ANALYSIS:The break-up of the Soviet empire left a legacy of contested borders in the Caucasus, writes Tony Kinsella
TRAVEL A few hundred metres west out of Clones and you find yourself in Fermanagh. The processes and influences which fixed that Monaghan-Fermanagh boundary are lost in the mists of the late 16th century. It would be little more than a line on a map for some 335 years, but in the fraught 1921 settlement of the Irish War of Independence it became an international border.
Our planet is scarred by hundreds of such lines. Internal administrative divisions, often haphazardly following minor rivers or even property boundaries, metamorphose into internationally-recognised borders as empires collapse. Few corners of the globe are quite as scarred as the Caucasus. Hittite, Greek, Persian, Roman, Byzantine, Mongol, Ottoman, Russian and other empires have washed backwards and forwards along the coasts and through the valleys of one of the most beautiful places on earth.
Peoples have been evicted, settled, migrated, become Christians or Muslims, adopted languages and alphabets (including the unique 33-letter Georgian one) in function of conditions over which they exercised precious little influence.
One distinction between the Russian empire and other empires was that it was built on a single landmass - with the exception of Alaska which the US bought in 1867.
Local administrative divisions mattered little when power was totally concentrated in St Petersburg and later Moscow. Josef Stalin, born in the Georgian town of Gori in 1878, was acutely aware of the potential danger posed to his Soviet Union by its "nationalities". Some of Stalin's many paranoiac nightmares have come to pass as the bomb-damaged streets and apartment buildings of his home town have jousted with the Beijing Olympics for front-page coverage these past days.
The Soviet system had a potentially dangerous habit of attributing titular autonomy to regions and districts. Republics and entities abounded. Most had their own armed police forces, while the republics had paramilitary forces under the command of their own ministries of the interior.
The lethal legacy of this system was devastatingly revealed during the Beslan school massacre of September 2004. City, state and Russian forces stumbled over each other, the school was not sealed off and no provision for medical services was made before an incoherent and unco-ordinated assault developed. Officially some 334 civilians perished, including 186 children.
Beslan lies just to the north of Vladikavkaz, the capital of North Ossetia, which became an autonomous republic in 1990. South Ossetia remained an Autonomous Oblast (district) of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic. Ossetians, to place them in an Irish context, lived in both Monaghan and Fermanagh, largely ignoring the formal boundary between them.
Georgia proclaimed its independence in April 1991 in a wave of nationalist fervour, partially expressed by the abolition of South Ossetian autonomy. Fighting broke out across South Ossetia in the winter of 1991. This involved armed units based around the former Georgian and South Ossetian police forces, ex-soldiers, and a variety of militia.
In the summer of 1992 Russian president Boris Yeltsin and his Georgian counterpart (and former Soviet foreign minister) Eduard Shevardnadze agreed a ceasefire under the auspices of the largely moribund Commonwealth of Independent States. This essentially froze forces where they were, establishing joint patrols and a Control Commission. The joint aspect involved Russian, Georgian and South Ossetian elements.
The mandate of this force was never overly clear, the difficulties involved in drawing peacekeeping forces from the protagonists never addressed, and no endgame was agreed - but it remains an agreed international peacekeeping force.
Imagine the potential for chaos if, in 1969, British and Irish troops had both been deployed in Northern Ireland - with the participation of "Northern Ireland forces". RUC and B Specials plus local militia would have operated in zones patrolled by British forces, while "nationalist militia" would have appeared in zones under Irish control.
This, plus another conflict area in Abkhazia, was where the security situation in Georgia remained stuck until President Saakashvili launched his reckless shelling of the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, on August 8th last, killing several Russian soldiers.
The Ossetians, the Abhkazians and the Russians were, it seems, waiting for just such an opportunity. Some 30,000 ground troops, along with naval and air forces, quickly routed the small Georgian army whose most modern elements were serving with US forces in Iraq. Moscow had applied the Colin Powell doctrine of using overwhelming force in defence of vital interests.
Tbilisi based itself on two utterly outdated concepts. One that people, in this case 70,000 South Ossetians and 200,000 Abhkazians, could be forced into becoming Georgians - an approach not wholly different from the more myopic of Irish republican ones.
The second was that the US still dominates our world. Since Washington supported Tbilisi, Moscow would not dare react.
The US quickly withdrew its 170 US military trainers. Washington continues to huff and, through Dick Cheney, to manage even an occasional petulant puff, but is out of options. Its armed forces are fully committed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and its policy of encircling a weakened Russia now lies in tatters.
Directly attacking Russia has again been shown not to be the most effective of military strategies. Recent Russian investment in repairing the nuts and bolts of its armed forces has paid obvious dividends.
Crisis management on our planet has become an increasingly regionalised task. The EU brokered the Georgian ceasefire, as Asean (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) cajoles the Burmese junta, and the South African Development Community oils the wheels of transition in Zimbabwe.
National security has become an international question. Those in Tbilisi, Washington or Moscow who deny that reality are comforted only by those who oppose the development of multilateral security instruments and processes. They are perfectly entitled to venerate their pasts, but that does not entitle them to compromise our futures.