 Hello. Hello. If everybody could find a seat, hopefully there are enough chairs here. Thank you all for coming. I'd like to welcome you to CSIS. I'm Jeff Mankoff. I'm the deputy director of the Russia and Eurasia program here. And I'd like to welcome you to our talk today by, and I'm going to really try to pronounce the name correctly, Donika Bakoyn. Okay, thank you. Who's going to be talking to us about elections in the de facto states of Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Transnistria? Here in the U.S., when we do pay attention to this part of the world, I think we tend to look at the de facto states really in terms of their geopolitical significance, in terms of the relationship between Russia and Georgia, between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and then how all of this affects U.S. interests. I think there's been much less attention paid to what's actually going on inside these states and how the process of asserting their de facto sovereignty has shaped political development in these states. And it's actually a very interesting topic, because at a moment where there's a lot of concern, certainly in Washington, about the democratic backsliding, let's say, in countries like Russia and Ukraine, one of the really underappreciated, undertold stories is the extent to which the de facto institutions in these de facto states are in some ways moving in the opposite direction. And why that should be is kind of an interesting question, kind of a paradox. And so I hope Dr. Abkhazia will be able to explain some of that mystery here to you all today. We're going to have Dr. Abkhazia give his presentation for what, about 30, 45 minutes or so. And then I'll turn it over to my colleague Sergei Markodonov, who's a visiting fellow here with the Russia and Eurasia program, to provide some commentary. And then we'll open it up to questions for the rest of the session. So without further ado, let me turn it over to Donaco Abkhazia. Thank you very much, Jeffrey. And thank you all for coming. It's a pleasure to be here and to be able to present my research, which has been conducted over the last two years really. And I should perhaps at the very beginning contextualize why this research was done. My own background actually initially is in Irish politics, deal with Northern Ireland, the Irish conflict. And that's also the priority of the Irish government. But so it might appear strange to you that the Irish government more or less funded this research project. And it was to coincide with the fact that they were chairing the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in 2012. And for the first six months of this year, from January to July, have the presidency of the European Union. So not Ireland doesn't have any long term strategic interests in these regions. We don't have any historical ties. So there was a certain, you might say, vacuum in terms of information about the regions. And I opportunistically offered my services through a competitive competition, essentially to write reports for the government while they were chairing the OSCE and conducting the EU presidency on how the OSCE and EU could best ameliorate the conflict situations in the regions. And then I had a follow-up grant, which was to look at the electoral processes in Apochasia, coinciding with their parliamentary elections in March of last year. And the presidential elections in Transnistria, which occurred in December 2011. So I spent a lot of time in the region. I visited Apochasia four times over 12 months. I was there for the August presidential elections, the March parliamentary elections. I was in Transnistria for their elections. And I was in Nagorno-Karabakh for the most recent elections in January, sorry, of July of last year. And so those reports have been prepared. I'm kind of in the process of putting together articles based on that research. And that's more or less the background. In terms of the terminology that I use, I put forward always a standard disclaimer. It doesn't always please everybody, but I do it nonetheless. And that is that I am very extremely sensitive to the fact that this is a, the region and the issues and the conflicts are very, they arouse passions in people, depending on where they're coming from. And it's very difficult to ever find a series of words to describe things that will satisfy everyone. Actually, it's impossible. And it's something that I know well being from Ireland. If you come to Ireland, what do you call it? Do you call the area north of where I am? Do you call it Northern Ireland? Do you call it the six counties? Do you call it Ulster? Where you're coming from politically will determine what you call things. But I think it's always, in my case, what I do is that I simply use the terms that are currently in use in the regions which I am analysing. That's simply it. It doesn't in any way give any indication of a political leaning or an acceptance of anything. It's simply calling things as they are in the places that I'm actually visiting. And I do that, I try to do that wherever I go. As I said, it doesn't always please everybody, but that's my disclaimer, just in case anybody is going to be upset about the terms that I use. Okay, I'll start by going through the elections one by one. It's a very ambitious task actually to go through four elections, many of the details of which would be new to you. Some of you, of course, may be very big experts in the field, but I'm going to kind of give a very general overview and leave the questions and answer session to work out the details. First, the region itself, that's a map I've borrowed, which is one of the very few maps which kind of encompasses the entire area which I'm talking about. You see there, of course, the de facto states themselves, Transnistria in the top corner there with the breaking away from Moldova, Abkhazia, South Asetia breaking away from Georgia, Nagorno-Karabakh there in the corner breaking away from Azerbaijan. These are the areas where the research took place. I should add, by the way, that I also went to Tbilisi, Tobaku, to Yerevan, to Kistinau to get the opinions of government officials there and people in non-governmental organizations as well. So it's not that I'm basing my findings or my research solely on the views of people in the de facto states themselves. The elections, as I said, there were four elections I looked at. The first of these were the presidential elections in Abkhazia. Abkhazia already had attracted my interest because of the fact that it already had something which is quite rare in the post-Soviet sphere, and that is a transfer of power from government to opposition. And that occurred in 2004 when the candidate who won, Sergei Begap, managed to defeat the favorite of the Kremlin, essentially. The man who he defeated was a man, Raul Hejimba. He was a former KGB. He was well known to be getting support from Russia. And the electorate of Abkhazia more or less decided that Sergei Begap was a more appropriate candidate for them. A pact was made whereby Raul Hejimba was offered the vice presidency. But that already had made it a very interesting entity because Georgia, of course, the political state that it had seceded from had never, up until that point, had a peaceful transfer of power from government to opposition. You had the overthrow of Gamma Securiti, of course, in the early 90s. You had the overthrow of Shevart Nautze in 2003. So it was quite interesting that Abkhazia, despite its living in a rather challenging political neighborhood and having a lack of international recognition, managed to have that thing that we often associate with a more democratic system, an ability of an opposition to challenge an incumbent power and for that incumbent power to handle over power. However, there are aspects of the Abkhaz presidential electoral system that you should be familiar with, which I guess put it in a less positive light, certainly if you're not Abkhaz. And that is that only ethnic Abkhaz candidates or rather ethnic Abkhaz individuals can run as candidates for presidential elections. It's not, I lived in Central Asia for many years and I was familiar with the fact that there were language laws where you had to speak the titular language to run for election. For example, in Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan, they have that in Abkhazia also. You must speak Abkhaz to run for the presidency and a minority of people do speak Abkhaz fluently. But you also must be ethnic Abkhaz. And again, that really excludes a large amount of the people who are living in Abkhazia. Another interesting provision actually is that you cannot be above the age of 60 to run for election in Abkhazia, which is kind of odd because Abkhazia has a long tradition of being well known for its longevity. In Soviet times in particular, the people used to go there to study why people lived so long. So it seems to be a rather interesting deviance from the norm that they have this age requirement as well. So in terms of the election in 2011, it was an unexpected election. It was a snap election because of the unexpected death of Sergei Begab. She died on an operating theatre in Moscow when they were trying to alleviate some problems with these lungs. So his vice president, Alexander Angfab, started with a certain, you might say, advantage. And he was very much, you might say, an anti-candidate. I have said this before, and I say it again, that if he was running in almost any larger political society in a state more familiar to you, he would never have a chance of winning. I mean, he made his whole campaign about essentially not campaigning. He had no electoral slogans, no posters. He speaks in a very uncharismatic fashion, reels out statistics, doesn't allow anybody to speak. And essentially he would have a long table of supporters who would be there as wallpaper and would never say a word during his two-hour election meeting. He would invite questions, and if questions weren't for coming, he would simply speak anyway. We were quite overwhelmed by this fact that he was the frontrunner, and yet he seemed so unable, essentially, to do what we would call the rudimentary electioneering techniques. But then, as I'll, I guess, argue that Abkhaz is a very small political society, so you don't actually have to go actively campaigning for votes of people you don't really know, most of the people you would know personally anyway. So he's running mate Michael Lagua, who never got to say very much, of course, during the campaign, he's vice presidential candidate. I should add, by the way, that the vice presidential nominees for Abkhazia do not have to be ethnic Abkhaz. However, they