Is Journalism Worth Dying For?: Final Dispatches (49 page)

This is the madness of tribalism. It is a modern, virulent disease which causes more and more people to want to commit acts of retaliative terrorism against someone or something. The prognosis for eliminating the disease is not good. The madness of tribalism is set to spread.

Islamophobia is being ratcheted up, with Muslims viewed as outcasts and pressure put at every opportunity on the Islamic world both generally and at a local level. “Everything is their fault,” because the more we give them a hard time, the more they will return the favor. This is the long-familiar Law of the Conservation of Evil.

The incompetence, inefficiency and perfidy of Russia’s secret services is becoming increasingly evident. They are partners in an international coalition which they cherish and, as we have seen, the more acts of terrorism there are, the more financial resources and power the secret services demand for themselves, including the right to take measures of an extra-judicial character. Their excuse is the need to catch another al-Qaeda cell, but in this they are usually unsuccessful, yet another terrorist act occurs, and everything is repeated. Those who demanded the extra resources and powers are not retired for failing to do their duty. In Russia they expect medals. They continue to furrow their brows and pretend they are doing a great job.

And yet, are the numbers of those wishing to cause explosions being reduced? No. They are increasing. Very few still believe the myth that we have only to catch bin Laden to be able to live in peace.
Increasingly, it occurs to people that the secret services find the hullabaloo about international terrorism highly profitable, and that the secret services themselves are part and parcel of what is sometimes the war against terrorism, and at other times just terrorism plain and simple.

We live in times when non-state terrorism is in a deadly embrace with state terrorism, the one complementing the other, and both of them targeting us. There is nowhere to hide. We are equally defenceless against our own secret services and against the growing number of those seeking revenge – for religion, for themselves, for their country, for their beliefs. There is no shortage of causes.

We run round in circles. The general fear of terrorist acts encourages a loosening of control over the secret services, who are supposedly doing what is needed but are in fact doing exactly as they please, and accordingly nothing useful. Who can be trusted in these circumstances? Nobody. The contemporary total lack of faith in the state authorities only strengthens the madness of tribalism.

Judge for yourselves: the lunacy of the notion that the FSB could be involved in the anticipated terrorist acts in France and the transporting of explosives to Paris by diplomatic bag seems clear. One might be tempted to laugh at this latest nonsense someone has put on the Internet. Standing between drivel on the Internet and us, however, are recent events in Qatar. In Doha, agents of the Russian secret services blew up Russia’s enemy Zelimkhan Yandarbiev [a former Acting President of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria]. The agents failed to cover their tracks, were caught, and now have confessed to assassination.

What needs to be added? The Doha bomb proves, quite apart from anything else, that Russia has returned to the Soviet period in the sense that it is not only practising political terrorism within its own borders, in Chechnya, but is also exterminating people wherever it pleases. After Yandarbiev’s assassination, it is not so easy to laugh off the idea of diplomatic explosives.

We now know that for “our people” exploding a bomb in France is merely a matter of technique, not permissibility. Some in Russia support
the tactic of political terrorism which came in with Putin, while others are categorically opposed to it. Be that as it may, the tribalism of the FSB (or GRU) is real. Everything is permitted.

We again face that question of who to trust. Who can you trust as you go down into the Metro, as you take your seat in a suburban train, on a steamer or plane, or fall asleep in your own home?

Nobody. This total lack of trust will sweep away the very governments which have sown it – be sure of that. But, as we already know, it is a royal path to ideological radicalism when some, in order to forget everything, join the skinheads; others are Islamic murid devotees seeking enlightenment or jihadists; others again are something else. It is impossible to predict what a brain infected with the madness of tribalism will dream up tomorrow.

The world must start coming to an agreement about our collective survival rather than continuing its coalitions for extermination and destruction. The race between different kinds of madness we are witnessing will, of course, bring this about sooner or later. The question is only, at the cost of how many victims?

