Thomas Goltz
And no, I do not mean that chunk of west-Pacific paradise claimed for Spain by Magellan in 1521, seized by the USA in 1898 after the Spanish-American war, occupied by Japan on December 8 1941 and liberated by American marines in 1944, and which continues to serve the USA navy as an ‘unincorporated territory’ of the United States (as well as the temporary home for several thousand Kurdish refugees who fled northern Iraq in the mid-1990s, before they found permanent shelter in places like my native Fargo, North Dakota).
No, I mean that GUAM most of you have never heard of before—the totally dysfunctional, post-Soviet alliance between Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova that was sort of jerry-rigged together in 1997 as an alternative to the ‘Commonwealth of Independent States’ (CIS), Moscow’s idea of a rump USSR, itself created by Boris Yeltsin as a means of stripping Mikhail Gorbachev of all legitimacy in late 1991 (and which might be said to have served as the prototype for Vladimir Putin’s Eurasia Custom’s Zone, which was so insistent of absorbing Ukraine as a member that it might be blamed for all the furor that began in Kiev that led to the Russian Anschluss of Crimea…)
On the surface, the four post-Soviet GUAM states did not ever really share too much aside from a vague western-orientation that was itself based on a common sense of Kremlin-related victimhood. “G” Georgia lost control of two provinces due to very ugly post-Soviet ethnic strife (South Ossetia and Abkhazia) in 1991 and 1993; “U” Ukraine was even then very fidgety about Crimea, but still seen as some sort of Slavic-world bulwark against Russian expansionism; “A” Azerbaijan had lost control of Mountainous (‘Nagorno’) Karabakh to Russian-ally Armenia during a really nasty war lasting from 1988-94; while “M” Moldova had long lost the right (eastern) bank of its territory, which had assumed the name of Transnistria, circa 1990 or 1991, depending on how your count.
The main point was that GUAM was the “nice” guys’ club, a new axis of new states that somehow could stand up to the new Russia on familiar, post-Soviet terms, and count on the “International Community” for support when push came to shove over burning questions such as ‘sovereignty’ and ‘territorial integrity’ because that was, after all, what the international community (the United Nations, etc) was all about, right?
(A footnote: Any sense that GUAM was somehow the ‘nice-guy’ club evolving from the former USSR was dismissed when it expanded to become GUUAM with the inclusion of post-Soviet Uzbekistan (“U” x 2) in 1999—thus giving the organization ‘strategic depth’ in post-Soviet Central Asia...But then Uzbekistan proved to be just a little too thuggish to remain in the ‘nice’ club of post-Soviet states, and self-exited from GUUAM in 2005, reducing the expanded acronym to the little-known original, four-letter word. But who wanted Uzbek ‘Peacekeepers’ from the Andijan massacres to join their GUAM colleagues patrolling places like Tajikistan anyway?)
Then there is TAKO, the acronym for the internationally unrecognized entities that separated (with oblique or overt Russian aid) from the GUAM member countries cited above, all of which claim some Kosovo sanctioned-style right to “self determination”--the reference being to the 1999 NATO bombing campaign designed to crush rump-Yugoslavia/Serbia into an Alamo-like surrender of some of its sovereign turf to a local minority to create its own statehood, U.N. membership and all.
Having established that holy precedent, where do we stop? Ruthinia? Kurdistan? Lakota? It should be noted, of course, that self-determining Kosovo has been exactly the paradigm Russia has claimed for the right of the diverse self-determining territories in the diverse GUAM countries. What is good for the goose…
But back to GUAM and the legal (U.N.-recognized) states that that organization is or was supposed to represent in the post-Soviet order.
Violation of sovereignty after violation of sovereignty has happened over the past 23 years since the collapse of the USSR, followed by UN Security Council resolution after UNSC resolution demanding/insisting/compelling (etc), that the occupying/invading/foreign forces (etc) be immediately removed/desist/go home (etc)--and with no result to this day (with the exception of Saddam Hussein’s sad men in Kuwait, circa 1990/91).
The pathetic post-Soviet GUAM group—whom you, the dear reader, are forgiven for never having heard about—are just an aspect of this collapse of the international system of state-sovereignty ushered on to a deeply confused, bloodied world with the treaty of Westphalia of 1648 (or the Treaty of Vienna of 1815) or even (duh) the creation of the United Nations in 1948.
If the largely-unknown GUAM was set up as a sort of anti-CIS, then the Russian-dominated CIS largely supported the anti-GUAM acronymic TAKO, and with the recently annexed GUAM territory (meaning Ukrainian) of Crimea, perhaps the now larger space of self-determining chunks of post-Soviet real-estate should be known as ‘TACKO,” as in (sort of) the street food associated with that former chunk of Mexico, now known as Texas, which got famously Anschlussed into the USA sometime between the 1836 Alamo 'event' and the US Civil War...
But I am getting ahead of the geopolitical story, and quite frankly just want to move to that ultra-safe rock that once was part of Spain, became a chunk of the USA until wrested away by the Japanese, but now once more sits like an island of stability (and likely, local boredom) on the western edge of the Pacific Ocean.
ANN.Az
