Russia’s victory over Georgia in the armed conflict in South Ossetia, the diplomatic maneuvers which followed the conflict and showed that the Western community cannot (and does not want to) oppose Russia in a serious way, and Dmitry Medvedev’s bold statements at the Valdai International Discussion Club make the President of Russia ‘a hero of the day’. Some time ago it was difficult for Dmitry Medvedev to show his real worth, but today his importance as a strong state leader is beyond any doubt. The only problem is that the President and his team believed that his role would be quite different.

The Kremlin bureaucrats hoped that Medvedev would be a kind of a liberal leader who could come to terms with the West. He was supposed to slowly, quietly and surely soften the regime, established by his predecessor Vladimir Putin, and to make the Russian capitalism legitimate and respectable worldwide. The liberals were ready (on certain terms) to put up with the ‘bloody regime’ that would be reformed gradually. And Vladimir Putin became the Prime Minister in order to protect the interests of some ‘important’ persons during the regime’s transformation by warning the incumbent President and his course against any ‘extremes’.

The presidential succession was thought over carefully, organized excellently and performed perfectly well. But not long after the new President’s inauguration, he had to start the confrontation with the West, quarreled with the liberals and provoked embarrassment among the bureaucrats.

It would be naive to explain this by Medvedev’s personal quality or by his desire to become independent of Vladimir Putin’s “old guard”. Quite the contrary, he’s followed Putin’s political course and has made it even tougher. On the other hand, it is apparently hard for a man of Dmitry Medvedev’s nature to play a role of a strong state leader and West’s “antagonist”. He justified himself in Vedomosti newspaper saying that owing to the force of circumstances he had no choice but to recognize the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and that he hadn’t planned to do it before Georgia’s armed conflict with South Ossetia. There is no reason for doubting his sincerity.

Here we can fix two consequences for Dmitry Medvedev’s presidency with certainty. The first one is that his positions as a national leader have been strengthened. The second one is that the ‘Medvedev project’, which had been elaborated a year and a half ago in the Kremlin, failed completely.

Now the President needs a new strategy and a new image urgently.

The reason for what has happened must lie in the economic processes, which cannot be influenced by the politicians. The global crisis is affecting Russia more and more and the current events are only its first signs. The world is breaking up into rivaling countries and blocs which try to protect and control their markets. Sincere mutual understanding and consensus gave place to conflict of interests. The irreconcilability of the state leaders is caused by Hobson’s choice rather than by their ideological confrontations. Those who talk about a new ‘Cold War’ miss the point. The Cold War was an ideological and social confrontation between two different systems. Today there are clashes engendered by the crisis of the single system including Russia, the USA, Georgia, Venezuela, Germany and South Ossetia. There will be no Cold War but there will be more ‘hot spots’.

The leaders of the states should respond to the new challenges which they have never had to face before. A year ago it seemed that the oil prices would always be high and the ruble rate would be stable. The Stabilization Fundand the reserves of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation werepermanently growing and nobody believed that this would come to an end. The industry also grew by leaps and bounds.

Unfortunately, the economic growth has become a thing of the past. Leanfleshed kine came and are eating up the fatfleshed kine right now. The Russian authorities will not rest on their laurels any more. The drastic alterations are required. The government understands that much better than the ordinary people and opposition do. But the authorities inwardly are not ready to carry out reforms.

The strategy of Russia’s development till 2020 is nothing but ridiculous wishful thinking that has nothing to do with present-day reality. The unsettled problems, which were ignored against a background of the economic growth, are coming to the forefront.

As the head of state, Medvedev will have to take up those challenges. His place in history depends on what steps he will take and how he will solve the problems. For the time being the Russian government has neither a clear policy nor, what is more, a strategy. No groundwork was laid even for propaganda and ideology. A new image of the President should be created now. But what kind of statesman will “Medvedev-2” be?

The Kremlin has got several options. It can pursue the policy of aggressive nationalism and promote the imperial traditions. True, wild enthusiasm, caused by Russia’s victory over Georgia, can vanish soon. And a new conflict, for example with Ukraine, would be far less popular and far more expensive. The prospects of victory will not be obvious either.

It is still more unlikely Russia will take the liberal course again. This does not meet the modern political and economic situation.

