Caught in the Big Squeeze

Amid Russian accusations that it is supplying Chechen rebels with weapons and Chechen pleas that it act as a mediator in the rapidly escalating second war between Moscow and Grozny, the post-Soviet republic of Georgia finds itself between the proverbial rock and hard place, damned for doing anything and damned for doing nothing.

“Both Russia and Chechnya are telling us in no uncertain terms that we must either be with them or face their wrath,” says Peter Mamradze, a senior advisor and confidant of Georgian President Eduard A. Shevardnadze. “The spillover from the present war, whatever its outcome, is a grave danger not only for Georgia, but for the rest of the non-Russian Caucasus.”

The advisor’s words might be paraphrased by the dying Mercutio’s line in “Romeo and Juliet”: “a curse on both your houses.” The ambivalence, bordering on double enmity, felt by Georgia toward Russia and Chechnya stems from its convoluted post-Soviet history and from the negative role played by both Russia and Chechnya in Georgia’s internal affairs. The first Soviet republic to declare independence from the U.S.S.R., Georgia was also the first to be subjected to the Kremlin’s tacit policy of dismemberment and destruction to compel wayward states back into Moscow’s orbit. Both Chechens and Russians were the key actors in bringing Georgia to the brink of becoming a classic example of a “failed state”: a territory so wracked by civil unrest and armed factions that it could not be regarded as a country in any traditional sense. In other words, it used to be a place much like Chechnya is today.

The sad litany of political chaos in Georgia began during the brief tenure of the country’s first post-Soviet president, the late Zviad Gamsakhurdia. He pitched his country into a series of miniature ethnic and clan wars in late 1991, resulting in a short but brutal civil war that laid waste to Tbilisi and ended in Gamsakhurdia’s ouster from power. Soon after, the gunmen who had seized the government, and invited Shevardnadze to return to Tbilisi from Moscow, directed their attention to the “autonomous” republic of Abkhazia, which had declared its own independence from Georgia. A two-year war between neighbors devastated what had once been a paradise on the Black Sea and left some 20,000 dead and some 300,000 homeless, mainly ethnic Georgians forced to flee from Abkhazia.

Therein lies the current paradox. The cutting edge of the Abkhaz forces was not, in fact, Abkhaz, but Chechen volunteers trained and maintained by Russian security services. Their commander was Shamil Basayev, the same warlord whose Islamist activities in Dagestan triggered the current Russian campaign in Chechnya. While Basayev and his “Abkhaz battalion” contributed the grunt and guerrilla work on the ground, it was “mystery” aircraft flying in and out of Russian airspace that provided the terror from the air, bombing and strafing Georgian military and civilian targets throughout Abkhazia.

But tables turn, and time moves on. Scarcely a year after Basayev’s Russian-supported battalion returned in glory to Chechnya, that miniature chunk of the Russian Federation was under Russian ground and aerial attack, no doubt by many of those same fighter-bombers that had been used to terrorize Georgians in Abkhazia. The even greater irony is that it was during the 1994-1996 war of Chechen independence that Basayev became a national hero in Chechnya by forcing the Kremlin into its own humiliating peace with the separatists, leaving Chechnya, like Abkhazia, a devastated if quasi-independent state recognized by no one and with only one non-Russian outlet to the world: Georgia.

Therein lies the ultimate irony. In an attempt to end their isolation, the Chechen leadership, under President Aslan Maskhadov, has sought to establish ties with its old enemy, the former Soviet Foreign Minister Shevardnadze. The first step was to publicly declare the Chechen adventure in Abkhazia “a historic mistake” and then ask for a “new chapter” in Georgian-Chechen relations.

The meetings between the Georgians and Chechens have outraged Moscow. In response, the Kremlin has exploited its role of “peacekeeper” in Abkhazia to foreclose any possibility of Georgia reclaiming the region by force. More ominously, Moscow has used its military bases in the country not only to limit Tbilisi’s writ over large areas of the country populated by other ethnic minorities, but also as convenient getaways for Russian agents operating in Georgia. The most notorious of these was Igor Giorgadze, the former Georgian security minister implicated in one of the many assassination attempts against Shevardnadze.

“We have received credible reports that Moscow has drawn up a new master plan to reinvent the Soviet Union under a different name and different makeup,” Mamradze says. “Rather than there being the 15 republics that made up the U.S.S.R., the new conglomeration would be a huge, federal state of some 40 nominally independent ‘countries.’ The scenario for Georgia is to cement the divisions between Abkhazia, Adjaria and Osetia and create three new ‘republics,’ with the rest of the country entering the new union as ‘Georgia.’ Other new states would be Tatarstan, Chechnya and pieces of the Russian Federation, along with a divided Azerbaijan and cutup Central Asian states. Moscow would rule over all, again.”

Paranoia coming from an otherwise sober advisor to Shevardnadze? What does the renewed war in Chechnya have to do with all of this? In Mamraadze’s words:

“The entire operation, from the fighting in August in Dagestan to the bombing of buildings in Moscow, does not seem to be an ad hoc crisis, but a well-planned operation by the Russian leadership not only to crush Chechnya with the blessings of the West, but to prepare to re-extend its influence beyond its frontiers into the independent states of the south Caucasus. While in an ideal world, having a democratic Russia with a robust economy, and having peace and security in Chechnya and Dagestan, would be the best situation for Georgia, given present circumstances and the players and issues involved, the sad fact is, the best thing for Georgia is the lesser of several bad options.

“Giving the Chechens their road [to both the Black and Caspian seas] means de facto inclusion in their Eurasia-wide mafia networks in arms and drug trafficking, and thus leads to the moral corruption of our state. Allowing or helping the Russians crush Chechen pretensions to real independence means inviting them back into the region to solve other problems they themselves created, which is the last thing we want to do. What we need is the time to integrate ourselves with the West to the point that we cannot be wrested away. It may sound heartless, but . . . [the] best [for us] is to let both sides slug it out for years or decades. Both have meddled in our internal affairs far too long. Let them meddle with one another for a long, long, time.” *