then move into the Ukraine (sic), could they take over the Czech Republic? These are awful options that are on the table, but there’s a fear that if they start here and are not stopped, what happens next?”

A year long EU probe was not necessary to unmask such claims as the nonsense that they are. But equally, perhaps not even such an investigation is enough to dispel the enduring anti-Russian sentiments nursed by the conservative-Atlanticist clique within Europe’s elite. This gang includes the usual suspects - a smelly alliance of right-wing pseudo-intellectuals (Bernard Henri-Levy) and past-their-prime freedom fighters determined to reinstate the Cold War that once gave them underdog hero status (Vaclav Havel). Just last week, that very group had issued a letter that compared Russia to Hitler’s Germany and urged the EU to defend Georgia at all costs.

In the wake of the report, that kind of comment becomes as ridiculous as the rubbish (so ably gathered by Greeenwald) that was spewed by John McCain:

[Putin] has exhibited most aggressive behavior, obviously, in Georgia. . . .We have to make the Russians understand that there are penalties for these this kind of behavior, this kind of naked aggression into Georgia, a tiny country and a tiny democracy.

and the Washington Post’s editorial board:

Part of the blame-the-victim argument is tactical — the notion that the elected president of Georgia foolishly allowed the Russians to goad him into a military operation to recover a small separatist region of Georgia. Mr. Saakashvili says, in an article we publish on the opposite page today, that the facts are otherwise, that he ordered his troops into action only after a Russian armored column was on the move. . . . Moreover, the evidence is persuasive and growing that Russia planned and instigated this war.

A year on, with a detente-minded Obama in the White House and the likes of Sarah Palin relegated to a museum of political curiosities, the EU investigation underscores just how much the GOP and the elite US media were on the wrong side of history.

The US, boxed in by a trigger happy Israel,  is frustrated about Russia’s refusal to support Iran sanctions. But let’s put Obama’s European missile defence gambit in perspective.

“If Russia is to give up Iran, the United States and the West have to offer something much bigger to Moscow than the scrapping of the missile defense system that never existed,” said Vladimir Sotnikov, an Iran expert at the Russian Academy of Sciences. And indeed, far from categorically abandoning the sale of S-300 anti-missile systems to Iran, Medvedev’s sole act of reciprocity has so far been to also remove some missiles that never existed, from Kaliningrad. Seems fair.

Russia does not want a nuclear armed Iran, so why is it not committing to sanctions? One explanation is that “Russia is enjoying the moment. Being a key player in the Iranian crisis confirms the Kremlin’s own view that Russia is once again a major world power. As soon as Moscow agrees to sanctions, Washington is unlikely to be so attentive”.

Another reason is that Russia knows that sanctions - though very good at creating civilian hardships - are far from effective at stopping countries from arming themselves (see Iraq).  So, being Iran’s closest big power trading partner gives Russia unprecedented leverage in the crisis to do something Western sanctions cannot: persuade Iran to back down.

“According to Rajab Safarov, director of the center for Contemporary Iranian Studies in Moscow, Russia has “sufficiently effective levers” to have an effect on Iran’s behavior. “Iran has an interest in good relations with Russia,” Safarov told reporters. “This means that Iran could listen to advice from Russia.”

Russia must also be careful not to unduly antagonise its large Islamic neighbour at a time when Dagestan and Chenchnya are experiencing resurgent separtist violence (two more senior Dagestani officials were gunned down on Sunday). While fighters have in the past been supplied by Saudi Wahhabis and groups tentatively associated with al-Qaeda, Medvedev-Putin cannot rule out the possibility of a spurned Iran (which is already being accused of supplying insurgents in Iran and Afghanistan with roadside bmobs) extending a destabilising hand to the militants.

At the same time, since the late 1990s, Russia has also cultivated close ties with Israel; in fact, diplomacy with this country may have contributed to Russia’s failure to make good, so far, on a contract to deliver the S-300 missiles to Iran. And Medvedev has hinted, albeit in a very lukewarm way, that sanctions against Iran may be ‘inevitable‘.

