Small Nations and Great Powers

A Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict in the Caucasus

Svante Cornell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780700711628
• eBook ISBN: 9781135796686
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Introduces the geographical, historical and ethno-linguistic framework of the Caucasus, focusing on the Russian incorporation of the region, the root most conflicts; analyses individual conflicts, from their origins to the attempts at resolving them; analyses the role of the three regional powers (Turkey, Iran and Russia); and sets out a synthesis of the Caucasian conflicts and a conclusion on the place of the Caucasus in world affairs.

1
The Caucasus: a region in conflict

The Caucasus has arguably been one of the regions of the Eurasian continent most affected by what in the last decade has come to be called ‘the new world disorder’. Together with former Yugoslavia, it is the area of Eurasia most gravely hit by ethnopolitical conflict and warfare. Indeed, of the eight instances of armed civil conflict that have occurred on the territory of the former Soviet Union, five have taken place in the Caucasus. The conflicts in Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, the Prigorodniy Rayon of North Ossetia, and Chechnya have together resulted in close to a hundred thousand deaths and an estimated two million six hundred thousand refugees and Internally Displaced Persons.¹ The humanitarian burden has nevertheless been borne by the people of the region more than by the international community, whose aid and relief efforts have been less than satisfactory.² A corollary of the armed conflicts of the region has furthermore been to aggravate the economic situation of the region, which was already suffering the problems of transition from the centralized and planned Soviet economy to a market economy. This, together with the availability of weapons that accompanies any war, has accentuated the risk of degeneration of tensions in other potential trouble spots, such as Javakheti in Georgia or Dagestan in the northeastern Caucasus.

The conflicts of the Caucasus, despite the unique circumstances and conditions of each conflict, display remarkable similarities in their roots and immediate causes. As a matter of fact, the four major conflicts—that is all those except the Ingush-Ossetian conflict—are cases of ethnic-based autonomous regions of the Soviet era revolting against their respective central governments during the liberalization and dissolution of the Soviet Union. This is by itself an interesting fact, as conflict theorists have argued that autonomy is in itself a desirable compromise solution to ethnic grievances. The Soviet Union and in particular the Caucasus, for a variety of reasons, form an exception to this generally observed trend. While autonomous minorities revolted, non-autonomous ones showed few signs of an imminent revolt, while campaigning for their minority rights to different degrees. Another equally remarkable similarity between conflicts in the Transcaucasus has been the importance of outside support for the revolting minority. The case of Chechnya nevertheless diverges from this pattern, as does the Ingush-Ossetian conflict. Moreover, while the conflicts have all too often squarely been described as ‘ethnic’ or ‘religious’ in nature, even superficial analysis of the conflicts shows the inadequacy of such simplistic explanations. The conflicts are primarily political conflicts over territory and ownership thereof. Naturally, the conflicts are all due to the process of politicizing ethnicity, which emerged openly in 1987–89, although its beginnings can be traced back to a considerably earlier date, and lasts until this day.

