Georgia vs. South Ossetia: The Prequel

The South Ossetian conflict flaring up in late 1989 started the break up of Georgia. The conflict of 2008 might well have sealed it.

Four months after Slobodan Milosevic’s speech on the Kosovo Field June 1989 symbolised the start of the Yugloslavia conflict, Georgia’s nationalist leader Zviad Gamsakhurdia, backed by over 20,000 supporters including paramilitaries, rolled towards the South Ossetian capital Tskhinvali, to assert ethnic Georgian rule over the entire territory of the republic. Ossetian groups duly blocked Gamsakhurdia’s entry to the town, and violence broke out. Andrei Sakharov, not long before his death, commented gloomily on the creation of “minor empires” in the former Soviet republics.

The standoff escalated through 1990. In April 1990, the Supreme Soviet in Moscow ruled that the ethnic autonomous territories of any republic seceding from the Soviet Union retained the right to remain in the Soviet Union. Then it was Tbilisi’s turn to pour fuel on the fire. In August 1990, the Georgian Soviet adopted a law prohibiting regional parties from participating in Georgian elections. Excluded from the political process in Georgia, South Ossetia boycotted parliamentary elections in October 1990, instead holding elections to their parliament in December 1990.

In response to the South Ossetian elections, the newly-elected Georgian parliament abolished the autonomy status of South Ossetia, declared a state of emergency in the region and in late December, imposed an economic blockade on the region that was to last to July 1992.

The conflict finally escalated into war the following month. In the first days of 1991, the Supreme Council of Georgia passed a law on the formation of the National Guard of Georgia. Then on January 5th, at the time of the Orthodox Christmas festivities, several thousand Georgian troops, police and paramilitaries entered Tskhinvali and carried out violent reprisals and atrocities against the population, ostensibly in search of arms.

The weekend war

The initial fighting took place mainly in and around Tskhinvali, around the Georgian villages, and north along the road to North Ossetia, the lifeline of the South Ossetians in the face of the Georgian blockade.

According to Nikola Cvetkovski of Caucasus Links, who has written a history of the South Ossetia conflict, the fighting in Tskhinvali initially divided the town into an Ossetian-controlled western sections and a Georgian-controlled east. But fierce resistance from Ossetian irregulars meant that already by the end of January, 1990, Georgian forces withdrew to take up positions on the heights around the city. From there they enforced a blockade that lasted almost one and a half years, and aimed at cutting the town off from heat, electricity, water and food.

Actual fighting was low intensity, deploying mostly light arms. Fighting however peaked regularly at weekends, as the so-called ‘weekend warriors’ of paramilitary formations arrived from Georgia proper. The ‘weekend warriors’ were themselves more interested in looting than fighting. As a result, military fatalities stayed low, but of the roughly 1000 Ossetians killed in the conflict, only around 100 are regarded to have been militia members: the remaining 900 were civilians. In addition, according to Alexei Zverev, ethnic conflict expert at Vrije University of Brussels, 93 villages (mostly Ossetian) were completely burned down.

Even the newly-formed Georgian national guard, intended to become the core of a new Georgian army, was recruited and financed “almost exclusively by private individuals, especially successful black-market entrepreneurs,” according to Swiss security expert Christoph Zuercher, who has written the classic account of the Georgian crisis in “The Post-Soviet Wars”.

Georgia’s second main (para)military formation prosecuting the war, the Mkhedrioni (Georgian for medieval knights), was, according to Zuercher, “created in 1989 by Jaba Ioseliani, a former patron of the Soviet underworld, and funded its activities from criminal dealings, including extortion and racketeering,” and constituted “a private army at the service of the state when it was waging war against secessionist minorities.”

“The Georgian militias—the Mkhedrioni and the National Guard—were to a very significant extent driven by the presence of private entrepreneurs of violence, undisciplined weekend warriors, who conducted frequent attacks on the civilian population and took hostages,” Zuercher continues. “But in the case of the Ossetian and Abkhazian fighters, the use of military force was not mainly motivated by private profit, but by the perceived threat to the status quo posed by an independent and nationalistic Georgia. (…). Once the Georgian militias entered their territories, Ossetians and Abkhazians saw their fears confirmed, and organized violence ceased to be an option and became a necessity,” adds Zuercher in his seminal study.

