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 IT WAS LAST YEAR around this time that I made an extensive reporting trip to the volatile Caucasus region. This strategically vital territory between the Black and Caspian seas is a veritable hornet’s nest of mutually hostile former Soviet republics and breakaway ethnic enclaves. Although the distances are not vast, my travels were made extremely problematic due to the number of closed borders, frozen conflicts and not so frozen conflicts.
In August 2008, the world’s attention had been briefly diverted away from the Beijing Olympics to news reports of conflict in South Ossetia. Very few pundits really understood the underlying cause of the clash, namely that ethnic Georgian forces had attempted to forcibly reclaim the tiny, self-declared independent territory back into its own sovereign authority.
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Baku, Azerbaijan: The final destination on my recent seven-country tour of the volatile Caucasus was Baku, Azerbaijan. One of my commitments during this short visit was to give a lecture at the Azeri Ministry of Foreign Affairs University. About four dozen former ambassadors, faculty members and students attended my presentation.
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BAKU, Azerbaijan: Last month, as I departed Canada enroute to the Caucasus, my primary objective had been to enter South Ossetia.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, this region has fiercely resisted the authority of the Republic of Georgia. Over the past 17 years, ethnic Ossetians have clashed four times with their Georgian neighbours. The most recent bloodletting began with a Georgian Army offensive on Aug. 7, which eventually provoked a large-scale Russian military intervention into the disputed territory.
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STAVROPOL, Russia: Last month, when I embarked upon my fact-finding tour of the war-ravaged Caucasus, I penned a column outlining the difficulties encountered in simply trying to secure entry visas and make travel arrangements.
My intention was to illustrate the challenges in reporting on this volatile flashpoint posed by the sheer complexity of the conflicts, both frozen and not so frozen, which hamper direct travel and access across the various confrontation lines.
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STEPANAKERT, Nagorno-Karabakh, The only way to enter this hotly disputed region in the Caucasus is to travel by road from Yerevan, Armenia.
During the Soviet era, Nagorno-Karabakh had been included within the administrative boundary of Azerbaijan. However, as the Soviet Union began to unravel in 1989, ethnic tensions erupted in the Caucasus.
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