A storm sweeps the
post-Soviet space By M K
Bhadrakumar
The last 10 days of September
were pivotal in the transition saga of the
"post-Soviet space". The events in their rush
seemed like a delayed summer storm blowing across
the immense deserts of the Central Asian steppes,
smashing up the debris of fanciful notions
accumulated over the past decade and a half, and
offering clarity to the landscape.
It all
began in Ukraine in the midriff of Eurasia, where
by early September the signs of what many had
already anticipated began appearing - the
inevitable unraveling of the eight-month-old
"Orange" revolution.
There was scarcely
any foreplay in what was happening. As the
prominent Russian political observer and chief
editor of the
prestigious journal
Politicheskiy Klass, Vitaliy Tretyakov, wrote
recently, "Broadly speaking, the political
question concerns the character of the so-called
Orange revolution in Ukraine ... Apparently a few
people would continue to believe that the Orange
revolution was really a revolution - a free,
democratic and spontaneous revolution. Even
Western experts and journalists, who had, as if on
someone's orders, uniformly described the events
in Kiev 10 months ago as a spontaneous outburst of
love for freedom by democratic-minded masses, have
presently, without battling an eye lid, begun
describing the Orange revolution as a coup within
Ukraine's political elite that was artificially
and skillfully orchestrated, inspired and financed
from the outside."
The Ukraine
developments nonetheless took such curious turns
by the day that the entire post-Soviet space
watched transfixed. President Viktor Yushchenko
and former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, the
iconic figures of the "Orange" revolution, having
now fallen out, both want to cut a deal with
Moscow to enhance their respective chances in the
parliamentary elections in March, when the
Russian-dominated eastern provinces of Ukraine
will have a decisive role. Their popularity within
Ukraine has dramatically plunged. They want
Moscow's patronage for assembling new coalitions
involving their erstwhile political adversaries in
eastern Ukraine.
Yushchenko has appointed
a pro-Russian prime minister, Yuri Yekhanurov, an
ethnic Russian born in Russia, and has entered
into a written agreement with Viktor Yanukovich
(whom he had belittled during the "Orange"
revolution as Moscow's pawn on the Ukrainian
chessboard).
Tymoshenko, in turn, has
reached out to the pro-Kremlin Russian oligarchs
who are dominating business in heavily
industrialized eastern Ukraine, especially in the
Donetsk region. President Vladimir Putin's superb
sense of irony came into play when he told
visiting premier Yekhanurov while receiving him at
the Kremlin on September 30: "Russia very much
hopes that you will be able to help the president
[Yushchenko] consolidate society and successfully
overcome the negative tendencies that have begun
to emerge in the Ukrainian economy." On his part,
Yekhanurov responded: "Russia is our main partner
and we clearly understand this."
Battlegrounds for global
influence Meanwhile, one after another, the
countries of the post-Soviet space are stepping
out and have begun narrating their own woes and
resentment toward the West for shabbily treating
them as mere battlegrounds for global influence.
On September 20, the trial of the
militants involved in the violent uprising last
May in Andijan in Uzbekistan commenced. The Uzbek
prosecutors alleged that Islamic militants
belonging to the Islamic Movement of Turkestan
(previously known as the Islamic Movement of
Uzbekistan) that had close links with al-Qaeda in
Afghanistan and the Hizb ut-Tahrir (which is
believed to be operating out of Western capitals)
were involved in the Andijan uprising.
The
prosecutors highlighted that prominent Western
media organizations had positioned themselves in
advance in the Ferghana Valley in May to narrate
to the world, as if with foreknowledge, about
another color revolution unfolding in the heart of
Central Asia. The testimony by the defendants,
inter alia, listed details of the American Embassy
in Tashkent having financed some of the militants
involved in the Andijan uprising.
Coinciding with the Andijan trial,
Uzbekistan conducted its first-ever military
exercise with Russia on Uzbek soil. Considering
the tortuous course of Uzbek-Russian relations
during the 15-year period since the collapse of
the Soviet Union, Tashkent was indeed making an
important political statement.