HOT MONEY UNDERLIES THE KREMLIN’S SUPPORT FOR CHAOS IN GEORGIA

September 20, 2004

As we know, in the days immediately following the Beslan nightmare, Messrs Putin and Ivanov (the one who is Minister of Defence) were unable to come up with anything more original than imitating Bush and the gentlemen closest to him, and promised to conduct pre-emptive strikes against the bases of terrorists and the terrorists themselves no matter where they might be found. It was clear to everybody that they were talking about Georgia which, without Eduard Shevardnadze,
^*
is increasingly slipping out of Kremlin control. More precisely, about the Pankisi Gorge, the territory continguous with Chechnya.

Why should the Kremlin so hate Georgia? Why does Georgia so vehemently resist Kremlin control? And why does the Kremlin react so over-sensitively to Georgia’s opposition? What is there now about this country and its foremost representatives that makes the Kremlin think it can bomb its way through their territory? Is Russia’s war against Georgia a predictable result of our foreign policy, or is it an instant excuse generated by the Kremlin’s political imperatives? A post-Beslan, post-traumatic stress syndrome?

In seeking answers to these questions, let us go from the simple to the complex, bearing in mind that the underlying causes of many inter-state cataclysms (and a war between Russia and Georgia would be precisely such a catastrophe) should be sought in elementary matters which lie on the surface.

Of course, Mikheil Saakashvili is a very clever boy. Moreover, he is handsome and a favorite of journalists all over the world. Clever boys, handsome men and other people’s favorites have for a long time been systematically removed by Putin from his entourage. But what about the Georgians’ court? What do Putin and his entourage see and hear when they meet Saakashvili?

Our approach to the President of Georgia begins today with his Senior Adviser.

“Daniel Kunin,” he introduces himself in English, and Daniel’s smile is wholly American, as if you are his best friend. He is very likeable and very young, he’s not wearing a jacket, and his tie has slipped to one side. He has his shirt sleeves rolled up. Daniel doesn’t speak Russian, although he turns out to be a descendant of the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. Savour this: in emigration Bakunin’s family dropped the first syllable of their surname in order not to be identified with their revolutionary kinsman, and now Kunin, with American citizenship, is the adviser to the Georgian President and has his salary paid by the US State Department. The source of his salary is no secret. Daniel himself tells me about it, and very humorously. When “Misha” invited him to become a senior aide, he agreed in principle and immediately sorted out all the details. The miserly salary Georgia could offer was not enough, so Misha organised him a salary in the USA.

Daniel is a very influential figure in the Georgian state civil service, where everybody now speaks English. This is
comme il faut
here, as it was
comme il faut
under the Tsarist regime to speak French. Even the President, Mikheil Saakashvili, and Prime Minister Zurab Zhvaniya, and the Speaker of Parliament, Nino Burdzhanadze, and the Deputy Defence Minister, Vasil Sikharulidze, and of course the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Salome Zurabishvili, are keen to be interviewed in English. Of course, that is their right if they find it more convenient.

One can imagine how, in this atmosphere of insistent Westernisation, members of Putin’s Administration must feel, accustomed as they are to seeing everybody in the Commonwealth of Independent States at their feet.

“What language do you usually use when you’re talking to your boss?” I ask Bakunin’s descendant.

“Usually English,” Daniel replies easily and cheerily. “Only during negotiations, when it’s important nobody else should understand us, do we talk in Georgian. I have taken private lessons, and used to work in Georgia in an NGO.”

An “NGO” is what they they call voluntary organizations.

“And you moved from an NGO straight into the position of a senior aide of the President of Georgia?”

“Yes, the entire government administration here is now made up of ex-NGO people,” Daniel laughs.

A bureaucratic apparatus composed of charity workers? One can imagine what our statist President, who hates all these NGOs, must feel when he is obliged to deal with this kind of new Georgian officialdom. And also when this American live wire, Kunin-Bakunin, in the presence of Putin, gives advice in his Anglo-Georgian patois to the recalcitrant Saakashvili.

“What does being an American aide of the Georgian President involve?” I ask Daniel, and he replies:

“Offering new ideas 24 hours a day – morning, noon and night. To have dozens of options and proposals on every issue which interests Misha.”

