Conflict and Security Assessment

The South Caucasus region has been plagued by conflict and instability since before the independence of the three states of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. The ethnopolitical conflicts in the region that raged in the early 1990s have led to the death of over 50,000 people, great material destruction, and contributed significantly to the political instability, economic hardships, and the increase in transnational crime that has characterized the region in its first decade of independence. The conflicts came on the heels of the weakening and subsequent break-up of the Soviet Union. The weakening of Communist control from the Kremlin stirred national liberation movements in the three republics, which had been forcefully annexed by the Red Army in the 1920s. The conflicts centered over the territorial status of three regions populated by ethnic minorities: the Mountainous Karabakh Autonomous Province of Azerbaijan, populated mainly by Armenians (armed conflict between 1988 and 1994); the Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic of Abkhazia (1992-93) and the South Ossetian Autonomous Province (1989-92), both in Georgia. The lack of civic consciousness contributed to the incompatibility of the conflicting sides. Majorities and minorities alike considered belonging to the newly emerging nations in a purely ethnic sense, leading to attempts by minorities to secede and by majorities to dominate. A mythification and glorification of history and nation developed on all sides, interweaving truth and fiction and further widening the gap between ever-more conscious national groups. Political immaturity and extremism prevented politicians from bringing the sides to conflicts to a common ground; a tit for tat legislative struggle for the sovereignty over the territories followed – which was made possible by autonomous institutions in the minority regions in question. Vague notions of ethnic self-determination and rights of ownership over a particular territory as well as reunification with brethren (in the Ossetian and Karabakh cases) led to warfare, which ended in defeat by the central governments in all three cases.

At present, none of the conflicts in the South Caucasus has found a negotiated solution, and the conflicts are frozen along unsteady cease-fire lines. A relapse to warfare is a distinct possibility in all three conflict areas as negotiations have yielded no positive results. Besides these active conflicts, other minority regions in the three states have seen tensions between the central government and representatives of ethnic minority populations rising. Areas with conflict potential include Georgia’s Javakheti region and Azerbaijan’s Talysh and Lezgin areas. In addition to ethnic tensions, which have been the region’s main type of conflict, all three countries have been afflicted by the use of violent means to alter the leadership of the respective states. This has included armed insurgencies that managed to overthrow existing governments in Georgia in 1991, in Azerbaijan in 1993, as well as several unsuccessful attempts made to alter the political environment since then. Assassination attempts have also been made against leaders, including two failed attempts on the life of Georgia’s President and the assassination of Armenia’s Prime Minister and Speaker of Parliament in 1999. To compound this unruly picture, the South Caucasus has in the last few years been increasingly affected by other security threats of a more transnational nature, including organized crime, specifically trafficking of narcotics, arms and persons, and the rise of Islamic radical movements.

The ethnic conflicts in the Caucasus are three of five armed ethnic conflicts that erupted in the Caucasus region during the last years of the Soviet Union’s existence. Significantly, of the nine armed conflicts in the former Soviet Union until today, five have taken place in the Caucasus. These included, in order of magnitude, the war in Chechnya; the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over Mountainous Karabakh; the Georgian-Abkhaz war; the Georgian-South Ossetian war; and the Ingush-Ossetian conflict. While each of these five conflicts were and are unique in their own roots and circumstances, several common elements in their emergence are notable – elements that lie at the heart of these conflicts and that are crucial to understanding their character, and therefore, their possible solutions.

The emergence of ethnic conflict in the Caucasus is intimately tied to the structure of the Soviet Union. A hierarchically structured asymmetric federation of ethnically based territorial entities, the Soviet Union – despite its Communist ideology – afforded great importance to ethnicity. Ethnically based territorial units received great rights of self-rule on paper, and though these never changed the totalitarian nature of the Union, the Soviet regime actively promoted the creation of titular, ethnic political elites and intelligentsia in the republics, autonomous republics, and autonomous provinces of the Union. This ensured that ethnic segregation was kept in place, and safeguarded the salience of ethnicity in political and public life. As the ideology of Communism, that had served as a glue keeping the disparate ethnic groups of the union together, lost its legitimacy in the late 1980s, the scene was set for the rise of ethnic nationalism to replace it as the dominant political ideology. This was increasingly the case as the Soviet Union had prepared its population extremely poorly for participatory politics: there was close to no civil society, no experience of democracy or tolerance, and the population was accustomed to the use of violence and repression instead of dialogue and compromise in solving political differences.

The Caucasus region, in addition, shared several elements that accentuated ethnic tensions there compared to other areas in the Union. Firstly, the salience of ethnic identity was comparatively higher there, as evidenced by higher levels of native language retention, resistance to linguistic Russification, and a lower geographic mobility of the population. Moreover, the region had seen past ethnic conflict in the immediate pre-Soviet era, during and after the First World War, and continued inter-ethnic tensions in the Soviet era. Unresolved grievances hence existed between ethnic groups, with diametrically different interpretations of History. The Caucasus was also a border area of the USSR, and as such contained a significant number of military installations in a relatively small area. With the breakdown of military discipline in the early 1990s, a large amount of weaponry was available in the region to secessionist movements and paramilitary organizations in a way that was not the case in many other parts of the Soviet Union.

An additional factor was the role of the central government in Moscow. Whether in the guise of the Soviet government in the late 1980s or the independent Russian Federation of the 1990s, the leadership in Moscow sought to maintain its dominant influence over the South Caucasus, and to prevent the South Caucasian states from seceding from the Union. The same attitude prevailed after the dissolution of the Union, as Moscow continued to prevent them from pursuing independent and pro-western foreign policies. The Russian government has had a clear intention to weaken the South Caucasian states’ viability and independence, a policy that continues to various degrees to this day. The Soviet government entertained minority secessionism in Georgia in order to counterbalance Georgian attempts to secede from the USSR; likewise, Moscow at different times supported both Armenia and Azerbaijan against each other to weaken their independence and increase their reliance on Moscow. This accentuated tensions between ethnic groups and contributed to the escalation of conflict. It should also be mentioned that do-called ‘democratic’ and ‘conservative’ forces in Moscow have followed closely similar and destabilizing policies against the Caucasus, especially Georgia.

To provide a comprehensive understanding of the current conflict situation in the Caucasus, this study will first briefly outline the current status of open conflicts, view the situation in minority areas within the regional states, and detail the transnational and external security threats that exist in the region at present. Secondly, the study will discuss the most pressing dangers for future instability and conflict in the Caucasus. Finally, it will address the role of development assistance in conflict management and prevention.

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