Dictators and democrats will have rubbed elbows this weekend at a Moscow meeting of the Commonwealth of Independent States, where the most pressing question may well be whether the Russian-led organization shouldn't just be shut down for good.
The loose grouping of 12 former Soviet republics has long been rent by disputes -- between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, between Georgia and Russia over mutual accusations of support for separatists and terrorists.
But it has never appeared so untenable as it does today, following the uprisings against the entrenched leaderships of Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan. The CIS puts democratically elected leaders such as Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili and Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko in the same club as Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko -- whom the US has branded the last dictator in Europe -- and the Turkmen autocrat, President Saparmurat Niyazov, best known abroad for the cult of adoration he's built to himself and his family.
PHOTO: EPA
"The CIS is a pointless organization for today. It brings together absolutely different countries with diametrically opposed interests," said Levan Ramishvili, an analyst at Georgia's independent Freedom Institute.
Sunday's meeting comes amid a spiraling diplomatic spat between Ukraine and Belarus, where five Ukrainians have been jailed for taking part in a protest. And it comes less than a month since Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili, Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko and the leaders of other former Soviet republics joined their voices in challenging Russia to make good on its six-year-old pledge to withdraw troops and weaponry from Georgia and Moldova.
The CIS clearly has more quarrels than shared vision among its members. Saakashvili was staying away from yesterday's meeting, as well as today's Victory in Europe day celebration in Moscow, because Georgia failed to win agreement on the withdrawal of Russian bases. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliev is staying away because of the attendance of the Armenian leader, and because yesterday was a day of mourning, marking a key battle during the six-year war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.
"If the CIS is going to survive, then it will be merely as a consultative council of heads of state, which doesn't obligate anyone to anything," said Stanislav Shushkevich, the Soviet-era parliamentary speaker in Belarus who together with Russia's Boris Yeltsin and Ukraine's Leonid Kravchuk signed the 1991 document that dissolved the Soviet Union.
"There's only one problem: Does the leader of a democratic state really want to confer with dictators?"
The most vocal recent criticism of the CIS has come from countries such as Ukraine and Georgia, where pro-Western leaders have come to power and hopes of shedding Russian influence are high.
But even President Vladimir Putin has thrown doubt on the future of the CIS, telling reporters in the Armenian capital Yerevan earlier this year that the forum had been created for the "civilized divorce" of the former Soviet republics, in contrast to the European Union, which was built to foster real cooperation.
Other officials have been no more sanguine.
"There is no good in the CIS as it is now -- ineffectual and unable to function," said Ilyas Omarov, the spokesman for the Kazakh Foreign Ministry.
The group's attempts to be more than a talk shop have often only fostered more discord. Its peacekeepers have been accused of destabilizing conflict zones in the former Soviet Union, and its election monitors -- deployed to provide a counterbalance to Western-dominated observer missions from such groups as the Council of Europe and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe -- have consistently given high marks to blatantly fraudulent ballots. Pavel Borodin, secretary of the Russia-Belarus union, said the CIS would have to radically change its focus to survive -- but survive it would.
"The CIS will be reborn as a purely economic organization," he said. "This is a market of 300 million consumers. There's nowhere else to turn."
Putin made much the same point to German journalists this week, singling out the shared energy system, transport network and other infrastructure dating back to Soviet times as strong incentives to deepen economic cooperation.
"These are all natural advantages that the past has give us," Putin said. "Not to use this, I think, would be simply stupid."
Yet the plans to remove trade barriers between member states that have dominated the CIS agenda since its creation have never gotten off the ground. Attempts at forging closer economic ties have been hampered by the stark differences between the sizes of the member economies and their levels of development, as well as fears of Russian domination.
"The CIS is a system that has completed all of its set tasks, and there is no hope for its development," Ukrainian Economic Minister Sergei Teryokhin said.
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