Page 59 - bne_November 2020_20201104

bne November 2020
Opinion 59
Well done. Weafer’s only lacuna was his failure to call the outbreak of riots in Kyrgyzstan, but you can’t expect oracles to get everything right...
bne IntelliNews has been reporting extensively on all these stories as they unfold but recap the main points and you get an unsettling list.
Rioting broke out in Kyrgyzstan on October 5 following parliamentary elections a day earlier that were widely seen as fixed. Following the vote, only four parties out of 16 passed the 7% threshold for entry into Parliament, three of which have close ties to Kyrgyz President Sooronbay Jeenbekov. As bne IntelliNews went to press it looks like the crisis is already over, as the Central Election Commission (CEC) has called for fresh elections that have to be held within two weeks.
The rapidity with which the government caved to the protesters' demands may have something to do with the mass demonstrations in Minsk following another stolen election on August 9. Belarus' self-appointed President Alexander Lukashenko massively falsified the vote to hand himself
a landslide victory, a result that has been rejected by the overwhelming majority of the population.
The Belarusian protests have just gone into their second month and show no sign of abating as the authorities slowly crank up the violence and introduce full-on Soviet-era repressions, not seen for three decades.
The demonstrations in the Far Eastern Russian region of Khabarovsk and those in Bulgaria have been going on even longer – over three months now.
The people took to the streets in Khabarovsk after the Kremlin arrested the popular local governor Sergei Furgal on murder charges and appointed its own placeman instead, leading to the largest domestic protests since the 2011 mass demonstrations in Moscow against a fixed Duma election. And while Bulgaria is not a member of the EEU and joined the EU instead, the people there have also
been determinedly protesting against official corruption
in a movement that has crushed trust in the authorities and proved an embarrassment for the EU.
And the war that has broken out in Nagorno-Karabakh is the worst clash between the two bitter enemies of Azerbaijan
and Armenia in decades. While the details are still unclear,
it appears that Azerbaijan attacked the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh on September 27 that is controlled by Armenia and within a week the two sides are now on the
brink of a full blown war as the fighting spills over the border to Azerbaijani territory. Of all the political crises going on at the moment this is the only one that is the result of a border dispute left over from the break-up of the Soviet Union and the creation of 15 new countries. From this perspective, the break- up of the Soviet Union went remarkably smoothly.
Most of these countries are members of the EEU: Armenia is, but Azerbaijan isn’t, although both countries are friends with Moscow, which has been mediating their dispute since the 1990s; it also sells arms to both sides.
Belarus and Kyrgyzstan are also both members of the EEU, although Bulgaria isn’t, but it does suffer more than the other EU accession countries from the same sort of problems most of the countries of the FSU suffer from: corruption, poverty and a backward economy.
These are just the “hot” conflicts. In the background the war between Russia and Ukraine is now in its seventh year and
the Crimean Peninsula remains firmly in Russian hands. The occupation of the formerly Georgian territory of Abkhazia and South Ossetia by Russia remains unresolved, as does the dispute over the Transnistria region between Moldova and Ukraine.
And more disputes are on the cards: Moldova goes to the polls this autumn; the Kremlin has already been accused of meddling in previous votes there.
What the hell is going on?
Why are all these problems appearing now? For most of the last three decades the majority of the countries emerging from the former socialist bloc have been hard at work trying to rebuild their collapsed economies. The protests and the war are probably the result of the interplay of three factors.
First, and most obvious, is the economic hardship inflicted not only the members of the EEU but all the countries of the Former Soviet Union (FSU) by the coronavirus (COVID-19) lockdowns that have caused massive economic damage across the region.
“Three out of the five members of the EEU are in flames and many of the countries around it that resisted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s strong-arming them to join are not much better off”
Incomes have fallen. Trade has been decimated. Travel halted. Economies have seen massive contractions. Unemployment has soared, especially in the poorer countries. And most importantly, remittances, which have been a lifeline for states such as Armenia and Kyrgyzstan, have evaporated.
Secondly, this is the end-game for the break-up of the Soviet Union. While the Soviet Union was formally dissolved in 1991 at a meeting in Minsk, that only started the beginning of the
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