Dmitry Medvedev’s words about the multipolar world sound like antiglobalistic rhetoric more and more. Moscow started to seek partners in the South countries, to develop the relations with Venezuela and other Latin American states. It is good that the Russian officials have come to realize that the West is only a single part of the modern world. But I’m not sure that they will manage to use this knowledge properly.

Apart from that, although leftist policy may look attractive to the Russian authorities, I doubt that they will manage to follow it. Using the political rhetoric and changing the policy are quite different things. Left rhetoric without a proper domestic social policy looks absurd, in particular when things are reaching a crisis point.

The Venezuelans back their President Hugo Chaves because he had the natural resource revenues seriously redistributed to the poor rather than because he quarrels with Washington. And now that he had enlisted the people’s support, he can criticize the USA as much as he likes.

Meanwhile in Russia the government tries to put the cart before the horse, as always.

Boris Kagarlitsky is Director of the Institute of Globalization and Social Movements

September 25, 2008

http://www.eurasianhome.org/xml/t/opinion.xml?lang=en&nic=opinion&pid=1224

As Bolivia teeters on the brink of civil war, President Evo Morales staunchly maintains his commitment to constructing a popular democracy by working within the state institutions that brought him to power. The show down with the right wing is taking place against the backdrop of the thirty-fifth anniversary of the overthrow of Salvador Allende, the heroic if tragic president of Chile who believed that the formal democratic state he inherited could be peacefully transformed to usher in a socialist society.

Like Allende, Morales faces a powerful economic and political elite aligned with the United States that is bent on reversing the limited reforms he has been able to implement during his nearly three years in power. Early on, Morales--Bolivia’s first indigenous president--moved assertively to exert greater control over the natural gas and oil resources of the country, sharply increasing the hydro-carbon tax, and then using a large portion of this revenue to provide a universal pension to all those over sixty years old, most of whom live in poverty and are indigenous.

The self-proclaimed Civic Committees in Media Luna (Half Moon)--Bolivia’s four eastern departments--have orchestrated a rebellion against these changes, demanding departmental autonomy and control of the hydro-carbon revenues, as well as an end to agrarian reform and even control of the police forces. The Santa Cruz Civic Committee, dominated by agro-industrial interests, is supporting the Cruceño Youth Union (UJC), an affiliated group that acts as a para-military organization, seizing and fire bombing government offices, and attacking Indian and peasant organizations that dare to support the national government.

Morales’ efforts to transform the institutions of the country have focused on the popularly elected Constituent Assembly to draft a new constitution. The assembly was convened in mid 2006 with representatives from Morales’ political party, the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) holding 54 percent of the seats. In the drafting of the new constitution, the right wing political parties, led by Podemos (We Can), insisted that a two-thirds vote was needed even for the working committees to approve the different sections of the constitution. When they were overruled and a new constitution was close to being approved in November, 2007, members of the assembly, including its indigenous president, Silvia Lazarte, were assaulted in the streets of Sucre, the old nineteenth century capital where the assembly was being held.

Using words that evoked Allende’s last stand in the Chilean presidential palace, Evo Morales declared “dead or alive, I will have a new constitution for the country.” He quartered the assembly in an old castle under military protection where it adopted a constitution that has to be approved in a national referendum. Labeling Morales a “dictator,” the civic committees and the departmental prefects (governors) of Media Luna were able to stall the vote on the referendum, and instead organized departmental referendums for autonomy in May of this year that were ruled unconstitutional by the National Electoral Council.

Taking recourse in democracy rather than force, and searching for a national consensus, Morales then held up the vote on the new constitution, and instead put his presidency on the line in a recall referendum in which his mandate as well as that of the prefects of the departments could be revoked. On August 10, voters went to the polls and Morales won a resounding 67 percent of the vote, receiving a majority of the ballots in 95 of the country’s 112 districts with even the Media Luna department of Pando voting in his favor.

However, the insurgent prefects also had their mandates renewed. Based on the illegal, departmental plebiscites held in May, they moved to take control of Santa Cruz, the richest department. UJC shock troops roamed the streets of the city and surrounding towns, attacking and repressing any opposition by local indigenous movements and MAS-allied forces. Not wanting to provoke an outright rebellion, Evo Morales did not deploy the army or use the local police, leaving the urban area under the effective control of the UJC.