Whatever Russia will do in the end, its role in the Iran nuclear standoff is much more than mere grandstanding: in fact, Russia might be the only country with a key to its peaceful resolution.

Russia’s annual disaster season is in full swing.

From the Kursk submarine disaster and the Beslan school massacre (along with the simultaneous suicide attacks on two airliners), it seems that if something will go wrong, it’s likely to do so between July and September.

Unfortunately, this year was no different: a major explosion killed as many as 76 people at the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectic plant, sending litres of toxic waste into the Yenisei river. And last week, a wave of violence left scores dead in the Chechnya region.

What was different, however, was the administration’s response to the Caucasian killings.

The LA Times’s Megan Stack reports that Medvedev ‘acknowledged that growing violence in the impoverished southern republic of Ingushetia is rooted in unresolved domestic problems such as corruption and poverty’, rather than external forces, blaming ‘unemployment, clans who could not care less about people . . . as well as corruption, which has really become very widespread among law enforcement authorities’.

All very laudable and grown up, you might say.

So what does Medvedev suggest to curb the unchecked power of law enforcement and monetisation/politicisation of justice?

Curbing the power of juries, of course!

Speaking within mere hours of his earlier humanism, Medvedev said: ‘Jury trails fail for a variety of reasons. We need to think about teams of professional judges considering these kinds of charges’ for extremism and terrorism trials.

What will these changes mean for Medvedev’s pledge to clean up the abuses that spawn extremism?

‘Human rights activists and legal experts said the change compromised the entire premise of jury trials and offered protection to police officers who used brutal methods to extract confessions from suspected terrorists in the North Caucasus’, accordin to the Moscow Times.

Add a legislative disaster to the bloody list.

That question, asked at Russia’s opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta back in 2006, after the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, was answered on Wednesday with the slaying of human rights activist Natalya Estemirova.

“Who is to blame for Natalya’s murder?”, asks Oleg Orlov, head of Moscow-based Memorial. “His name is Ramzan Kadyrov.”

Indeed, writes the Christian Science Monitor, “Memorial, the Russian human rights organization that Ms. Estemirova worked with, and other human rights experts here say her death can be added to a fast-growing price tag for a Faustian pact. They say that pro-Moscow strongman Ramzan Kadyrov “pacified” rebellious Chechnya, and in exchange, the Kremlin agreed to turn a blind eye to his methods”.

This dreadful situation is not unique to Russia: Pakistan, the most recent example of outsourcing state sovereignty, has struck a similar bargain with the Swat Islamists. In exchange for guaranteeing its borders and receiving a lukewarm backing from the tribes, the state has allowed the ruling forces in the territory to dispense its feudal mode of justice, which has resulted in beatings, religious fundamentalism and honour killings.

But the very example of Pakistan should give Russia’s leaders food for thought. Whilst seemingly a good short term solution for dealing with terroritial threats, this practice can only bring grave problems later on.

Kadyrov, whose father himself defected to the Russian side from the rebels, can seriously blackmail the Kremlin into giving him even greater powers, without any guarantee that he will not mount an opposition himself. Moreover, after any more such political murders, his regime is beginning to differ less and less from the sort of thing radical rebel Basayev had in mind for the republic.

Putin and Medvedev may have already started to realise the dangerous and unpredictable nature of such an empowered ruler as Kadyrov. But, as with the Taliban and the CIA that had ‘created’ it in the 1980s, it may prove very difficult, if not impossible, to rein him in should he choose to turn against his old masters.

Most English-speaking readers didn’t know about Ingushetia until this morning, when its president Yunus-Bek Yevkurov miraculously and barely survived a massive suicide bomb that nearly levelled a whole city block (lending added weight, if any were needed, to Russian officials’ traffic aversion).

The headline grabbing stunt, on the anniversary of a bloody 2004 raid on Russian forces, capped off months of political violence in the semi-autonomous republic that borders Chechnya.

All the signs - the suicide nature of the bomb, the symbolic date - point to the work of Islamic extremists operating out of Chechnya.

But as with most things in Russia, the obvious answer may not be what it seems.

