Former Soviet war zones. The hazards of a long, hard freeze

Unresolved wars have poisoned the newly independent republics of the former Soviet south - and could flare anew

IF THE so-called frozen conflicts of the Black Sea region are ever thawed out, somebody will need to be standing by with a very large bucket indeed.

To outsiders, that may seem like an odd warning: unless you have a special interest in the obscure enclaves of small, impoverished states, where local feuds have flared up and died down, a frozen conflict may sound like a conflict you can forget. But such a conclusion would be wrong: the region's unresolved wars - in Transdniestria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Nagorno-Karabakh - are a big reason why the newly independent states of the former Soviet south have failed miserably to fulfil their potential. Instead of enjoying their freedom, they have emerged into the world as stunted, embittered and ill-governed creatures. And if real fighting flares again - a process which has begun in South Ossetia - things could become far worse.

At the heart of each conflict is a claimed mini-state whose rulers prevailed, by dint of Russian arms, in a local war. While there are huge differences, these statelets have things in common. Ten years or more of isolation under unrecognised governments have left them as harsh, militarised societies, with few functioning institutions, and economies open to crime.

South Ossetia is the pettiest, but currently the hottest of the conflict zones. It is a landlocked province of Georgia which would have no viability as a legitimate country. It survives as a conduit for smuggling between Georgia and Russia, mainly in cheap spirits, arms and grain, under the diplomatic protection of the Russian government and the military protection of Russian troops.

Of the four statelets, Karabakh comes closest to being a normal society - at least for the ethnic Armenians who remain there. Nearly a million people from both sides of the war were put to flight by the fighting which concluded in 1994 with a big victory by soldiers from Karabakh and Armenia itself.

Especially since 2001, when a local bully and racketeer, Samvel Babayan, was put in jail, Karabakh - which calls itself independent but is in practice virtually joined to Armenia - has had something recognisable as local politics and a mixed economy. Investment from the Armenian diaspora has boosted the economy. One new arrival from America, Vartkes Anivian, started a dairy-products company after the war, and now employs 250 people. Municipal elections have just been held in the enclave - to the fury of Azerbaijan, to which Karabakh legally belongs - and there was genuine competition between the candidates. The atmosphere in Stepanakert, Karabakh's capital, is orderly in a post-Soviet way, not chaotic.

So Karabakh might have a decent future if the enclave's future could somehow be settled. Four years ago, a compromise seemed within reach: most of Karabakh would have been joined to Armenia, while the Azeris recovered the surrounding areas and gained a corridor between their republic's two parts. More recently, the mood on both sides has hardened, and a big body of Azerbaijani opinion longs to recover the land by force.

Small wars, or medium?

The fighting over Karabakh was and could again become a fair-sized war; South Ossetia by comparison is a small, though strategically significant, squabble. Abkhazia, in Georgia, and Transdniestria, in Moldova, fall somewhere in between.

Both Abkhazia and Transdniestria can make claims to special political status, if not to independence, on historical grounds. Both regimes control territories and economies capable of standing alone. But both are willing hostages of Russia, which helped them fight their wars of secession when the Soviet Union collapsed, and has given them military and diplomatic support ever since. It has issued passports so freely that probably a majority of the population in each enclave could claim Russian nationality. But Russia's “protection” has also become the main obstacle to a constitutional settlement. Russia prefers to keep the enclaves as its own pawns. At its most mischievous, the Kremlin's strategy may view Transdniestria as a second version of Kaliningrad, the Russian enclave near Poland - in other words, a trouble-making outpost on the borders of NATO. And some of the worst features of Russia's own governance have been transferred to its proteges in Georgia and Moldova: organised crime, corruption, and authoritarian leadership.

For the people of these non-countries, life goes on, after a fashion. “It is a normal town, but blown up a bit,” says a United Nations official trying to put the best face on Sukhumi, “capital” of Abkhazia. And there is indeed the ghost of something lovely in the landscape, where the beaches curve north to the Russian border.

But to call Sukhumi “normal”, even by the elastic standards of the Caucasus, is stretching things. For one thing, half of its population is missing. Ethnic Georgians fled the city or were driven out in the civil war of 1992-93. And to say that Sukhumi is blown up “a bit” risks flattering a town where only about one-third of the buildings are in good shape, one-third are badly run down, and one-third are derelict. The roads are crumbling, the pavements are grassing over, and the airport is dead save for a few UN helicopters. Tourists from Russia are the mainstay, along with agriculture, of the visible economy. The invisible economy belongs to burly men who drive smart cars with handguns on their hips. They, or their like, run a blacker-than-black trade centred on the port. Smuggling probably involves drugs, arms, fuel and stolen cars. “Whatever you have”, says the UN official, “it disappears into a black hole when it hits the docks.”

Tiraspol, the capital of Transdniestria, presents a more orderly faade. Streets are eerily quiet and clean, and almost bare of cars, even on a weekday afternoon. Nobody in civilian clothes carries a gun openly. A statue of Lenin looks down from a pink marble column in front of the presidential palace. The Bolshevik leader looks uncannily like Transdniestria's own bearded “president”, Igor Smirnov, a former metalworker from Kamchatka in the Russian Pacific who moved to Tiraspol in 1987 as a factory manager and manoeuvred his way into power. Mr Smirnov's son heads the “state customs committee”, the second biggest job in a land which lives largely on trade, licit and illicit, between Ukraine and the rest of Moldova.

In the past month both Moldova and Ukraine have announced much tighter customs controls on goods moving out of Transdniestria. Moldova was retaliating against a decision by the authorities in Transdniestra to shut schools there still teaching Romanian in the Latin alphabet.

But despite such occasional flurries of firm government, experience suggests that Transdniestria's borders will remain porous enough for it to go on supplying Moldovan markets with untaxed consumer goods, and to go on shipping its more sinister cargoes, including arms, out through Ukraine or by air. According to a recent report from the International Crisis Group, a Brussels think-tank, Transdniestria has five or six arms factories making small arms, mortars and missile-launchers, for sale to the world's trouble-spots. A recent study from the German Marshall Fund of the United States has called the conflict zones “unresolved fragments of Soviet Empire [which] now serve as shipping points for weapons, narcotics, and victims of human trafficking, as breeding grounds for transnational organised crime, and last but not least, for terrorism”. That may be a bit too hard on Karabakh, but a fairly accurate account of Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Transdniestria. It may be time for the world to slop them out.

Unresolved wars have poisoned the newly independent republics of the former Soviet south - and could flare anew.