-Caveat Lector-
Behind the Headlines
> August 2, 1999
>
> SHEVARDNADZES GEORGIA A MODEL DEMOCRACY WHAT A LAUGH!
>
> Is there no limit to the mendacity of the War Party? Defense
> Secretary William Cohens recent trip to Tbilisi, the capital
> city of the former Soviet republic of Georgia, provides the
> answer a clear and emphatic no. The Associated Press reports
> that Cohen met with President Eduard Shevardnadze and Defense
> Minister David Tevzadza for an hour, and came out babbling that
> Georgia has become a model of a democratic state. Yes, Georgia
> is a model, alright that is, if your idea of democracy
> encompasses such practices as breaking up opposition meetings,
> arresting opposition leaders, torturing political prisoners,
> subversion of the judiciary, and assassination of political
> opponents.
>
>
>
> I'M SO GLAD
>
> Shevardnadze, the former Soviet Foreign Minister, seized power in
> a post-Soviet coup and has been clinging to office ever since
> often by a thread. The revolt of the ethnic Abhazians, in which
> they won de facto independence, nearly drove him out of Tbilisi,
> a humiliation he has avenged several times over. On December 17,
> 1998, opposition leader and former government official Nuzgar
> Lezhava was beaten to death by police during a police raid on a
> conclave of opposition politicians. The police claimed that
> Lezhava had fallen out of a tree. Doctors from the British
> Helsinki Human Rights Group who examined the body contradicted
> the official story: according to their testimony, he had been
> tortured to death by Shevardnadze's political police. Gee, I'm so
> glad Georgia is a "model" of democracy just imagine how bad it
> would be if it were a dictatorship!
>
> A DEMOCRATIC UTOPIA?
>
> While the precise number of political prisoners is open to
> dispute with estimates as low as 180 and as high as 2,500
> virtually all observers agree that this democratic utopia
> imprisons dissidents. Meetings held by the opposition Zviadist
> movement have been regularly broken up by police using electric
> prods. Another Georgian custom of equal charm is jailing people
> as hostages for others the authorities have not yet apprehended
> and the courts are powerless to intervene. In 1998, Shevardnadze
> decreed that all sitting judges were required to take a new set
> of "exams" and those who failed to pass the test or refused to
> take it were purged from the bench. One can only conclude that,
> in describing Georgia as a "model" democracy, Secretary Cohen was
> using a new, distinctively Clintonian definition of democracy
> that wouldn't even pass muster in deepest darkest Arkansas.
>
> INQUIRING MINDS WANT TO KNOW
>
> As reported in this column on several occasions, Shevardnadze has
> been calling for a "Kosovo solution" to Georgia's internal
> problems and the Cohen visit was a key indication that Washington
> is receptive to the idea. Shevardnadze is claiming that the
> refugee problem unleashed by his war against secessionist
> Abhazians requires another "humanitarian" intervention by NATO.
> While Shevardnadze claims hundreds of thousands of refugees have
> been forced from their homes by rebel Abhazians, the authorities
> inflate these numbers in order to maximize the flow of Western
> aid. Theft by government officials is rampant, and the conditions
> under which refugees are forced to live cannot be blamed on the
> Abhazians. For example, 600 refugees crammed into a sanitorium in
> Kutaisi supposedly receive $4 a month from international aid
> agencies but the Georgian government deducts half this amount
> before the refugees even get it, ostensibly for electricity. But
> then why is the electricity turned off most of the time in the
> Kutaisi camp? Inquiring minds want to know . . .
>
> SELECTIVE COMPASSION
>
> For Shevardnadze to point to the plight of the Georgian refugees
> as the rationale for Western military intervention is the height
> of hypocrisy: for it was under his rule that many thousands of
> Ossetians were "ethnically cleansed" from Shevardnadze's own
> capital city of Tbilisi, in 1992, and deprived of their property.
> Under the so-called "privatization" scheme inaugurated by this
> "free market" ex-Commie, the confiscated property of the
> Ossetians was sold off: even if the Georgian government agrees to
> let them back into Tbilisi, they no longer have homes to which
> they can return. The humanitarian concern of the West is highly
> selective, and if or when the NATO-crats take up their
> Georgian friend's invitation to intervene, you can bet we will
> hear nothing about these refugees.
>
> THE BALKANS OF THE STEPPES
>
> The Transcaucasus is the only region on earth that rivals the
> Balkans in the complexity, longevity, and ferocity of its ethnic
> rivalries. Hundreds of tribal groupings and ethno-religious
> divisions split the rugged landscape, and the story of their
> bloody feuds, and the endless waves of Transcaucasian ethnic
> cleansings, is far longer than can be related in a single column.
> Yet one twist in the ethnic fabric of this volatile flashpoint
> requires our special attention because it shows how clearly and
> unmistakably the heavy hand of the West is the cause rather than
> the solution to the region's problems: the planned reintroduction
> of the Meskhetian Turks to their historical homeland in Georgia,
> near the Turkish border.
>
> A CRIME REPEATED
>
> Ignoring the mountains of evidence that disqualify Georgia from
> membership in an association of ostensibly democratic nations,
> the Council of Europe has admitted Georgia. While this, given the
> ghastly record of the Shevardnadze regime, is shocking enough,
> the real shocker is the condition attached to the Council's
> invitation to join: the repatriation, within 7 years, of the
> descendants of Meskhetian Turks deported to Central Asia by
> Stalin in 1944. The Council demands that as many as 300,000 of
> these people be rounded up and sent to their ancestral homeland,
> in what used to be Meskhetia. While no one denies that Stalin's
> policy of forced mass migrations was a monstrous injustice, the
> question is whether justice would be served in displacing the
> Armenians who now make up the majority in that area. Instead of
> nullifying a great crime, the Council of Europe proposes to
> repeat it.