For a start, Moscow had recently appointed Yevkurov, a brave and principled man, to replace a hated former hardline KGB general who had failed to pacify the republic.  But rather than crack down on ‘militants’ (read: any young males you can get your hands on), Yevkurov chose a different path.

He increased goodwill by actually relaxing the draconian and racist round-ups, or ‘chistkas’, while training his sights on corruption instead. This was very smart policy because greedy officials can do more damage than actual militants; from blowing up airplanes to besieging Beslan. And as Yulia Latynina writes, it was common knowledge that Ingush officials up to the highest levels were on the take.

Indeed, the Saudi paper Arab News compared the violence against Yevkurov to Colombian and Mexican drug gangs: “He has made strides in fighting corruption and tackling the economic mess he found and it is difficult not to believe that he did not make enemies in doing so…As in those two countries, there are people in Ingushetia who are not afraid to strike at the heart of the state to keep things as they are”.

Russia’s Audit Chamber chief Sergei Stepashin openly speculated that it was Yevkurov’s anti-corruption drive had prompted the attempt on his life.

Anywhere in Russia, fighting corruption is a potentially fatal undertaking: crusading officials and journalists are routinely targeted more for their whistleblowing than their politics. All things considered, with “a brain concussion, a ruptured liver, a torn lung, several broken ribs and a damaged knee”, Yevkurov got off lightly compared to Judge Aza Gazgireyeva, assassinated earlier this month in front of her kids. However, he remains fighting for his life at a top Moscow hospital, and it is not yet clear that he will make it.

How ironic that even in the Caucasus, what gets you nearly killed is not being a Kremlin appointed ‘Quisling’ at the heart of an Islamist insurgency, but daring to clean up your own local government.

Mikhail Saakashvili is a politician known for following his gut, both figuratively and literally, as when he devoured his tie during a live BBC interview. Could this crucial organ also be his Achille’s heel?

Today, Tbilisi is a city under siege: the BBC reports that “usually the main roads in the city centre are full of fast-moving traffic. Now the cars are unable to get access because opposition supporters have closed off the roads with manned barricades”

Thus far, however, the man widely hated for provoking the Russian dismemberment of Georgia has been remarkably resistant to the near constant strikes, sit ins and even attempted government takeovers – usually by dismissing critical cabinet members and cracking down on the media, while a smitten west looks on.

But late last week, the mounting opposition fixed upon another strategy that might finally work to topple the embattled head of state: find out where he eats every night, and sabotage his dinners!

The Georgian president is renowned for his voracious love of food and fine restaurants.

As Victoria Floethe, a young Vanity Fair intern inexplicably wined and dined by him last autumn, wrote:

Pretty girls were not this potentate’s fatal flaw. Misha was much more desirous of … restaurants. He was obsessed with their meaning and importance. The more restaurants he could build, the better. He didn’t believe the Russians would attack a place that looked like Chicago.

(Possibly a strategic error on his part, as the Russian army had been training for the last 60 years precisely to attack American restaurant chains).

So how will he handle any more incidents like what happened on Thursday night?

On that occasion, hundreds of protesters surrounded him inside of the upmarket Italian restaurant where he was reportedly eating while opposition leader Georgi Khaindrava shouted into a megaphone: “Coward! You’re afraid of your own people! Get out of Georgia: the people hate you!”. Finally, an irate Saakashvili had to be whisked away in his motorcade via a back entrance mid way through his meal.

Khaindrava and his movement have vowed to follow the president everywhere he goes, in the most literal sense, and not let up until he resigns.

But who is Khaindrava and these malcontents? Contrary to accusations by Saakashvili readily echoed in western media (eg. “the Georgians quite rightly point to Moscow’s hand in Georgian unrest”), Khaindrava is anything but Moscow’s puppet.

In an interview with Café Babel, he stated: “Russia has been an imperial, aggressive land since the ninth century. It has never changed. Russia is the initiator of the barbarianism that exists in Georgia today”.

Far from siding with Russia, the opposition accuse Saakashvili of having played into Moscow’s hands and cracking down on democracy. Khaindrava:

Under Saakashvili’s regime, there is no freedom of the press anymore and we have no impartial courts either. In 2007, a peaceful demonstration was put down by army units with gas grenades. Then there were the numerous falsifications at the parliamentary and presidential elections. The independent TV station Imedi was shut down.

