The World in Conflict by The Economist

Author:The Economist
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs

But he added:

We have to hope that this announcement doesn’t cause a more radical wing to emerge, as happened during the peace process in Northern Ireland.

Georgia

Situated between Russia and Turkey and with a strategic coastline on the Black Sea, Georgia has historically been coveted by its larger neighbours. During most of the 20th century this meant control by Moscow as part of the Soviet Union – indeed, in some ways an honoured part, given that Joseph Stalin was a Georgian. Independence came in April 1991 as Georgian nationalists (there had been anti-Soviet demonstrations three years earlier) took advantage of the accelerating collapse of the Soviet Union.

But independence for the 4.9 million population has been marked by continuing tensions, at times violent, between the Georgian government in Tbilisi and the Russian government in Moscow. In common with several former satellite states of the Soviet Union, Georgia has sought closer relations with the West, both with NATO and the EU. One aspect of this is the country’s membership since 1994 in the Partnership for Peace, a programme offered by NATO to improve trust between western European countries and former communist states. Another aspect is Georgia’s desire to join the EU, which has responded by first in 2006 including Georgia in its European Neighbourhood Policy and then in 2014 signing an association agreement with it to deepen both economic and financial links. Neither initiative has endeared Georgia to the Russia of Vladimir Putin.

The proof was the five-day Russo-Georgian war of 2008. This had its origins in Georgia’s wish to reassert its authority over the provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The former had declared its independence from Georgia in 1991 (ironically three months before Georgia’s declaration of independence) and the latter in 1992. The outcome of these clashes of rival ethnicities and nationalisms in the Caucasus was defeat for Georgia by the mid-1990s and the installation in both South Ossetia and Abkhazia of Russian troops as peacekeepers.

Tensions with Russia lessened after Eduard Shevardnadze, the Georgian-born former Soviet foreign minister, took charge from 1992 onwards of the government in Tbilisi. But Shevardnadze was ousted – peacefully – in the “Rose revolution” of 2003 and replaced by the US-educated and aggressively pro-Western Mikheil Saakashvili. The relationship with Russia, which even in the days of Shevardnadze had accused Georgia of harbouring Chechen rebels seeking to secede from Russia, almost immediately became fraught. In 2006 Georgia demanded that Russian peacekeepers in South Ossetia should have visas; in April 2008 it accused Russia of shooting down an unmanned drone over Abkhazia. Things finally came to a head in August 2008 when South Ossetian separatists fired on Georgian peacekeepers: Georgia reacted by sending its troops into South Ossetia; and Russia reacted by invading Georgia and launching air raids as far as the Black Sea port of Poti.

If Saakashvili had expected the West to come to his aid, he was soon disillusioned. For all his rhetoric, and despite the close co-operation in training exercises between the American and Georgian military,

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