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In Caucasus, Frozen Conflicts Are Still Hot
By Kim Murphy, Los Angeles Times
North Ossetia, Russia
September 13, 2004
GIZEL, Russia - Each day for 12 years, the rhythm of life in this village of scrap-metal lean-tos, plywood shacks and misery in North Ossetia has been the same.
Those who have jobs in the nearest city hike up to the main road and flag down a passing car or, with luck, catch a bus. Later in the morning, the children set out for school, walking a mile and a half along roads that are often muddy or buried in snow. At 5 p.m. sharp, the water tap in the center of town opens up for precisely three hours.
There is a reason why no bus stops at Gizel, why there is no school or running water and two outhouses must do for 300 people: Gizel is a "temporary" place, set up in this Russian republic in 1992 to accommodate some of the 100,000 refugees fleeing South Ossetia's separatist war against Georgia.
Somehow, the war never officially ended, and many of the refugees never went home. In addition, brief clashes have flared again over the last few weeks, and officials here say a revival of the fighting is their worst fear.
Across the territory of the former Soviet Union, as many as 1 million people are living in the forgotten limbos of frozen ethnic and territorial conflicts, some so obscure that most of the world isn't aware of them, and so deeply hostile that they may never be resolved.
Nowhere are these frozen conflicts as volatile as here in the North Caucasus, where ethnic battles that erupted after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 could ignite again at the slightest provocation.
Here in North Ossetia, the horrific hostage-taking at a provincial school in the town of Beslan resurrected in many minds another conflict from 1992, with the neighboring Russian republic of Ingushetia, that killed 200 people and displaced thousands. The Beslan hostage-takers, a combination of Chechen and other rebels, were reportedly led by a well-known Ingush militant.
No sooner had the hostages been taken than some Ossetians began pulling weapons out of their closets, determined to strike against Ingush villages in North Ossetia.
"Me and my friends had a plan. We wanted to go to an Ingush village . and we were going to capture two schools there," said one man, a veteran of the Ingush-Ossetian war. "But in the end, we realized those were such evil terrorists that even if we had their schools, we could never break them."
For those seeking to undermine what remains of the Russian empire, the North Caucasus is the chosen field of battle, thanks in part to the constant threat of instability in this highly strategic region. One of the hostage-takers captured in Beslan said that the real aim of the school seizure was not simply to free the neighboring province of Chechnya from Russian rule, but to "start war in the entire territory of the North Caucasus."
Frozen conflicts plague the region. In South Ossetia, officially part of Georgia but seeking to join Russia, periodic mortar attacks and small-arms skirmishes claimed several dozen lives over the summer as Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili moved to end the de facto autonomy there and in the Black Sea republic of Abkhazia.
The conflict over Azerbaijan's Armenian-majority enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh is no closer to resolution than it was when the heaviest fighting ended 10 years ago. And in Moldova, the self-proclaimed but otherwise unrecognized republic of Trans-Dniester has seen deliberate electricity shut-offs and a rail blockade after increased tension over language issues.
The world may tune out the conflicts in these hard-to-pronounce areas, but analysts warn that it does so at its peril: The conflict belt runs along the vital energy corridor linking Caspian Sea oil supplies with Western Europe and the United States.
Moreover, the self-declared independent zones - answering to no recognized governments - are potential breeding grounds for problems that can spill well beyond their borders, experts warn.
Abkhazia, which Saakashvili has sworn to bring back under Georgian rule, was the site of the reported disappearance of more than a pound of highly enriched uranium sometime after fighting broke out in 1992. On at least two other occasions, Georgian officials have found stolen radioactive material they believed was bound for a port in Adzharia, a third breakaway region that Georgia retook in May.
"It is widely and correctly believed that these unresolved fragments of the Soviet empire now serve as shipment points for weapons, narcotics and victims of trafficking, and as breeding grounds for transnational organized crime - and, last but not least, for terrorism," said a report produced by the German Marshall Fund and the Project on Transitional Democracies.
The recent fighting in South Ossetia appears to have been triggered by the Georgian government's attempt to crack down on the huge smugglers' market on the border with Russia. Georgia says it is determined to collect taxes on the rampant shipments of cheap vodka and other smuggled goods that routinely flow out of South Ossetia, but leaders there say the market closure was the first step in an attempted economic blockade.
