More than one commentator has let the word Sudetenland slip from his lips during the current dust-up in Georgia. For the uninitiated, Sudetenland was how folks, before World War II, referred to the German-speaking bits of Czechoslovakia. The territory was forcibly annexed into Germany by you-know-who in 1938, one of the first concessions to Germany in the West’s policy of appeasement (the rest of Czechoslovakia was annexed the following year), which ended upon Germany’s invasion of Poland.
There are some remarkable similarities to what we are seeing now in South Ossetia and the Sudetenland crisis of the 1930s. It seems there is a handbook to annexing a weaker neighbor’s territory, and the Russians have followed it chapter and verse.
1. Find some justification – ethnic, political, historical, what-have-you – that warrants intervention in the target territory.
For Germany, it was the large population ethnic Germans living in the Sudetenland that was used as a pretext for German intervention, so despite the fact that Bohemia and Moravia (there was never a ‘Sudetenland’ per se) were possessions of the old pre-World War I Austrian empire, Nazi Germany carefully laid down the ethnic argument for annexation long before springing forth. It helped that Germany, via the Anschluss, had already, in effect, annexed Austria itself.
As we turn towards the conflict in Georgia, the roots of Russian interventionism go back to the drawing of a political boundary in the early 1920s by the Soviets, carving out of Georgian territory a South Ossetia that had never previously existed; in fact, there is no ‘Ossetia,’ either. The designation was one manufactured by the Soviets in a kind of divide-and-conquer strategy in the Caucasus. By issuing South Ossetians Russian passports a few years back, Russia furthered the pretense that these folks were ‘Russian citizens.’
Just as the Sudeten Germans might have had some legitimate gripes about their treatment by the Czechs, so, too, the Ossetians might have some grievances against the Georgians. This is so much the better when trying to hoodwink liberal democracies about ulterior motives and leads us to Step 2.
2. Plant provocateurs and agents within the target territory’s ‘provisional’ government.
The loudest voices of Sudeten German complaint received their marching orders straight from Berlin. They worked hand in glove with the Germans to, first, provoke ethnic tensions in the region, and, second, to thwart all good-faith efforts to resolve the situation by political means, necessitating further intervention by Germany.
Today’s South Ossetia is a spookily similar replay of this step. The ‘government’ of South Ossetia is nothing more than a conclave of thugs and ex-KGB operatives. Writing last week for Radio Free Europe, Yulia Latynina explained:
“…there is no way the regime in South Ossetia can be in any sense called “separatist.” Who there is a separatist? The head of the local KGB, Anatoly Baranov, used to head the Federal Security Service (FSB) in the Russian Republic of Mordovia. The head of the South Ossetian Interior Ministry, Mikhail Mindzayev, served in the Interior Ministry of Russia’s North Ossetia. The South Ossetian ‘defense minister,’ Vasily Lunev, used to be military commissar in Perm Oblast, and the secretary of South Ossetia’s Security Council, Anatoly Barankevich, is a former deputy military commissar of Stavropol Krai. So who exactly is a separatist in this government? South Ossetian ‘prime minister’ Yury Morozov?***“It [South Ossetia’s government] is a joint venture of siloviki generals and Ossetian bandits for making money in a conflict with Georgia [my boldface]. For me, the most surprising thing in this entire story is the complete lack of any strategic goals on the part of the South Ossetians.”
Of course, they did have strategic goals; it was to delay and stall any possible resolution of the Georgian-Ossetian conflict until such time that the Russians could annex the territory.
3. Manufacture a ‘humanitarian’ crisis.
The above steps, however, mightn’t provide sufficient cover for military action and eventual annexation. One of the keys to annexing your neighbor’s land is in not spooking foes who are powerful enough to intervene. There needs to be additional justification.
For the Germans of 70 years ago, it was the claimed political and human rights violations by the Czechoslovak government in connection with the Sudeten German minority. Of course, there’s a little bit of truth in every lie. The Czechs did not care for the Sudeten Germans, it’s true, but aside from the preferential treatment of the majority, common for that era, the Sudeten Germans were not the victims of what we today call genocide or ethnic cleansing. They were, instead, subjected to what I’d call petty discrimination, which is no doubt reprehensible, but hardly a pretext for German intervention.