The Caucasus, throughout its history, has been a borderland. It has been an area over which empires have competed; an area in which civilizations and religions met; it has served both as bridge and barrier to contacts between north and south, and between east and west. Its crucial geopolitical location—lying between the historical Tsarist, Safavid and Ottoman empires as well as also between the regional powers of the late twentieth century: Russia, Iran, and Turkey—has been a mixed blessing. More often than not, the Caucasian peoples have ‘lost rather than gained from their important geopolitical position’, as Alexander Rondeli has noted.³ Foreign powers have co-opted local dynasties and leaderships against their rivals, annexed the territories on which the Caucasian peoples have lived, deported their populations, or suppressed them violently throughout history. Today, the Caucasian states are thought to have ‘the potential to become one of the real success stories of the next century’, being a crucial communications route between Europe and Asia, and thanks to their role in the production and export of the oil and gas resources of the Caspian Sea and its environs.⁴ Nevertheless, the speedy development of the Caucasus remains elusive for a series of interrelated reasons. The first, of course, is the persistence of the five armed conflicts that have plagued the region since the late 1980s: in fact, although the five conflicts are frozen along ceasefire lines (except for Chechnya which descended into war for a second time in September 1999), no final political solution has been found to any of them. On the contrary, the road to a mutually acceptable settlement in any of the conflicts remains hostage to the future. The second reason is that the attitudes of the principle outside powers are in general not conducive to peace and stability. The main states with an interest in the region pursue their own interests, which are frequently at the expense of those of the peoples and states of the Caucasus. This is naturally valid more for some players than others, as the individual chapters on the regional and great powers will show. Thirdly, the increasing geopolitical importance of the Caucasus, be it in the politics of oil or in the larger struggle for influence over the ‘Crescent’ of states (that is Central Asia and the Caucasus) that from a ‘northern’ perspective forms Russia’s ‘underbelly’—and from a southern perspective the ‘Northern Tier’ of the Middle East—implies that foreign powers are increasingly willing and able to ally with one state or another in the region, whereas the rebellious minorities, for their part, continue to seek links to outside powers to further their security. Although the struggle for influence in the region, as argued by Edmund Herzig, does increase the number of options available to the three states and prevents one state from dominating the area,⁵ in recent years this process has led to the formation of countervailing alignments of states which threaten to intensify the zero sum character of the international relations of the Caucasus. This process may prove detrimental to peace and stability as the parties to a conflict see the possibility of seeking better terms for a solution either by biding their time or allying with certain external powers or forces.

The existing, open conflicts of the region, furthermore, do not fill the entire spectrum of potential confrontational relations between and among peoples and states in the region; there are several relatively acute problematic situations with the potential to deteriorate into violence. As a whole, then, the difficult international as well as inter-ethnic relations in the Caucasus pose important actual and potential threats to the regional security of Eurasia, and by extension to international security in general. The region and its conflicts are nevertheless little known and poorly understood outside the immediate neighbourhood of the Caucasus. In this chapter, the Caucasus region will be briefly defined and its ethno-territorial aspects outlined; the region as such and the interested parties to it will be defined; and the analytical framework of a security complex, which will provide a background for the subsequent analysis, will be introduced.

Historical & geographical settings & ethnolinguistic divisions

The geographical delimitation of the Caucasus, as that of Europe for that matter, has no generally accepted answer. The primary delimitation is geographical: the Caucasus then forms the mountainous region between the shores of the Black and Caspian Seas. This simplistic definition naturally needs to be qualified. If one is to define the region in the light of the history of the past 200 years and with regard to demographic factors, the logical northern border of the Caucasus would be the area originally in the foothills but later in the plains on the northern slope of the Caucasus mountains which separate the areas of habitation of the small peoples of the North Caucasus from the Russian-populated areas to their north. In late twentieth-century political terms, the most appropriate definition is the northern border of the North Caucasian autonomous republics with Krasnodar and Stavropol Krai, where mainland Russia can be said to begin. In the west, the border area is the region where Turkish-populated areas meet regions populated by Georgians and Armenians. This is a sensitive topic, as the Armenian population in the past extended much further westwards than is the case today. However, given the fact that the eastern border of the Ottoman empire with Russia became roughly defined—except for certain contentious areas such as Batumi, Kars, Ardahan, Erzurum, etc—in the first half of the nineteenth century, this border indeed forms a logical western border for the Caucasus. The appropriate southern border is more difficult to define, as demographically both banks of the Araxes river, which now forms a political border, is populated by Azerbaijani Turks. In this sense, the Araxes, which has defined Iran’s northern border since 1828, makes little sense; it divides a large people—the Azerbaijani Turks—into two empires, much as the eastern border of Turkey divided the Armenians. Nevertheless, in political terms this border has been stable for the past 170 years, and must therefore be reckoned with. In terms of today’s political map, the Caucasus region then includes three entire states—Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia—as well as a portion of a fourth: the North Caucasus which forms a part of the Russian Federation. The Caucasus, defined as such, comprises an area of roughly 400,000 km2, with a population of something over 20 million. The delimitation is made difficult by the fact that the administrative units in the North Caucasus are drawn further north than the traditional places of residence of their titular nations. The North Caucasian peoples have thus moved north from their traditional areas of residence in the mountains or their immediate foothills, and now many of them live in the plains north of the mountain ranges, areas where large number of Russians and Cossacks also live. It seems safe to argue that the reason for this drawing of the map during the early Soviet era was in order to include large Slavic populations in these territories, with the aim of diluting their demographic composition.

