[A-List] US/Russian inter-imperialist rivalry: Georgia

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Why Russia isn't looking for peace

Special report: In the week a British hostage escaped from the Pankisi
Gorge, we visit the East's Bermuda Triangle
By Rob Parsons At Pankisi Gorge, Georgia
The Sunday Herald: 10 November 2002

THE Pankisi Gorge looks glorious in the autumn sun: more gentle than craggy
and wild, more bucolic than the fevered imaginations of journalists would
have you believe.

It is hard to imagine that only last week British banker Peter Shaw was
fleeing for his life from kidnappers here after four months incarcerated in
a hole in the ground. And it is hard to grasp that this notorious place, at
the border between Russia, Georgia and Chechnya, is currently the focus of a
three- way tug-of-war between the Georgians, the Russians and the
Americans -- and that, according to some, it has been penetrated by al-Qaeda
and Taliban fugitives from Afghanistan.

Sitting in the haze of the valley, listening to the Alazani river gurgle
down from the mountains, I exchange pleasantries with an elderly woman who
is far more concerned with washing her wool than the mysterious ways of
Russian president Vladimir Putin and world politics.

Russia's pretensions towards Georgia seem preposterous. Moscow's case is
that the Pankisi is such a hive of Chechen resistance that it has become the
key to ending the Chechen war. But this is a ludicrous argument -- made even
more so by the recent tragic events of the Moscow theatre siege. Putin
complains that the Russian-Georgian border is so porous that Chechen
fighters are able to come and go as they please. There is some truth in
this. But the fact is that it was, more than anything, a Russian security
apparatus rotten with corruption that enabled 50 Chechen fighters armed to
the teeth to penetrate right to the heart of Moscow.

For the moment, though, President 'Flush them down the john' Putin can
scarcely believe his luck. The theatre hostage crisis could have terminally
damaged his presidency but instead he has emerged triumphant -- at least in
the short term. Public opinion, which had been tiring of the Chechen war,
has swung back behind his personal crusade for total victory.

Russia wants vengeance. There are few voices of reason in the Kremlin -- and
none, it seems, near enough to the president to tell him that the Moscow
theatre siege was born of Che chen desperation.

More repression is on the way, but it will only bring more
counter-violence -- unless, of course, Moscow seeks a final solution for the
Chechens. Wipe them all out, or destroy the male population? It would not be
the first time that Russia had contemplated this small people's genocide.

President Putin's military options are limited. Moscow already has more than
80,000 troops committed to winning a war that it has already claimed several
times to have won. That's 80,000 men in an area considerably smaller than
Northern Ireland. Russia's failure to win the war -- and there can be no
doubt that it has failed to win it -- has nothing to do with lack of effort
and everything to do with poor leadership, low morale and the moral
degradation of the Russian armed forces. That, of course, and the determined
resistance of the Chechen opposition.

As before, propaganda will be a substitute for progress, while the fighting
and random brutality will continue to inflict misery on the Chechen people.
Russian society has been whipped into a frenzy of anti-Chechen hatred by its
national media and politicians. This is not a good time to be a Chechen
living in a Russian city.

Human rights organisations are reporting a major increase in police
harassment and beatings of what Russians like to call 'black-arses': the
sallow-skinned, dark-haired Chechens and their Caucasus brethren: Ingush,
Daghestanis, Georgians and Azeris. In Moscow recently a 15-year-old friend
of my daughter was set upon and beaten by a gang of Russian thugs for no
other reason than the fact he is Chechen. Xenophobia finds an easy echo in
the frustrated, humiliated, angry ranks of the urban young.

The Chechen war forms just one part of Moscow's inchoate set of policies for
the Caucasus region as a whole. Before the hostage-taking, it was clear that
hawks in the government were tempted to extend the Chechen war across state
boundaries into Georgia.

The danger now is that they will be encouraged by the success of the
counter-terror operation and the international response to press harder
still.

There are some, like Andranik Migranyan, a hawkish policy adviser to the
Kremlin, who actively seek confrontation with the West. Some would like
Georgia and the Pankisi Gorge to be a testing ground. They have already
sought a quid pro quo from Washington over Iraq: give us Georgia, they say,
and we'll give you a free hand in Iraq.

The hawks are demanding the right to violate Georgia's territorial integrity
because, they claim, its government has allowed Chechen fight ers to use the
Pankisi Gorge as a base for launching operations against Russia. The
Georgian authorities, on the other hand, boast that they have Pan kisi
almost fully under control, following a complex military and police
operation that began in September and is still under way.

Yet the day before I drove to the valley, a government official phoned me to
warn that the Pankisi was very far from being under Georgian control.
Georgia's own ministry of internal affairs admits now that there may at one
time have been as many as 800 Chechen fighters in the valley, and that it
was completely beyond the jurisdiction of the state.

But now? Even as close to the Pankisi Gorge as the Georgian capital,
Tbilisi, the picture is murky. Georgian officials say the combined military
and police operation was a qualified success, but add that criminal Chechen
gangs, led by the notorious Akhmadov brothers, still control several
villages. The brothers have dominated the narcotics trade and kidnapping in
the valley for the best part of three years.

The sun is emerging over the hills as my car lurches through the wine
villages of eastern Georgia. I am forced to fight for space with horses and
carts and the biggest, hairiest pigs I have ever seen.

Once we have passed through the main military checkpoint at the mouth of the
Pankisi Gorge, we are effectively entering Georgia's equivalent of the
Bermuda triangle. Until recently, strangers who came here tended to
disappear. Now Georgian troops are a common sight along the streets and
river crossings. I walk around unaccompanied and, although I encounter
hostility, I am not physically threatened.

The local Chechens, or Kists, who have lived here for generations, are angry
that the Georgian government has surrendered to Moscow five Che chen
fighters arrested for crossing illegally into Georgia. It is a betrayal,
they say, of the Caucasus's laws of hospitality. Most Georgians agree.

The mother of one of the five Chechen fighters lives in Pankisi. She went to
Tbilisi to plead with the Georgian authorities for her son's release. 'I
would rather you shot him than handed him over to the Russians. At least
then I would be able to bury his body,' she told them.

The Chechen refugees from the war are nervous. They sense that a change of
political climate is on the way, and fear that the Georgian government will
force them to go back to Russia. Georgian troops, they tell me, are
beginning to treat them as the Russians used to.

But the biggest change -- one that has happened in the space of a few
months -- is that there are no fighters in sight. Some may still be
sheltering in the thick forests that cling to the sides of the nearby
mountains, but most appear to have gone.

Today the Pankisi is most certainly not a Chechen base for launching attacks
on Russia. Georgia has reasserted a degree of control over the valley and is
extending it week by week.

Russia ought to be happy, but it clearly is not. In part, it seems, this is
because the Chechen presence in Pankisi was never the real problem. What
Russia really fears is losing influence in the region to the United States.

American troops now train Georgian soldiers, and Washington is developing a
long-term interest in Caspian Sea oil. American investment is also pouring
into the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipe line, a massive project that bypasses
Russia and will go some way to relieving the region's economic dependency on
Moscow.

In the mean time, the Pankisi Gorge remains a stick with which Russia can
beat the Georgians and stir up trouble in the southern Caucasus. The more
trouble, the less stability, of course; but at least it will make life
difficult for the Americans.

Rob Parsons is the BBC's Moscow correspondent