always have been. So there's a requirement, you could potentially, because there are so many minorities in Abkhazia, you could potentially, for example, have an Armenian vice presidential candidate, but that's never happened. You move on, then, to Raul Hajimba, the man who was defeated in 2004. This was his third presidential election. He also ran in 2009. He's running mate Svetlana Djurgenia, might make him seem like a progressive. Abkhazia is a very patriarchal system. He has a female running mate, the first time ever in Abkhazia. However, when I tell you that she is the wife of a former president who's now dead, the first president of Abkhazia, that will put things in perspective. President Arzimba, who passed away some years ago. So she was primarily chosen for that reason, to provide a certain linkage to a previous war hero in Abkhazia. And also she's supposed to be financially well resourced, so she would be able to sustain herself during the campaign. Raul Hajimba, interestingly enough, repackaged himself. In 2004, as I mentioned, he was primarily known as the Kremlin's candidate. By 2011, he's primarily known as a man who has cornered the Abkhaz nationalist vote. He more or less focuses on the issues that there's a creeping annexation coming from Russia, that they're worried about property being bought up by Russians, they're worried about the encroachments in terms of language. So he's more or less no longer known as the pro-Russia candidate. He's actually the opposite. In many ways, his support base is very much based on a skepticism. Well, how they put it is that they want to be treated as equals by Russia. That was more or less what I was getting from their campaign team. Sergei Shemba, those of you that are Abkhazia watchers, will be familiar with him a long time, Foreign Minister for Abkhazia. He had run a very professional campaign, extremely professional, and I'll show you some pictures to illustrate that, but there were billboards, very slick TV advertising, which I probably won't get time to show you, but essentially computer digital imagery of what an airport in Sakumi is going to look like when he's president, which looks bigger than Frankfurt Airport, to be honest, and has several terminals going to all parts of the world. This will all happen in his one term. He appropriated the term change. He looked at all the Western campaigns to see what had worked. He was the candidate of change. Despite the fact that he was 14 years in government, he withdrew strategically before the election to present himself as an outsider, and said Ang Fab is the man of kind of, and they also portrayed him as, of course, his own charismatic, said he's the man of the 19th century. He's an authoritarian figure who doesn't know how to communicate with people. Shemba is the man for the 21st century, and he's also going to be the guy to usher in a new generation of politicians in Abkhazia. How so? Because he was the oldest of the three candidates, despite looking remarkably fresh, actually, but he was already 60, and therefore could not run a second time. So he was going to be a one-term president if he was successful. And he made a virtue of that, saying, let me be a tool in your hands, essentially. I will be a one-term president, bringing in a new generation of politicians. Forget the old kind of Soviet-era figures like Ang Fab, who's going to be around for two terms. His running mate, Shamil Azimba, was quite an interesting figure, but I won't discuss him now, to be honest, because we don't have much time. There's just some photographs that I took with the candidates, just to illustrate the fact that I met them. It's showing off in my part. With my wife in all occasions who travelled with me, Ang Fab there, of course, unsmiling as normal. Raul Azimba, after a very long meeting with Abkhaz war veterans, which was the longest two hours of my life, because it was completely in Abkhaz, and I had no idea what was going on. And Serge Shemba, again, just so you can see from his demeanour, he's just kind of a natural, touchy-feely friendly guy who's very much a persuader. Certainly, if you didn't know any of the three candidates, and this is the point I would emphasise, you would vote really for Shemba, I think. I mean, he was a very charismatic and very personable individual, and very televisual as well, quite a handsome individual in the flesh. So I've more or less made some of these points already. The campaign slogans, essentially, Ang Fab saying, I'm not making any promises. That's for politicians, I'm not really a politician. Hajimba appealing to the Abkhaz nationalist vote, which was always going to put a ceiling on how much he was going to get. And Shemba, lots of slogans, lots of promises, thousands of jobs being promised, reaching out to all the ethnicities, reaching out to the youth. There are three major parties in Abkhazia. United Abkhazia was more or less the party of Baghap, the dead president, so they were backing Ang Fab, the form of national unity of Abkhazia. That's Raul Hajimba's party, and the party of economic development of Abkhazia is the party of Beslan Bupa, who's the richest man in Abkhazia. He's kind of the even Ashwili of Abkhazia. And he was backing Shemba. He's not personally popular. He did run for the presidency in 2009, didn't do well, and therefore figured it was better to back somebody who was more popular and charismatic than he. So he was kind of a figure in the shadows behind Shemba. In terms of the campaign itself, I'll just simply say that the Kitavani interview, which I've mentioned here, was a turning point in the election campaign. It was quite clear that Shemba's people, they were doing their own private surveys of opinion were beginning to feel a week before the election that they weren't going to win. So they trundled out, you might say, some black propaganda, which was that they got Kitavani, who was a Georgian military figure from the early 1990s, who is hated in Abkhazia because he's believed that he somehow started the war in August 1992. He more or less said in a televised interview that he had cooperated with Ang Fab during the 1990s. So essentially Ang Fab was being accused of treason. Now Shemba, of course, denied that he was responsible for this, but it was quite clear he was going to benefit from it. So his people were more or less behind it. But Shemba himself denies any knowledge of this happening. But it actually worked against him. It was counterproductive. It went against a very strong tradition of Abkhazia of, you know, essentially it's such a small society, you have to live with your neighbor after the election. So name calling, calling people very, you know, leveling very serious charges against people is not done. It's also a reason that they don't have television debates. This thing of publicly haranguing people on TV is seen as very unnecessarily adversarial. But also again, in the politically small society, it's quite difficult to pull off. Otherwise, we'll see they did have one in Transnistria. That was a first in among the de facto states. Here are just some pictures I took from the campaign itself. Campaign is mainly based around public meetings. You know, you because it's a politically small society, you do have a good chance of beating a huge chunk of the electorate during the couple of weeks of the campaign. So here are some just photos from the campaign meetings, Ang Fab addressing often outdoors because it was in August, of course, so weather was wonderful. Raul Hajimba, meeting the veterans, campaign literature, very biographical, as you can see as well. And here's Shamba. There is a video TV in the center of Sakumi, the bill boards, you know, very, very lavish production. Handouts, handbills, you know, on television or telephone poles as well. And the public meetings often they were very big, as you can see. And again, he had a different strategy from Ang Fab. His strategy was very you'd have seven or eight people who would and they were very carefully chosen. You'd have a woman, you'd have a young person, you'd have an old person, you'd have an Armenian, a war veteran, and each would speak wonderfully about Shamba. So you were almost, you know, full of excitement before he came on the stage. It was very much like a classic political meeting that you would expect in a larger political environment. The results, though, show that his technique didn't work in Apprasia. Shamba did rather badly. He more or less co-polled with Raul Hujimba at about 20 percent, Alexander Ang Fab winning in the first round. And because of the Ketuvani interview, mainly, he didn't retain the services of Shamba, who was prime minister, of course, before the election, nor any of his team. He dismissed them unceremoniously. Many of them didn't even get official letters I was told afterwards. They just simply found that someone was coming into the room taking away the boxes. So he didn't kind of see himself, Ang Fab didn't see himself as a chairman or a president of all the talents. He was very much I won. Everybody else is out. If we look at the parliamentary elections in Apprasia, which took place in March, I'm going to go very quickly through because I have lots of graphs which we really won't have time to delve into. So I'll just simply give you the headlines, which is that it's a second ballot system, as is the presidential system. It's not very party orientated because the electoral law doesn't allow parties to run in the majority of the seats. The maximum number of candidates which a party can put forward is 11 and there's 35 seats in the legislature. So you will never have a one party legislature for that reason. It's militated against it in the electoral law. So the larger parties, the United Apprasia and Hajimba's National Unity of Apprasia parties put forward 11 candidates in the elections, smaller amounts for the Communist Party and the Party of Economic Development, and a much lower turnout, 44% compared to over 70% in the presidential elections, which is typical of normal elections because parliament doesn't have the power. And that's the situation in most post-Soviet states. It's a presidential system, so people are less inclined to turn out, to vote. That said, it's extremely competitive. And that's one thing that struck me. If you compare 2007-2012, the number of candidates, I'll move to 2012 here, you see that almost a third had five to ten candidates running in the constituency. In Sukhumi in particular, nobody got elected on the first round. There were so many candidates running for election and so fragmented was the vote. So, hotly contested, but in terms of gender, as you can see, it's not a particularly women-friendly political