"The Georgian side is not fulfilling its agreement, because it took up an obligation to invest certain means to restore the destroyed economy of South Ossetia, and it has done nothing," South Ossetian President Eduard Kokoity said in an interview.
Under the Soviets, Ossetia was split between Georgia and Russia, in large part because of geography: The north and south are divided by the high, forbidding peaks of the Caucasus range, whose passes were historically closed up to six months of winter. Today, about 95% of South Ossetians hold Russian passports, and Russian border guards and peacekeeping troops patrol the frontier.
The specter of Russia looms over many of the frozen conflicts along the belt of the Black Sea and the Caucasus. All lie in Russia's "near abroad," the geopolitical zone around which Moscow has drawn a line in the sand against U.S. diplomacy.
Georgian President Saakashvili has accused Russia of supplying missiles to its peacekeepers in South Ossetia and engaging in a military buildup on its borders. But Moscow has spoken in favor of a negotiated settlement, and of maintaining Georgia's territorial integrity.
"There are no fools in the Russian leadership who want an international war on their hands right now," said Sergei Mikheyev of the Center for Political Technologies in Moscow. "Russia would be happy to mediate a settlement in which Georgia becomes a federalized country and incorporates South Ossetia and Abkhazia as autonomous units, but at this point it seems impossible to make all three sides see that this is the only nonviolent way out of the situation."
Kokoity, a former wrestling champion, said that South Ossetia had the same right of self-determination that Georgia exercised when it withdrew from the Soviet Union in 1991, taking South Ossetia with it.
During the war that broke out in South Ossetia in 1991, 1,000 people died and more than 112 Ossetian villages were destroyed.
"I had a house, a beautiful, three-story house. But it was destroyed, and I never got any compensation," said Tusya Galoyeva, a 64-year-old native of the South Ossetian village of Gory, who fled to Gizel during the war.
Before the war, Gizel was an unfinished recreational center for a collective farm; many of the rooms in its half-done concrete buildings are open to the summer air. Buckets stand on the floors to catch rain dripping through makeshift roofs, and most units have several families crowded inside, sleeping dormitory fashion and sharing kitchens.
"You have a lot of people living really in some of the worst conditions I have ever seen, certainly the worst conditions in Europe," said William Tall, head of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees office in the North Caucasus.
"The conflict has been going on for so long, and we're not getting anything. We've been living in indignation for years," said resident Zemfira Laliyeva, whose relatives have all returned to South Ossetia. She has not, mostly because she lived in a predominantly Georgian village, and fears her neighbors.
"My husband's brother returned, and look what's happening there now," she said, referring to the clashes. "He's spending nights in the forest!
"Not only that," she added, "but our house was not rebuilt. Where can I return to?"
In settlement talks, Ossetian refugees have demanded restitution from Georgia. Now Saakashvili has been offering some benefits and the possibility that displaced South Ossetians could take over their lost homes from those living in them now.
But most here regard the idea of integrating South Ossetia into Georgia as a pipe dream; Kokoity rejects even the widely discussed proposal of offering South Ossetia broad autonomy in a Georgian state.
"This will never happen, and I can claim this with complete confidence," he said flatly. "What state do they think they are inviting us into? Georgia is a failed state. Let's operate with the facts: In Georgia, three presidents were elected.. None of the Georgian presidents finished his term in accordance with the constitution - they were all removed with coups, or 'rose revolutions,' or whatever."
Saakashvili, who was elected after longtime Georgian President Eduard A. Shevardnadze was ousted in a popular uprising, has insisted that his aim is unification of a democratic state within its internationally recognized borders. Russia's encouragement of separatists in South Ossetia and Abkhazia can lead to dangerous consequences, he warned in an interview this month with the Moscow newspaper Novaya Gazeta.
"If they denounce separatist support in Chechnya while advising it in Georgia, they simply do not understand what this war can become," he said. "It would have consequences far more serious than the conflicts of the early 1990s. The region has more weapons, the fighters can organize themselves more efficiently; they are more experienced, more disciplined. It will turn into a long-term conflict."
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