by Jules Evans | Sep 3, 2008 | Europe and Central Asia
I’ve argued before that if the West wants to stop Russian expansionism, it has to take away the excuse for that expansionism – the oppression of Russian citizens in former colonies like Georgia, Ukraine or the Baltics. This oppression is real, and as long as it exists, as long as the EU isn’t really pro-active in protecting the rights of Russian citizens outside of Russia, then Russia will use this as an excuse for its military sorties.
An interesting historical parallel for this strategy was drawn to my attention today. It turns out that, during the Great Game of the 18th and 19th century, the Russian empire used exactly the same strategy, using the excuse of Russian slaves in central Asia as an excuse to invade the khanates of Khiva and Bukhara and extend the borders of the Russian empire.
The British empire, realizing what Russia was up to, dispatched two secret agents to the khan of Khiva, in what is now Uzbekistan, to persuade him to release all his Russian slaves, which he did, thus removing the excuse for Russian aggression.
You can read about the incident here.
by Mark Weston | Sep 1, 2008 | Middle East and North Africa
Turkey has been drawn in to the Georgia crisis. Because the country allowed US aid ships to sail through the Bosphorus to Georgia, Russia has tightened border security checks on Turkish trucks, causing long queues and severe delays to trade. Russia is one of Turkey’s main trading partners, so its sulking could cost the stuttering Turkish economy billions. Ankara has retaliated by tightening its own border controls, and has threatened to withdraw support for Russian membership of the WTO. Given that the latter is an organisation dedicated to free trade, such a threat doesn’t seem inappropriate.
by Daniel Korski | Aug 31, 2008 | Cooperation and coherence, Influence and networks, North America
As the Gulf Coast gets ready to evacuate and plans for the Republican Convention have been throw into disarray, an interesting question has emerged. To what extent can the Obama campaign use its well-established, grass-roots network to assist the official recovery effort?
Yesterday in Ohio, Senator Obama said he would mobilize its e-mail list of supporters to encourage them to volunteer or send contributions:
We can activate an e-mail list of a couple million people who want to give back. I think we can get tons of volunteers to travel down there if it becomes necessary.
Helping victims of crises can be politically-expedient, as well as the humanitarian thing to do. When Russian-Israeli tycoon Arcadi Gaydamak used his money to build “refugee” camps for victims of Hezbollah’s rockets he wrote himself into Israeli politics.
Barack Obama does not have money, but it is common knowledge that his campaign’s e-mail/grass-roots network is the largest in political history, and campaign team expects to raise $1 billion online during the 2008 campaign, 12 times as much as John Kerry raised through online fundraising in 2004. Many analysts believe that Obama, despite what the national polls say, will eventually pull ahead of McCain because of the national, internet-aided network.
But the idea of using this network for national, non-partisan purposes is novel, though logical. If it is eventually used to help victims of the hurricane and if Obama is elected to the White House could this network be “federalised” or serve as a nucleus of a new Kennedy-style Peace Corps or a way to take the newly-established Civilian Reserve Corps a step further?
by Jules Evans | Aug 27, 2008 | Europe and Central Asia
The typical criticism of the Foreign Office is the one eloquently expressed in John Le Carre’s The Constant Gardener – that they are pitiless practitioners of real-politik who care more about stability than idealism, and who only really work to protect the interests of British corporations, rather than British values.
But on Russia, the FCO seems to have erred on the other side. They seem committed to sacrificing our strategic relationship with Russia on the altar of pointless liberal grand-standing.
The rot set in, it seems to me, when the previous ambassador to Moscow, Sir Roderic Lyne, was replaced by the present ambassador, Sir Anthony Brenton. Lyne was well-liked, tactful, amusing (always a great asset in Russia) and – in a word- diplomatic. Brenton was more of an analyst, highly intelligent, but lacking in the social skills and sureness of touch that Lyne possessed.
Brenton made the error of attending the ‘Other Russia’ political rally in 2006. The Other Russia movement was an opposition movement led by Garry Kasparov, which also included Eduard Limonov, a proto-fascist punk. Other countries, such as the US, sent government figures to the opposition conference, but the only ambassador present was the UK’s.
It was a mistake. An ambassador of course keeps touch with the various political factions in a country, but they should never publicly throw in their lot with an opposition, particularly an opposition which had so little popular support in Russia. Garry Kasparov gets an enormous amount of press in the West, but he’s barely even a marginal figure in Russian politics. And the Kremlin was furious with this public support for the opposition. Brenton is being replaced in October, but his time in Moscow has been disastrous for UK-Russian relations.
Then, when Alexander Litvinenko was brutally murdered in London, I was surprised to hear the British government come out and, basically, accuse the Kremlin of the murder, and condemn the Kremlin for failing to extradite Andrei Lugovoi. Miliband, new to the job and all-fired-up, gave the Kremlin an ultimatum – extradite Lugovoi or else.
But the Kremlin was never going to extradite Lugovoi – firstly, because the UK almost always refuses Russia’s requests for extradition (including requests to extradite Litvinenko himself) on the grounds that Russia’s judicial system can’t be trusted. So why should Russia cooperate with us? And secondly, why would the FSB, which is incredibly paranoid about MI6 and thinks it rules the world, hand over one of its agents, albeit a somewhat rogue agent, to MI6?
So Miliband was left looking outspoken, weak, and naive.