environment. Only one woman elected out of 35. That's a steep decline actually from the previous parliament, which was a high of four, three in the election and one in the by-election. I'm going to move on to the ethnicity of candidates. So, it's worth showing you what the current breakdown of population is in Aprasia. These figures, of course, are, you might say, open to question, because they were conducted, we'll say, in an environment which is not particularly conducive to conducting very good sense-sci. But the Apras are now deemed to be a slight majority of the population of Aprasia, 50.71%. However, if you look at that, they've jumped remarkably since the previous census in 2003. And I think what's happening there is a lot of people of mixed marriages are professing themselves to be Apras on the census simply because it will give them preferential treatment, politically, economically, and other ways like that, which I've seen in other countries as well. But officially, they're just about half of the population. Significant minorities of Georgians, of course, far down from their 1989 high, the last Soviet census, and a significant minority of Armenians, and still some Russians living there as well. But if you look at the candidates, here is 2007, 2012, you have 81% of the candidates are ethnic Apras, 84% in the recent election are ethnic Apras. So this is a very, it's a system dominated by the ethnic Apras, despite their numerical, relative numerical inferiority, they do very, very well. And that's not a coincidence. You have a lot of, you have a number of safe seats for ethnic minorities. So for example, there are three seats which are always held by Armenians, and the Apras never contest them. They broke that gentleman's agreement though with the Russians in this election. Notice that if you look at the number of successful MPs, there were three successful MPs who were Russian, ethnic Russian in 2007, that's down to zero now. And that's because essentially those gentlemen agreements whereby the Apras did not run in constituencies where the Russians were strong, numerically strong, they broke that agreement or they more or less called it off. And therefore there's now no ethnic Russian in the Apras legislature. You might ask by the way what language should they speak? Many people do anyway, what language should they speak in the Apras legislature? It's Apras, surprisingly. Many people think it's Russian. They do have a little box in the corner whereby somebody translates from Aprasi into Russian for that small number who can't speak, who can't speak Apras. But that's part of the policy. I mean they want to make the Apras language stronger in Aprasia. And of course the more ethnic Apras candidates you have, I guess the more that's facilitated. So it's a deliberate policy which again I've seen in other countries. It's not unusual to Aprasi. I've seen it in Kazakhstan for example, a country I lived in for a couple of years. Very high turnover of candidates. That's another big feature. In the 2012 election, for example, only five of the 35 incumbents successfully held their seats. The majority either didn't run or they were unsuccessful. And most of those who were successful had to fight a second round. So very competitive elections. That was the very striking feature of what I saw. If I move on to Transnistria and again I'm rushing through these I know but it's very ambitious to do four case studies in one presentation. Here you see the very grandiose buildings of on top. You see the Presidential Palace from Soviet era of course. It was built and Lenin still outside and the Supreme Soviet the parliament of Transnistria. If you ever wondered what an Apras and South Ossetian embassy looks like in another unrecognized state. This is what it looks like. This is the Apras and South Ossetian embassies in Tirassapal in Transnistria. I'm not sure what they do. I'd love to meet them actually find out what they do but I didn't get an opportunity during the occasions I was in Transnistria. The presidential election in Transnistria was fundamentally different from its counterparts in Karabakh and Aprasya because there were no observable term limits before in Transnistria. Aprasya had observed the two term limit. Karabakh has observed the two term limit whereas you had a man in Transnistria who was running for his fifth term of office and he was very much considered or at least he considered himself the founding father of Transnistria despite the fact that he wasn't born in Transnistria and had only moved to Transnistria relative late in life. He was Igor Smirnov. He is Igor Smirnov. He presented himself more or less as the state builder a man who would usher in renewed prosperity I guess into Transnistria. He was challenged on this occasion by a very strong contender Anatoly Kaminsky strong not because of his personality but because of his support. He was more or less backed by Russia during this campaign. When I say Russia, I mean the Kremlin. He was for various reasons. Igor Smirnov was no longer popular in the Kremlin and they had spent quite a bit of time trying to persuade him to retire before the election. And when he decided to put forward his candidature a very hostile media campaign was focused on him. For example, he was accused on Russian television of misappropriating funds and his son in particular Oleg Smirnov was accused of misappropriating four million dollars in humanitarian aid from Russia to Transnistria. And it was a very clever ploy. I mean, I don't know if it's true or not. Could be, could be not. But it was a very clever smear because essentially this was money destined for old people, for pensioners. And pensioners are an extremely important constituency in Transnistria. I mean 200,000 people have left Transnistria in the last 20 years. So what you left is quite an old population. So what was being suggested on Russian television, which is what the television that everybody watches in Transnistria was that the incumbent was more or less siphoning off money destined for pensioners for his own private gain. That's a pretty serious charge. And it was on, it was constantly he's an extradition warrant was put out for the arrest of Oleg Smirnov during the election campaign. So all, all gloves were off. I mean, they really went out for Smirnov in this campaign and they gave their backing to Anatoly Kaminsky, the second candidate here. You gave, if Gaini Chevchuk was the third candidate former speaker of parliament, former leader of the renewal party, but had strategically or maybe opportunistically left in 2009, largely because he was unhappy with the trends with Smirnov's rule. So being two or three years out of power meant that he was able to present himself as an outsider as an agent of change. Again, he, he appropriated the slogan change in this election. He argued that Kaminsky was just as old as Smirnov and very like him in terms of his political style. So people who went for Chevchuk and he was the ultimate victor, as we'll see, went for him not thinking that they were taking a gamble. He had the political experience, but he also had the youth and he had a reputation for being a reformer, which neither of the two, you know, larger individuals Smirnov and Kaminsky had. Oleg, they knew had three minor candidates. Oleg Hirjan, the communist party representative, Andrei Safonov, who was a veteran of election campaigns. He ran three times altogether and Dmitry Soin, who was previously a supporter of Kaminsky, but decided to go, go it alone in this election at the last minute. The major issues, by the way, were the the role of Russia in the Transnistrian economy, which is hugely important. Transnistria could not survive without Russian support. That's the bottom line. And when the Kremlin made it clear they didn't want Smirnov, Smirnov's reaction was to adopt an election campaign slogan. The Republic is not for sale. In other words, we can't be bought. But that suggested that his own fate and Transnistria's favor inextricably linked and the electorate managed to figure out that that's not true. We can dump you and keep the Russian support. And actually, if we keep you, maybe we'll jeopardize the Russian support. So that actually didn't work in the end. The election campaign itself was full of black PR. I have some wonderful examples here, which I again, I probably will, I don't think I'll have time to show you, but there was a wonderful black PR campaign against Chevchuk, for example, where they had very on-savory individuals presenting themselves as Chevchuk supporters. So for example, you had these homeless people without teeth who were obviously drinking alcohol and drunk and they were saying, yeah, we're very well-educated people and we vote for Chevchuk. We're Chevchuk people. And they were putting it forward as official advertising for Chevchuk, even though it was obvious, I guess, to an outside observer that these were not. And another one I remember was a blonde woman who was, again, she had a bottle of whiskey in front of her. She was smoking a cigarette, just saying, I don't know much about politics. I don't know much about what Chevchuk stands for. But he's a cute guy and that's what matters. And I'm for Chevchuk. So this was the kind of black PR. Compared to Abkhazia, compared to Karabakh, which, as I said, they don't get into dirty campaigns. Transnistria was very dirty. You might say it was partially due to the fact that Transnistria was a bit larger. It's about 550,000 people, so it's not that small a political society. There was a TV debate. That was for the first time ever, not only in Transnistria, but in any of the de facto states. The first debate took place among only four candidates. The Smirnov, of course, didn't participate. He thought he was too big for that. Neither did Kaminsky, because he had Russian support. That, in retrospect, was a mistake. The Chevchuk and the three minor candidates debated among themselves. And then there was a second TV debate two days before the second round between Chevchuk and Kaminsky, and Chevchuk won that debate hands down. And that was one of the reasons why, as we'll see, he did remarkably well in the second round. Here are just some of the posters. Here, Republic Not For Sale. That's Igor Smirnov looking very pensive. Then you have the imprimatur of Putin for the Kaminsky campaign. Chevchuk, he found it very hard to get billboard space because, of course, it's all in private hands, and many of them were associated with the president. But this is his poster for order. This is the Communist Party candidate, Oleg Harjan. I have the pictures there of the merchandise because it was the most commercial Communist Party