Mark Zoryan: The West is beginning to realize that the “Georgian situation” is absurd

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The attempts of the US administration and the European structures to pretend that nothing worth mentioning is going on in Javakhq no longer make sense. As far as we know, the embassies of almost all European states and the US embassy in Georgia have informed their governments of the processes that took place during the local elections in Georgia and pointed out the peculiarity of the situation in Samtskhe-Javakheti and Kvemo-Kartli.

Presently the diplomatic circles in Tbilisi are actively discussing the “bad marks” Georgia has received for its local elections. These discussions got especially active after the Tbilisi visit of the US assistant secretary of state Daniel Fried, who was obviously trying to save the face of the ruling regime. At the same time, we have received enough reports saying that the US administration are extremely displeased with the style and outcome of the elections. Now that the Georgian-Russian conflict has gone beyond any sensible limits of inter-state confrontation, the Americans and Europeans have faced a problem similar to the ones they faced in the Balkans and solved by political and military interference.

The recent – deliberately representative — Washington seminar on Russian-Georgian relations has come to a conclusion that the propaganda task has lost any sense as it has become very hard to find arguments to explain to the world community the point and the political causes of this conflict, which is already spreading outside the region.

During the seminar, one of the leading US experts on Eastern Europe, representative of the OSCE office in the US congress Michael Ox said that the present situation in Georgian-Russian relations does not serve the interests of the US and is a barren scheme.

On the whole, the American experts on Eastern Europe, who are known for their colorful language, describe this situation as “an absolute deadlock,” while the attempts of the West to “separate the fighting sides” are qualified as “rotten politicking.” If there is anything that unites the American and European experts, it is their unanimity that the “Georgian situation” is absurd.

Exactly now that there is a real want of effective political expertise, the International Crisis Group – who we know well for its activities in Karabakh – has been assigned the task of facilitating the development of proposals – in fact, a plan of how to settle the situation in Samtskhe-Javakheti. This work will certainly cover a complex of problems concerning the ethnic rights of the local Armenian population. Certain Georgian and Armenian experts are involved in this project. According to the preliminary information, the group will recommend to enlarge self-government in Javakheti and Kvemo-Kartli. Well aware of the ICG’s position on the Karabakh problem, we can hardly expect that they will make any realistic proposals and that the Georgian authorities will accept them. At the same time, this initiative is hardly the result of the activities of the Armenian lobby or of the talks of US administration representatives with Armenian politicians. The US has just waited for a tenser scenario in Javakhq to interfere and is now ready to show an open interest in this region of Georgia.

Today, the problem is that the US has realized that Georgia is a peculiar country and one can’t just apply general operational approaches to it. That’s why they have decided to “divide” Georgia into political or regional-political blocs and to deal with each of them individually. Obviously, they hope that this will help them achieve certain goals in the sphere of system security. Still, it seems that they have not yet fully grasped Georgia’s problems. We don’t mean the current policy but some more fundamental problems. So, we can assume that, having learned about new circumstances in the policy of Russia, Turkey and the South Caucasian states, the US has decided to work out new scenarios of its political and economic expansion in the region. Otherwise, it would be hard to explain why they have suddenly taken so keen interest in the processes they formerly ignored.