Fast forward to today and, again, the similarities are eerily similar. Russia has accused Georgia of committing all manner of grave ills in South Ossetia. Genocide…ethnic cleansing…you name it; however, there is no evidence of any of it. Journalistic accounts of the goings-on in South Ossetia are practically non-existent due to the remoteness of the region and Russian controls on the foreign press corps.
Like the Sudetenland of yesteryear, there is significant hostility between the two peoples, but hardly genocide. To give you some idea of the status quo ante, Yulia Latynina, again from her Radio Free Europe piece, described the security situation before the invasion:
“Whenever someone starts telling us about shelling in Tskhinvali, it is important to keep in mind exactly what Tskhinvali is. It is not a city somewhere in the middle of a republic that is being fired upon by saboteurs. On three sides, Tskhinvali is surrounded by Georgian villages. The edge of Tskhinvali is a military outpost. South Ossetian forces fire from there into the Georgian villages, and the Georgians respond with fire of their own. To help keep Georgian fire from hitting civilians in the city, all the South Ossetians would have to do is move their military base forward a couple hundred meters.
But, of course, it is a fundamental principle of terrorists the world over – set up firing points in civilian areas and then when your enemy fires on you, you gleefully parade the bodies of your own children in front of the television cameras. Kokoity’s terrorists are following this same principle. If South Ossetia can in any way be considered a state, it must be considered a terrorist state.
When we are told about ‘peaceful civilians’ in South Ossetia, we must keep in mind that the situation there is similar to that in Palestinian refugee camps. South Ossetia, like the Palestinian Liberation Organization before it, is not a state or an ethos or a territory. It is a peculiar form of mutated government in which residents have been turned into militarized refugees.”
If we’re going to call the above situation ‘genocide’, then we’re going to have to develop an entirely new concept to describe the Holocaust, the Serbian actions in Bosnia, the massacre in Rwanda, and so on. In fact, if this is genocide, then Russian actions in Chechnya would likewise qualify (many times over).
It is a favorite tact of the despot to cynically employ the language and poses of religion to obfuscate quite opposite ends. Shakespeare noted as much in Richard the Third, when Buckingham counsels Richard thusly:
The Maior is here at hand: intend some feare,
Be not you spoke with, but by mightie suit:
And looke you get a Prayer-Booke in your hand,
And stand betweene two Church-men, good my Lord,
For on that ground Ile make a holy Descant:
And be not easily wonne to our requests,
Play the Maids part, still answer nay, and take it.
Of course, we have long swapped out Christianity for the ersatz religion of international law and international human rights, and the modern despot, rather than appearing “betweene two Church-men” now simply hides his aims beneath the rhetoric of liberal democracy and human rights, hence the appeals to Western ears by invoking ‘justice,’ ‘genocide,’ ‘ethnic cleansing,’ ‘peace-keeping,’ and the like. But make no mistake, this is a land grab of the old school, pure and simple.
4. Rinse and repeat.
Of course, we all know the sad history of Europe post Sudetenland. The Germans, emboldened by the lack of resistance to their annexation of the Sudetenland, went further until the point of no return was passed, throwing the world into a spasm of violence unprecedented in its scope and severity.
First, South Ossetia, then Abkhazia, then Georgia proper. What’s next…Crimea? The Baltics? As Strategic Forecasting reported this morning:
But in Georgia’s twilight hour, Stratfor’s gaze is not particularly riveted on Tbilisi. Georgia’s fate is more or less sealed. At dawn either the bombs will fall and the tanks will advance and depose the Georgian government by force, or a siege will begin that will depose it in time. Either way, the government of what is currently known as Georgia will evolve into a form that slavishly respects Russian wishes. The only reason Russian officials have not said they will enforce “regime change” is because they feel the term is too American. Whatever the nomenclature, the details of how this change happens pale in comparison to what such a change represents.
Instead, Stratfor’s gaze is shifting westward, to those states that only recently escaped the Russian grip and “successfully” joined the West: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia (formerly Czechoslovakia), Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. They have grown and prospered in NATO and the European Union, but their position remains fragile. They are all small states, and collectively – much less alone – they are no match for a strengthening Russia.
And so now we are in a race against time. Moscow will soon attempt to flood its power into the region while the West will try to reinforce its newest members against that flood.
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