Source: Keynote Presentation at the Rose Roth Conference in Tbilisi, Georgia
President of the Parliamentary Assembly, Mr. Speaker, Ministers, Ambassadors, Ladies and Gentlemen,
I am very glad to be back in Tbilisi. I have been travelling to Georgia and the Caucasus region for more than 20 years as a journalist, writer, researcher and scholar and I love to come back. One day, I hope that the main reason to be in Georgia will be friends and wine. Sadly that day is not here yet.
Of course, those of us foreigners who come here learn a lot from the locals. I would say one thing we learn from the Caucasus is something that our grandparents maybe knew but we have forgotten: the art of hospitality, of how to invite neighbours and strangers, young and old to the dinner table.My favorite image of this region is of a big table where neighbours and strangers, young and old, are all seated together. Of course there are rules—very strict rules—but everyone is invited, no one is left out.
Sadly, what is true of a small Georgian village is not true of the Caucasus region as a whole. Division and unresolved conflict are a major feature of this region. Not only is everyone not sitting at the same table, many people are standing in trenches or behind barbed wire.
The question is perhaps a little naive but I want to ask why this is the case.
There are many good things to celebrate about what has happened in Georgia over the past two decades but today, speaking to a conference of NATO, a security organization, I want to address the question of security or rather lack of security in the Caucasus, and what outsiders can do about it. My main theme of today is that of mutual insecurity.
Unfortunately security and Caucasus do not go together. You might say the two words are a contradiction in terms. In the South Caucasus we have three unresolved conflicts over Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Nagorny Karabakh, all now more than 20 years old. All of them continue to cause hardship and pain for local people and headaches for the international community. In the Russian North Caucasus a continuing conflict between Islamist insurgents and Russian security forces costs around 700 lives a year. And as we see from the recent link between the bombing of the Boston marathon and Dagestan and perhaps Chechnya, this is also a conflict that the world cannot safely ignore.
These conflicts have caused great suffering. More than one million people in the South Caucasus are still displaced from their homes from the three conflicts here, meaning that around six per cent of the entire population is made up of refugees.
Unresolved conflicts, closed borders and high military budgets have also stunted development in this region. It is important to emphasize that one consequence is not just visible destruction, but missed potential, the gap between how the situation is and what it might be without the continuing influence of the conflicts.
Look at the poverty statistics. The region has definitely made economic progress. But at around 5,000 dollars per capita, GDP in Georgia and Armenia is now only one third of that of Turkey. The two countries are now four times poorer than Estonia, which was of course part of the same Soviet state 25 years ago. Azerbaijan is wealthier, which is good news. But it has to be said that is chiefly due to oil and gas revenues and that outside the prosperous city of Baku, poverty rates in the countryside are not much better than in Armenia and Georgia. And on the Russian north side of the Caucasus the economic picture is even more bleak.
On top of a million refugees, there is probably a greater number of migrants who have left this region seeking work. There are too many Armenian, Azerbaijani or Georgian businessmen, doctors, scholars doing their work in other countries, not their native lands.
And when many parts of the world are busy with global integration, the South Caucasus has also missed out on the chance of regional projects, north-south and east-west railways, roads and communication projects which would benefit everyone.
We may not be any nearer resolving these conflicts than we were 20 years, but I do believe we are least a little wiser. Almost everyone understands by now that none of these conflicts are liable to rapid conflict resolution. It is more a matter of long-term conflict transformation.
And I would say that the evidence of the last 20 years also proves that exclusion and isolation have also been failed strategies. The only approaches that have had success are those that focus on inclusion and communication. If someone is excluded from the process, they inevitably will try to spoil the process.
Ladies and Gentlemen, scholars have come up with many different explanations for the conflicts that broke out in this region in the late 1980s and '90s: grievances which the Soviet system had not resolved; ethnic nationalism rushing into the ideological vacuum left by the collapse of socialism; the ambitions of new elites; the manipulations of neighboring powers, especially Russia.
All of these explanations tell part of the story. Let me focus on one factor which may be the first and most important explanation of all.
"Security" is a rather small unexciting word. But in the Caucasus it has a more direct meaning, of physical survival. Literally every national group in the Caucasus here has the memory of attack, invasion and state extinction.
In this city I could cite 1795 or 1921 or indeed August 2008 when the Russian army was in Gori. Others have their own memories. Armenians of 1915, Azerbaijanis of 1918, Ossetians of 1920 and 1990. Abkhaz of 1992. And so it goes on.
