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The South Caucasus is one of those places where people like to say that the “weight of history” lies heavily. Increasingly, I raise a dissenting voice. True, history lies all round you in this region, not least in its regular invocation by modern politicians, writes Thomas de Waal, a Senior Associate for the Caucasus at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.
I have been writing about the Caucasus for years but when I started in 2009 to research a short book about the region, which became The Caucasus: An Introduction, even I was surprised by how some of the historical facts I learned challenged many of today’s dominant political narratives. Three examples make the point.
First, in Russia’s wars of 1820s against the Ottomans, Armenians and Azerbaijanis fought side by side in the Tsarist army. At that historical juncture, the Shi’a-Sunni divide overrode any notions of Turkic brotherhood. Alexander Pushkin himself witnessed the “Karabakh regiment” composed of Azeri cavalry in action outside Kars, and wrote an admiring poem dedicated to one of its officers, Farhad-Bek. That should caution against making any instant assumption about an eternal Azerbaijani-Turkish alliance, which often fuel political attitudes over the Nagorny Karabakh conflict (and which the Armenian-Turkish normalisation process, albeit thus far unsuccessful, has also somewhat shaken).
Second, the way that the Abkhaz-Georgian-Russian interrelationship has reshuffled since the 1850s challenges conventional wisdom. In the decades after Georgia fell was annexed by Russia in 1801, and increasingly throughout the 19th century, the Russian authorities ensured that Georgian aristocrats became loyal servants of the Tsar by allowing them to ascend the imperial career-ladder while keeping their noble status. At the same time, the Russians regarded the Abkhaz as wild pro-Turkish tribesmen and implacable enemies.
In 1852, the Russian general Grigory Filipson complained that his soldiers could not step outside their Black Sea fortress without fear of being killed by Abkhaz malcontents: “In a word, we occupy Abkhazia but we do not rule it.” In the last quarter of the 19th century, the Russians’ deportation of the Abkhaz from their homeland facilitated the immigration of Georgians into Abkhazia, redrawing the demographic map and seeding the ground for conflict in the 20th century. This history raises question marks about the durability of the Abkhaz-Russian relationship, and indeed of Russian-Georgian hostility.
A third surprise to me was to learn how Georgia’s first declaration of independence in the 20th century was, in geopolitical orientation, 180 degrees different from the second. In May 1918, in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and when Georgia was threatened by an imminent Turkish invasion, the head of the Tbilisi government, Noe Zhordania, reluctantly declared Georgia independent.
Zhordania’s independent republic lasted almost three years until Georgia’s incorporation into the Soviet Union in 1921. Amid the USSR’s slow disintegration seven decades on, Georgia embarked on a second and more successful attempt at independence. This time, Russia was called the colonialist enemy while Turkey became a newly discovered friendly neighbour. Again, this suggests that if Georgia’s striving for self-sufficiency can be regarded as a historical constant the nature of its alliances is not.
“Why should we care?”, you may ask. “Aren’t these historical examples merely interesting but irrelevant anecdotes when set against the immediate tensions and problems of the region?” I don’t believe so, for two reasons.
First, these historical shifts suggest that there is nothing culturally determined about the smouldering conflicts of the Caucasus. It shows that they have nothing to do with “ethnic incompatibility” or “ancient hatreds”, but rather arise — and can fade — according to changes of interest or calculation; and it usefully refocuses our attention on the Soviet period and the two decades immediately preceding it.
For the roots of the Caucasian conflicts lie here (or so I believe): not in the distant past but in the way the Soviet system stored up problems by smothering the political grievances amongst its constituent peoples with bribes and the threat of force, rather than genuinely arbitrating between them (which might have led to a culture of accommodation and flexibility). When the policeman from Moscow abandoned his post, everyone was left in a chronic sense of insecurity — and some saw the opportunity to grasp hold of deadly historical narratives that Soviet Caucasian intellectuals had been nurturing for decades. Bad history became the ammunition for feuding regional elites.
However, an openness of history to surprising directions can be reflected in the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over the enclave of Nagorny Karabakh. This is no primordial or civilisational clash, but better described as a clash between two emerging nation-states each of which saw this totemic territory as a cause to be mobilised and a crux of their new-old identity.
There is nothing ethnically incompatible about Armenians and Azeris. They had decent rates of intermarriage in Soviet times, and today trade and interact freely on the territory of Georgia and Russia. That makes me conclude that the challenge in the Karabakh dispute is not about reconciling ordinary people but about reconciling political narratives. It comes down to both security and symbolism: if a settlement can be designed which fulfils the security needs of each side and in which their proud attachment to Karabakh is honoured, most people should have no problem in supporting it — and everyone will be a long way towards a solution.
If the first historical lesson is that the region’s conflicts are not predestined, the second is that the Caucasus is not as bloody as it looks. The locals fight when they have to, but also have sophisticated ways of not fighting. I am not of course saying that the Caucasus is a non-violent, vegetarian kind of place. Denmark it is not. There is a strong culture of violence and weapons here, but I would argue that this is often an expressive substitute for real killing.
The conflicts of the south Caucasus in the 1990s, great tragedies as they were, exemplify the point. Their most striking feature was the vast number of displaced people — a total of almost 1.5 million in three years — rather than numbers killed (the body-count was far smaller than in the contemporaneous war in Bosnia, for example). This was a grave regional humanitarian catastrophe. But it also points to the fact that in both Karabakh and Abkhazia, advancing soldiers generally preferred to terrify civilians into flight rather than to kill them.
All this underlines a deep history of pragmatism in the South Caucasus which is there, just below the surface, if you care to look for it.
Caucasian political elites who find that exploiting regional tensions is a useful means of consolidating their power have no interest in telling these stories of unglamorous pragmatic coexistence, but foreign visitors and politicians are under no such obligation. They can narrate these alternative stories when they travel to the region and spread the message that history can be light cloak as well as heavy armour.
This article has been republished in part from www.opendemocracy.net.