Because the US administration and the leaders of the European countries are turning a blind eye on the tyranny in Georgia for superior, geopolitical reasons of their own, and the completely unbalanced Saakashvili is receiving international support, despite the fact that he is practically leading a Soviet regime in Georgia –an international crisis was bound to come about.

Saakashvili might yet survive this latest challenge to his rule.

After all, notes the BBC, “in some quarters it seems that public tolerance of the opposition leaders may be starting to wear thin”.

Who will blink first: the opposition, or Saakashvili’s stomach?

That was how the liberal Novaya Gazeta, Anna Politkovskaya’s old paper and one that recently lost another of its journalists to a contract killing, summed up today’s “not guilty” verdict in the trial of Chechen brothers Dzhabrail and Ibragim Makhmudov as well as Moscow ex-cop, Sergei Khadzhikurbanov, for the murder of opposition journalist.

Yet, at the same time, the verdict gives a sigh of relief. As the LA Times’s Megan Stack had noted earlier today,

“If the verdict is guilty, nobody will be looking for the real murderers,” said Murad Musayev, lawyer for Dzhabrail Makhmudov, the younger Chechen brother. “They will mark the Anna Politkovskaya case closed. I’m sure that’s what they’re trying to do.”

At least now it will be harder to do that, and the editor of Novaya Gazeta, Sergei Sokolov, pledged to continue with their own internal investigation.

He accused the authorities and secret services in colluding to actively sabotage the investigation “as soon as it became known that members of the law and order services and their countless secret agents were drawn into this whole story”.

The trial was very flawed. For example, Luke Harding in the Guardian writes that “during the investigation vital pieces of evidence disappeared, including mobile phone SIM cards, computer discs and a photo of Rustam Makhmudov, who apparently fled to western Europe using a false passport. Crucial video footage showing the assassin entering Politkovskaya’s apartment block went missing”.

At the same time, Sokolov acknowledges the difficulties involved, especially considering that “nobody in Russia is paying much attention. The Politkovskaya case drew a bigger reaction in the West than in Russia”.

Who says Russia has no soft power?

Well, Robert Amsterdam, for one. He has argued that the Russian invasion of Georgia illustrated its woeful loss of any sort of diplomatic legitimacy.

Outside of polite society, it has been a point beaten to death by such brownshirted bloggers as la Russophobe:  “Russia's need to rely on physical force obviously shows that even in regard to a tiny country like Georgia (population less than half the city of Moscow), Russia lacks any other way to deal with a crisis”.

Unfortunately, these sentiments have got the upper hand since the Georgian war, but it was not always so. For example, in a 2006 report for the Brookings Institution, Fiona Hill wrote that

It is by no means assured that Russia's increasing soft power will be used to positive effect. But the prospect is clearly there‚ and should be encouraging Russia's current leadership to chart a new regional policy for itself in Eurasia.

Such optimism seemed quaint during the Georgian War, but as the smoke clears, it now seems that Russian soft power might have been strengthened, not weakened, by the war.

According to the BBC, today's signing of an agreement to resolve the status of another disputed region - Nagorno-Karabakh - by Armenia and Azerbaijan in Moscow, may have been spurned on by Moscow's ‘hard power’ actions in August:
“Correspondents say Russia's brief war with Georgia in August has given impetus to international efforts to resolve disputes in the Caucasus, a region where Moscow is seeking greater influence”

 

With Russian and American top brass talking again, it looks like the two countries have kissed and made up following the whole Georgia thing.

Or, if you’re US ambassador Beylre, kissed and made out: not only did he recently deny any US intention to punish Russia, but also put a nice gloss on the affair: “There is always an inclination to look at the dark side of things during these periods of strain. I think that sometimes obscures some of the very positive aspects of the joint work that we are doing together in a very positive way”.

