Monday, March 23, 2009

Forcing independence upon North Caucasus nations

http://windowoneurasia.blogspot.com/2009/03/window-on-eurasia-moscows-security.html

The above article is by Paul Goble and entitled “Moscow’s Security Situation Deteriorating Across the North Caucasus. I’ll provide a few excerpts and then make some comments.

“Even as Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin made his upbeat comments about conditions in the North Caucasus during a meeting with the presidents of Chechnya and Daghestan, the security situation in that region continued to deteriorate, with anti-Russian militants increasingly active and Russian forces increasingly ineffective.

On Friday, Putin told Daghestani President Mukhu Aliyev and Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov that he was confident that “law enforcement organs” could handle [the] remains of the militant opposition to Russia . . . But even as he was doing so . . . the activity of the militants in the republics of the south of Russia [was] growing” . . . .”

[NVO’s Vladimir] Mukhin said that in recent times, the militants had been active not just in Daghestan but in Chechnya, Ingushetia and Kabardino-Balkaria as well, and he added that the leaders of what Moscow calls “the illegal armed formations” have so stepped up their efforts that they now constitute “a new front of struggle with local organs of power, the militia and federal forces.”

“The republic’s interior minister, Ruslan Meyriyev, says this outcome reflects the response of the militants to the increasingly aggressive approach of the law enforcement organs: “We become more active, and they become more active . . .”

“But he did not express particular optimism that conditions in Ingushetia were getting better as a result: “The situation is quite complicated,” he said. “It is not tragic, not a failure; it is simply complicated,” an assessment with which many of the people of that republic would not agree.”

“. . . there is an increasing sense, the Caucasus Times writer said, that “there is no way out.”

Indeed, Murat Kardanov said, for Moscow now, the least painful “exit from the situation could be to establish a state border with the Eastern North Caucasus. Undoubtedly, the majority [of people in the region] would be against, but who asked the Tajiks, the Kyrgyz or the Georgians about this in the 1990s?’
“And then one fine day,” he said, the residents of the North Caucasus “will wake up in a new country. And despite everything, they will survive.”

COMMENT:

If I am understanding Goble’s quote of Murat Kardanov correctly, Kardanov is proposing to separate Russia from some of the Republics presently in the Russian Federation. Since Kardanov says “”Eastern” North Caucasus and not simply “North Caucasus,” I’m guessing he won’t propose giving up Kabardino-Balkharia (even though there has been trouble there as well as in Dagestan and Chechnya) or North Ossetia and probably not South Ossetia. His new Nation might include at least Ingushetia, Chechnya and Dagestan. If it included North and South Ossetia that might be because Kardanov would like to get rid of Kabardino-Balkaria and he couldn’t easily do that and not give up North and South Ossetia as well. Maybe he’d like to give up Abkhzaia which normally sides with North Caucasus nations but how could he do that with Karachayevo-Cherkesiya in the way? But then why not make a clean sweep and give up Karachayevo-Cherkesia as well?

I don’t know how deeply Kardanov has thought this matter through. It sounds immensely complicated to me, but I must say that in Liberal Democracies I prefer letting any people that want independence or separation to have it. In Liberal Democracies it really doesn’t make difference whether a nation is independent or combined in some political way with another nation. If for cultural reasons you want to separate, then separate. We don’t want you part of us if you don’t want to be.

And despite what Anti-Americans say, Imperialism is defunct. Few in the Liberal Democratic realm want an empire. Empire is a political structure of the past – at least if we assume that Liberal Democracy is the political structure of the future then it is a thing of the past. Consider the EU as an example of a conglomeration of Liberal Democracies. One can go from one to the other without hindrance. To imagine one of those Liberal Democracies controlling or owning another is preposterous. It wouldn’t make any sense. If you were to ask the modern-day Germans if they wouldn’t like to own Poland again, they would, I am quite sure, say “heck no.” They would think of owning any country as an unwarranted expense. Why should we take our tax money and waste it on something like that?

Of course if Putin really did want to revive a Tsarist-like Empire then Kardanov would be clearly out of step with is thinking. No, no, regardless of the expense, difficulty and resistance, we must add nation after nation to our Russian empire. It was a mistake to let all those nations become independent. We must strive to get them all back. . . but if that is Putin’s plan he would be motivated by ego and pride rather than by a desire for peace and political and economic harmony.

1 comment:

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