Simultaneously, the right wing--led by the Santa Cruz Civic Committee--began sewing economic instability, seeking to destabilize the Morales government much like the CIA-backed opposition did in Chile against Salvador Allende in the early 1970s. As in Chile, the rural business elites and allied truckers engaged in “strikes,” withholding or refusing to ship produce to the urban markets in the western Andes where the Indian population is concentrated, while selling commodities on the black market at high prices. The Confederation of Private Businesses of Bolivia called for a national producers’ shutdown if the government refused “to change its economic policies.”

The social movements allied with the government have mobilized against this right wing offensive. In the Media Luna, a union coalition of indigenous peoples and peasants campaigned against voting in the autonomy referendums, and have taken on the bands of the UJC as they try to intimidate and terrorize people. In the Andean highlands, the social movements descended on the capital La Paz in demonstrations backing the Morales’ government, including a large mobilization in June that stormed the American embassy because of its support for the right wing. In July, the federation of coca growers in the Chapare, where US anti-drug operations are centered, expelled the US Agency for International Development.

This past week the Civic Committees stepped up their efforts to take control of the Media Luna departments. In Santa Cruz on September 8, crowds of youth lead by the UJC seized government offices, including the land reform office, the tax office, state TV studios, the nationalized telephone company Entel, and set fire to the offices of a non-governmental human rights organization that promotes indigenous rights and provides legal advice. The military police, who had been dispatched to protect many of these offices, were forced to retreat, at times experiencing bloody blows that they were forbidden from responding to due to standing orders from La Paz not to use their weapons. The commanding general of the military police, while angrily denouncing the violent demonstrators, said that the military could take no action unless Evo Morales signed a degree authorizing the use of firearms.

What was in effect occurring was a struggle between Morales and the military over who would assume ultimate responsibility for the fighting and deaths that would ensue with a military intervention in Media Luna. The armed forces do not support the autonomous rebellion because it threatens the geographic integrity of the Bolivian nation. Yet they are reluctant to intervene because under past governments, when they fired on and killed demonstrators in the streets of La Paz, they were blamed for the bloodshed.

On September 10, as violence intensified throughout Media Luna, Evo Morales expelled US ambassador Philip Goldberg for “conspiring against democracy.” The month before, Goldberg had met with the prefect of Santa Cruz, Ruben Costas, who subsequently declared himself “governor” of the autonomous department and ordered the formal take over of government offices--including those collecting tax revenues. Costas is the principal leader of the rebellious prefects, and the main antagonist of Evo Morales.

September 11, the 35th anniversary of the coup against Allende, was the bloodiest day in the escalating conflict. In the Media Luna department of Pando, a para-military band with machine guns attacked the Indian community of El Porvenir, near the departmental capital of El Cobija, resulting in the death of at least 28 people. In a separate action, three policemen were kidnapped. The Red Ponchos, an official militia reserve unit of Indians loyal to Evo Morales, mobilized its forces to help the indigenous communities organize their self defense.

The next day Morales declared a state of siege in Pando and dispatched the army to move on Cobija and to retake its airport that had been occupied by right wing forces. Army units are also being sent to guard the natural gas oleoducts, one of which had been seized by the UJC, cutting the flow of gas to neighboring Brazil and Argentina. General Luis Trigo Antelo, the commander in chief of the Bolivian Armed Forces declared: “We will not tolerate any more actions by radical groups that are provoking a confrontation among Bolivians, causing pain and suffering and threatening the national security.” In signing the order authorizing the use of force in Pando, Morales stated that he felt responsible for the humiliation of the military and the police by radicals and vandals because he had not authorized them to use their weapons. This was the quid pro quo for getting the military high command to act.

After sustained fighting with at least three dead, the army took control of the airport and moved on the city. An order for the arrest of the prefect of Pando was issued for refusing to recognize the state of siege and for being responsible for the massacre in El Porvenir. In Santa Cruz, the police arrested 8 rioters of the UJC. Peasant organizations have announced they will march on the city to retake control of the government offices. The dissident prefects, led by Costas, are still demanding departmental autonomy and refusing to accept a national vote on the referendum for the new constitution.

