A Tale of Goose and Gander

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

So, we’re suddenly confronted with another war in the Caucasus -- not over Chechnya this time, but rather South Ossetia, a place few Canadians have ever heard of.

Russia is now fighting on behalf of, rather than against, a region seeking to secede from another country.

Last week, Russian troops crossed their border into South Ossetia, which technically belongs to a former Soviet Republic, Georgia. Russian-supported separatists in another breakaway region of Georgia, Abkhazia, have also targeted Georgian troops by launching air and artillery strikes to drive them out.

What is this all about? It’s probably best to see it as the continuing “slow-motion” unraveling of that faux Communist federation, the old Soviet Union.

When the USSR collapsed in 1992, full-fledged so-called “union republics,” such as Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine – and Georgia – were quickly recognized by the international community as being entitled to nationhood, and became sovereign entities, with UN seats, embassies in foreign countries, and all the other accouterments of statehood.

The same thing occurred in the other multi-national Communist federation, Yugoslavia, where Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, even Bosnia-Herzegovina (a hodge-podge that was hardly a candidate for independence), all attained sovereignty.

Because of the vagaries of history, though, ethnically homogeneous units such as Albanian Kosovo (part of Serbia), Chechnya (part of Russia proper) and South Ossetia (part of Georgia) were merely “autonomous regions” or “autonomous republics.”

But this was all just Communist claptrap. These territories had simply been “tacked on” to the larger units for the sake of political convenience.

Not surprisingly, when the Communist empires collapsed, Kosovars, Chechens, Ossetians, Abkhazians, and many other peoples, quite understandably also wanted to exercise their right to slf-determination.

Yet the same nations that had just acquired their freedoms refused to grant it to others. Hence the wars of the Soviet and Yugoslav successions.

The 70,000 people in South Ossetia are overwhelmingly ethnic Ossetians, related to the people in North Ossetia (across the border in the Russian Federation). Like the Kosovar Albanians, they have demonstrated their desire to be free of foreign control.

In two referenda held in the territory in 1992 and 2006, they voted overwhelmingly to secede from Georgia. They broke away from the Tbilisi-based Georgian government during a bloody 1991-1992 conflict that killed more than 1,000 people. They have been a self-governing entity for almost two decades, yet remain a de facto state not recognized by the international community.

Ottawa and Washington were quick to blame Russia for the violence, though it remains unclear whether Moscow was in fact responding to a Georgian attempt to reclaim South Ossetia by force.

“We call on Russia to cease attacks on Georgia by aircraft and missiles, respect Georgia’s territorial integrity, and withdraw its ground combat forces from Georgian soil,” U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in a statement. The European Union and NATO also called for a halt to hostilities.

But “who started it” is not the point here. The Ossetians do not want to be ruled from Tbilisi, any more than the Albanians in Kosovo wanted to be governed from Belgrade.

Interesting, isn’t it, that the U.S., in a case of “diplomatic amnesia,” has seen fit to ignore the obvious parallels between Kosovo in 1999 and South Ossetia today. The Russians have not.

Earlier this year, Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, warned Rice that if the U.S. recognized Kosovo, they would be setting a precedent for South Ossetia and other breakaway provinces.

Yet American commentators see only Russian aggression. Robert Kagan in the Washington Post suggested that “Putin cares no more about a few thousand South Ossetians than he does about Kosovo's Serbs. Claims of pan-Slavic sympathy are pretexts designed to fan Russian great-power
nationalism at home and to expand Russia's power abroad.”

How do we know that? How quickly the discourse of the Cold War reasserts itself!

What if I wrote this in 1999: “Bill Clinton cares no more about a few thousand Kosovar Albanians than he does about Iraqi Kurds. Claims of pro-democratic sympathy are pretexts designed to fan American great-power nationalism at home and to expand America's power abroad.”

After all, if “sovereignty” and “territorial integrity” are such important principles to Canada, the United States, and other western countries, why then did they wrest Kosovo away from Serbia nine years ago and recognize Kosovo's independence earlier this year? Or is sauce for the NATO goose different than sauce for the Russian gander?