As the dust settles in South Ossetia, what has the Russo-Georgia conflict taught us about the complex politics of the Caucasian region? Russia had plenty of reasons for intervening so drastically in Georgia, of course, including the manoeuvring of traditional power politics and the urge to keep an uppity, restive neighbour in check.
But one aspect that many analysts have missed is the role played by Russia’s southern republics: North Ossetia, of course, but also Dagestan, Ingushetia and even Chechnya. Over the past few years the Kremlin has secured the loyalty of all the governments of these regions, but a continuing Islamic insurgency in the north Caucasus, which remains Russia’s top national security headache, means Moscow is unlikely to miss an opprtunity to keep the southern republics sweet—and found one in South Ossetia. North Ossetia obviously has an interest in defending its ethnic brethren over the Georgian border, but many of the other republics were also happy to see it stuck to the Georgians because of their closeness to the country’s other troublesome region, Abkhazia.
It’s a complex situation—Daniel J Gerstle, a writer and human rights consultant who has spent time in the Caucasus, tries to untangle it for us.
Also this week: as Labour’s fortunes under Gordon Brown continue to decline, Kieran Brett and Michael Macdonnell, former advisers inside No 10, urge the party to embrace pragmatism and to ignore those calling for it to return to its ideological roots. And Duncan O’Leary looks at how the Conservatives are responding to the increasing politicisation of public behaviour.
Kosovo, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Chechnya, the Bakassi peninsula. There are disputes over all of these territories but only one, the last—over a sizeable oil-rich wedge of land between Nigeria and Cameroon—has been taken to the International Court of Justice (World Court) for adjudication. Why not the others? There is no good reason. In the latest situation, we see hubris on the Russian side and an inflated sense of self-importance on the Georgian.
Six years ago, Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo, confronted with growing tensions with Cameroon over the Bakassi peninsula, which had long been ruled by Nigeria, decided to resist the advice of his minister of defence—who was pushing for a military solution—and to turn the dispute over to the World Court. Newspapers ridiculed Obasanjo and public opinion was nationalistic, but the president held his course even when, in 2006, the court ruled in Cameron’s favour. Bakassi is now being turned over to Cameroon.
Unlike South Ossetia, there was something important to fight over in Bakassi—large quantities of oil—but Nigeria nonetheless swallowed its pride. This does sometimes happen, though not as often as it should.
Continue reading ‘Power’s world: against self-determination’
In his editorial marking the triumph of Fethullah Gülen in our global intellectuals poll a month ago, David Goodhart described the attempt by Turkey’s chief prosecutor to get the country’s ruling AK party banned as “the most important conflict in Europe.”
Well, the conflict is over and AK has survived. Yet the party’s—and Turkey’s—troubles are far from over, says Nicholas Birch in a web exclusive for Prospect. The old coercive system, which has led to modern Turkey’s history of parties being banned and military coups, may be over, but it is not at all clear what will replace it.
Also this week: Lesley Chamberlain marks the death of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn. His accounts of life in the gulag killed off any lingering affection for the Soviet system among European leftists, says Chamberlain, but his own relationship with the motherland was complex and nuanced.
Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, under the weight of multiple police investigations, announced last week that he would not be competing in the upcoming September 17 primary of his Kadima party and would yield the premiership to the next party leader—as I suggested he would in my Prospect article on Marwan Barghouti. Who will replace him? Olmert has made it painfully clear that his own preference is transport minister and former military chief of staff Shaul Mofaz, rather than the other main contender, foreign secretary Tzipi Livni.
This has more to do with geo- than with personal politics. Livni has long been outspoken about Olmert’s tribulations, publicly speaking out against his scandals and calling on him to resign, while Mofaz has been more the loyalist. Yet were Livni to win, it’s likely that the peace talks with the Palestinians would continue more or less along the lines that Olmert has laid out, with Kadima falling in line with the left-of-centre Labor party leader and current defence minister, Ehud Barak. The centre-right Mofaz, on the other hand, could be expected to adopt blocking tactics, aligning with right-wing parties like Likud and even the ultra-right Avigdor Lieberman’s Israel B’teynu party—which has called for Israel to hold on to West Bank territories and even for the expulsion of Palestinian citizens living inside Israel’s 1967 borders.
If Mofaz does win the Kadima primary, it is also possible that the current government will simply fall and the country will go to new elections. If the polls are to be believed, hardliner Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu would become Israel’s next prime minister—which would certainly not auger a continuation of the Olmert peace initiatives. So will Olmert’s legacy be to scuttle his peace efforts—which he has promised to maintain during his last days as prime minister—in order to gain vengeance against Livni and others who have called for his downfall? Stay tuned.
The cream of America’s black population has never done so well as in the last ten years—two secretaries of state, a national security adviser, chief of the armed forces, heads of major companies from American Express to Time Warner, congressmen and women, rectors of major universities, bishops, newspaper editorial writers. The list goes on and on, and perhaps later this year it will be capped by the election of a black president. What a difference from the 1960s, when only sport, the arts and preaching were open to ambitious blacks. Even in the 1970s, as I long ago documented in Encounter magazine, middle-class professional blacks were beginning to roar ahead in sizable numbers, closing the gap with their white peers. Thank you Martin Luther King.
