Abkhazia Joins List of Deteriorating Conflicts
In its monthly report, the International Crisis Group lists Georgia among the “eight actual or potential conflict situations around the world deteriorated in April 2008.” Georgia has joined in odd company with Burundi, Haiti, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Uganda, Yemen, Zimbabwe as a potential or current conflict zone.
Such a distinction was certainly not the vision of those who helped to usher in Georgia’s 2003 Rose Revolution, but a confluence of events (see: A Race to the Bottom in Georgia) has led to the current stalemate with Russia.
In Slate on Monday, Anne Applebaum ponders the “possibility that Abkhazia could become the starting point of a larger war.” She says that “Abkhazia ranks right up there with Nagorno-Karabakh, Dagestan, South Ossetia, and all the other forgotten Caucasian cities and statelets that no one wants to think too hard about but where, occasionally, something really awful happens.”
True or not (the international community has kept close watch over these frozen conflicts since their inception), events in Abkhazia may in fact lead to chain reaction that could spiral into military action.
In Monday’s Moscow Times, Alexander Golts, deputy editor of the online newspaper Yezhednevny Zhurnal, leaves us with this thought…
Recall how World War I began. States wanted only to protect their national pride and frighten their opponents. But at some point, the tensions escalated sharply and, coupled with mass mobilizations of their armies, the conflict in the Balkans spun out of control with tragic consequences for the entire world. This scenario could be repeated in the Caucasus.
Tags: Abkhazia, Georgia, International Crisis Group, Kremlin, North Caucasus, Russia, Russophile
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