Evo Morales refuses to back down, declaring in a meeting with supportive union leaders, “we will launch a campaign to approve the new constitution.” He did, however, indicate he may modify the draft to accommodate some of the demands for autonomy by the prefects. Like Allende, Morales continues to search for a democratic solution to the crisis in his country. For the moment, he has the backing of the Bolivian armed forces along with overwhelming popular support, thereby avoiding the ultimate fate of the Chilean president.

Roger Burbach is Director of the Center for the Study of the Americas (CENSA) based in Berkeley, CA. He has written extensively on Latin America and is the author of “The Pinochet Affair: State Terrorism and Global Justice.”

It seems that after the conflict with Georgia all we need is to clash with Ukraine. A lot of politicians both in Russia and Ukraine would definitely like it to happen.

The public statements made by Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, whom the status of the Ukrainian city of Sevastopol gives no rest at all, are unlikely to surprise or really offend anybody – everyone has already got accustomed to such declarations. And the problem of the distant year 2017, when there will be a need to relocate the Russian Black Sea Fleet from the Crimea, is not yet on the agenda: most probably, new politicians will have come to power in both Moscow and Kyiv by that time.

But a Caucasian crisis resulted in a new quarrel over Sevastopol, this time provoked by the Ukrainian side.

From now on, the Black Sea Fleet ships or Russian fighter jets’ leaving their bases in Sevastopol should meet some provocative requirements, established by the Ukrainian authorities. Seventy two hours before the departure the Command are obliged not only to notify the Ukrainian authorities of vessels’ leaving the base, but also to let them know of the purposes and route of their movement and to report on the arms and ammunition on board. This requirement does not accord with the secrecy that is always observed in the army, particularly considering that Ukraine maintains close relations with both NATO and Georgia. Moreover, the new requirements, which have been laid down by Kyiv, are at odds with the existing treaties on the status of the Russian Black Sea Fleet and Sevastopol.

It is easy to guess that sooner or later a Russian ship will not obey those requirements and the Ukrainian party will use force to block its leaving the base. Here is classical casus belli.

On the other hand, the Slavic way of doing work will almost certainly destroy all the crafty designs of the warmongers. At worst, the Russians will pretend to report, and the Ukrainians will pretend to believe those reports. After all, a ship can go to the Russian city of Novorossiysk and at sea it can receive the order to head for the Abkhazian city of Sukhumi or the Georgian city of Poti.

But it is alarming that the tireless politicians in Kyiv and Moscow are thinking of more and more outright and sophisticated ways of provoking clashes between Russia and Ukraine. Now there are rumours that armed conflicts could take place. The Russian media write openly and cynically that after the ‘peacemaking operation’ in Georgia the ‘friendship-making operation’ should be held in Ukraine.

The current Russian-Ukrainian conflict refutes the statement that close economic relations hinder confrontation. As an oil exporter, Russia depends on the Ukrainian transit routes, and Ukraine, which is an industrial country with limited resources, needs Russian raw materials and fuel urgently. However, this interdependence leads to constant quarrels rather than to general concord, cooperation and mutual understanding. It comes natural as each party seeks to benefit from this partnership as much as possible and makes the least concessions to each other. The logic of capitalism turns economic cooperation into a kind of confrontation.

And yet, if the Russian-Ukrainian conflicts had nothing to do with much more important causes for instability, they would be rather comical. Even the collision between Moscow and the West over the Georgian events, which was unimaginable five or seven years ago, shows not only the deterioration of the relations between the parties involved in the Caucasian politics, but also more and more strained international relations, which is an integral part of all the large-scale economic depressions.

It is clear as daylight that things in Ukraine and Russia will go from bad to worse in the near future. Therefore, the “external enemy” will be looked for by the authorities in both countries more intensely. What’s most terrible is that the politicians become hostages of their own rhetoric. If the politicians speak about their irreconcilability for a long time, they will have to act in accordance with their words and to start fighting sooner or later. The politicians are concerned about their popularity ratings, but do not care about public opinions. They are ready to take risky steps in order to save their faces, but they do not ask the citizens about their vision of the political future. In other words, the ordinary people are unable to influence the politicians and to stave off confrontation.