My diagnosis of today’s official Tbilisi is that it has adopted the characteristics of American workaholic management, exactly as portrayed in American films: hamburgers, no deference, with everybody cheery, optimistic and life-affirming. The managers of the country are totally orientated towards the West, without any nuances. No helmsman to the north-west, none of the political unpredictability in which today’s Kremlin court is mired. Georgia under Saakashvili is manifestly anti-byzantine, anti-bureaucratic, anti-hierarchical. It is an anti-colony rejecting the presence of a governing metropolis. The Kremlin, however, is the exact opposite: neo-Soviet byzantinism, arch-hierarchy, nostalgia for an empire which flows over into practical action to subordinate and suborn former colonies, of which the latest example is the $800 million tax gift to Ukraine and Belarus for supporting a quasi-Soviet status quo. And the politics of provocation.

Mikheil Saakashvili really is charming and smiles a lot. He is direct and precise in what he says:

“We asked the Russians, ‘What have we done wrong? Why do you so dislike us?’ We promised to pay pensions and salaries to state officials in South Ossetia. What’s wrong with that? The Russians did not reply and began provocative exchanges of fire. We have American troops here, but we play it down. We say, ‘We do not want an armed conflict,’ and the Russians increase the pressure. But we will not allow the same thing to be repeated as happened here in 1992 [when a four-man Military Council which included Shevardnadze took power]. That stopped reforms. We want to make Georgia attractive. What’s wrong with that? But frankly it is very difficult to tell what Russia wants from us. All its actions in Georgia are irrational. We asked the international community to organise a conference on South Ossetia, on its status, to suggest a political solution. The UN, OSCE and the European Union supported the idea. The Russians turned it down.”

When did you last talk to Putin?

When I phone they don’t put me through. I have sent two letters to Putin. I have had no reply. (A brief, impromptu meeting took place
only on September 16 in Astan, Kazakhstan at a summit meeting of the Commonwealth of Independent States.)

How did you react to the statement by Putin’s Chechen favorite, Ramzan Kadyrov, that he would send thousands of his troops to South Ossetia and “solve the problem”!

“Fuck him!”

    On this high point we pretty much concluded. And now about the atmosphere in the Georgian President’s office, which was not spelled out in words and sentences but which was very striking. He is completely in love with his people. He speaks of the death of Georgian soldiers as a catastrophe: “When 16 people were killed, I had to take a decision.” And he took it: to withdraw the Georgian divisions to a safe distance, so that no more Georgian soldiers would die.
^*

I emerged staggered by the contrast. In Russia not 16 but 16,000 soldiers can die and nothing would induce the President to save the rest by moving units back to a safe distance. It is not Russia’s size which is at fault here, not its millions of inhabitants, but its mean-spiritedness. Saakashvili’s love for his people must, one supposes, be completely baffling to Putin, who has persuaded himself that he is reviving an empire and must not hesitate to squander lives. Once the supposed road to empire has been embarked upon, colonies must prostrate themselves, and anybody who is not with us is against us. These are the irrational causes of the Kremlin’s spat with Tbilisi,
but there are other, entirely rational financial and economic, reasons for it.

What are modern Russia’s interests in the territories beyond the Caucasian mountains? What has Putin’s bureaucracy got to fight over in the region? In the first place, Russia wants to strengthen its so-called “Christian (Ossetian) axis” in the Caucasus as a counterweight to its “soft Islamic underbelly” (Chechnya, Ingushetia, Karachayevo-Cherkessia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Dagestan and Adigeya). These axes have a long history and are real enough. There genuinely is a territorial imperative which makes it logical for Russia to focus on South Ossetia, a tiny scrap of land on the other side of the mountains from North Ossetia.

In the second place, Russia has an interest in Abkhazia, a strip of land on the Black Sea coast, which it needs if it is to have overland access to Armenia, the Kremlin’s sole remaining partner in that region (the others all having deserted Russia) where the US does not yet have a strategic presence.