The Origins and Trajectory of the Caucasian Conflicts

Abstract

Conflicts in the Caucasus began as a result of the weakening of the institutions of the Soviet Union. Since then there have been some major transformations. Initially, there were ‘triangular conflicts' with the centre (Moscow) on the one side and two competing national projects on the other side (a Union Republic and a minority group with an autonomous status within this republic). After the collapse of the Soviet Union, these conflicts evolved into bilateral ones between two popular-nationalist movements with competing territorial claims: newly independent nation states, on the one hand, and minority groups with autonomous status, on the other.

Notes

¹‘Stop Russophobic Music Video’—Ombudsman Tells Georgian TV’, Civil Georgia, 27 August 2008, available at: http://www.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id=19315, accessed 14 May 2010.

²Intelligentsia here refers to the Soviet-era professionals working in education, and arts and culture who had developed sub-cultures occupying the space between the official party line and the dissident movement, often being rather close to the dissidents as in the case of Georgia.

³The first Armenian President Levon Ter-Petrossian, and most of the leaders of the Karabakh Committee that came to power in 1989, were members of the Soviet–Armenian intelligentsia; Zviad Gamsakhurdia and Abulfaz Elchibey, respectively, the first presidents of Georgia and Azerbaijan, were Soviet-era intelligentsia members with long records of dissident activism. In the North Caucasus, the intelligentsia played a key role in the development of the post-Soviet political space in the North Caucasus with figures such as Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, a writer, and vice-president under the first Chechen de facto President Djokhar Dudaev, and Musa Shanibov, leader of the Kabard national movement who also played a key role in the Caucasus Peoples Confederation.

⁴They included demands closing down the Nairit synthetic rubber factory in Yerevan and Medzamor nuclear power station not far from the capital (1987), protests against the Caucasus Mountain Railway project in Georgia (1988), and opposition to the cutting down of the Topkhana forest in Azerbaijan (November 1988).

⁵I should clarify here that not all national movements in the Caucasus emerged as anti-systemic. For example, both the Ossetian national movement in South Ossetia and the Abkhaz national movement were anti-Georgian in their essence and looked towards Moscow for protection.

⁶The ‘triangular conflicts' as defined here differ from Rogers Brubaker's ‘triadic relational nexus' which considers the nationalising state, a minority group and external national homelands (Brubaker 1999, p. 55), and which takes its historic references from Central and Eastern Europe, rather than cases emerging from Soviet experimentation.

⁷Igor Nolyain sees the Karabakh conflict as a Moscow–Armenian national movement conflict (Nolyain 1994).

⁸This was in spite of the fact that the power of Moscow was in the midst of an unprecedented retreat on all fronts: from Eastern Europe to the former republics of the Soviet Union, making the area under Russian rule even smaller than the area occupied by the Tsarist Empire of the nineteenth century.

⁹Russian omnipotence and responsibility in igniting and managing the conflicts in the Caucasus also fitted some Western reports which still carried the hallmarks of Cold War influence. See Goltz (1993).

¹⁰‘The West Masterminded Chechen War to Destroy the USSR and Russia’, Pravda, 11 December 2009, available at: http://english.pravda.ru/russia/history/111072-0/, accessed 29 June 2010.

¹¹This argument partially fits the Russian Federation, which inherited the old Soviet state institutions including the military infrastructure, but its situation had degraded as a result of a lack of investment, the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Eastern Europe and former Soviet republics and demoralisation resulting from cataclysmic political changes, leading to the catastrophic military campaign in Chechnya especially in the early months of the war.

¹²See also Evangelista (2002, p. 37).

¹³The text of the ceasefire agreement between Abkhazia and Georgia is available at: http://www.c-r.org/our-work/accord/georgia-abkhazia/keytext3.php, accessed 24 July 2012.

¹⁴Among those who resigned were the Foreign Minister Toufiq Zulfugarov, and the presidential advisor on international affairs Vafa Guliuzade, who resigned at the beginning of the negotiations process in 1999, revealing deep splits among Azerbaijani foreign affairs decision-makers.

¹⁵‘160 000 Zhertv’, Izvestiya, 16 August 2005, available at: http://www.izvestia.ru/russia/article2515033/, accessed 17 May 2010.

¹⁶On UNOMIG's mandate, see http://www.unomig.org/glance/mandate/ (accessed 4 October 2011).

¹⁷‘Among the most prominent names are former Secretaries of State Henry A. Kissinger and James A. Baker, III, former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, former Senator and Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, former White House chief of staff John H. Sununu, and two former national security advisers, Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski’. See Kinzer (2007).

¹⁸At the time, Chechnya was high on the agenda of salafi-jihadi groups. Eleven out of 19 aeroplane hijackers of 9/11 had either fought in Chechnya or had left home declaring that they were leaving for jihad in Chechnya. See Murphey and Ottaway (2001, p. A12) and Van Natta Jr and Zernike (2001).

¹⁹‘US plans to expand military presence in Azerbaijan close to Iran’, Alexander’s Gas and Oil, 13 April 2005, available at: http://www.gasandoil.com/news/middle_east/b6e5b7a43c36e4bc336f009785cb9b46, accessed 5 October 2011; Sanamyan (2011).

²⁰‘Azerbaijan Parliament Approves Military Doctrine’, News Az, 9 June 2010, available at: http://news.az/articles/17123, accessed 5 October 2011.

²¹See Yevgrashina (2008); ‘Aliyev: Azerbaijan’s defense spending tops Armenia budget’, Azernews, 26 June 2010, available at: http://www.azernews.az/azerbaijan/21743.html, accessed 24 July 2012.

²²C.W. Blandy reports that ‘the Abkhaz downed two Georgian drones on 18 March and 20 April, with a further two more on 4 May and a fifth on 8 May’ (Blandy 2009).

²³‘Georgia Controls Tskhinvali—Saakashvili Claims’, Civil Georgia, 8 August 2008, available at: http://www.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id=18975, accessed 24 June 2010.

²⁴This applies to the Abkhaz, Georgian and Russian armies, while the Ossetian forces resembled paramilitary organisations with loose coordination.

²⁵See ‘Russia’s Medvedev ‘Frustrated’ With Karabakh Impasse’, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 27 June 2011, available at: http://www.rferl.org/content/russia_medvedev_frustrated_karabakh_impasse/24248417.html, accessed 8 September 2011.

²⁶The clashes on the north-eastern portion of the line of contact started on 4 March 2008, exactly two days after opposition demonstrations in Yerevan which were repressed by force, causing the death of 10 people. The two sides dispute who initiated the military operations. See ‘Armenia/Azerbaijan: Deadly Fighting Erupts in Nagorno-Karabakh’, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 4 March 2011, available at: http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1079580.html, accessed 7 October 2011.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Vicken Cheterian

The author would like to thank the four editors of this collection for their invitation to Birmingham in 2009 when the first outline of this essay was presented, and for their detailed remarks on an earlier draft. Also, thanks to the comments of two anonymous reviewers, and special thanks to Jeremy Smith for his additional work on the revised version of this essay, which helped upgrade the essay linguistically and in its content.