In the Georgian crisis, there were no good-guys. The Georgian government’s response to fighting with South Ossetians was extremely heavy-handed, with a huge bombardment of Tskhinvali by artillery. A balanced response would have condemned Russia’s involvement in the crisis, while also asserting the need to protect the lives of Ossetian civilians, which the Georgian government does not seem willing to protect.
But Miliband again weighed in with a surprisingly outspoken and one-sided response, which blamed Russia entirely for the conflict. His piece in the Times was such a one-sided polemic that it came as something of a shock to read at the end of it ‘David Miliband is the Foreign Secretary’.
He is now travelling to Ukraine to drum up ‘the widest possible support for a coalition against Russian aggression’. What is the gameplan here? Is this just a coalition ‘against Russia’? What are the coalition’s concrete goals?
It just seems really badly thought out, just more liberal grandstanding, more unnecessary alienation of Russia, and even potentially alienation of Ukrainians, half of whom speak Russian, and who feel more sympathy with Russia than any British youth stepping off a plane to deliver a speech. Ukraine has deep ties with Russia, and depends on Russian gas, so will never sign up to some vague ‘coalition against Russia’.
President Yushchenko might meet with Miliband and voice support, but Yushchenko is deeply unpopular and on the way out, while prime minister Timoshenko, the rising power and likely next president, has already said Ukraine wants to keep out of any military conflicts and has conspicuously failed to condemn Russia’s actions in Georgia. I wonder if she will even bother meeting Miliband.
So our foreign minister will again look weak, toothless and naive.
Yes, Ukraine’s government wants to join NATO. But its population doesn’t, so that is unlikely to happen as well. Ukraine is a country which has, at times, looked like it could be split into two, a Russian-speaking and a Ukrainian-speaking part. They are trying to forge a unity out of their young country. The last thing they need is some vain young Brit trying to draw a battle-line through the middle of their country.
Whatever happened to an intelligent, and diplomatic FCO? When did it become so shrill, so driven by the desire to look good domestically rather than achieve anything real globally?
I’m not for a moment claiming that the Russian government is anything other than a KGB kleptocracy which picks fights with small neighbouring countries in order to increase its popularity at home. But there’s no point grand-standing against it. Identify your goals, then identify the best way to achieve them. Simply mouthing off against Russia might feel noble but it’s counter-productive – the regime is very popular, and is likely to be in power for many years to come.
The best way to limit iRussian expansionism is to take away the excuse for its expansionism by making sure that former colonies – Georgia, Ukraine, the Baltic countries – respect the rights of Russian citizens living within their borders. If the EU takes a pro-active stance on that, it takes the wind out of Russia’s victimist rhetoric.
by Daniel Korski | Aug 24, 2008 | Conflict and security
Since the Russian invasion of Georgia there has been a lot of discussion about the media war and who won it. The Guardian’s Peter Wilby, like many others, think “the Georgians played the PR game more skilfully.”
But another aspect seems to have received a little less attention – namely the nature of the media’s coverage and how it differed from other wars. Or, as a future PhD thesis might be titled: “The Media Coverage of the Georgian War: A Comparative Perspective.”
Let’s start with the Iraq War, which, like the Bosnian War before it, was a milestone in journalistic history. The tactics of the early Iraqi insurgency – indiscriminate killings, road-side bombs, kidnappings etc. – as well as the occasional Coalition aerial attack made the war the deadliest for the media. The war and its deadly aftermath have cost more reporters’ lives than any other conflict.
But reporting, too, seemed to undergo a transformation from its earlier Balkan incarnation. The Iraq War initially took the embed concept to the extreme. Viewers were up, close and personal – yet at the same time removed, as reporters were placed under different forms of censorship. We, the viewers, knew what the soldiers felt, could hear the whizzing bullets and could see their ghostly green silhouettes during night-time raids, but were left in the dark about the larger picture.
As post-combat stability gave way to violence, insurgency and chaos, it became too difficult to report outside Baghdad’s Green Zone. Suddenly we were looking down the other end of the media telescope: it became easier to understand the big picture – the missing WMD, the faltering reconstruction, the developing insurgency – but much of the detail was became, or at least fragmented. Relationships and personal stories – a stable of Balkan reporting – seemed rarer. Footage was usually after the event; a bomb would go off, but by the time the crew would to shoot the scene the bodies had been removed.
But in Georgia, the business of war-reporting seemed to take a step back to its Balkan version. Reporting was on the spot and live again. Really live. Pictures were not only after the event, but during the happening. We saw the footage as it happened, to the people, to the journalists. Even to the soldiers. “Embedded journalism” was live, but controlled. This was live and uncontrolled. David Chkhikvishvili’s video images of Georgian rockets being launched towards South Ossetia were live – and the first most people heard of the conflict.
But the war also seemed a little grittier, a post-Iraq kind of Balkans War – more indiscriminate, and more dangerous for reporters. Before the Russian suspension of hostilities, a Reuters reporter’s vehicle narrowly escaped bomb blasts near Gori. Jon Williams, an editor for BBC News, went so far as to call the safety situation during the conflict “catastrophic”.
As the prospect of state-to-state conflict seemed outdated before the Georgian War, so journalism seemed to be in a permanent post-Iraq state. Things have changed and it will be interesting to hear the progression reflect on these changes in the weeks to come.