I've ever seen. You could buy anything in this Communist Party headquarters. Dimitri Soin, every little state, every little political society has their really exotic characters. And Dimitri Soin is the one for Transnistria. He is wanted by Interpol for murder on the request of Moldova. That's a serious thing, I guess. But he also has a yoga class. Here you see him naked here in the corner. He runs yoga classes. He has a lot of female groupies. And he runs also a Che Guevara School of Political Leadership, of which I am the graduate number 56, as you see here, which means there haven't been that many graduates, but I became an honorary graduate on visiting him. He was, I think, the most interesting political. And actually, I make him sound like an oddball, but in a different environment, had Chev took not been running and had Soin declared himself earlier, he might have been a more serious campaigner, but he entered the campaign extremely late. And as I said, there were already big shots in the campaign, so he did quite poorly, as we'll see in the end. And here's Safan of the last candidate, who, as I said, ran in two previous campaigns. He's head of the Political Science Association of Transnistria. So any of you who are political scientists, you go to Transnistria. This is your man. But here's the result. Chev took emerged first in the first round. Anatoly Kaminsky's Russia's man only came second. Igor Smirnov, this was a shock, didn't even get in the top two. He wasn't going forward to the second round. And then minor votes for the minor candidates who were squeezed out by the larger rivalry that was at play in this election. So Smirnov objected, he put in complaints to the Central Election Commission saying there was fraud and whatnot. The Central Election Commission reviewed the complaints. They identified minor inconsistencies and minor violations, but nothing that would have overcome the deficit in Smirnov's vote. So Smirnov was eliminated. And that's, I should emphasize, that's a big first for de facto states. I mean that the incumbent not only loses, but doesn't even make it to the second round. And that Russia's candidate again is trailing. And as we'll see when we look at the second round, Kaminsky actually gets less votes in the second round than he did in the first round. Let's look at that again. In the first round, he got 25%. In the second round, he got 19%. Even though the smaller candidates had been eliminated. That shows you two things, I guess, that once everybody saw that the momentum was with Chevchuk, they all started moving towards Chevchuk. And secondly, how badly Kaminsky did in that TV debate two days before the election. He was annihilated. Chevchuk was really on top of that debate. And it shows you something that a lot of people said to me in Transnistria, particularly those who were involved in surveying opinion, that Russia backed Kaminsky simply because of the positions he held. They said, okay, we don't want Smirnov. Who do you want to dislodge him? The obvious person is the number two. Who's the number two in Transnistria? Well, it's probably the guy who's head of parliament and head of the largest party. So we're back him. But it wasn't based on any strong relationship with Kaminsky. And he proved to be a very, very poor candidate in reality. And finally, we move on to Nagorno-Karabakh. Photographs which I could spend forever explaining the significance of, but I'll move swiftly on. Previous elections, 1996, 1997. The reason why they were in rapid succession was, of course, Robert Kucharian, who went on to be president of Armenia, was president of Nagorno-Karabakh before that, making him a rather interesting political phenomenon of being president, at least in the vertical commas, of two different states. In this election in 2012, you had the incumbent Bako Sakyan. He'd been elected in 2007, or rather modest on assuming individual, certainly not that charismatic, running for reelection. What was interesting about this election in 2012 was that you had a very strong challenger, Vitaly Balasanyan. He was strong because he was a war veteran. He's, in every school in Karabakh, you see his picture. He's a poet, you know, according to the people who live in Karabakh today, he is a war hero, and therefore is somebody who could not be dismissed lightly. He was a former deputy defense minister in Karabakh, also a former presidential advisor. So he had experience. He was already in the National Assembly in Karabakh, and he had war experience, which is vital, of course, to be taken seriously politically in Karabakh. And unlike his predecessor, who ran in 2007, Massey Smalyan, whose experience was primarily in the NGO world, and as a deputy foreign minister, he was considered a more heavyweight individual. But Massey Smalyan, the opposition candidate from 2007, lent his support to Vitaly Balasanyan, which made them quite a lethal team. And then you had two pseudo candidates, a very common phenomenon in the post-Soviet sphere, of putting up, you know, the government putting up fake candidates to give the impression of competition. So before Vitaly Balasanyan had put forward his candidature, the government had more or less set it up so that Sahak Iyan would be up against these two people, Sahamanyan, who's the deputy director of a university, local university in Steppenirkart, and this Valery Kachatar, if I can pronounce the name, Kachatar Iyan, who was an unemployed pensioner. Now you can imagine, what is an unemployed pensioner doing running for president unless he's a pseudo candidate? And I interviewed them all, and I interviewed Valery. Valery was perhaps the most interesting, because I said, what made you run for president? You know, I didn't say you don't have much experience, but I was curious, you know, why a man of such limited experience would put himself forward? And he said more or less, well, you know, I knew, I thought I had the trust of the people, I felt I had a good chance, so I decided to put myself forward. And then I asked him the next question, so why did you withdraw at the end? Because he withdrew 10 days before the election. He said, well, after campaigning for some time, he had one public meeting. After campaigning for some time, I figured that the president had more support than me, more resources, and therefore I threw in my support with him, not the most persuasive analysis of why you're a narrative of why you run for presidency. So what essentially happened was that Balasanyan's candidature put the cat among the pigeons, and the pseudo candidates, well, one stayed on, Arkady, who ran a reasonably professional campaign, but his campaign was so lacking in momentum. His office was always empty, his phone never rang. I said, do you do public meetings? Yes, you know, but most people know me anyway. There's no need to go out there kind of actively soliciting votes. And as you'll see, the result perhaps indicates what the result of that lack of initiative was. We met the different candidates. This is just me showing off again. Here we are with all the candidates one by one. And then there's, this is Valeri who withdrew. And then we have election day. You have the electoral list outside, of course, of each polling station. 149, I think, polling stations. And again, it's a small political society. So the electoral register in some of the polling stations was like 50, 60 people. Very, very small. Three people on the ballot paper. Again, that's a rural polling station. That's an urban one. You can see the difference in the architecture and the internal furniture and whatnot. And of course, you can only be at one count. So we went to this one here. We just, it was getting dark and you had to be in a polling station by eight o'clock. So we picked one randomly and ended up in this one where these were the votes for Balasanyan, these were for Sahafiyan. This was for Arkady, the third candidate and these were the spoiled ballots. The results came in very quickly. By the way, you might wonder like, how are these votes tabulated and how can we be sure if they're accurate or whatnot? I mean, my answer to that is that what's really important is that you have firstly genuine opposition candidates and then you have those opposition candidates, team workers in each polling station. And then they will observe whether they're ready violations. So what we did is we rushed back from the polling station into Stepanakart and at that stage we went to the opposition headquarters and they were frenzy of activity. People were getting mobile phone conversations from each polling station saying, what's the result there? They were doing tabulations and already two hours after the polls had closed, it was already becoming clear that it was about a two to one majority in favor of the incumbent with almost no votes for Arkady and that's the way it turned out. 65% for the incumbent, but a non-precident of 32% for Vitaly Balasanyan. So that's the highest ever vote for an opposition candidate in Karabakh. Arkady, as you see, getting less than 1% of the vote. The turnout is quite high. Overall assessment of the campaign, the vote itself was an accurate reflection of the votes cast. I mean, I didn't get any sense that there was a vote rigging in that sense. However, it wasn't a fair campaign. The incumbent had about 40 campaign offices. The two opposition figures, or the one real and one pseudo, had one campaign office. The incumbent had about 1,000 party workers working for him. And I asked them, I said, how can you do all of this with a spending limit of 15,000 euros, 6 million drum? And they said, well, I mean, how are you having 1,000 campaign workers? I said, oh, they're volunteers, so we don't pay them. I said, well, how do you have 40 offices? And they said, well, they're donated by supporters. So of course, it's in-kind donation. It's not declared. So you can see how the incumbent has a huge administrative resource in his favor, which again, is something that's quite common in the former Soviet Union. But the significance perhaps from an outside Karabakh perspective is that Karabakh had, for many years, had a partly free status under the Freedom House rankings, which are quite influential. And they had boasted about this in many fora. So it was very disappointing for them that in 2010 they lost this and went from partly free to not free because of the fact that their parliamentary elections didn't produce any opposition candidates. Only pro-presidential ones were elected. But with this election, because of the very strong opposition campaign of Vitaly Belisanyan, they regained that partly free status, which is, of course, very important for the political elite there, I