The distinction between the North Caucasus and South or Trans-Caucasia is also relevant in itself. Here it should be noted that the term Transcaucasia stems from Russian (Zakavkaz) and literally means ‘the lands beyond the Caucasus mountains’, hence clearly reflecting a Russian point of view. A more neutral term, which will be used in this volume, is the South Caucasus or South Caucasia. Politically, it has been noted that the South Caucasus consists of the three independent states of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia; the entire North Caucasus forms a part of the Russian Federation, with the status of Chechnya still to be decided. From West to East, the territorial units of the North Caucasus are Adygeia, Karachai-Cherkessia, Kabardino-Balkaria, North Ossetia, Ingushetia, Chechnya, and Dagestan. It should be noted that the Abkhaz and South Ossetians, while holders of administrative units lying within Georgia, are ethnic kin of North Caucasian peoples.

The museum of peoples

The ethno-linguistic map of the Caucasus is an area of study in its own right, and it is difficult to draw a comprehensible outline in a concise manner. It is nevertheless crucial to have an idea of the ethno-linguistic and religious conditions to understand the politics of the present-day Caucasus. The South Caucasus is comparatively easy to map. It consists of three major peoples, the Azeris (6 million), Georgians (4 million) and Armenians (3.5 million in the Caucasus), as well as a number of less numerous peoples, some of which are indigenous. All the republics are multi-ethnic, although presently Armenia is developing towards a mono-ethnic state with over 95 per cent Armenians and little over 2 per cent Russians, the only significant remaining minority being a number of Yezidi Kurds amounting to less than 2 per cent of the population. However, both Georgia and Azerbaijan are multi-ethnic; in Georgia, for example, the titular nationality comprises less than 70 per cent of the population; the main minority groups are Armenians, Georgians, Azeris, followed by Ossetians, Greeks, and Abkhaz. Furthermore, the majority population itself, the Georgians or Kartvelians, comprises several sub-groups such as Mingrelians and Svans. In Azerbaijan, the Azeri presently make up over 90 per cent; Dagestani peoples form over 3 per cent, and Russians 2.5 per cent.⁶ These figures approximate the official position; however, in reality the size of the Dagestani Lezgin community in Azerbaijan is unknown, officially put at 200,000 but according to Lezgin sources substantially larger. The Kurdish population is also substantial, according to some sources over 10 per cent of the population; in the south there is a substantial community of the Iranian ethnic group, of Talysh, possibly some 200,000–400,000 people.

The North Caucasus presents a considerably more complicated population map. Its population is composed of several different groups of people. The first group of peoples are those which can be termed only as indigenous Caucasian peoples. These are the Vainakh peoples (composed of Chechens, Ingush, and Tsova-Tush) and Dagestani peoples—such as the Avars, Lezgins, Dargins, and Laks—in the northeast; and the Abkhaz and Circassian peoples (sub-divided somewhat artificially into Kabardins, Adyge, and Cherkess) in the northwest. Ethnologists have concluded that these groups do not have an origin outside the Caucasus; in fact they have according to certain sources been traced back 8,000 years in the case of Dagestan, and to over 6,000 years in Chechnya. They have thus remained in the region throughout the substantial migrations that have passed through the Caucasus in recorded history, protected well into modern times by the inaccessibility of their mountains.⁷ The second group of peoples inhabiting the Caucasus are settlers of Turkic and Iranian origin. Ossetians and Tats (Mountain Jews) are the only sizeable ethnic groups to claim Iranian origin. The Turkic peoples appeared in the Caucasus some time between the middle and the end of the first millennium, but not until the thirteenth century did they establish some sort of hegemony, as Chingiz Khan moved into the Caucasus from the south. The Turkic peoples of the North Caucasus belong to the Kipchak family of languages,⁸ and consist of the Karachais and Balkars (who are in fact one people speaking dialects of the same language) in the central North Caucasus, and the Kumyks and Nogais in Dagestan.

The crossroads of religions

As far as religious matters are concerned, the Caucasian diversity is equally prominent. In fact, followers of four major religions are found in the area.

