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rfmcdonaldThe worst--or a close approximation thereof--has happened in Beslan, as covered at Crooked Timber (1, 2), with at least 340 dead including more than a hundred schoolchildren. Regardless of the responsibility of the Spetznaz for a bungled assault on the school, the fate of Chechnya and Chechens has just become proportionally dimmer. It's never a good thing when your neighbours think you should be subjected to genocide, again, as The Hindu reported even before the disaster:
It doesn't look like the 21st century will be a good century in which to be a Chechen, any more than the 20th century was, or even the 19th century.
I'd like to thank Godlesscapitalist at GNXP for reminding me of War Nerd's article on Ossetia over at The Exile. The article is actually more concerned with nominally Georgian South Ossetia than with the Russian republic of North Ossetia where the recent school-hostages drama took place, but it provides a decent overview of the Ossetian situation in Georgia.
In the late 1980s, a Russian dissident writer--either Sakharov or Solzhenitsyn--described Georgia as an empire in miniature. Georgia has a long state history, its independence ending only at the end of the 18th century when devastating Persian raids forced Georgia to accept Russian annexation. Georgia, however, was never an independent nation-state, a brief period when the country was a Menshevik-governed republic aside. Ethnic differences in the core ethnic Georgian population aside--the Christian Mingrelians, for instance, or the Muslim Ajarians--there are numerous minorities on the fringes of Georgia's territory which haven't been assimilated. The Armenians of Georgia, for instance, numbering as many as 400 thousand, concentrated in the south of the country, and before the Soviet era the dominant population in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, remain distinct.
The most critical problem facing the Georgian nation-state, though, are the Abkhazians and the Ossetians located on the northern fringes of Georgia. Traditionally Muslim populations, with strong connections to the Russian North Caucasus, the Abkhazians and Ossetians (South Ossetians are mainly Muslim, North Ossetians are largely Christian) have long been afraid of being overwhelmed by the force of superior Georgian (or Russian) numbers; under the Soviet Union, pressures towards Georgianization encouraged the Abkhaz to view Georgians as the enemy. When the Soviet Union was decommunizing and Georgian nationalism and separatism was growing, these two populations sought protections for their own autonomous statuses. They didn't get them. As Ghia Nodia wrote for IWPR back in 1997, Georgia's post-Communist political elites
The incipient fascism of Gamsakhurdia, independent Georgia's first leader, touched the whole mess off. The result? Abkhazia and South Ossetia fought two nasty wars of independence, each characterized by substantial population exchanges (the flight of Ossetians into both South and North Ossetia, the flight of a quarter-million and more Georgians and others from Abkhazia), both conflicts ending with the de facto and self-proclaimed but unrecognized Russian-supported independence. Abkhazia has been particularly adamant in its refusal to accept reincorporation into Georgia, but South Ossetia has also been skeptical.
The "Rose Revolution" this spring that overturned Eduard Shevardnadze's increasingly autocratic regime and installed a more democratic government under Mikhail Saakashvili, has triggered what Saakashvili and his government are presenting as a process of Georgian reunification. The "Velvet Revolution" in Ajaria against the separatist regime in that district was greeted as the first stage of Georgia's reformation. Next would come South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Unfortunately, neither South Ossetians nor Abkhazians want to rejoin Georgia. They insist on their right to independence and self-determination. I don't blame them. In the early 1990s, before the devolution of Chechen separatism into an ideology justifying the mass murder of civilians, Abkhazia and Chechnya were allied in the Confederation of Caucasian Peoples. In the early 1990s, Abkhazia and Chechnya were equally qualified in the right to demand independence, in the context of the general decomposition of the Soviet system. Abkhazia (and, less visibly, South Ossetia) has managed to achieve some kind of low-level stability even if it shares in the general post-Soviet depression of the Caucasus region. Chechnya--aided by abundant, massive, often immoral, and purely destructive Russian wars--has manifestly not.
Why should Abkhazia or South Ossetia be forced to join a Georgian state they never consent to associate with in the first place? If, as Renan wrote in Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?, a nation is formed of people and peoples who willingly associate themselves in pursuit of a single cause, and if the Abkhazians and South Ossetians don't want to join the Georgian cause, and if they've done a competent enough job of independence, why should they be forced to assimilate themselves politically? I suspect that Saakashvili is not a democrat so much as he is a populist; and populists, it is fairly well-known, aren't necessarily committed to the rights of minorities.
If Saakashvili tries anything in regards to the other two successor states of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, though, it will be because the West supports him, and mistakes his populism and his irredentism for a more benign democratic nationalism. I hope that won't happen, but my capacity for hope in the whole region of the post-Soviet Caucasus is limited.
Here's hoping that I'm wonderfully wrong.
Zemfira Dzgoyeva's two sisters, Alla and Allchika, nodded in agreement as she said: ``We heard the militants are a mix of Chechens and Ingush. These two peoples have different accents, but the same kind of mentality. I treated Chechens during the wars as a nurse. We did nothing to them, but still they come here.''