Again, on
September 27, talks between the US and Uzbekistan
on the leasing of the Karshi-Khanabad air base to
the US military finally broke up in acrimony. US
officials went public with the announcement that
the base would be handed back to Uzbek authorities
by the end of the year. This is a huge blow to the
US military presence in the region as a whole
since the Karshi-Khanabad base is simply
irreplaceable. Incidentally, it was by far the
biggest base in the so-called Turkestan Military
District of the Soviet era, dominating the Central
Asian region as a whole.
Washington has
been making overtures to Tashkent to let bygones
be bygones and to work out some level of political
understanding regarding continued use of the base.
As a fallback, Washington hinted that it would
regard at least over-flight arrangements through
Uzbek air space (for sorties by American aircraft
in and out of Afghanistan) as "helpful";
Washington agreed to pay US$23 million for some of
the services rendered to the base by the Uzbek
side during the past five years. But it is an
indication of how high anti-American feelings are
running in the region that Tashkent simply ignored
these US overtures.
Curiously, on
September 21, as if taking a cue from next-door
Uzbekistan, the president of Kyrgyzstan, Kurmanbek
Bakiyev, demanded that the Pentagon should pay
higher rent for its base in Manas and also
dismantle it as soon as the situation in
Afghanistan became stable enough. Bakiyev was
making a subtle point that for Bishkek, any
continued association with Washington over the
basing arrangement was primarily a money matter
and no geopolitical connotations were to be given
to it. Significantly, Bakiyev made the statement
while on a visit to the Russian military base at
Kant to the north of Bishkek - in the presence of
the visiting Russian Defense Minister Sergei
Ivanov. Bakiyev said that the current rent for
Manas was "too low" and the Kyrgyz economy needed
funding.
Within the week, the Kyrgyz
parliament refused to ratify the continuance of
Roza Otunbayeva as foreign minister in the new
government formed by Bakiyev after the July
presidential election in Kyrgyzstan. Otunbayeva, a
former Kyrgyz ambassador in Washington, was widely
regarded as close to the Americans. Her departure
from the Kyrgyz government indeed signifies a
further diminution of American influence in
Bishkek.
Hardly three days later, on
September 30, the newly appointed Kyrgyz Prime
Minister, Felix Kulov, who had often been labeled
as the "pro-American" leader of the "Tulip"
revolution in Kyrgyzstan in March, arrived in
Moscow on an official visit.
Kulov said:
"The visit is purely political, and as my first
visit abroad in my capacity as prime minister, we
thought it important to outline our foreign policy
priorities and our loyalty to our friendly,
partnership relations with Russia, which is our
main strategic partner." According to the Russian
media, Kulov also announced during the visit that
the deposed Kyrgyz leader, Askar Akayev, "can come
back [to Bishkek] any time he wants to, and I see
no obstacles to his return".
As if he did
not want to be left out of all these contagious
thoughts raging across the post-Soviet space,
Tajikistan's President Imomali Rakhmonov announced
during a tour of the eastern regions (bordering
China) on September 23 that "in Tajikistan there
never was, nor will there be, a US military base".
Rakhmonov's statement has stifled rumors in recent
days that it was possible that some of the US
troops and equipment to be vacated from the Uzbek
base could be relocated in Tajikistan.
Without doubt, Ukraine's "homecoming" is
having a huge psychological, political impact on
the entire post-Soviet space. The shockwaves of
the "Orange" revolution eight months ago were
indeed felt as far away as Central Asia. Arguably,
the phenomenon of color revolutions of the past
18-20 months constituted a defining moment in the
transition of the countries in the post-Soviet
space. It is only natural that the unraveling of
the color revolutions so vividly would cast a
profound spell all across Central Asia.
The developments in Ukraine have certainly
accentuated the contradictory realities in the
post-Soviet space. First, the events in Ukraine
underline that a mere change of elites in the
transition countries of the former Soviet Union -
as had happened in "revolutionary" Georgia,
Ukraine or Kyrgyzstan - have been mistaken for an
irreversible shift.