Russia appears on the scene

Until then, the Soviet Centre, in its death throes, had remained largely on the sidelines in the conflict. The Soviet leadership had apparently latterly struck a deal with Tbilisi, allowing Gamsakhurdia a free hand in South Ossetia in return for accepting Soviet supremacy. This deal was shown up during the Moscow Putsch in August 1991, when supposedly nationalist Gamsakhurdia – in sharp contrast to events in Moscow and Leningrad – meekly accepted the authority of the Provisional Committee established by the putsch, and subordinated his armed units to the Soviet Interior Ministry.

The failure of the putsch, however, destroyed Gamsakhurdia’s authority: On December 22, 1991, in the last days of the Soviet Union, approximately 500 National Guard soldiers entered Tbilisi and drove Gamsakhurdia out, marking the start of the Georgian civil war. The new interim authorities—Ioseliani (leader of the Mkhedrioni) and Kitovani (head of the National Guard), then called Eduard Shevardnadze, former Soviet foreign minister, back from Moscow to head Georgia.

The struggle for power in Tiblisi now hugely exacerbated the ongoing ethnic conflicts, as the deposed president mounted military resistance from his home region in western Georgia against the new authorities in Tbilisi – and thus triggered the Abkhasian conflict, flaring up in spring 1992 and turning to war by the summer.

The conflict constellation now also changed due to the appearance of an entirely new actor: Boris Yeltsin’s Russia. Yeltsin’s new Russia, born of the idealism of the Perestroika liberal movement, and riding high on the wave of enthusiasm following the defeat of the Putsch, was more concerned about the rights of minorities in neighbouring states than the Soviet leadership had been. Russia was also sensitive to the concerns of the North Ossetian leadership, who were inundated with refugees from the South Ossetian conflict and feared further destabilisation.

According to Alexei Zverev, this new conflict constellation made Russian intervention on the side of the South Ossetians look increasingly probable. In mid-April 1992, Georgian artillery resumed daily missile attacks on the residential quarters of Tskhinvali. Then, in 20 May 1992, unidentified gunmen, whom the Ossetians claimed were Georgians, massacred a busload of Ossetian refugees fleeing Tskhinvali.

The massacre prompted North Ossetia to cut the gas pipeline to Georgia, and elicited furious statements from Russian politicians, including chief reformer Yegor Gaidar. By June 1992, Boris Yeltsin’s administration seemed to be on the brink of intervening to protect South Ossetia.

The situation was ironically saved only by a further escalation of Georgia’s own civil war between Shevardnadze and Gamsakhurdia in Western Georgia, which was simultaneously making conflict between Tbilisi and separatist Abkhazia look imminent. In the face of this extraordinarily dangerous situation, Shevardnadze could not possibly afford to fall out with the Russians.

On 22 June 1992, Yeltsin and Shevardnadze duly met with North and South Ossetian representatives in Sochi and signed a ceasefire agreement. The agreement envisaged the deployment of joint Russian, Georgian and Ossetian peacekeeping forces. The peacekeepers moved into the region on 14 July, 1992.

In view of the civil war raging at the time in Georgia and the start of the Abkhazian conflict, no one initially gave the South Ossetian ceasefire much chance. But it held 16 years… until August 7 2008.

Medvedev calls for democracy po-russki

“Russian democracy will not merely copy foreign models. Civil society cannot be bought with foreign grants,” Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has said in an article published today September 10 by Internet newssite Gazeta.ru, expressing a conservative evolutionary vision of democraticisation.

Crucially, however, Medvedev said that parties would play a central role in Russian democracy, competing for power at all levels, and even nominating candidates for the post of president.

“As in most democratic states, parliamentary parties will be leaders in the political struggle, regularly replacing each other in power. Parties and their coalitions will form federal and regional governments, not vice versa, and nominate candidacies for president, and regional and local government leaders,” Medvedev said, according to Interfax.

