September 3, 2008 (LPAC)This article previously appeared in the August 22, 2008 issue of Executive Intelligence Review, which can be found at www.larouchepub.com.

The Caucasus Chessboard

The map shows the nearly dozen “autonomous republics” of the Caucasus region, within Georgia and Russia. Three are in Georgia: Abkhazia and South Ossetia along the mountainous border with Russia, and Adjaria bordering Turkey on the Black Sea. The Ossetes, an Indo-European people whose language is closely related to Persian, have lived in the Caucasus for two millennia. Their main religion is Orthodox Christianity, with a minority of Muslims. The status of these “autonomies,” and crises around them, are rooted in centuries of imperial intervention in this East-West and North-South crossroads of Eurasia.

The ancient nation of Georgia formally joined the Russian Empire in 1801, after late-18th-Century attacks by the Ottoman and Persian empires left the capital Tbilisi (Tiflis) in ruins. The acquisition consolidated Russian gains in the Caucasus, including Ossetian lands, which had advanced after the Russian- Ottoman War of 176 8-74 . In renewed conflicts in the 19th Century, Istanbul ceded its Caucasus holdings, in return for Russia’s withdrawal from Anatolia. Russia continued to battle Caucasus insurgencies up into the 1870s.

The British Empire made the Caucasus a theater of its contest with Russia over power in Eurasia—the Great Game, as Rudyard Kipling called it. Col. Claude Stokes, British High Commissioner in Transcaucasia, voiced one of the schemes after World War I: a large Eurasian Muslim buffer state, which “would lean upon Great Britain and provide a buffer between Russia and the British Asiatic possessions.” Stokes’s ally, British Foreign Minister Lord Curzon, advocated revival of a 1830s scheme of British intelligence figure David Urquhart for creation of a Caucasus Mountaineer Republic, which would foment Russian-Turkish conflict, to the advantage of the British Empire.

In the 1920s, the Soviet “nationalities policy,” formulated by Joseph Stalin after the 1923 Baku Conference of Peoples of the East (a hotbed of British and other foreign intelligence agents), led to the often arbitrary delineation of autonomous ethnic republics and regions within the republics of the Soviet Union. Thus, North Ossetia was in the Russian Republic, while South Ossetia was assigned to Georgia.

When the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, the autonomies went with their respective republics. Under Georgia’s first post-Soviet leader, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, a Georgian nationalist, the autonomous status of South Ossetia and Abkhazia was challenged. Civil wars broke out in both areas in the early 1990s. The brutal fighting ended in 1992 and 1994, respectively, with agreements for Russian peacekeeping forces under the auspices of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) to police the autonomous regions. The Russian presence in Abkhazia came to be endorsed by the UN and supported by on-site UN observers, while in South Ossetia, a joint Russian-Georgian peacekeeping force has been approved and monitored by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). The night of Aug. 7 , the Georgian peacekeepers turned their guns on the Russians.