This Caucasus is defined by immense diversity in a small space. Of ethnic groups, languages, geography. This gives this region its enormous cultural wealth. And there are strong traditions here of managing differences with your neighbour. Let us note the large number of potential conflicts that have not occurred in this region, as well as those that have.
But a diverse house with multiple neighbours inevitably has many disputes in it and it needs a good policeman to keep order. In Soviet times there was a policeman, albeit a repressive one, keeping order. But when the Soviet policeman gave up doing his job, every group began naming their own policemen to fill the gap. Or looking to big neighbours to provide them with security. The result was conflict
How else can we explain, for example, the conflict between Georgians and Ossetians, two ethnic groups which are tied together by common religion, inter-marriage, trade? Only a massive failure of mutual trust and security can explain the conflict between them.
You could say the problem with these conflict regions is that they have lost a policeman whom no one liked but not agreed to find a new one.
The three conflicts of this region in the 1990s—Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Karabakh—are all different of course. But they all have common elements. They all ended with terrible loss of life and massive flight of refugees. In each case a territory broke away from its parent-republic of Soviet times, but did not achieve recognition for its independence aspirations by most of the world.
Now you could say each side has a negative power of veto on the other.
The Abkhaz, Ossetians and Armenians have a power of veto on the return of refugees and internally displaced people. Tbilisi and Baku have a power of veto on the world giving the breakaway territories international legitimacy. (Please note but I am not talking about independence here but some kind of status in the international system.)
If I have one big observation here it is the lesson that Europe has learned painfully over the centuries in its bloody history: There can be no such thing as absolute security, especially in a complex region such as this one. Only collaboration, diplomacy, politics can provide you with some kind of security.
Indeed I would go further and say that the pursuit of the illusory goal of absolute security is a major reason why the Caucasus has ended up with so much conflict.
Here I would like to give credit to the new government of Georgia, which, as I see it, understands this better than any other actor in the region.
I commend the government's efforts to de-militarize Georgian policy to Abkhazia and South Ossetia, to promise no use of force, to reach out quietly to people in these regions, to look for status-neutral mechanisms of connection, to deal with some of the painful issues of the past such as missing persons. There is a long way to go, but all these measures are a very good start. And it is not easy to do this when there are Russian troops stationed a few miles away in South Ossetia.
But I see here the beginnings of a European approach of seeing security as a matter of collaborating with your neighbour, not working against him. Or, as one of my Georgian colleagues put it elegantly, a paraphrase of the famous saying of John F Kennedy "Think not what your adversary can do for you, but what you can do for your adversary." How can you help him get out of the hole he is dug into?
This approach requires enormous patience -- remember we are talking about long-term transformation. But I would say the first step has already been made. In the current situation, no one expects any more a new armed conflict over Abkhazia or South Ossetia. That is an enormous step forward. With that, the first barrier of fear has been lifted.
So, if there is reason to be worried in the Caucasus at the moment it is more about what is happening to the north and south of here.
I will dwell only briefly on the North Caucasus here. It is Russia's sovereign territory and Russia is not asking for international intervention there. But let me point out that the problems of the North Caucasus are becoming international anyway, whether Moscow wants them to or not.
The Winter Olympic Games are coming to Sochi in less than one year's time. The world is heading to the North Caucasus. And the countries of the world are going to be asking questions about the security of their teams there. And the terrible bombing in Boston which seems to have a link with Dagestan and Chechnya is also a reminder of the importance of sharing information, collaborating over security.
This obviously includes Georgia too, which shares the longest foreign border with the republics of the North Caucasus. I think it is more obvious than ever that Russia and Georgia have a shared interest in a more stable North Caucasus which is more open to the world.
The unresolved conflict which I believe we should pay most attention to is the one to the south of here, the one between Armenians and Azerbaijanis over Nagorny Karabakh.
This year, 2013, marks the sad anniversary of 25 years since the dispute first broke out in modern form at the end of the Soviet era in 1988. And next year will mark 20 years since the ceasefire that halted armed hostilities in 1994 but did not resolve the conflict.
Since then the lines on the map have not changed but the context around the conflict has grown much more serious. There are now some 20,000 Armenian and 20,000 Azerbaijani soldiers in trenches on either side of the ceasefire line of more than 200 km. The Armenians have built up elaborate defenses. The Azerbaijanis have used their big oil and gas revenues to spend four billion dollars a year on their military and buy rockets, Mig-29 warplanes, helicopters and drones.