>
> LIGHTING THE FUSE
>
> Not only that, but in insisting on this condition, the Council is
> planting a tripwire that is bound to trigger Western intervention
> sooner rather than later. The repatriation of the Meskhetians
> would double the number of refugees in Georgia; yet the Council
> does not specify how nearly half a million people are to be
> housed, fed, and ministered to, nor is there any indication of
> who will foot the bill. Given the tensions which are already high
> in that area, the Meskhetian exodus seems designed to exacerbate
> an explosive situation. As the British Helsinki Human Rights
> Group put it: "It should be remembered that the Council insists
> that the Georgian state should provide linguistic and religious
> facilities which will emphasize the differences between the
> Meskhetian Turks and the resident population. Not since President
> Wilson created the Polish corridor and other anomalies has such
> an ethnic tinderbox been gratuitously created by people who will
> not have to face the consequences." Light the fuse, and then
> stand back this is the time-tested method of the War Party. It
> works every time.
>
> CONSPIRACY THEORIES
>
> I have written before of the various financial interests that
> stand to make a killing when the great Caspian Sea oil bonanza
> comes through: interests directly tied to both parties,
> especially the oil companies, but also including the big defense
> contractors and its ancillary industries. Beneath the waters of
> the Caspian Sea lies the greatest known untapped source of oil:
> the trick is to transport it. The projected pipeline has many
> proposed routes, but all of them intersect the ethnic wars and
> endless border disputes that plague the Transcaucasus. Of course,
> it is just a coincidence that the presence of NATO troops will
> ensure that the pipeline is built and protected and if you
> don't believe that, then you must be one of those screwball
> conspiracy theorists, either a right-wing extremist or a
> blame-America-first Commie, possibly both.
>
> MARCHING THROUGH GEORGIA
>
> The U.S. is already providing Shevardnadze's increasingly
> beleaguered central government in Tbilisi with plenty of military
> aid helicopters, training, and no doubt covert aid of a more
> serious nature. But it is doubtful that this will be enough to
> prop up the regime. The central government is facing yet another
> challenge in the secession of Adjaria, an autonomous region whose
> president accuses Shevardnadze of masterminding an assassination
> plot. (Shevardnadze, for his part, accuses the Abhazians of
> plotting his own death, with the connivance of Russia.) There is
> also the problem of what to do about Nagorno-Karabakh, the object
> of a low-level war between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The presence
> of Western troops on the ground would solve the pipeline
> profiteers' problems in a single blow. With transport facilities
> already under construction in Albania, NATO's newest colony
> paid for out of "reconstruction" costs for Kosovo and other
> economic aid to the region via the "Stability Pact the way is
> being paved for a Transcaucasian Trans-Balkan pipeline that
> will transport Caspian oil to market in Western Europe. There is,
> however, just one little problem . . .
>
> THE BOTTOM LINE
>
> If Shevardnadze should lose control, again, like he nearly did in
> 1992, Georgia would devolve back to its pre-Soviet condition of
> autonomous local communities. Instead of dealing with the central
> authorities in Tbilisi, the oil barons would have to negotiate
> with as many as a dozen independent "republics," each with its
> own demands and greedy for increased state revenues. The costs
> and the risks of investing in the Great Caspian Oil Bonanza
> grandiosely referred to by its boosters as "reopening the Silk
> Road" would be unsustainable in a free market. As advocates of
> a "Third Way" between capitalism and socialism, however, the
> Clintonian-New Labor wing of the War Party does not concern
> itself with such arcane questions. Like their "right-wing" mirror
> images in the Republican and Tory establishments, these
> modern-day mercantilists are talking about the bottom line here,
> and it is this: without the protection of the Western military
> machine, that pipeline will never be built, and those profits
> will be "lost."
>
> A NEW COLD WAR
>
> While the prospects for U.S./Western intervention are scattered
> across the globe, literally on every continent, from Africa to
> South America to the Pacific island of East Timor, to date the
> most dangerous by far is the steady escalation of Western
> involvement in the Transcaucasus. Behind the threat to tame the
> Abhazians and subdue the Armenians is the likelihood of a
> confrontation with Russia: not the Russian Empire of the Soviet
> era, but a shrunken and seriously weakened Weimar Russia
> encircled, resentful, and still armed with nuclear weapons.
>
> THE BIG QUESTION
>
> Would the mercantilists in Washington and London risk World War
> III to reap the profits from what has been widely touted as the
> biggest oil deal in history? To ask the question is to answer it.
>
>
>
> Check out Justin Raimondo's article, "China and the New Cold War"
>
> "Behind the Headlines" appears Monday, Wednesday, and Friday,
> with special editions as events warrant.
>
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>
>
>
>
> Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com. He is
> also the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy
> of the Conservative Movement (with an Introduction by Patrick J.
> Buchanan), (1993), and Into the Bosnian Quagmire: The Case
> Against US Intervention in the Balkans (1996). He is an Adjunct
> Scholar with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, in Auburn, Alabama,
> a Senior Fellow at the Center for Libertarian Studies, and writes
> frequently for Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. He is
> the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N.
> Rothbard (forthcoming from Prometheus Books).
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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>From antiwar.com/justin/justincol.html
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