But this won’t happen overnight. Medvedev said genuine democracy has to develop through experience and practice, and cannot simply be imported. “Only our own experience of democratic development will give us the right to say that we are free, we are responsible, we are successful,” Medvedev wrote. “Political culture cannot be changed merely by imitating political events of progressive societies, (…) freedom cannot be copied from a book, even if it is a very good book. (…) But no one will live our life for us. No one will become free, successful, and responsible for us,” Medvedev said.

Medvedev argued in favour of gradualism rather than the attempts at radical democraticisation Russia saw in the 1990s.

“We have no right to put social stability at risk and threaten life even for the sake of the loftiest of the goals. (…) Reforms are intended for people, not people for reforms. (…) Change will come. Yes, it will be gradual and well thought out, and go step-by-step. But it will be steady and consistent,” Medvedev said, according to Interfax.

Medvedev significantly failed to mention the role of the mass media and freedom of the press in his article. Instead, he highlighted an effective judiciary as the missing link in Russia’s attempts at democraticisation to date.

“Democracy is in need of protection as much as the fundamental rights and liberties of our citizens are. First of all, protection from corruption, which breeds lawlessness, lack of freedom and injustice. We are just beginning to build such a protection mechanism. The judiciary must be its nucleus,” he wrote.

Although insisting Russia had to take its fate in its own hands, Medvedev also said Russia needed more international integration to be successful. “Our internal financial and technological capabilities are insufficient today to give a real boost to the quality of life. We need money and technologies from countries of Europe, America and Asia,” he wrote, according to Interfax.

Medvedev also highlighted the roots of the demographic crisis. “The population is shrinking with every passing year. Alcoholism, smoking, traffic accidents, poor access to many of the modern medical technologies and environmental problems cut the life span of many people. An increase in birthrate that has made itself felt, does not compensate for the number of deaths,” he said.

Medvedev has made a series of strong statements about the impact of alcoholism on Russia’s development, and spoken positively about Mikhail Gorbachev’s ill-fated anti-alcohol campaign. However, specific measures have yet to be formulated.

Legal eagles Obama and Medvedev swap notes

Graham Stack for Russia Profile (www.russiaprofile.org)

The Connection Between the Lawyer Presidents is More Curious than Medvedev Seems to Have Realized

When they first met, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev played up the common legal background he shares with U.S. President Barack Obama. And despite question marks over the veracity of Medvedev’s claim to have studied a “legal reference work” authored by Obama, the influence of the Russian president’s legal schooling is palpable, in his public statements, policies, and above all his appointments. But is his habit of hiring like-minded colleagues really a bid to consolidate the rule of law, or just good old-fashioned nepotism?

Relations between U.S. and Russian presidents are full of paradoxes. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, each new Russian president has been paired with a new U.S. president – Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin, George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin, and now Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev. The previous two presidential pairs featured an unlikely personal bond, which nevertheless failed to prevent tensions escalating between the countries.

Obama, after his first meetings with Medvedev, seemed to deliberately avoid any sentimentality, emphasizing that he wants a relationship based on shared national interests, not personalities. In fact, Medvedev’s response to Obama was more personal than vice versa, inspired by his and Obama’s common background as legal scholars.

Following the two presidents’ first meeting at the G20 summit in London in March, Medvedev commented that “we have read the same books.” Following a bilateral meeting at the G8 summit in L’Aquila on July 10, the footnote swapping seemed to have gone one step further: Medvedev said he had previously studied a “legal reference work” co-authored by Obama. “This is curious to say the least,” Medvedev remarked.

The issue is actually even more curious than Medvedev seems to have realized: Obama, as a legal scholar, published nothing, except one research note to the Harvard Law Review as a graduate. Medvedev’s own publication record is far more impressive than Obama’s – having co-authored a standard work on Russia’s civil code in the 1990s.

What publication was Medvedev referring to, then? It could be that he meant the Harvard Law Review. Obama famously edited the prestigious periodical between 1980 and 1990 as its first black editor. These were also the years when Medvedev was completing his doctorate in St. Petersburg.