think, in many respects. So overall conclusions about these de facto states, and I said I've rushed through four very complicated case studies, so forgive me for that, but that's the problem with having an overambitious presentation project. The election's very competitive, surprisingly competitive. The results are unpredictable, and that's something that shouldn't be taken for granted in post-Soviet elections. As I said, I lived for a year in Uzbekistan. I lived for a couple of years in Kazakhstan. I know what uncompetitive elections are like, and I know what predictable results are like when the president, it's just a matter of whether the president will get 90% or 92%. These were unpredictable elections, particularly in Abkhazia and Transnistria, nobody expected the outcome, for example, in Transnistria. What's also very significant is that my experience, certainly, of looking at these elections counters what is a very popular narrative with some people, certainly the political elite, in Baku and Tbilisi, in Kisselnow, that everything that happens in these political environments is controlled by an external force, so that what happens in Karabakh is completely controlled by Yerevan, what happens in Kisselnow, or sorry, in Transnistria, is completely controlled by Moscow and the same in Abkhazia. That was not my experience, and in actual fact, what's interesting is often the results are counter to what the Kremlin has explicitly said as its preference. Now, you can go down a narrative which is also popular among the conspiratorial minded that this is all theatrics, that they've actually got a script to pretend they're being competitive, but to be honest, if you were there, I think you know the difference between, I said I lived in Central Asia for five years, I know theatrics, this wasn't theatrical, that's my opinion on it anyway. So what do these elections achieve? They achieve more or less what the elections achieve anywhere else, they are a mechanism whereby people choose who will govern them, because even those these societies are not recognized, they still have to more or less get the rubbish collected, send their kids to school, they have to find some way of organizing themselves in the absence of recognition, so elections do that, in that sense they are very normal and the election issues that people raise were extremely boring, I mean like you know people sometimes think that people are always talking about what are you gonna do to solve the conflict, what do you think about Georgia, what do you think about Russia or Azerbaijan, nobody mentioned these things during the election campaigns, they were talking about health, education, roads, extremely ordinary and all the more extraordinary for the fact that they were ordinary because they take place in a rather unusual political environment. And my last assessment I guess is that it's remarkable that when you know there are quite a lot of people that do look at this part of the world but none of them seem to focus on elections, certainly I couldn't, when I went down with this mission of evaluating these elections, I would say well who else has written about this and let me therefore compare my results with theirs, I couldn't find anybody, and again if there are people out there please let me know because I would love to engage with them but most people when they look at the region they look at conflict, they look at geopolitics and this is what Jeffrey was saying in his opening, that they assume that these regions are the pawns of great powers, now that's not to say that great powers are not important, but I think if you adopt that narrative wholesale you exclude any domestic agency in the regions themselves and I think that's the key point that I would make in this presentation and I welcome Sergei's response and your questions of course. Okay that was great, I have plenty of questions myself but before we get into that I think maybe we'll just turn it over to Sergei. Thank you Jeff. First of all let me express my admiration and gratitude to my good friend and colleague Donica because he represented very colorful picture of the situation in different de facto states. It was not so geo-strategy with some schemes but it was a real analysis on the situation on the ground and you have felt the difference between some abstract geo-strategy or geopolitical schemes and field research fulfilled by empirical datas which is crucially important. Let me make some turn from empirical data and facts to theoretical observation, methodological observations on the de facto states. I think this problem is crucially important for all analysts who work over the issues of the post-Soviet transformations. The way from the post-Soviet space to diversified Eurasia because the existence of de facto states itself reflects first of all the huge gap between formal judicial issues and practices. From the formal judicial point of view there is no subject to be discussed because Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh or Transnistria are not recognized by most of UN members like in the case of Abkhazia and South Ossetia and by none of UN members like Nagorno-Karabakh or Transnistria and this is why they are not existing from the formal judicial point of view but in practice in reality they have existed. Not for one year, two years, people visit schools, finish school, been married and doing business travels and so on. Vote, by the way, from time to time and change the power. There is a dynamics. But the second crucially important point, the existence of de facto states reflects the incomplete formation of the post-Soviet statehood. I repeated these phases plenty of times but as they put it in the ancient Rome, Repetitio Estumato Studioro. I think there is a difference between the end of the USSR as a formal judicial fact and the end of the USSR as a historical process. I think existence of the de facto states has proven that the historical process is not over till nowadays because we have non-recognized entities, non-recognized bodies, absence of diplomatic relations between former USSR republics and before the resolution of all above mentioned problems, we could not speak about the finish of these processes as historical one, not only judicial. I think I absolutely agree with Jeff and Donica that for a long period, analysis of de facto states were restricted by some obstacles. This topic was a hostage of some approach. The first one is geopolitical. When situation in Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, South of the city was perceived through the prism of geopolitical rivalry between greater powers like United States, Russia or internationally recognized states like Georgia, Russia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Moldova, Ukraine, Russia and so on. The next context is conflict. Those entities were perceived, were considered only through the prism of the conflicts. This is why most of them were considered like temporarily. This is why we have a specific term in the Western media and analytical society like breakaway republics. They broke, but maybe in midterm or short-term prospective parts of the parental states. And the third context could be characterized like analysis of different deviations. Hand of the Kremlin, Armenian lobbies and then some other bogeymen. I think most of analysts have ignored evident facts. The first one is dynamics in those entities like transfers of power, like existence of opposition, freedom of express of views, political competition and so on. Many people analyzing de facto states showed or represented the picture there like Abkhaz people or South Asiatians organized army which follow their order decreed by president or Moscow Kremlin and so on and so on. But there were many cases and Donaka described it brilliantly when position of Kremlin opposed the position of people on the ground. The case of Bogapsh in 2004, don't forget about cases in South Ossetia. A recent case with Alla Giova or case of 2001. Don't forget that in 2001, Kokoyte was elected not as a Kremlin's protege, Kremlin's appointee. That time Kremlin supported Ludwig Chiberov and by the way, Dmitry Sanakoev, who is now pro-Georgian politician of the Asiatian background. The same situation is with the Transnistria or we could remember the experience of Nagorno-Karabakh. In Armenia, Doshnak Tsutun, the oldest party of Armenian origin was prohibited in the period of Levontar-Petrosyan presidency. But at the same time in parallel in Nagorno-Karabakh, this party played a significant domestic role. It was one of the leading forces in these de facto states. And don't forget about some contradictions between Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh on so-called occupied territories and so on and so on. This is why at least we need to recognize in the context of unrecognized or not completely recognized entities that the dynamics, especially domestic dynamics in those entities are a little bit more complicated. It has more complexities than some propagandist or politicized stereotypes. I think the electoral campaigns in the de facto states, despite of general logics and goals, have their own agenda, very important. Frequently it's ignored, but it's necessary to pay special attention to those goals. The first goal is to show, to send the message to the international community that those entities are existing regardless of absence of recognition. We are transnistrians. We are people from Nagorno-Karabakh. We are post-people. We are existing. And those electoral campaigns have to prove this fact. You could recognize it, to support it, to hate us, but we are existing. It's kind of a message. The second point is to win a competition with parental states. And one of the most popular slogans among Abhas people and assets, let's see on Georgia. After the USSR dissolution in 1991, there were no cases of civilized transfer of power from one president to another one. What's about Gamsahurdia, who was overthrown in 1992? What's about Shivarnadze, who left this post due to the revolution of the roses, but not due to elections, but parliamentary elections, which were falsified and so on. And the case of cohabitation in Georgia is not completely resolved till this October. The same approach is discussed widely in Nagorno-Karabakh. In Nagorno-Karabakh, there were no such traditions like inheriting power from the father to son. This is why it's also used for discussion, for appealing to have self-determination, self-sufficient state, separate from the parental state. In the case of Transnistria, parliamentary crisis in Moldova was also perceived by leaders of Transnistria as a negative pattern, which would not be helpful for the