Georgians Build Ties With Russian Caucasus

Ellen Barry
The New York Times

TBILISI, Georgia — At 6 p.m. on a recent Tuesday, a satellite news channel financed by the Georgian government went on the air with a palpable air of excitement. Unlike Georgia’s other channels, First Caucasus News was broadcasting in Russian — its target audience includes viewers north of its border, in the mountainous and restive Russian region known as the North Caucasus.

As the debut approached, the channel’s general director promised repeatedly that Kanal PIK, as the channel is known, would not be used as a vehicle for anti-Russian propaganda. Then the inaugural broadcast began, and in the course of a question-and-answer session two hours and 40 minutes long, President Mikheil Saakashvili said the people of the North Caucasus were chafing under Moscow’s rule — and that a haven awaited them in Georgia.

“The North Caucasus has become a ghetto,” he said. “These people have been given to the local feudal lords, who can kill them, rape them, hang them by their feet, torture them, take everything. Obviously, these people behave one way there, and a different way when they enter a country where there is rule of law.”

The remark fleshed out a high-risk strategy Mr. Saakashvili rolled out last fall, when in a speech at the United NationsGeneral Assembly he envisioned a union of the North and South Caucasus that would “join the European family of free nations, following the Georgian path.” (He noted that this vision did not call for changing borders.)

Georgia went on to drop visa requirements for residents of the North Caucasus — including Russian republics like Dagestan, Ingushetia and Chechnya, among others — allowing them to enter the country freely for 90 days. The offer attracted more than 12,000 visitors in the next three months, many of them Muslim pilgrims taking advantage of an overland route to the hajj, Georgian officials say.

Meanwhile, Caucasian solidarity is an increasingly fashionable topic in Tbilisi, which last year hosted two conferences on Russian atrocities against the Circassians, an ethnic group driven out of the region in the late czarist period. A organization representing the Didos, a tiny ethnicity from Dagestan, appealed to the Georgian Parliament in December to be accepted into Georgian jurisdiction.

The president’s initiative to promote unity in the Caucasus drills straight into one of Moscow’s greatest anxieties. The night before Kanal PIK’s debut, a suicide bomber killed dozens at Domodedovo Airport outside Moscow, the latest in a series of attacks by insurgents from the North Caucasus. The Kremlin has been trying to stamp out resistance there since the breakup of the Soviet Union — through two civil wars, a heavy-handed police presence, power-sharing with repressive local elites and huge cash transfers, among other tactics. But the insurgency is still able to threaten Moscow’s long-term interests — among them the 2014 Olympics planned for Sochi, at the western edge of the Caucasus.

Russia’s foreign minister dismissed Tbilisi’s decision to drop visa requirements as “another propagandistic step,” but other officials openly accused Georgia of opening a corridor for terrorists. Western diplomats have warned Georgia that direct engagement with the North Caucasus could be risky.

In a wide-ranging report to be published later this month by the Center for American Progress, based in Washington, Samuel Charap and Cory Welt say the policy was begun “unilaterally, in the absence of normal diplomatic relations, and to a part of Russia that is the locus of its greatest internal security threat: a violent and growing Islamist insurgency.”

“Regardless of the Georgian government’s motives, this policy will inevitably be seen in Moscow as designed to stoke instability,” the report says.

Georgian officials respond that, amid sustained military tension with Russia, they have no choice but to shore up relations with all their neighbors. They also note that Russian offensives against Georgia have sometimes included detachments from the North Caucasus.

“Some of my friends from the West would tell me, ‘Why do you need the North Caucasus, won’t it be an extra headache?’ ”Mr.Saakashvili said during the question-and-answer session. “And then I ask, ‘Next time our friend Vladimir sends 50,000 Chechen soldiers to us, will your soldiers protect us?’ ”

At Kanal PIK’s studio shortly after its debut, political questions were eclipsed by logistics. The channel is abundantly financed for its six-hour daily broadcast — it received 7 million euros, or about $9.5 million, in startup money. Its studio smelled slightly of cocoa butter and had a sleek look; its set designer works for the sports-car maker Bugatti, said Robert Parsons, the station’s general director and co-owner of its management company.

But it has proved nearly impossible for reporters to work in the Russian North Caucasus. The channel’s small number of employees there are, as Mr. Parsons put it, “terrified, really.”

One journalist has stopped answering his phone when he sees the call is from a Tbilisi number, said Ekaterina Kotrikadze, the channel’s assistant news director and a co-owner of its management company. A cameraman in Chechnya resigned after he was approached personally by the region’s Kremlin-backed leader, Ramzan A. Kadyrov, she said.

“They were obliged to run away to the village for a month,” she said. “They have changed their mind about working with us.”
It is Georgia’s second attempt to break the Kremlin’s near-monopoly on television news in Russian territory. A previous Russian-language channel, called First Caucasian, went off the air last year when its French satellite operator backed out of a deal, saying it had received a better offer from Russia’s Gazprom Media Group.

Mr. Parsons, who is on sabbatical from France24 television, said that the rebranded station would have complete editorial independence from the government — it’s “not even to have a hint of propaganda” — and that he hoped Russia would not be at the center of its coverage.

“Traditionally, historically, linguistically, this has been for a far greater period of time part of the world to the south than the world to the north,” he said. “If you look at the links with Iran and Turkey, the roots are far deeper than they are with Russia.”

On a recent afternoon, a Circassian flag hung in the station’s newsroom, and a veteran Chechen newscaster had flown in from Canada and was looking for apartments in Tbilisi. Mr. Parsons was reviewing “Occupation,” a new documentary about the aftermath of the 2008 war, which featured a montage of historical injuries and deaths at the hands of Russian and Soviet forces.

“It’s quite a passionate little film,” said Melanie Anstey, the channel’s deputy director for general programming, delicately. “It doesn’t say, ‘On the one hand, on the other hand.’ ”

Among few programs to survive from the channel’s earlier iteration is a talk show hosted by Alla Dudayeva, widow of the Chechen rebel leader Dzhokar M. Dudayev, who was killed by a Russian rocket in 1996. On “Caucasian Portrait,” Mrs. Dudayeva — who has delicate features and a light, girlish voice — paints her guest’s portrait while conducting an interview.

Though Mrs. Dudayeva steers clear of politics on her show, she makes no secret of her beliefs: that Russia is one or possibly two years away from collapse; that Prime MinisterVladimir V. Putin’s rise to power was predicted by Nostradamus; that Russian special services carried out all the major terrorist attacks of recent years, and intentionally downed a plane carrying Poland’s president; that the militants, she said, are “people courageous enough to keep fighting for the freedom of their motherland and, now, for the liberation of the Caucasus.”

She said she hoped her program would convince Russians that the citizens of the North Caucasus were not the enemy, a message she said official Moscow had tried to convey.
“More than anything,” she said, “they are afraid of the truth.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/world/europe/13georgia.html?pagewanted=2&_r=4