Islam exists both in its Shi’i version, Ja’fari Shi’i Islam being the majority religion of the Azeris (75–85 per cent), of the Talysh of Azerbaijan, and a small number of Dagestani ethnic groups on the territory of Azerbaijan. The majority Sunni tradition exists both in its Shafi’i school, among the peoples of Dagestan, but predominantly in the Hanafi school, which is the religion of Chechnya and Ingushetia, of the Circassian peoples (the Adyge, Cherkess, and Kabardins), the Turkic Karachais and Balkars, the Ajars of Georgia, as well as of the minority of Azeris (15–25 per cent) that are Sunni and the minorities of Ossetians (20–30 per cent) and Abkhazians (est. 35 per cent) that are Muslim.⁹

Christianity is also present in the Transcaucasus in various forms. The main pillars of Christianity in the region are the Georgian Orthodox Church and the Armenian Monophysite Church. Moreover, the considerable majority of Ossetians are Orthodox Christians, mainly of the same rite as the Russians, who are also present in the region as settlers (roughly 3 per cent in Armenia, 4 per cent in Azerbaijan, 6 per cent in Georgia, as well as in the North Caucasus.) Nevertheless some Ossetians in Georgia seem to follow the Georgian Orthodox rite. The Abkhaz are also partly Christian, although the Abkhaz in general are equally weary of both Islam and Christianity—an interesting instance of the retention of pagan traditions, their amalgamation with Islam and Christianity, and a generally low religious profile. Since the break-up of the Soviet Union, a number of Protestant missions have reached the Caucasus from western Europe, but have gained few followers, with some success only in Armenia.

Judaism is represented in the form of the indigenous Georgian Jews, as well as the Tats or Mountain Jews, who live in Azerbaijan and Dagestan. They enjoy relatively good relations with the states of the region, and the Mountain Jews of Quba in Azerbaijan take pride in saying that ‘there are only two places in the world where Jews live together like this, in Israel and here’.¹⁰ Besides the Tats, there were Ashkenazi Jews living mainly in Baku, many of whom have migrated to Israel, more as a result of the generally difficult conditions in the country than any discrimination. There are also about 20,000 Georgian Jews.

Finally, Buddhism, which is actually one of the ‘indigenous’ religions of the Russian Federation according to the present constitution, is the religion of the Kalmyks, who live on the northwestern shore of the Caspian Sea, to the north of Dagestan. Kalmykia is not normally considered as a part of the Caucasus, but it is not part of any other Russian region and does border the Caucasus. Moreover, interaction between Kalmyks and the Caucasian peoples to their south are increasing. The role of religion in the conflicts of the area has been debated and is the object of much prejudice, especially in the West—this issue is treated below.

The Caucasus: a security complex?

Regions as levels of analysis and their definition have been an issue neglected in the theory of international relations for many years, despite the fact that the term ‘region’ is used widely in everyday language. Theoretical discussions have provided two levels of analysis, on which most theory has operated: first, the level of the individual state, and second, the so-called ‘system’ level of analysis— that is, the global international system of states. In a sense, then, there is a ‘unit’ level and a ‘global’ level of analysis; however, between these two levels are regions—or sub-systems of states whose security is linked more strongly to one another than to states outside the group. This regional level is very important in the understanding of the security and security relations of states. However, in the words of Barry Buzan:

[the] important set of security dynamics at the regional level…often tends to get lost or discounted. At that middle level, one finds...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• 1. The Caucasus: A Region In Conflict
• 2. The Legacy of History: Underlying Factors In the Caucasian Conflicts
• 3. The Armenian-Azerbaijani Conflict Over Nagorno-Karabakh
• 4. Georgia: From Unitary Dreams to an Asymmetric Federation?
• 5. Russia’s War With Chechnya
• 6. Conflicts In the North Caucasus
• 7. Turkey: Priority to Azerbaijan
• 8. Iran: A Reluctant Neighbour
• 9. Russia: A Retreating Hegemonic Power
• 10. The United States: Towards Engagement
• 11. The Caucasus In Eurasian Geopolitics: From Backwater to Centre-Stage?
• Notes
• Bibliography