#26 - JRL 2006-131 - JRL Home
From: Timothy Blauvelt <blauvelt@rambler.ru>
Subject: In response to Sergei Roy in JRL #130
Date: Wed, 07 Jun 2006

Mr. Roy questions the expertise of Western commentators in a roundtable transcript from an earlier JRL (e: JRL 129 #22. Untimely Thoughts: Weekly Russia Experts Panel The “Montenegrin precedent”) with regard to the link between the Montenegro case and that of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and on politics in the Caucasus more generally.

Some of Mr. Roy’s arguments, however, make one question his own expertise in the region. For a start, he introduces a recent statement President Putin to the effect that Russia has no plans to incorporate territories outside its borders, and argues that this statement alone should be clear enough to remove any suspicion or innuendo regarding Russia’s intentions.

Even if other Russian politicians were not making regular statements on a nearly daily basis that contradict Putin’s statement, it would be difficult to see how a single such statement could be seen as the final word with regard to the future of Russian policy regarding this or any other issue. (For example, last week Vadim Gustov, chairman of the Federation Council's CIS committee, told Kommersant that “Russia has every right to accept the separatist provinces if they vote to join the Russian Federation”; Gennady Bukaev, assistant to Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov, claimed at a joint session of government of South Ossetia and Russia's North Ossetia in April that the federal government had made a principle decision to incorporate the former).

He then goes on to argue that restitution of Georgian territorial integrity in Abkhazia and South Ossetia and the return of the refugees will inevitably lead to war, bloodshed and atrocities. Mr. Roy apparently knows in his bones that “A shot lasts an instant, but the report resounds in the mountains for a hundred years.” Thus as warrior savages, there is no possible way that the Causasians can resolve a complex political issue through negotiation and compromise, so they shouldn’t even try (despite lot of hundreds of thousands of Georgian refugees - the plurality of the population in the case of Abkhazia - about who’s fate Mr. Roy does not seem particularly interested).

He then goes on to argue that Ossetians’ and Abkhazians’ status as “divided people” gives them an unquestionable right to reunification, and he brings up the analogy of German re-unification. Although there is some legitimacy to this argument with regard to Ossetians (although, again, it throws to the wind the fates and interests of the significant Georgian population of South Ossetia), his argument that the Abkhazians have an unquestionable right (or even the desire) to unite with Abazians in Karachai-Circassia is absurd.

Next, although Mr. Roy may be correct in thinking that the peoples of separatists regions might be offended to be referred to as “pawns” in regional competition between larger powers, that does not inherently change the reality that this may be exactly what they are. The fact that these peoples were issued Russian passports (which in itself was a move of questionable legality) does nothing to change that reality.

Mr. Roy a bit later avers that a third of Georgia’s “able-bodied” population is living in Russia and sending remittances. The most extreme estimates put the number of Georgians in Russia at 1 million, which given the nearly 5 million population of Georgia is considerably less than a third. The more conservative unpublished World Bank estimates put the overall number of Georgian emigration over the last decade at 15% of the population, the majority to Russia, but many as well to Europe and North America.

Mr. Roy concludes by calling for “pundits” to “show greater respect for the realities of the situation on the ground, with fewer flights of geopolitical fancy,” and berates them for lack of “first-hand knowledge of the past history and present mood of human beings involved in the conflict.” This to me seems to reflect a familiar and patronizing attitude of Russian intellectuals when discussing the Caucasus in the wake of increasing Western involvement in the region in recent years: as if to say “We know our feral little brothers in the Causasus in a way you foreigners never can or will, so leave the issue to us.”