The Wizard of Oz has come to Moscow, with a twist. "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain," Dorothy and her companions are enjoined in that iconic film - just as Russia's political leaders, having needled Georgia by recognizing the "independence" of breakaway Abkhazia and South Ossetia, are hoping that no one will glance eastward, to Chechnya, for an object lesson in the Kremlin's true attitudes toward secessionist movements.
There, its troops fought two brutal campaigns and flattened the capital, Grozny, after the Chechens tried to leave the Russian Federation.
But you would hardly know it from the rhetoric of Russia's parliamentarians and president this week, who seem to have belatedly and enthusiastically embraced the virtues of Wilsonian self-determination.
In the Financial Times yesterday, Russian president Dmitri Medvedev wrote that "a heavy decision weighed on my shoulders. Taking into account the freely expressed views of the Ossetian and Abkhazian peoples, and based on the principles of the United Nations charter, I signed a decree on the Russian Federation's recognition of the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia." Let freedom ring.
No one, of course, expects that Abkhazia, population 200,000, or South Ossetia, 70,000, would be independent in anything but name. The Russian government has handed out passports like cups of borscht in both regions, and has made heroes of the leaders of their hitherto unrecognized governments. And the "freely expressed views of the Ossetian and Abkhazian peoples" to which Mr. Medvedev high-mindedly referred were articulated in referendums viewed as farcical by much of the international community. The UN, by the way, still considers both regions to be integral parts of Georgia.
The Kremlin has also argued repeatedly that the declaration of independence from Serbia by Kosovo earlier this year set a precedent for the Caucasus. Repetition has not made the comparison any less specious.
Kosovo was never legally part of Serbia, but was rather an autonomous component of the Yugoslav federation, which dissolved in the early 1990s. Kosovar Albanians were being targeted for ethnic cleansing and periodically massacred by Serbs before NATO intervened in 1999; although Georgian behaviour in Abkhazia and South Ossetia has not always been saintly, Tbilisi has never been credibly accused of anything remotely similar.
In its conflict with Georgia, Moscow has demonstrated an Orwellian eagerness to adopt the language but not the substance of international order. The West should take this opportunity to hoist Russia's government on its own petard. If Mr. Medvedev's chief concern is the democratic destiny of Ossetians and Abkhazians, then surely he would not object to the deployment of an international peacekeeping force to protect it.
