POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT TRENDS IN THE TRANSCAUCASUS IN LIGHT OF ANTITERRORIST OPERATION

Alexander CHEPURIN

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Alexander Chepurin, Envoy Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary first class, deputy director, Fourth Department of the CIS Countries, Foreign Ministry of Russia (Moscow, Russia)

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Several years ago while stationed in one of the prospering Scandinavian countries I attended a press conference of one of the leading Russian politicians who introduced his speech with the words that he “did not like” the country and that he felt for the journalists who had to report about common and even dull local developments there. This statement that carried a great deal of extravagance and a taste for polemic was warmly received.

If applied elsewhere this logic suggests that the Caucasus and the events in its southern and Russian parts are of great interest to researchers. Indeed, the region has concentrated all possible (and impossible) problems ranging from the geostrategic and ethnic, which started a series of local conflicts, to the problems born by terrorist threats. They affected Russia (Chechnia) and the Transcaucasian states, Georgia in the first place (the Pankisi Gorge and the areas along the republic’s northern borders). The continued terrorist threat adds new and highly alarming overtones to the “Caucasian cauldron” by generating serious challenges to regional security and calls for increased attention to the local developments in light of an international antiterrorist opposition.

Successful solution to antiterrorist problems depends, to a great extent, on the evolution of the highly complicated political and economic problems in the Transcaucasian states, their domestic and foreign policies, and on certain factors generated outside these countries.

First, it should be noted that geopolitically the Transcaucasian states are found in the border areas where the interests of the North, West, and South meet and where Christian and Muslim cultures have intermingled. The situation is aggravated by the “arc of instability” that crosses the area and by the repeated attempts to turn the territory into one of the international terrorist bases.

Second, the highly adverse social and economic situation in the Transcaucasian states, especially in Georgia and Armenia and, to a certain extent, in Azerbaijan deprives their leaders of……………….

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