[R-G] Huge Stakes Behind War in Caucasus

[Anthony Fenton]

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~(((( T h e B u l l e t ))))~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 131 .... August 11, 2008
__________________________________________________

Huge Stakes Behind War in Caucasus
Sungur Savran


"Serbia is a sovereign nation and its territorial integrity should be  
respected." Had George Bush said what he said about Georgia from  
Beijing about Serbia as well, this is how he would have approached the  
so-called independence of Kosovo. The truth, of course, is far from  
this. The U.S. was the first country to recognise the new 'state' when  
Kosovo seceded from Serbia last spring. Yet, Bush now has the audacity  
to talk about the territorial integrity of Georgia. The policies of  
imperialism will have pride of place in the annals of hypocrisy.


The war over the issue of South Ossetia has three political  
dimensions. The first is an entirely local question. Certain peoples  
(in particular the Ossets and the Abhaz) that were part of Georgia  
under the Soviet Union have, since the dissolution of the latter,  
declared loud and clear that they do not wish to live under Georgian  
rule any longer. Georgia, in contrast, wants to keep these peoples  
forcibly tied to its domination. Thus the rights of these peoples to  
self-determination are violated by Georgia.


Saakashvili's bluff

Secondly, Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili is a fiery partisan  
of U.S. imperialism and covets NATO membership for Georgia. Only  
several months ago, under Russian pressure, most EU members of NATO  
had rejected the American proposal regarding NATO membership for  
Georgia and Ukraine. By attacking Tshkinvali, the capital of South  
Ossetia, a de facto independent territory since the 1992 ceasefire  
between Georgian and Osset armies, Saakashvili seems to have attempted  
to provoke Russia into a confrontation and thus force the hand of the  
NATO alliance into acting more rapidly. Russia has seen this bluff.  
But the West, despite some harsh words by the U.S. administration, has  
simply not followed suit. Saakashvili is a political adventurer who  
has not refrained from risking to throw the region, indeed the whole  
world, into the vortex of all out war just to have his country join  
the imperialist alliance. The Georgian people should get rid of this  
blood-thirsty politician for its own interests.


Saakashvili, the darling of the West, has also made Georgia into a  
Ghurka of U.S. imperialism. Today, after the withdrawal of troops by  
some countries, Georgia is the third country in Iraq, after the U.S.  
and the UK, in terms of troops on the ground. A country with a  
population of less than 5 million, a country whose people are  
suffering from unemployment and poverty maintains two thousand troops  
in Iraq! It is not imminent defeat at Russian hands that should shame  
the Georgian people, but the fact that the country has acted as the  
hitman of U.S. imperialism in Iraq.


U.S. Plans for the Caucasus and Central Asia

The third and most important question behind the present war is the  
long-standing U.S. policy that aims to encircle and isolate Russia.  
Even in the 1990s, when the U.S. was supposedly on good terms with the  
Yeltsin administration and Strobe Talbott's friendship policy was  
running high, the U.S. strove to encircle Russia through a web of  
alliances in what is known as Russia's 'near abroad'. The  
establishment of the Partnership for Peace alliance – the waiting room  
for NATO – and the subsequent expansion of NATO to former Soviet  
republics and Eastern Eurpoean countries were only the most salient  
dimension. GUUAM was the name given to the loose web of alliances that  
the U.S. entertained with Russia's southern and eastern neighbours,  
Georgia, the Ukraine, Uzbekistan (no longer part of the web),  
Azerbaijan and Moldova. The Afghanistan war, notwithstanding the  
rhetoric of the 'war on terror', was devised to penetrate former  
Soviet Central Asia, where thanks to the war the U.S. established, for  
the first time in modern history for a Western power, military bases.  
Putin's acquiescence to Bush's post-9/11 policies with the aim of  
covering up his own dirty war in Chechnya was as stupid as Stalin's  
reliance on the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in order to protect the Soviet  
Union from Nazi aggression.


This political conflict between the U.S. and Russia is thus the real  
stake of the war over miniscule South Ossetia. U.S. ambitions  
regarding the oil and natural gas of the Caucasus and Central Asia in  
addition to that of the Middle East is the economic basis of this tug- 
of-war between the U.S. and Russia. The U.S. desires to deprive Russia  
of the benefits of these regional riches, a policy symbolised by the  
Baku-Tblissi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline. Behind this is the U.S. strategic  
aim of keeping Russia and China down as contending superpowers in the  
21st century. This self-serving policy of U.S. imperialism has borne  
its first product, leading to a situation where a tiny conflict has  
led to a conflagration that threatens the region and the world.


Socialists around the world should condemn the adventurist policy of  
Saakashvili and demand the immediate withdrawal of Georgian troops  
from South Ossetia. Bush's argument regarding the "territorial  
integrity of the sovereign nation of Georgia" is not valid even from a  
legalistic point of view, since the 1992 ceasefire established de  
facto autonomy for South Ossetia, sanctioned internationally through  
the appointment of a peace mission headed by Russian troops. Much more  
important than any legal considerations are the facts of the right to  
self-determination of the Ossets and the Abhaz, the reactionary  
adventurism of Saakashvili, and the imperialist aims of the U.S. in  
the region. To see the Russian-Georgian war over South Ossetia as one  
between a historically dominant big nation (the Russians) and a  
historically oppressed small nation (Georgia) is to misconceive its  
real import. This is a proxy war, where the proxy (Saakashvili's  
Georgia) has made a rash move without the consent of the real culprit,  
U.S. imperialism. Hence Georgia has engaged in an unjust war and  
should withdraw.


Turkey's complicity

Turkey, among the region's medium-sized powers, has given extensive  
support to Georgia in recent years, providing aid to the level of USD  
45 million, donating military materiel, weapons and ammunition,  
including missile ramps, warships, and early air warning systems, and  
trained Georgian officers to acclimatise them to NATO standards. This  
is part and parcel of Turkey's overall orientation of aiding and  
abetting U.S. expansionism in the Balkans, the Middle East, the  
Caucasus and Central Asia. It is a policy that bears within it the  
seeds of catastrophic developments. Should Turkey, the southern  
neighbour of Georgia, find itself in a military standoff with the  
Russian Federation, the limited threat from the Russian-Georgian war  
would be magnified to a power that would threaten to throw the whole  
region into flames. The deceptive neutral stance the Turkish  
government has so far displayed vis-a-vis the ongoing war should not  
hide Turkey's complicity in the adventurist policy of the Saakashvili  
government. Turkey should stop aiding Georgia militarily, should leave  
NATO and withdraw its troops from Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and  
Lebanon.


The Caucasus is a mosaic of peoples. Imperialism whips up old  
hostilities and Russia, the oppressor nation in the region for two  
centuries, manipulates or forces all small nationalities into  
submission. Given the interpenetration and geographic mixity of the  
various peoples of the Caucasus, the quest for entirely independent  
national states would lead to ethnic cleansing and massacres that  
would dwarf the catastrophe that visited Yugoslavia. The only way  
forward is for the peoples of the Caucasus to move away from narrow  
nationalism and unite in a polyphony of cultures. The only way forward  
in the longer term is a Federation of Caucasian Peoples. •

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~(((( T h e B u l l e t))))~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Bullet is produced by the Socialist Project. Readers are
encouraged to distribute widely. Comments, criticisms and
suggestions are welcome. Write to info at socialistproject.ca

If you wish to subscribe: www.socialistproject.ca/lists/?p=subscribe

The Bullet archive is available at www.socialistproject.ca/bullet

For more analysis of contemporary politics check out
'Relay: A Socialist Project Review' at www.socialistproject.ca/relay