But like America’s infrastructure, neglect has meant that the cracks beneath are once again coming to the surface. Not, as in the past, in the form of civil rights agitation or riots, but in the shearing of family ties, educational failure and the appalling state of health and morbidity among American blacks. The “benign neglect” of Patrick Moynihan, social affairs adviser to President Nixon, has moved to malign neglect. Not that recent presidents have ignored the issue, but their various plans pale before the ambitions of Lyndon Johnson’s far-sighted “war on poverty,” which was sabotaged by the Vietnam war. Another such war is now needed.
The basic statistics have been thrown into relief by a new report, “The Measure of America,” published by the American Human Development Report, which is modelled on the UN annual report of the same name. The UN report was the brainchild of the late Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq, and based on the work of the Indian Nobel economics laureate Amartya Sen.
Continue reading ‘Power’s world: measuring American development’
Edward Luttwak’s last cover story for us, a provocative essay arguing that the middle east was of small and declining strategic significance, proved so irritating to so many that it remains one of the most popular pieces we’ve ever published, to judge by our website traffic. (It’s also being turned into a book. The film rights may still be available.)
Now Luttwak is back with another dose of far-out contrarianism: George W Bush’s presidency, he argues, far from being the foreign-policy catastrophe almost everyone, left and right, takes it to be, has actually been a stunning success. With the admittedly rather glaring exception of Iraq, Bush’s aggressive foreign policy has successfully rolled back the global tide of jihadism and brought recalcitrant governments in the Muslim world on side. “You’re either with us or against us”—the Bushism most commonly invoked to stand for what is supposed to be the president’s dunderheaded black-and-white view of the world was and remains, says Luttwak, exactly the right slogan and the right attitude.
Please vent your spleen below.
Mugabe stole the Zimbabwean election with violence and intimidation. But Morgan Tsvangirai unwittingly helped him. How did this hitherto brave leader lose his bearings so badly, and what will the consequences be—both for Zimbabwe, whose warring factions are now in fragile talks, and for the MDC, which is also riven with deep faultlines? Stephen Chan, who reported from inside Zimbabwe between the first presidential poll and the run-offs, looks ahead.
There is, it seems, a yawning chasm between what US voters think their presidential candidates know about the world, and what they actually know.
In a July poll asking which candidate had better knowledge of world affairs, McCain came out with a 63-26 advantage.
This is in spite of the fact that Obama one of the few senators to vote against the Iraq war, on the basis that it would spark a long and bloody Shia-Sunni struggle, and now proposes a troop withdrawal timetable which the Iraqi government is in complete agreement with (neither of which his opponent can claim). Obama also took the initiative on Zimbabwe over a year ago: in June 2007, he sponsored a senate resolution condemning Mugabe’s disregard for democratic processes and calling for action to prevent further violence before the election.
Meanwhile, McCain has consistently failed to show he knows the difference between Shias and a Sunnis, still thinks there is a country called Czechoslovakia, and is worried about problems on the “Iraq/Pakistan border.” (No such border exists.) One wonders if wilful ignorance is the only criteria needed for a “strong foreign policy rating.”
The 10,000 crowd at the Fez festival of world sacred music were ecstatic—some literally so—when Mohamed Abdou (left) took centre stage on 15th June. The Saudi Sinatra is virtually unknown in the west, but in the middle east he is a multimillion-selling superstar. Backed by the magnificent syncopated strings of Abderarahim Mountassir, with a full mixed choir and desert percussion, the white-robed crooner rocked the casbah, or, more accurately, the magnificent gates of Bab Makina, surely one of the world’s most exotic venues, with a selection of hits old and new. His repertoire deals poetically with the poetry of the desert, sand, night and palms, but mostly Allah.
Non-believers were thin on the ground, perhaps because the event was unhelpfully billed as “Monotonous Chants of Heijaz,” but Prospect contributor and world music expert Joe Boyd and myself were converted. File under “you had to be there,” but George W needs to know that Islam has some of the best tunes.
What kind of man is Robert Mugabe? How did the internationally feted liberation hero of the 1970s turn into the blood-soaked tyrant of today? Heidi Holland, who knew Mugabe when they were both anti-Ian Smith activists in the 1970s, attempts to answer these questions in Dinner with Mugabe, her new “psychobiography” of the Zimbabwean president. Tom de Castella reviews the book for Prospect here. Meanwhile, Zimbabwe-watchers will not want to miss Stephen Chan’s dispatches from Harare for Prospect online, to my—entirely unbiased—mind the most in-depth and informed coverage of the Zimbabwe election crisis to be found in western media.
Also this week: Derek Brower explains how oil subsidies in the developing world are keeping the price of oil sky-high—and how they are playing havoc with the assumptions of market economists.
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