"The aggressor has been punished"

Putin Medvedev has reportedly ordered a halt to the Russian advance on Georgia, but the Captain, noting Russian demands that the Georgian president resign, remains skeptical:

...Putin doesn’t want Western-friendly governments in the former Soviet republics; he wants puppet governments answerable to Moscow. He supported the separatists in the Caucasus in order to deliberately provoke a incident he could exploit to depose the freely-elected government in Tbilisi and impose Russian rule through a proxy government imposed by force.

The demand for Saakashvili to resign should offend every free nation on Earth. Saakashvili represents Georgia, not the newly-birthed Russian Empire, and Moscow has no right to demand that a freely-elected president resign under force of arms. Free nations should also look toward Ukraine and recognize the next victim on Putin’s list.

For those who call this a peace, it is no such thing. The Russians have their boot on Georgia’s throat, and have only paused to get a surrender.

David Clark, in The Guardian, says both sides share some responsibility for the conflict, but that Russia has been trying to provoke and subdue its neighbors for years:

The history behind Georgia's "frozen conflicts" is long and complex, and there is certainly fault to be found on all sides. The wars that followed Georgia's independence were brutal affairs in which members of all communities were to be found among the victims and perpetrators. It is therefore understandable that Abkhazians and South Ossetians are suspicious of Tbilisi and want guarantees about their security. It is also true that Georgia's president, Mikheil Saakashvili, has turned out to be something less than the model democrat he first seemed. Many former admirers have been shocked at his increasingly authoritarian leanings.

But complexity is no excuse for abdicating moral judgment in situations of this importance. If responsibility for the conflict is not a black and white matter, the picture is not uniformly grey either. By any reasonable measure, the impact of Russian policy has been uniquely destructive in generating instability and political division in the Caucasus. The events of the early 1990s notwithstanding, Georgia's treatment of minorities that have remained under its rule has been generally good. Whatever his faults, Saakashvili is no Milosevic - and wild Russian allegations of genocide have no independent support. Under approp-riate international supervision, it would be perfectly possible to turn his offer of autonomy for Abkhazia and South Ossetia into a workable constitutional settlement that guaranteed the security and fundamental rights of people living those territories.

The problem is that considerations of this nature form no part of Russia's vision for the region. It talks about defending the people of South Ossetia, but the Kremlin's aims are geopolitical rather than humanitarian. It seeks to restore the sphere of influence it regards as Russia's birthright, which it lost with the collapse of the Soviet Union (a "major geopolitical disaster", according to Putin). There is no place for an independent Georgia (or Ukraine or Moldova) in this mental picture. When Russian leaders talk about the benefits of "sovereign democracy", they are talking exclusively about their own sovereignty and not at all about democracy. The countries on their borders have no right to foreign policies of their own if they conflict with Russia's. This is especially true of energy supplies, where Georgia's role in maintaining the only east-west pipeline route free of Russia's monopolistic grip causes double offence. This is about the Kremlin's attitude to us, too.

So how should western countries respond? The question arises most immediately in relation to Nato, where Georgia hopes to take a step closer to joining by securing a membership action plan. Sceptics within Nato, like Germany, will see the conflict as evidence that Georgia is an unreliable partner best kept at arm's length. This is entirely the wrong way of looking at it. Georgia's security concerns are real, and Russia is the cause. The onus should therefore be on Russia to reduce the security fears that drive the desire for Nato membership by withdrawing unwanted troops and becoming part of a political solution to the frozen conflicts. If it will not do this, it has to accept the consequences. [via Oliver Kamm]

Damian P.

Posted by damian at August 12, 2008 09:13 AM