developments in Transnistria. And the third last known point of motivation to provide electoral campaign. It's a special request for democratic procedures for small communities. Donaqa told about it, about the square of those entities and size of population, but it's necessary to clarify this issue in a more detailed way. What does it mean? People in Nagorno-Karabakh, Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia won military clashes. They survived huge physical losses of population. You know that before the Georgian-Abkhazian military confrontation of 1992, 1993, the population of Abkhaz, Abkhaz population, composed 93,000 people. And due to the military clash, about 3,000 people from this amount were killed. And many people were injured after this clash. Practically every family has its own memory on this conflict. This is why people make conclusion. We deserve the right to be free, not only from Georgia, from Russia, from other centers of the power, but inside our community. We liberated ourselves not in favor of dictatorship. This problem was highly discussed, especially in the electoral campaign in South Ossetia in 2011, 2012. Of course, we won due to Russia, of course, five days war. But for what? For Kokoyte? For his clan? For his family? No. It's a very important motivation. Speaking about Donagas presentation itself, honestly speaking, I have felt the lack of information and analysis on South Ossetia. Of course, this entity is rather different from Abkhazia, especially in the West, to those de facto states analyzed and mentioned through the point. Abkhazia points South Ossetia, but they are very different. And of course, Abkhazia has much more resources for the independent statehood than South Ossetia, which practically has no any resources. But anyway, the problem is not only resources or aspirations of the people. Dynamics is also very interesting. Maybe South Ossetia would be in midterm or long term prospect part of Russian Federation. I don't know. I'm not sure that Russia is really eager to have South Ossetia as a part of the country. But there is a request for qualitative governance and choice, which could not be justified only by the situation of the war. Of course, South Ossetia, in comparison with Abkhazia, looks like less democratic. But this situation was not eternal, was not constant. It changed. In the period of early 90s, don't forget that South Ossetia also survived some successful transfers of power from Ludwig Chebirov to Eduard Kokoyte. And decline of democratic procedures and shift to dictatorship was provoked by all circumstances of unfreezing of the conflict in 2004, when and where resources for choice on the ground was rather minimal and unfreezing on the conflict from the Georgian side also provoked reaction in South Ossetia, reaction and request for mobilization and restrictions from the point of democratic development. This is why I could mention only one minus of the presentation information on South Ossetia, because it would be also useful. But I think the greatest plus of the presentation was consideration of the de facto states like diversified phenomenon. Donica tried to pay our attention that Transnistria is not the same as Abkhazia. And both of those entities are not the same as Nagorno-Karabakh. Very different ethnic composition, development, party system, relations with Russia, by the way. Because you know, if Russia supported electoral campaigns in Transnistria and especially Abkhazia and South Ossetia, this approach could not be applied to relations between Russia and Nagorno-Karabakh. Maybe you know that on the eve of presidential campaign, brilliantly described by Donica, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia, stated that it would not recognize the results of presidential election in so-called Nagorno-Karabakh Republic because Russia supports territorial integrity of Azerbaijan. This is why even a Russian approach is very different. Russia recognized the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, but it didn't apply the same scheme to Transnistria. And in the case of Nagorno-Karabakh, it behaves in the contrary direction, in the contrary way. Being interested to have constructive relations both in Armenia and with Azerbaijan and to provide the swing policy in the Caucasus lost the influence on Georgia, especially after events of 2008. I think we need to continue the investigation of the de facto states, especially from the point of their domestic development and dynamics. Of course, the factor of geopolitics and great powers are very important. But without prerequisites on the ground, it would be impossible to discuss everything about Transnistria, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia. Thank you very much. And I am also very glad to have your questions and comments. Thank you. OK, thanks, Sergei. I realized I neglected some of my duties as host. I forgot to mention that Donica is a lecturer at the School of Law and government at Dublin City University. And he's also the editor of this book here, The Color Revolutions in the Former Soviet Republics, which has just come out, in which if you're interested in the topic, I encourage you to go out and look for it. OK. Can I also continue your advertising line to make a brief advertising of my paper published last year? It's entitled The Unrecognized States of Eurasia's Phenomenon of the USSR Dissolution. It was published in the democratization journal. And previous year also, due to the support of the Institute of the Caucasus, based in Yerevan, I published a small book on the de facto states of the post-Soviet space. Now it's available on the website of the Caucasus Institute in Russian. But I hope maybe in midterm or short-term perspective I would have the English version of this paper in some variants of versions. Thank you. OK, so no shortage of materials out there. Let me just start with a brief observation and a question. Sergey mentioned this. I thought one of the real strengths of the discussion here was how you disaggregated these de facto states and really showed how they differ not only from the recognized states of the former Soviet Union, but from one another as well. That's one of the things that is really fascinating about the region or about these states for me, de facto states, is that there are some commonalities between them, including that they've had these peaceful transfers of power, that they have relatively free and fair elections, both at the parliamentary and the presidential level. And so I was wondering if you could maybe step back a little bit from the analysis of the individual cases and talk a little bit about what you see driving some of the commonalities between these different republics and then just provide a little bit of context in that way. I'm kind of reluctant to do so, and I'll tell you why. I said my big thing that I came away with and I'm in this and reinforcing Sergei's point and maybe implicitly my own, that we tend to look at these countries as de facto states and see that as their primary identity, that we should look at them as de facto states. And having spent so long there, it's almost like saying, well, do recognized states often have anything in common? If we compare the Philippines and Sweden and Greece, will we make useful comparisons of their election campaigns? Well, yes, but they actually have less in common than they have in common. And I would make the same point about the de facto states. I think that actually because of the fact that they're cut off from the world, that they lack that kind of freedom of movement that they often don't have the same interaction, that they often, you know, therefore are almost laboratories by themselves. They don't actually have a lot of comparative processes to compare with. It's striking though, because I mean, compared to the other post-Soviet republics and they share obviously a post-Soviet political culture, there's something about the way that these processes are unfolding there that's just somehow different, I guess that's just, it's kind of a fascinating, as you said, laboratory. And I don't know what to make of it in the bigger picture. Okay, let's turn it over to questions from the audience. Please keep your interventions brief and please keep them in the form of a question. So I saw over here first. Yeah. So my name is Vlad Spina, I'm listed as a teaching, my teaching affiliation, but I am from the Moldova Foundation. So I mostly will speak about Transnistria, which I know best. You are just saying, Jeff, commonality, I think at least between Transnistria, South Ossetia and the Abkhazia, the commonality is Russian support. And I think it is missing in this discussion, at least from your side there, about the geopolitical factor, and you mentioned, but you down-sided the importance. If you take the Russian support from Transnistria, I mean Russian troops on the ground, intelligence services on the ground, controlling everything, financial support, economic support, you don't have anything what you described. So I think that, and I'm quite surprised why CSIS didn't pick an analyst that will tackle this geopolitical factor. But after he's a game like you don't have mentioned his position, I think it was completely clear that you are going to focus on only one side of the story. Is there a question in here? Because I think we need to have sort of a Q&A here. This comment, and I will ask other people who know Abkhazia, who know South Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh, to tell other side of the story, because otherwise everything is fine in these states, for 20 years there was ethnic cleansing. Okay, okay, we really need to have this in a sort of Q&A, so if there's not a specific question there, I'm just gonna turn it back over to the analyst. Just two quick points on that. I'm familiar more or less with the points, and the issue of dependency, two things on that. If you were to take that criteria to its logical conclusion, we shouldn't look at elections in Ireland because Ireland is completely dependent on external aid right now. We couldn't survive for a moment without the lifeline of the European Central Bank and the IMF, and we're 440 billion euro in debt, so that's putting Transnistria's 3 billion debt to Gazprom in perspective. I just say that because if you just isolated dependency means you can't have a democratic election or a competitive election, then you're, as I said, you have to take a logical conclusion with recognized states as well. And the second thing is, I mean, as I said myself, I don't think you were directing it primarily at me, I guessed implicitly, but the thing is, is that I did say that I'm not