CCTS
Review 34

CR’s experiences in the Caucasus

In the first presentation, Jonathan Cohen, of Conciliation Resources, described his experience of working in the Caucasus, in particular in relation to the conflict over Abkhazia, and the Georgian-Abkhaz peace process. Jonathan has personally been active in this region since 1992, soon after the war began; CR’s work there commenced in 1998.

Jonathan admitted that when he began working in the Caucasus he knew little about the region and, with retrospect, the work in which he was initially involved was naïve and ill-founded. He reflected that ignorance was a common starting point when an organisation is new to a region, and stressed the importance of acting in an appropriately modest way.

The original design of CR’s peacebuilding project evolved in 1997-8, after the war had ended. The project was based on three assumptions:

The first was that the focus should be on helping people to identify and address for themselves the problems in their local society. It was recognised that the Abkhaz had born the brunt of the war, and for nascent civic organisations there the priority would not, initially, be to enter into dialogue with Georgia. CR therefore focused on assisting some nascent Abkhaz NGOs to develop civil society capacities, encourage activism and enable marginalised groups to find a voice. To this end they have provided training, support, strategic advice and funding for a range of activities, including civic education; language programmes; human rights development; youth groups; disabled groups; and local business development. From the outset a decision was taken not to work on civil society development issues in Georgia, given the plethora of other international organisations doing this. However, some projects specifically related to the conflict and peace process were initiated with Georgian NGOs and activists; in particular CR supported the evolution of a network of IDP organisations – seeking to empower the most marginalised group in Georgian society that had an important voice for the peace process.

The second assumption was that the war and the political animosity that followed had fuelled antagonism and negative stereotypes on both sides that had to be broken down. CR has therefore supported a number of media developments, including radio, print and TV projects, some within the communities, others that bridged the divide, including representatives from both sides (for example, some TV and radio programmes and the publication of a newspaper).

The third assumption was that it would be important for the people in both communities to begin to analyse what their options were, and to find ways of influencing their political leaders. By 2000 it was possible to establish a series of what has now been 19 direct Georgian-Abkhaz dialogue meetings within the framework of the Schlaining process, involving more than 120 officials, politicians and civil society actors, and to organise international study visits (for example to Northern Ireland) for these groups.

CR’s strategy has evolved over time in a way that Jonathan described as both constant and organic. It has been affected by CR’s understanding of the current political climate; their relationships with the Georgian and Abkhaz governments and their officials; their relationships with local partners; these partners’ evolving aspirations, and the changing objectives of donors, though it is hoped that CR has been able to influence these objectives.

The relationship with key stakeholders/partners

CR works at a number of different levels – both within the region and internationally.
At a local level they have very many (some might say too many) civil society partners. Maintaining these relationships is very demanding, requiring a continuing dialogue that assists people to be clear about their needs and how these might be addressed, while consistently ‘being there’ for people who are living in difficult and pressured circumstances, whose scope for action is oftentimes very limited. This requires long-term commitment.

At the political level CR maintains a dialogue with both Abkhaz and Georgian authorities, exploring their attitudes with them and challenging them to open up their thinking to alternative approaches. It can be difficult to proceed in a way that appears even-handed to both parties, when the Georgian authorities have often done much that needs to be challenged and the Abkhaz authorities have little room for manoeuvre.

At an international level CR maintains a relationship with the UN, and has regular meetings with the British and other European ambassadors and foreign ministry representatives. This is another benefit of the length of CR’s involvement in the region: they have a recognised expertise and this gives them opportunities to influence policy.

Key openings and turning points

In a sense there are always potential turning points after a conflict, because the politics are so raw and open, but it is often only possible to identify the key turning points after the event. What is important, therefore, is to be able to recognise moments when action might be possible and to grasp the opportunity. Jonathan described this as a mixture of planned opportunism and principled pragmatism.
For example, the impasse in inter-governmental negotiations means that there are currently very few if any direct discussions between the Georgian and Abkhaz governments. Notwithstanding this, CR has continued to explore opportunities for facilitating informal dialogue and after a long round of consultations it appears that a group of parliamentarians from the respective parties are open to the idea of a meeting. Such meetings are encouraged by CR in the hope that they influence higher-level discussions as and when they resume.