Even the New York Times, that pre-eminent peddler of the ‘Evil-Russia-Crushes-Tiny-Democratic-Georgia’ narrative at the time of the conflict, has pulled off a spectacular 180 with a recent article questioning Georgia's democratic credentials. (ESSENTIAL READING ALERT: Mark Ames wrote a typically thoughtful and spot on think piece on this in The Nation).

So, apart from a friendly / passive aggressive nuclear showdown in Europe and two new countries in the Caucasus, it's back to normal, right?

Nearly. The most important rejigging has been very subtle. As this article in the NYT points out, on the fence countries like Azerbaijan have begun to move closer to Russia to avoid Georgia's fate. Moreover, Georgia now maintains a somewhat toxic status, in that neighbouring countries are loath to get too close to it and incur Russian wrath.

So two months on, it seems Georgia is the only loser. America has moved on, Russia has increased its influence, and its neighbours have ostracised it.

This is the price, in the words of an Azeri commentator Rasim Musabayov, of having “a foreign policy that goes against your geography”.

 

In a refreshing turn of events, Vladimir Putin has reportedly saved the lives of several journalists during a trip to a Siberian conservation area for the endangered Amur tiger (in accordance with the Lomonosov-Lavoisier Law of Conservation of Media, an opposition website owner in secessionist Ingushetia was ordered killed shortly afterwards).

When a tiger escaped from a trap and ran in the direction of the press pack, Putin is said to have shot it with a tranquiliser gun. Then, in a clear signal to Nato and Georgia, the Prime Minister stripped down to his camouflage underwear and proceeded to tear out and eat its still beating heart.

Well, not exactly; but he might as well have done, judging by the British headlines:

“Putin shoots a tiger as Europe grapples with Russian aggression” screams the Guardian, and then asks: “Was it an openly hostile signal of power play to the west? Or just another incarnation of Putin's oft-demonstrated masculinity?”

“Vladimir Putin 'shoots’ tiger, dismisses EU leaders”, declares the Times, adding that “the Russian Prime Minister , shown in new macho-style pictures apparently tranquilising a tiger , said that any attempts at severing relations would be hampered by the self-interest of European nations”.

In fact, histrionics aside, this has been a big week for Russian diplomacy: President Medvedev spelt out the 5 principles of his new foreign policy vision. The following is the BBC's Paul Reynolds's fine summary; his article is also worth reading for its good commentary.

1. International law

“Russia recognises the primacy of the basic principles of international law, which define relations between civilised nations. It is in the framework of these principles, of this concept of international law, that we will develop our relations with other states.”

2. Multi-polar world

“The world should be multi-polar. Unipolarity is unacceptable, domination is impermissible. We cannot accept a world order in which all decisions are taken by one country, even such a serious and authoritative country as the United States of America. This kind of world is unstable and fraught with conflict.”

3. No isolation

“Russia does not want confrontation with any country; Russia has no intention of isolating itself. We will develop, as far as possible, friendly relations both with Europe and with the United State of America, as well as with other countries of the world.”

4. Protect citizens

“Our unquestionable priority is to protect the life and dignity of our citizens, wherever they are. We will also proceed from this in pursuing our foreign policy. We will also protect the interest of our business community abroad. And it should be clear to everyone that if someone makes aggressive forays, he will get a response.”

5. Spheres of influence

“Russia, just like other countries in the world, has regions where it has its privileged interests. In these regions, there are countries with which we have traditionally had friendly cordial relations, historically special relations. We will work very attentively in these regions and develop these friendly relations with these states, with our close neighbours.”

Asked if these “priority regions” were those that bordered on Russia he replied: “Certainly the regions bordering [on Russia], but not only them.”

And he stated: “As regards the future, it depends not just on us. It also depends on our friends, our partners in the international community. They have a choice.”

Of course, these postulates are nothing new. The principles of Multipolarity and the idea of Russia's Monroe Doctrine in the so-called Near Abroad (the former Soviet republics) were first advanced about a decade ago by Yevgueny Primakov. At the time, around the allied bombing of Yugoslavia, Russia made a lot of bluster regarding Nato encroachment, but couldn't deliver.  The difference is that now Russia appears for the first time able to put its tanks where its mouth is.