And there is no international peacekeeping force on the line, just six monitors from the OSCE who visit it twice a month.
There is now a real gap between Azerbaijan's real position as the losing side in the conflict of 1994 and its ambitions and self-image as a rising successful power
Few people expect the Azerbaijanis to start a war tomorrow, especially when it has so much wealth at stake. But the very real frustration and the rhetoric grows every year on the Azerbaijani side. So the risk also grows that Azerbaijan will one day play the war card -- a move which will almost certainly be a disaster for everyone, not just Armenians and Azerbaijanis, but Georgia and the wider region as a whole.
To get back to my theme of "mutual insecurity," each side has ways of collaborating with the other to free them both from this trap.
I say to my Armenian friends. You cannot ignore the seven territories around Karabakh and the terrible plight of the people who come from there. I am referring to the more than half a million Azerbaijanis who fled the occupied territories around Nagorny Karabakh and more than 40,000 from Karabakh itself.
This is not a normal status quo. The best guarantee of Armenians' security is to give up the occupied territories around Karabakh. But of course they are afraid to do so without security guarantees.
Equally, I say to my Azerbaijani friends, you cannot ignore the aspirations and fears of the Armenians of Karabakh. These are the people who hold the key to the return of territories and refugees. Treat them seriously and you will see the benefits. Threaten them and they will only harden their positions.
Now, many people blame the three mediators of the OSCE’s Minsk Group--France, Russia and the United States--for not having resolved this conflict. But the truth is the Minsk Process has been more about managing the conflict, coming up with a solution on paper and urging the two parties to accept it.
If the two sides do not want a solution on the terms offered --and so far they do not--there is very little the three mediators can do to force them.
This is where I get back to the idea of a shared security approach. If, as the American scholar Wayne Merry says, the situation around Karabakh is now a "pre-war situation" rather than a "post-war situation" more proactive diplomacy is needed.
In particular the latter-day Great Powers need to offer a much more concrete vision of what the security arrangements will be that underpin a peace agreement.
This is a process where everybody needs to be at the table, where every voice needs to be heard. If the Azerbaijanis say they do not want Russians on the ground, so be it. If the Armenians say they do not want a NATO force, fine. But better to have these conversations now and better to plan an international peacekeeping intervention to underpin a peace than to stop a new war that has already started.
While I have such a distinguished audience in front of me, I would like to raise one last issue, the issue of re-establishing the railway through Abkhazia to Russia.
There is not much that Georgia can do about the Karabakh conflict or about regional integration in the Caucasus in general.
But there is one project that could benefit peace in the region and regional integration. That is the rebuilding of the railway along the Black Sea through Abkhazia, connecting Georgia and Russia.
It must have been a painful decision for the government here to support the rebuilding of the railway and not linking it to the return of Georgian refugees to Abkhazia. But that is surely the right approach. To move forward, to try and solve those problems that you can solve rather than waiting to solve the most difficult ones first.
A restored railway through Abkhazia would also benefit everyone in this region by re-opening a closed route around the eastern shore of the Black Sea.
If the idea is good, a mistake was made in the way it was announced. Being too hasty, the Georgian government broke the rules of the table by not consulting with Azerbaijan about its ideas.
Azerbaijan has its concerns about the railway, notably that it could be an overland conduit for Russia to supply arms to its adversary, Armenia. That is an understandable concern, but it can be addressed. The Georgians can restrict what cargo travels on the railway through their territory.
But this should be promoted as a project that is of benefit to everyone in the Caucasus, including Azerbaijan. A railway that connects Georgians and Abkhaz, Russians and Turks, Armenians and Russians, Azerbaijanis and Ukrainians.
We must be realistic. There is not much that outsiders can do here in the Caucasus with limited resources. Let us not pretend that this is a first-order priority for the world.
Resources are stretched -- although, again I make the special argument for Karabakh that if we do not want another Bosnia on our hands, it is better to spend the resources now rather than wait for conflict to begin again and spend those resources later.
But we can at least get behind projects and ideas which help knit the region together and empower those who are reaching out to each other across conflict divides.
Sooner or later, there will be peace here. And with peace I predict there will be an immense boom in prosperity. The only trouble is we cannot say when that day is.
For myself I only hope that I am not too old when the day of peace happens -- although of course that would qualify me for a place of honor at the Georgian table.
Thank you!
The keynote presentation was given at the Rose Roth Conference in Tbilisi, April 29, 2013.
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