That is to say, the
evolution of the transition countries of the
former Soviet Union (except the Baltic republics
that have their unique character and history) to
stable democratic systems and thriving market
economies will remain extremely difficult and
complicated. These countries (unlike the Baltic
republics or the countries of Central Europe) lack
a tradition of independent statehood; they are
bedeviled by fault lines of ethnicity and
sub-nationalism, which is further compounded by
regional divisions, clan structures and so on;
their sensitive geopolitical location between
Russia, China and Western Europe introduces
specific problems and circumstances.
Second, there is serious doubt whether a
revolutionary dynamic indeed exists in any of
these transition countries where the opposition is
willing to move beyond the prevailing political
rules and to appeal directly to the people.
Paradoxically, this is the reality today even in
Georgia, where the potency of such a revolutionary
dynamic might probably have seemed the highest.
President Mikhail Saakashvili's rule is
fast reverting to good old Caucasian ways.
Washington seems to be getting exasperated now and
then. This is despite the generous American
bankrolling of the Saakashvili government, and the
unfinished agenda of eliminating the Russian
military presence from the south Caucasus.
(Georgia is second only to Israel as the per
capita recipient of American aid anywhere in the
world.)
Third, to quote Ira Straus, an
expert on Russia, the developments in Ukraine
firmly signal that geography is indeed part of the
destiny of the transition countries of the former
Soviet Union. "So is history. It [post-Soviet
space] is not going to float out into the
Mediterranean or the Atlantic. No earthquake is
going to turn its legal border with Russia into an
ethnic or social border, or rupture its organic
intercourse with its larger neighbor. It is also
impossible to eliminate the underlying gradualism
of socio-economic development, or the multiple
complexities of reform and its contradictory
requirements."
Fourth, it must be
understood that a major factor for the unraveling
of the "Orange" revolution lies in the belated
realization in Kiev that the European Union simply
does not have the stomach to "enlarge", let alone
try to integrate a country as large and
problematic as Ukraine.
Of course, the
post-Soviet republics of Central Asia understood
this ground reality even earlier and proceeded to
address their Western integration orientations by
developing bilateral ties with the EU member
countries. Ukraine at least might have looked both
ways - East and West - for a brief while, but
Central Asians have known deep down all along that
there are serious limits to cynically balancing
their relations between the East and West, or
playing off Moscow against Washington.
True, the Central Asian pendulum swings
were manifestly there through the 1990s but they
were in actuality more a mirror image of what
Boris Yeltsin's Russia itself was doing -
vacillating between impromptu dalliances with the
West and a hankering for continued strategic
autonomy. The then US deputy secretary of state,
Strobe Talbott, rationalized this paradigm in
The Russia Hand, his masterly memoir of
president Bill Clinton's diplomacy with Yeltsin,
when he spoke of "the Westernized Russian's sense
of his own country as an exotic, bulky, untamed
Eurasian giant not comfortable in its own skin,
unsure whether it was welcome in Europe or, for
that matter, in the West, or even whether it
really belonged there".
It was apparent
that with the advent of Vladimir Putin at the helm
of affairs in Russia, these "pendulum swings"
began to soften in the post-Soviet republics of
Central Asia (and even in Ukraine under Leonid
Kuchma or Georgia under Eduard Shevardnadze).
Arguably, the color revolutions in Georgia,
Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan were urgently necessitated
by the challenge posed by such softening of the
pendulum swings.
Fifth, Ukrainian
developments once again show that the Western
integration processes in the post-Soviet republics
are very much linked to and are conditional on
Russia's own Western integration orientation.
Indeed, what happens in Ukraine in the coming
weeks and months will be an important indicator of
the shape of things to come for the post-Soviet
space.
Significantly, in a major speech at
Stanford University (alma mater of US Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice) on September 20, Russian
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned against the
real danger of blundering into another Cold War.
Will Russia and the West cooperate in
Ukraine instead of pulling in opposite directions?
Will Ukraine be allowed to settle into acting as a
bridge between the West and Russia? The trend is
likely to be Ukraine itself not wanting to be
integrated in a form that separates it from
Russia. If so, will it prompt a remedial course on
the part of the West to draw Russia itself closer
to it? The post-Soviet space will be keenly
awaiting the answers to these questions.
M K Bhadrakumar is a former
Indian career diplomat who has served in
Islamabad, Kabul, Tashkent and Moscow.
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