excluding the fact at all that the major powers play a role. All I'm saying is that the narrative has been exclusively focused on looking at the great power role in these regions, and we don't look at all at what happens just in the regions on their own terms. And that's why, I mean, I'm very happy that CSIS gave me the forum just to bring a new light on what is a rather stale story because most of the time I read about these regions, it's all the same geopolitics and the same conflict resolution analysis, which is all very useful, I'm not dismissing it, but there are other aspects that we can look at and that's all that I'm trying to do with this presentation. The problem is not to be champion or opponent of the de facto state. You mentioned three cases, Transnistria, South Ossetia and Abkhazia and united all of them due to the factor of the Russian support, but the Russian support is very different in all those cases. In case of Transnistria, Russia and de facto state don't share the common borders in the case of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. In case of Transnistria, don't forget about Ukrainian factor by the way and Ukrainian support of the Transnistrian de facto statehood which is absolutely absent in the case of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. I'm not admiring of Russia who critic on Russia. The problem is in another context. We need to understand one thing. The domestic dynamics in de facto states exists. It's not good, it's not bad. Of course, I am not so naive to deny the fact of Russian interest, geopolitical interest as well as interest of the West or Ukraine or Georgia or some other actors. It's clear, but it's necessary to understand that the situation is much more complex and not so simple by the way. It's not restricted by the factor of the Russian support only. Because I think continuing the topic raised by Donika and Jeff, the problem is existence of legitimacy among non-recognized citizens. Of course, due to ethnic cleansing, so due to some other factors, but the factor of ethnic cleansing, dear friends, is part of practically all cases of the shaping of nation states. What's about Sudetenland? What's about Silesia? What's about most of their countries of contemporary European Union? Don't forget about those cases. It's more usual and typical. Of course, I am not going to justify those methods. It's a part of nation building. It's not bad, it's not good. But there is an identity and there is a legitimacy of the non-recognized power among non-recognized citizens. Because don't forget that existence of the de facto state is connected with many restrictions and limits. Those presidents could not be accepted in U.N. The ambassadors could not visit those entities, maybe only through the prism of conflict resolution or so on. Economic sanctions, problems with visas, and so on. But regardless of aforementioned restrictions and limits, people continue to support those entities. It's interesting. It doesn't relate only to the factor of Russia or factor of Armenia. And Russian factor is weaker in the case of Nagorno-Karabakh. It's absent in the case of the North Republic of Cyprus. But those entities are existing. Okay, thanks. I saw Wayne. Wayne, married the American Foreign Policy Council. First, let me congratulate you on getting a standing room only audience in Washington. I cannot tell you too much what a triumph you've had here. And entirely justified by the quality of your presentation. I would be interested to know the reactions to your work in Kishnya, Tbilisi, and Baku, both because you've indicated that you wish to continue your work in these entities, which could be sensitive for those governments. And second, because your work undercuts a major part of the rhetorical position in those cities about the democratic legitimacy in the entities. So I'd be interested to know how have they, how have those three capitals responded to your research? I'd like to believe that my research is so influential that they've all made official statements on it. But I can tell you more from my interactions with people on the ground and also within some of the political elites, particularly in Georgia. Georgia is a very complex society and I think the political lead there and the common people have a very nuanced understanding, or a lot of them do, of the difficulties involved. I mean, they've had lots of failed attempts at resolving the conflicts and whatnot. So I've given this presentation in Tbilisi and I have to say that I didn't receive any negative background. There's a general understanding that the situation is complicated and that they really have to, that I think I certainly understand the Georgian government's desire to, when they come to DC, when they come to Brussels, that they present the issue in a paradigm that is Georgia-Russia because it attracts a certain type of political figure in both Europe and who have memories of Russian or Soviet, you might say imperial projects in Europe and in DC among, let's say, Cold Warriors or Neo-Cold Warriors. But I think within Georgia themselves, they realize that that's not really, or at least it doesn't capture everything and therefore I have never found any hostility I have to confess. I have to say that in my very brief encounters with representatives from Azerbaijan, I haven't found the same nuanced response and one could speculate for many reasons why that might be the case, but it might be the political system, I think. I think Georgia is, I think the political culture in Georgia such that you never can have a very authoritarian form of government or at least one that cannot be replaced because the political culture wouldn't allow it to happen and I'm not so sure the same can be said of Azerbaijan. In Moldova, I have to say my connection is much more tenuous because I'm very much a South Caucasus person in terms of political focus. But because the Moldova transnistria issue is not an ethnic one, I think that I've never found the same degree of passion that I see when I see, like Armenia, Azerbaijan, or Georgia, Russia, for example, that I always feel more optimistic when I look at Moldova transnistria in a way because there's already so much interaction between the two entities, Moldova and transnistria. So without having any direct anecdotes that I could kind of illustrate the point, I wouldn't think that they would be opposed to this. I think that in environments like this, they tend to send often representatives to kind of put forward the official narrative. But I like to think that privately, they don't subscribe to what they say publicly, that they actually genuinely do keep an eye on what's going on. Okay, over here. Koninsu Deimandov from the Embassy of Azerbaijan. Thank you for your presentation. I have a brief question. Could you please elaborate the reaction of the international organizations for such kind of events? And also, how do you think, what is the message that you intend to convey through these events? The reaction of international organizations to the elections, which I guess what you're asking is pretty straightforward. They don't recognize the elections. And that's why as an academic, I have to keep, I guess, emphasizing the point that I'm not a political representative. It's a source of curiosity for me and one that I'm unburdened by any feeling that I'm representing my country or a government or anything like that, that it's a legitimate research question to find out what's going on with these elections. Because I think when you think about it, you know the elections take place, you know the results if you read about them, but you always wonder, you must wonder, you know, what was it really like? I mean, what were the slogans like? What were the people like? What were the public meetings like? And that was more or less why I conducted the research. So in terms of international organizations, none have recognized these elections. Why I do the research or what motivates me? I have a similar question also coincidentally from the representative from Azerbaijan who asked me that. I always wonder is there something more to it than meets the eye? I mean, am I representing anybody else or am I being funded by anybody? No, I mean, I simply bring the research to the attention of people because, you know, I think it's one of the ambitions of anybody who does research and writes about it, that they'd like as many people as possible to read it and know about it. And that's a very human, I think, endeavor. But it's not part of any larger political project of mine. Okay, Andrinik. Thank you very much. I'm Andrinik Cohen, I'm from the Embassy of Armenia. And I would like to first thank you very much for your interesting presentation. And you are right that it is not usual that we have the opportunity to enjoy presentations not on the political aspects of the conflict and not the conflict resolution, but on the specific needs of the people who are living on those territories, like you elaborated today on the right of people to organize their societies democratically. My question will relate, will be some follow-up of my colleague from Azerbaijan, the Embassy on the International Organizations Aspects. These people in these regions have managed to organize their lives democratically without major international presence. Though we have some here and there observers from international organizations, like in Nagorno-Karabakh in the last elections, there were 82 observers from 22 countries. However, none of the major international watchdogs like OSCE or Council of Europe participated. Do you think that their participation will strengthen the democratic aspirations of people living there anyhow, or will help them to have guidelines how to go forward in these terms as they are doing in other parts of the Europe and our parts of the world? And my question will go also to Mr. Gev. Thank you again for interesting presentation. And you mentioned one point that probably the people of non-recognized states are sending sort of a signal message to international community by trying to organize their lives more and more democratically, just in probably in comparison with other neighboring states, or states we are in conflict with. You probably, it was, yeah, Daniel who mentioned the Freedom House report, like Nagorno-Karabakh is partly free versus to Azerbaijan, which is not free according to Freedom House. How does these things help in terms of conflict resolution? Is there, are there any, do they have any influence on international community in their terms of attitude towards the conflicting parties? And by the way, again, one, if I may, one point, and Sergei and Dona have put it, is that