There is nothing else left to do but hope either that the officials are cautious and have common sense or that the political crisis will make them address the internal problems before their creating external ones.

Boris Kagarlitsky is Director of the Institute of Globalization and Social Movements

http://www.eurasianhome.org/xml/t/opinion.xml?lang=en&nic=opinion&pid=1214

Mikhail Khodorkovsky is out of luck again. This time he was refused parole despite he had seemed to have good chances for it. The authorities made it clear that the situation could change and that there was every reason for hoping…

Being a state’s prisoner, the disgraced tycoon hoped that the new president of Russia would release him. The application for parole resembled an offer of prisoners of war exchange. But in exchange for Khodorkovsky’s discharge President Medvedev was supposed to be praised by the Western leaders and to be supported by the Russian liberals. Khodorkovsky’s discharge was a sure way to make Dmitry Medvedev look like a liberal.

New Russian President needed a good reputation indeed. When in the Kremlin it was decided to nominate Dmitry Medvedev for presidency, they sought to improve the relations with the West and to show the ‘liberal side’ of the current regime. This was immediately appreciated by some Russian liberals who were ready to admire the new leader’s slogan “Freedom is better than unfreedom” sounded discordantly to Putin’s tough rhetoric. While siloviki and nationalists, on the contrary, were frightened by that statement and possible reduction of their budgets.

Russian liberals were even ready to praise to the skies the former “bloody regime”. There was no need to change anything for it. There was a need only to supplement a couple of fine slogans uttered by the new leader with a finer gesture. For example, to discharge Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Medvedev could show a magic trick quickly turning the “bloody regime” into a democratic republic!

But the trick failed in spite of the spectators and performers’ hopes.

As ill luck would have it, the war with Georgia broke out at the wrong (or right) time. Though that war was to be nothing but a frontier conflict, nevertheless, it caused the avalanche-like process of political consequences. The U.S. Administration, which had a grudge against Russia for the hostilities in Georgia, toughened up the rhetoric towards Russia. The mass media hysteria in Washington caused the forming of a wide anti-Russian consensus between the Republicans and the Democrats. From then on, it makes no difference to the Kremlin who will become the next U.S. President. Any President will have to act sternly towards Moscow at the beginning of his term.

There is no point in flirting with the domestic liberal opposition against a background of the worsening of the relations with the USA. The oppositionists are not independent political force in Russia and they are of interest only because the Kremlin officials consider them representatives of the Western interests. If the Kremlin did not believe the liberals to be agents of foreign influence, the authorities would deal with them more disdainfully and would be harder on them. But as the foreigners are respected in Russia, the “agents of foreign influence” are esteemed to some extent.

The deterioration of the relations between Moscow and Washington makes the liberal opposition inefficient. Apparently realizing that or maybe simply being affected by their own propaganda, the liberals became really hysterical about the war in Georgia. The torrent of abuse and unsubstantiated accusations from the liberal mass media towards the Russian government can be compared only with the same muddy flow of the anti-Georgian propaganda from the Russian pro-government TV channels. However, there are significant differences here. In August the average people watched the Olympic Games rather than political programs. It is very good for emotional health of the nation that the war with Georgia took place simultaneously with the Olympic Games in Beijing: the national feelings were inoffensively expressed in the emotions of the sports fans.

The listeners to the “Ekho Moskvy” broadcasting station and the readers of liberal newspapers believe each word of their staff journalists like the Orthodox Christians believe a gospel revelation. That’s why they suffer from deep depression. Even the victories of the Russian team on the last days of the Olympic Games could not help those people to overcome it. Though, the proper Russian liberals should not support its national team. Russia’s ranking third in the Olympic Games should be regarded as an achievement of the “bloody regime” and, therefore, it can even worsen the depression.

Given the current situation, it made no sense for the Russian authorities to set Khodorkovsky free. In a period of liberal reforms Khodorkovsky’s release would be a gesture of good will, but after the armed conflict with Georgia this would be taken as a display of weakness.

The former head of Yukos will continue to be imprisoned until the Kremlin officials decide that it is time to implement liberal reforms again.

Boris Kagarlitsky is Director of the Institute of Globalization and Social Movements

http://www.eurasianhome.org/xml/t/opinion.xml?lang=en&nic=opinion&pid=1199