Prague Property

Chechnya

A soldier’s tale

WAR stories are necessarily gruesome, but by any standards Arkady Babchenko’s first-hand account of Russia’s wars in the breakaway province of Chechnya makes harrowing reading. Within the first few pages the reader is introduced to such horrors as the taste of water tainted with rotting human flesh, the merciless beating of new recruits and the killing of a pet dog for food.

A conscript in the first Chechen war (1994-96), Mr Babchenko volunteered to fight in the second (which started in 1999) for reasons he leaves unclear. In between he gained a law degree. Unlike the provincial cannon-fodder who make up most of the Russian army, he is able to describe what he saw in lean but vivid prose. He spares nobody, least of all himself. The officers are venal, violent and incompetent, systematically pilfering the soldiers’ rations. Everyone sells army munitions to the rebels at any opportunity. The soldiers are ill trained and chiefly preoccupied with finding food and shelter. The Chechen insurgents appear only as shadowy, vicious figures, slitting their captives’ throats or trading them as slaves. Both sides treat civilians atrociously.

Mr Babchenko dispassionately describes the resulting humiliation and brutalisation, not only his own but also of the million soldiers and support staff who have passed through the Chechen meatgrinder since 1994. Only the fierce loyalty of close pals provides a redeeming feature.

Like the murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya, the author—who now works for Novaya Gazeta, in which she had a column—sees the war as a microcosm of his motherland’s ills: corruption, brutality, hypocrisy and pointlessness. Like Ms Politkovskaya, he is stronger on telling bleak, startling stories than stringing them together in a structured narrative. The reader has to infer the chronology from what mostly reads like random and sometimes repetitive pages from a diary kept in the field. The lengthy snippets of soldierly conversation, salty and despairing, sound just right, though they necessarily can be only reconstructions of the real thing.

Mr Babchenko may be weak on analysis. But Russian politicians too have signally failed to answer the deep questions about their country and its people that underlie such tales of brutality.

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Georgia

Misha’s mess
Nov 15th 2007
From The Economist print edition

Mikheil Saakashvili’s crackdown has outraged his friends. What should they do now?

MOST ex-Soviet countries have already abandoned the idea that rapid economic and political reform can bring a future based on openness, freedom and legality. Some (such as Ukraine) are stuck in political stalemate. Others (such as Russia) have turned to what the Kremlin calls “sovereign democracy”—crony capitalism laced with nationalism. Now Georgia, which until recently was one of the few bright prospects left, risks turning into yet another ill-run country with a corrupt elite squabbling over the spoils of office.

This is not a total surprise. Since the 2003 “rose revolution” that swept him into power, President Mikheil Saakashvili’s weaknesses have included impetuousness, self-indulgence and a reliance on too narrow a circle of advisers. But until now these seemed to be outweighed by his drive, vision and charm—and the spectacular successes of his deregulation and free-market reforms.

Now the balance has tipped. Unleashing riot police on demonstrators, leaving dozens in hospital, then declaring a state of emergency, seem an inexplicable overreaction to protests that posed no threat to public order. Blanket bans on demonstrations and on anti-government radio and television are tactics that would raise blushes even in the Kremlin.

Mr Saakashvili claims his country was facing a putsch organised by outside provocateurs. Though Georgia has certainly suffered much from Russian mischief-making, he has produced no convincing evidence that it has played a decisive part in recent days. Having cried wolf, he may find it harder to win outside attention when his country faces a genuine threat.

His decisions to call an early presidential election on January 5th and to lift the state of emergency (see article) are not big concessions. The election looks like a cynical stunt to capitalise on the opposition’s divisions and unpreparedness, in conditions in which the contest can hardly be free or fair. Although the opposition has now found a candidate, the president’s command of the media and the state’s resources is likely to assure him an easy victory; it will not be a democratic mandate. Rigged elections are a favourite tool of tyrants.

Is anybody paying attention?

The West has been shamefully slow to condemn the abuse of power by its protégé, “Misha”. America and the European Union have expressed some regret and called for calm, but they have not said bluntly and publicly that the Georgian authorities’ use of force is unacceptable. They should. It would also be worth investigating how the foreign aid showered on Georgia has been spent. It is not just that some may have leaked away on mistresses and Mercedes cars. It would be a sad business if American tax dollars had paid both for the security forces’ training and equipment and for the broadcasting facilities that they recently smashed up.

Georgia’s friends should also urge Mr Saakashvili to postpone the presidential vote, and instead hold a fair, internationally supervised parliamentary election in the spring. The speaker of parliament, Nino Burjanadze, who retains the statesmanlike image that Mr Saakashvili has lost, should convene talks between all political forces, at first to reach agreement on election rules, then to discuss constitutional changes. A new parliament should take back some of the powers that the presidency has recently misused. Until that happens, Mr Saakashvili should be in political quarantine. Any planned official visits to Western capitals, and particularly to Washington or Brussels, should wait until Georgia has returned to normal.