However, according to a number of sources, it is extremely unlikely that the journal was available at St. Petersburg State University until the late 1990s. Also it is unclear why Harvard Law Review could have been interesting for a Russian legal scholar at that time.

More likely is that Medvedev confused Obama’s editorial position at Harvard Law Review with his later teaching post at University of Chicago. University of Chicago law school publishes the famous journal “Law and Economics.” “Law and Economics” is the flagship journal of the neo-institutional economic school that analyses an economy according to its legal institutional framework, and as such is a key journal in Medvedev’s field of commercial law. Obama’s faculty friend and now top economic advisor, Austan Goolsbee, was lead editor of the journal in the 1990s.

Neo-institutional economics became mainstream in Russia in the second half of the 1990s, as it became clear that macroeconomic stabilization and privatization did not work if an economy lacked efficient laws and institutions. As a result, government economic reforms started to focus on the legal sphere. This shift was embodied by the appointment of legal scholar German Gref as a long-serving economy minister between 2000 and 2007. Gref studied and taught alongside Medvedev in the St. Petersburg law faculty in the early 1990s.

Medvedev must have studied this school of thought – and may (wrongly) think Obama edited its foremost journal when he taught at the University of Chicago. In fact Obama taught constitutional law, and was concerned with issues of race and citizens’ rights quite distant from Medvedev’s scholarly interests.

Civiliki: Network or norms?

Whatever the truth, Medvedev’s response to Obama demonstrates how strong his identity as a civil law scholar remains, despite years of working in the Kremlin and government. This is an identity he shares with other top officials and friends, nicknamed the civiliki, to distinguish them from Vladimir Putin’s ex-KGB network of siloviki.

This identity was underscored last week by a visit to his alma mater, St. Petersburg University’s law faculty, posted on his video blog on the Kremlin website, where Medvedev reminisces about his years studying and teaching there. Ilya Nikiforov, an associate lecturer at the civil law department, pointed out that “Medvedev even contributed a chapter for a civil law textbook, co-authored by members of St. Petersburg Law School, after having become president last year.”

Medvedev’s background in law does not just serve him intellectually, but as a source of personnel appointments. Besides Gref, who now heads Russia’s largest bank, the state-owned Sberbank, the new Minister of Justice Alexander Konovalov also studied and taught alongside Medvedev in Petersburg in the 1990s, where he lectured on Roman and civil law.

From among Medvedev’s undergraduate classmates (class of 87), Konstantin Chuichenko heads the Central Control Directorate in the presidential administration, Nikolai Vinnichenko is presidential envoy to the Urals Federal District, Artur Parfenchikov heads the State Bailiffs Service, Nikolai Gutsan is deputy prosecutor general, and Valeriya Adamova chairs the Moscow Arbitration Court. About a dozen other colleagues and classmates are scattered through the top echelons of the state as well as Gazprom.

Most civil among the civiliki, and the closest to Medvedev, is his longtime friend, former classmate, faculty colleague and textbook co-author, Anton Ivanov. Ivanov was catapulted to head Russia’s Supreme Arbitration Court, the country’s court of final instance in commercial disputes, also with prerogatives in norm setting, in 2005.

Like Medvedev, Ivanov has retained close ties to academia, as scientific director of the law faculty of Moscow’s prestigious Higher School of Economics. According to deputy dean of the faculty, Natalia Rostovtseva, Ivanov’s position is not a formality. “He plays an active role in the life of the faculty,” said Rostovtseva. “He teaches the second year course on the civil code, and examines. Moreover, he insists that students get practical experience by attending sessions of the Supreme Arbitration Court and completing internships there.” Ivanov himself complains that he now only has time for three or four publications per year.

Ivanov is notable for having taken a principled position against siloviki policy in the state sector of the economy. In June he called for a moratorium on the creation of state corporations such as giant defense sector and engineering holding Russian Technologies, headed by leading silovik Sergei Chemezov, a personal friend of Vladimir Putin’s. Ivanov argued that Russia’s civil code does not envisage any such hybrid form of private and state property, and demanded “common norms for all legal entities.”

