BOOK OF THE DAY: BRIAN TRENCHreviews War and Peace in the Caucasus: Russia's Troubled Frontierby Vicken Cheterian Hurst Co 395pp, £24.00
PEACE HAS been fragile for two decades and war never far away in the complex, multi-ethnic patchwork of states and autonomous regions between the Caspian and Black seas. In August 2008, as this book was going to press, war broke out again in Ossetia, which straddles the Caucasus mountains and the borders of Russia and Georgia.
With Georgia looking to join Nato and enjoying US military support, Cheterian concludes this book with the grim observation that, “the Caucasus risks becoming the theatre of a new East-West confrontation”. Disputes over oil from the Caspian Sea could be the fuel.
This book presents a set of theories about state- and nation-building to explain how the conflicts emerged in Karabakh between Armenian-supported and Azerbaijani forces, in Ossetia and Abkhazia between Russian-supported local forces and Georgia, and in Chechnya between local forces and Russia.
Cheterian says the collapse or weakness of states opened a space for nationalist movements. This happened, he says, both at the level of the Soviet Union and, later, Russia, and within individual post-Soviet republics.
In seeking to explain why disputes over territory and self-determination turned into wars, Cheterian identifies military actions by the state power in question as the avoidable trigger for further and continuing military actions.
The author also presents a theory on the place of history, and specifically of “historical trauma”, in promoting nationalist sentiment and independence movements. When I visited the Armenian capital Yerevan in 2002, it was only a matter of hours before someone mentioned the Turkish-led genocide of Armenians in 1915.
Cheterian highlights the role of Soviet-educated historians and of history-writing in post-Soviet nationalism. In some cases, historians were commissioned by academies or state agencies to present the case for or against claims of nationhood or distinct ethnicity. The living memory in Chechnya of Stalin’s 1944 deportation for “treason” of 400,000 Chechens has been a constant grievance against Russian sovereignty over them. Many of the independence leaders were professors or poets, who could articulate such resentment as art, ideology or myth.
Chetarian does not explain why the military conflicts took the forms they did.
Some of the state actions were extraordinarily repressive – there were more explosions per day in the Chechen capital Grozny than at the height of the much more widely reported bombardment of Sarajevo.
Some of the actions by independence forces were also notably excessive, even by modern guerrilla standards. Chechen forces went over the border into Russia in 1995 and took patients and staff of a hospital hostage; more than 150 people were killed in the action. Others have attributed significant influence on the conduct of the Chechen campaign to Islamist fighters who came from Afghanistan and further afield.
Reputable writings have traced the role of mujahideen in Azerbaijan and Chechnya. Other than highlighting the role of a Saudi jihadist, Khattab, in the second Chechen war, Chetarian gives this dimension little emphasis.
The book is decidedly not a chronology of atrocities but it is surprising that the Chechen fighters’ hostage-taking at the Beslan school in 2004 and the consequent deaths of 350 people, mostly children, and their attack on a Moscow theatre in 2002, when about 100 were killed, are not mentioned.
These omissions appear to relate more to the circumstances of the book’s production than to any deliberate selectivity. The research was started in the mid-1990s and interrupted for several years in the early 2000s.
There is significantly more detail on the early stages of the conflicts, including vivid narrative detail from the author’s visits to the trouble spots as a journalist, than on their continuation nearly two decades later.
From Armenian family background, Cheterian does not hesitate to name Armenian excesses in the pursuit of independence for Karabakh. In his contributions to several institutes, journalism projects, and to Le Monde Diplomatique and opendemocracy.net, he represents a current of independent, evidence-based reportage and analysis that may just become strong enough to promote rational engagement with the possibilities of peace in the Caucasus.
Brian Trench lectures in the school of communications, Dublin City University