This is not just about salving Western governments’ wounded feelings. Failure to criticise Mr Saakashvili’s mistakes will undermine the West’s cause throughout the region. Russians will wonder whether outside support for Georgia in recent years was a cynical bit of Kremlin-bashing and energy politics, rather than good-hearted help for a country yearning for security and freedom.

Yet even as they urge Georgia’s leader to change course, Europe and America should also bolster the country’s security. One reason for twitchiness in Mr Saakashvili’s inner circle is a feeling that Georgia faces a threat from a resurgent Russia, and the West is a wobbly ally. The latest shenanigans must not send the Kremlin a signal that Georgia is up for grabs. A NATO summit in Bucharest in April is due to consider the conditions for Georgia, eventually, to join. Any offer must not give Mr Saakashvili a free ride. Membership would require not only continued development of Georgia’s well financed armed forces, but also the entrenchment of NATO’s central values: the rule of law and political pluralism. The path to membership is likely to be longer and tougher, thanks to Mr Saakashvili’s blunders. But these must also not give Russia any veto over Georgia’s future.

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Europe.view

People power
Nov 15th 2007
From Economist.com

Ex-communist politicians now face demanding voters

THE gloomy story of east European politics goes like this. Politicians are out of touch and voters don’t care; outside pressure can be safely ignored; reform stalls or goes backwards. That certainly has seemed the case in many new member states of the European Union, and in countries queuing to join. It looks like the story of Georgia now.

But the real trend may be a different one: voters are increasingly impatient with inept, heavy-handed or corrupt governments. Last month Polish voters threw out the brusque and incompetent Law and Justice party, overturning their own reputation for cynicism and apathy in the process.

Supposedly passive Latvians have successfully defended one of the country’s strongest independent institutions, an anti-corruption agency known by the acronym KNAB (which stands for Corruption Prevention and Combating bureau). The business-friendly coalition government of Prime Minister Aigars Kalvitis had tried to sack KNAB’s director, Aleksejs Loskutovs, ostensibly because of trivial book-keeping irregularities. The real reason seems to be KNAB’s success in investigating campaign-finance abuses that it says involve Mr Kalvitis’s party.

Mr Kalvitis’s pressure prompted the largest demonstrations since the dying days of the Soviet Union. A recent one was joined, rather unusually, by the country’s president, Valdis Zatlers, who said that the government should resign soon.

Now Mr Kalvitis says he will stand down, and has backtracked on the suspension of Mr Loskutovs. Whatever the outcome, the days when Latvian politics was stitched up by a handful of tycoons, each with a political party in his pocket, seem to be over.

Though the crackdown in Georgia reflects dismally disappointing misjudgment at the highest level, the story behind it is rather more encouraging. The opposition demonstrations of the past weeks may have been in part financed and stoked by outsiders, and they sometimes sounded hysterical and silly—demanding the return of the monarchy, for example.

But some of the grievances expressed were real. The gains of the economic boom did indeed seem to be too narrowly shared. The highest reaches of officialdom seemed to have developed a culture of impunity. It would have been truly worrying if Mikheil Saakashvili’s personal popularity and grip on power meant that nobody was bothered that some things were going wrong, and it is a sign of Georgia’s deepening civic culture that its citizens chose to do something about it.

Similarly, the protests against the state of emergency now reflect commendable public concern, which the West should endorse, not ignore. In Georgia and Ukraine alike, the real legacy of revolutions against corrupt authoritarian rule is not the immediate flowers, which soon wither, but the way that the democratic sub-soil is enriched and deepened. Nothing like this was visible in the dim days of Mr Saakashvili’s predecessor, Eduard Shevardnadze. His ability to buy off and sideline any putative opposition was a depressing feature of Georgia’s underdeveloped democracy.

Biffing governments is one thing. Providing alternatives is another. Georgia’s opposition does not look like a credible potential government. Its destiny for now may be to stimulate better behaviour by the authorities, not to take power itself.

Latvia’s opposition consists of a freemarket party led by the eccentric Einars Repse (nicknamed “Martian”) and a pro-Russian grouping seen by many Latvians as little more than a Kremlin puppet. In Poland, it is too early to tell whether the Civic Platform government will show real vision, competence and integrity, or founder like its predecessor.

The role of money is still the most worrying question. How can poor countries’ political systems stay open and fair when some of the players are billionaires? As western Europe’s failure to stand up to Kremlin lures shows, maintaining honesty and public-spiritedness in the face of huge bribes is a hard task.

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