Likewise, Medvedev’s rhetoric against “legal nihilism” and his calls to strengthen the rule of law obviously draw on his roots in jurisprudence.

On the other hand, the civiliki network might turn into a “jobs for the boys” club, ensuring the loyalty to Medvedev of what are meant to be independent institutions. On July 7, for instance, a former St. Petersburg law faculty member, Sergei Mavrin, was proposed by Medvedev as deputy chairman of the constitutional court. Prior to this, new legal amendments empowered the president to propose candidates, whereas previously judges had voted on new members. Mavrin is now widely tipped to head the constitutional court when current head Valery Zorkin steps down in 2012.

So the crucial test for Medvedev’s presidency could be whether his declared interest in strengthening legal norms is actually implemented, or whether his academic background will simply serve him as a source of cadres, equivalent to Vladimir Putin’s siloviki network.

Similarly in U.S.-Russian relations, a reset will only work if Obama’s and Medvedev’s shared legal background helps them move ahead with strengthening the rule of law in the international sphere. If their legal interest is simply used as a basis to build a personal relationship, the history of the previous two presidential pairs, where personal friendship failed to prevent escalation of Russian-U.S. tension, may be doomed to repeat itself.

Russia’s GDP reported to have shrunk 8.8% YoY in January

Graham Stack for business new europe (www.businessneweurope.eu)

Interfax cited a Russian government official as indicating yesterday February 24 that real GDP fell by 8.8% YOY in January, following a 9.9% YOY decline in December 2008.

Last Friday February 20, Minister for the Economy Elvira Nabiullina announced that GDP contracted 2.4% MoM in January.

According to business daily Vedomosti, Russian exports dropped about 41% YoY in January to USD 20.2bn, with a 5.5% YoY decline in physical volumes. Oil and gas exports contracted 3.1% YoY and 41% YoY, respectively. Imports declined 34.2% YoY to USD 10.3bn in January, bringing Russia’s trade balance to USD 9.9bn. Real imports contracted 5.5% YoY.

VTB Capital’s Aleksandra Evtifyeva writes, “while the recent economic data and the PMI-based GDP Indicator suggest that economic activity almost froze in January, the 8.8% YoY decline in GDP still came as a negative surprise. Although fixed capital investment plunged 15.5% YoY, retail sales were still up 2.4% YoY last month.”

One reason Evtifyeva forwards for the sudden drop is Russia’s gas dispute with Ukraine, that saw a cut in Russian gas exports to Europe. Other analysts pointed to the “base effect” – the high rate of growth recorded in January 2008 of roughly 8 per cent year on year.

However, even if exports recover in February, Evtifyeva see “serious risks of consumption taking a lead from declining industrial production (which was down 16% YoY in January).”

According to Royal Bank of Scotland’s Head of CEEMEA research Timothy Ash, “these are pretty grim figures, and are showing the Russian economy is contracting at a much more rapid pace than expected; primarily related to the fact that it is commodity-based, and has been credit-fuelled in recent years. The commodity/credit underpinnings of the economy have been removed, hence the downturn.”

Ash argues this figure makes even the revised official forecasts for a 2.2% YOY contraction in real GDP over 2009 appear unattainable.

“The sheer extent of the slowing in the economy has obviously clear implications for the budget, as revenues are likely to subside, while spending pressures will increase, boosting the deficit, perhaps beyond the 8-10% of GDP currently being suggested by various government officials,” says Ash. “It also raises concern over the durability of the current 41 top end of the rouble basket. With growth in near-free-fall pressures will build for the CBR to relax its current relatively restrictive monetary policy, and to allow the exchange rate to bear a bit more of the burden in helping the economy come to a soft landing.”

“The more statist elements within the Putin/Medvedev administration are likely to become increasingly critical of the more orthodox reformers in the cabinet (Kudrin et al) and this could also suggest less orthodox policy responses; note comments last week by a prominent parliamentarian for the imposition of capital controls,” adds Ash.

Other analysts argue that the high interest rates the central bank is using to keep the rouble stable have also hurt growth. However, the rouble appears to have stabilised, at least temporarily, and authorities are hoping the banks will begin lending again, instead of hording dollars.