Challenges

It is a challenge to get close enough to a community to be able to support people ‘on the ground’, without losing the ability to raise difficult issues or being regarded as partisan.
Being a long-term actor in the region obviously has benefits in terms of the expertise that has been developed and the relationships that can be forged. On the other hand, it increases the likelihood of accusations of partisanship, as well as making it difficult to maintain a feeling of freshness in your approach to the work.

It can be particularly difficult to maintain the stance of not taking a position on the outcome of the conflict in this region, where the culture can be to regard neutrality as opposition.

The fact that CR is providing the funding can create an asymmetry in relationships with civil society partners. CR prefers to see itself as a partner rather than as a donor and in instances where it was involved in assisting in the running of small grant competitions CR tried to sidestep this problem as much as possible by passing responsibility to a local partner which took primary responsibility for selecting the projects that received financial support. In other contexts there is a great deal of local consultation about the dispersal of funds.

Finding funding for the ‘right’ work is often difficult. CR has been fortunate in being able to engage with the UK government and the EU to influence their approach and their willingness to fund work on the key issues.

Other issues not specific to this work or this region include the occasional problems of co-ordination between different peacebuilding organisations (some are easier to work with than others) and our failure as organisations to bring on a new generation of activists. This is exacerbated by the fact that for many young people the priority is to find work and there is rarely adequate funding for them to find posts in civil society organisations.

What qualities are required?

Jonathan identified seven qualities that he thought were necessary in peacebuilding work (and, in the interests of alliteration, did his best to make them all start with ‘p’). They were:

Patience: the willingness to wait for the right moment to act;
Persistence: the ability not to be disheartened by the many set-backs;
Political judgement: to be at the same time idealistic (or you wouldn’t be in this work) and realistic (or you couldn’t do it at all);
Personability: the ability to get on with people and create confidence (and in this region at least, a good liver!);
Prescriptiveness: the ability to criticise, where necessary, and to push hard analysis;
Persuasiveness: the ability to encourage people to consider alternative approaches and actions;
Authenticity: the commitment to working with integrity and good faith, and the belief that this earns you the right to say difficult things.

Discussion

The first commentator noted that fifteen years have now passed since the end of the war, without a resolution. Jonathan responded that the passing of so much time is seen differently by different people. The Abkhaz are in general uncritical, grateful for the fact that they are somewhat less isolated now than they were. The Georgian government is becoming increasingly frustrated at the lack of progress, but at the same time not encouraging progress and allowing little room for negotiation. (One participant observed that unhelpful political action is a common factor in protracted peace negotiations.) It is getting harder to find donors – because the focus has inevitably shifted to new conflicts and worse political situations. (Jonathan saw this, at least in some sense, as no bad thing – since it ensures that a good case for funding has to be made.)

Participants were interested in the problems inherent in working with so many different groups, and in the dichotomy of simultaneously doing grassroots capacity building work and engaging with the political systems that have created or sustained the problems. Jonathan agreed that it could be difficult to maintain clear objectives at the different levels. Action in the moment is not infrequently intuitive rather than worked out, but is always underpinned by constant joint strategising. Jonathan believed that both the breadth of CR’s relationships and the number of different levels at which they worked were fundamental to their being taken seriously in the region. The community-level support gave local people the confidence that CR cared about their future, and made it easier for them to be challenging politically. One participant pointed out that the initial lack of capacity for negotiation on the part of the Abkhaz made it necessary to work in a different way with them and complemented Jonathan that CR had managed to sustain this when it must inevitably attract criticism. Jonathan replied that CR dealt with the asymmetry by focusing their work where it was most needed – mostly in Abkhazia, but also with IDP groups in Georgia.

One participant worried that if an organisation’s strategy is not worked out in collaboration with its partners, there is a danger of instrumentalising them. Although she was impressed with CR’s relationship with the people and organisations it works with, she wondered how possible it was to avoid this dilemma, particularly if one had many partners. Jonathan agreed that partners could be instrumentalised, but pointed out that so could CR! He was quite comfortable with this, as long as CR continued to be very open about what they were trying to do. CR’s political work makes some partners quite uncomfortable, but it doesn’t stop them doing it.

There are different approaches among the conflict transformation community in the degree to which they encourage the different parties in a conflict to develop a common strategy. Jonathan felt that too much focus on a single strategy could be more instrumentalising, and more frustrating, than a more flexible approach. He recognised that much in the Georgian and Abkhaz strategies had to be different because of their different aspirations, but this does not mean that there are not commonalities; one of CR’s roles is to provide the space to explore these.

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