Alla butted in: ``General Yermolov [a 19th century Russian commander who led the Caucasus campaign] was right: these people cannot be educated.'' Edik, 11, said of the militants: ``You need to shoot and punish them all.''Geor Batsazova, 13, whose sister, Diana, and mother, Ilfa, are inside theschool, almost collapses at the mention of a possible storming to the building. ``All I want to do is see my mother again.'' He stabbed the air with his hand: ``We should get those Chechen with knives.''
It doesn't look like the 21st century will be a good century in which to be a Chechen, any more than the 20th century was, or even the 19th century.
I'd like to thank Godlesscapitalist at GNXP for reminding me of War Nerd's article on Ossetia over at The Exile. The article is actually more concerned with nominally Georgian South Ossetia than with the Russian republic of North Ossetia where the recent school-hostages drama took place, but it provides a decent overview of the Ossetian situation in Georgia.
In the late 1980s, a Russian dissident writer--either Sakharov or Solzhenitsyn--described Georgia as an empire in miniature. Georgia has a long state history, its independence ending only at the end of the 18th century when devastating Persian raids forced Georgia to accept Russian annexation. Georgia, however, was never an independent nation-state, a brief period when the country was a Menshevik-governed republic aside. Ethnic differences in the core ethnic Georgian population aside--the Christian Mingrelians, for instance, or the Muslim Ajarians--there are numerous minorities on the fringes of Georgia's territory which haven't been assimilated. The Armenians of Georgia, for instance, numbering as many as 400 thousand, concentrated in the south of the country, and before the Soviet era the dominant population in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, remain distinct.
The most critical problem facing the Georgian nation-state, though, are the Abkhazians and the Ossetians located on the northern fringes of Georgia. Traditionally Muslim populations, with strong connections to the Russian North Caucasus, the Abkhazians and Ossetians (South Ossetians are mainly Muslim, North Ossetians are largely Christian) have long been afraid of being overwhelmed by the force of superior Georgian (or Russian) numbers; under the Soviet Union, pressures towards Georgianization encouraged the Abkhaz to view Georgians as the enemy. When the Soviet Union was decommunizing and Georgian nationalism and separatism was growing, these two populations sought protections for their own autonomous statuses. They didn't get them. As Ghia Nodia wrote for IWPR back in 1997, Georgia's post-Communist political elites
did not know how to solve these kinds of problems. They believed it to be crucial to prove "scientifically" that land was "historically ours". In this context, calling minorities "guests" did not necessarily imply pushing them to leave. It meant that Georgians came here first, so they are the hosts, and others can stay if they do not challenge this status. If anyone-as in the Abkhaz and Ossetian cases-did, it meant war.
The incipient fascism of Gamsakhurdia, independent Georgia's first leader, touched the whole mess off. The result? Abkhazia and South Ossetia fought two nasty wars of independence, each characterized by substantial population exchanges (the flight of Ossetians into both South and North Ossetia, the flight of a quarter-million and more Georgians and others from Abkhazia), both conflicts ending with the de facto and self-proclaimed but unrecognized Russian-supported independence. Abkhazia has been particularly adamant in its refusal to accept reincorporation into Georgia, but South Ossetia has also been skeptical.
The "Rose Revolution" this spring that overturned Eduard Shevardnadze's increasingly autocratic regime and installed a more democratic government under Mikhail Saakashvili, has triggered what Saakashvili and his government are presenting as a process of Georgian reunification. The "Velvet Revolution" in Ajaria against the separatist regime in that district was greeted as the first stage of Georgia's reformation. Next would come South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Unfortunately, neither South Ossetians nor Abkhazians want to rejoin Georgia. They insist on their right to independence and self-determination. I don't blame them. In the early 1990s, before the devolution of Chechen separatism into an ideology justifying the mass murder of civilians, Abkhazia and Chechnya were allied in the Confederation of Caucasian Peoples. In the early 1990s, Abkhazia and Chechnya were equally qualified in the right to demand independence, in the context of the general decomposition of the Soviet system. Abkhazia (and, less visibly, South Ossetia) has managed to achieve some kind of low-level stability even if it shares in the general post-Soviet depression of the Caucasus region. Chechnya--aided by abundant, massive, often immoral, and purely destructive Russian wars--has manifestly not.
Why should Abkhazia or South Ossetia be forced to join a Georgian state they never consent to associate with in the first place? If, as Renan wrote in Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?, a nation is formed of people and peoples who willingly associate themselves in pursuit of a single cause, and if the Abkhazians and South Ossetians don't want to join the Georgian cause, and if they've done a competent enough job of independence, why should they be forced to assimilate themselves politically? I suspect that Saakashvili is not a democrat so much as he is a populist; and populists, it is fairly well-known, aren't necessarily committed to the rights of minorities.
If Saakashvili tries anything in regards to the other two successor states of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, though, it will be because the West supports him, and mistakes his populism and his irredentism for a more benign democratic nationalism. I hope that won't happen, but my capacity for hope in the whole region of the post-Soviet Caucasus is limited.
Here's hoping that I'm wonderfully wrong.