international organizations didn't recognize or the elections in breakaway regions or non-recognized states, but in the case of Nagorno-Karabakh, I must say that means group, for example, which includes Russia, they recognize the right of Nagorno-Karabakh people to conduct their life, organize their life democratically, which is stated in the statement of a means group. Just points for that. Thank you. Okay. It seems to be a continuation of the question about international organizations. To be honest, I myself personally don't have an opinion on it. I don't think that they would necessarily make the elections more competitive or more democratic if there was international observation, because I don't think that's primarily why the elections are being conducted. This was one thing that was, even to a small extent, counter-intuitive. I thought that the primary purpose of the elections would be somehow to impress internationally, but no internationals are really coming. You mentioned 82 observers in Nagorno-Karabakh, but most of those people are already well-disposed towards Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh and CIS observers in other, in Abkhazia, for example, or already without even before the election takes place, have already more or less decided it's going to be okay. So these are, I don't think that's why the elections are particularly better than the norm of the region. I think it's simply because they fulfill the function, as I argued, that elections are designed to do, that people need leadership, they need someone to govern, particularly so in a state that has no international connections of any significance. So I think that, obviously, when I spoke to people there, I spoke, for example, with the head of the Central Election Commission in Nagorno-Karabakh, in Transnistria, in Abkhazia, and they were all asking for the OSCE and people like that to come to offer technical assistance. They said, you don't have to recognize, you can just, but to be honest, they have that the knowledge of how to conduct a free and fair election is not rocket science and it's already out there on the internet. And most of the electoral laws that Karabakh, Transnistria, Abkhazia have is more or less taken from best practice around the world. Now, how they implemented it might be another matter, but they have it in their documents. If you look at the electoral law of these regions, there's nothing that you could really query about it. Thank you very much for your question. Did you mean the statement of the means group made on the eve of elections? Yes? Yeah. Because it provoked criticism and some discussions. I think there is a clear alternative for the political dynamics in the de facto states. You could have democratic or quasi or semi democratic development through electoral campaigns or you would have a federation of field commanders. As they put it in the Roman times, Terzo Nondato here. What's the interest of the international community in those hard spots or frozen hard spots to have federation of field commanders or more or less controlled territory which faces electoral campaigns and democratic development? As for the question on the conflict resolution, the answer depends on your understanding. What do you mean speaking about the conflict resolution? Because from the Georgian point of view, conflict resolution is a restoration of the Georgian jurisdiction in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. It would be conflict resolution. The same would be applied to Azerbaijan or Moldova. But from the point of Nagorno-Karabakh or Abkhazia or Transnistria, the conflict resolution would mean a little bit different from their so-called parental states. This is why I think the interest of the international community to have more or less stable and predictable territory with no matter which status is, with no matter which flag is now on this territory, more or less democratic, more or less predictable and stable. That is an interest. I think it could help to promotion of the conflict resolution. And the conflict resolution itself will be dependent on the readiness of sites and gauging the conflict to make any compromises. Okay, we're running a little bit short on time here so I'm going to try and take a couple of questions and we'll bundle them together. So please. Yes, thank you, Dr. Mankov. I'm representing Embassy of Georgia. My name is Tia Genjadze. And thank you for giving this opportunity to speak now because I think, and that's regretful, that there is an elephant in the room and nobody really wants to touch upon this subject. And the elephant, unfortunately, is represents those people who have been actually forced out of these territories. And very regretfully, I don't really see any reflection through methodology or through other sources that have been actually consulted throughout the process of this research that would actually bring in the voice of those people. You are depicting a very happy, shiny picture where people go to elections and they're casting their votes. And yes, of course, they have right. But what about the right of those people, those 300,000 people in Georgians, mostly ethnically who have fled apasia as a result of ethnic cleansing? And this has been already established by international community. So my question, actually, I didn't really mean to ask questions today because I don't really think that there is enough depth, I'm sorry, in this research that would actually open, let's say, platform for some sort of scientific or academic discussion. But I would really like to ask one fundamental question. How can one actually, and maybe that's hypothetical more, how can one think or even discuss electoral democracy in a society which is basically a classical ethnocracy? And you have an argument, and there are a couple of contradictions in your own research. There are no possibilities for people who are out of apasia now and who do not, unfortunately, even have a hope to return at some point, although their right to return their right to their property has been also internationally recognized. So I'm wondering, I mean, and also those ethnic groups who are now living in apasia but do not have any access to governing. So my question would be, I mean, how do you see this as a democracy? Okay, let's take a couple more here. Thank you. I'll be quick. Arsene Kharazan from Voice of America's Armenian service. You're in a politicized city, so I assume you expect questions like this. So I'll try. I'm also studying conflict resolution, and conflict resolution is viewed like international relations here, which I think is not necessarily true. So my question will be, somebody from Ireland and Ireland is a role model for us for a successful conflict resolution. If you had to compare the conflicts that you've been talking about, and maybe not necessarily talk about the democratic process, but where you would say they stand in the possibilities for the future resolution or transformation in comparison to your own background in the conflict, how would you picture or map out those conflicts? Okay, maybe one more. Yeah. Thanks, Tanako, for your presentation. I'm Nick Kondra from Johns Hopkins Ice, and I applaud the work. I think that being the first person doing it is a really brave thing to do. My question is about democracy. We've covered elections, and that's excellent, but in political science theory, democratic governance is more than just elections. So I wonder if you might give any comment on what kinds of formal or informal checks on governance happen in these de facto republics. Thanks. Okay, so let's give it back over to Donica. So refugees, the comparison with Ireland, and elections versus democracy. Yeah, and all very good questions. And to take the first one first, why not emphasize those who have forcibly left up Khazia since the early 1990s, and some of them left, of course, in 2008? Again, the analysis is framed not by what should be, and I think this is very much the difference in where we're coming from. You're representing a government, though I have to say the diversity of views in Georgia is quite pronounced. If I may, today I do not represent all the government. I represent those Georgians who are not having any opportunity to go back to their homes. No, but I think you understand my point. I mean, you're a professional occupation as a representative of the Georgian government, and I'm just simply saying that I have spent enough. I've been in Georgia for the best part of a dozen years. I've just come from Tbilisi, and I'm aware that there's a diversity of views in the subject. Yours is one, and it's one that matters to a lot of people, but it's not the only one, and I don't have to feel in that way that I have to respond necessarily to your point of view as if you're representing Georgia or even representing IDPs, which are also a diverse group of which many of my friends and former students, actually. But the point about why not to emphasize it more, well, of course, in a short presentation, there are many things I could have emphasized, but as I said, the framework was what is happening now, not what should happen, which is implicit in your question. I mean, your question implies that we should emphasize that this is not this or it shouldn't be called that because, and I don't go down that road. I mean, people regarding Karabax say the same. They say what about the people, the quarter of the population who were there during Soviet times who are not there now? But as I said, that's not my role to look at the, I'm looking at an electoral process. I mean, people come and go from different polities and to say what might have been, had people been there is something. I understand why somebody would say from Georgia might say that that's something important, but from my own academic perspective, it wasn't my focus. And when you design a research project, you design it. I mean, it wasn't something that I try, I admit the Georgian government in exile, for example, who have their own views, of course, on what is happening in Abkhazia. So again, it's not that I'm unfamiliar, but my focus was on what is happening now and what is the society now in Abkhazia and in the other de facto states. As far as the ethnocracy is concerned, I did emphasize that. I didn't kind of try to make it as into, as you said, a shiny, happy people. I simply said that you had to be Abkhaz to run for president. I made that point. I stressed it. I showed how the majority of people in the Abkhaz National Assembly are ethnic Abkhaz and I implied that that was unrepresentative of the population in Abkhazia. So I think that you're imputing more to my presentation than I think it says perhaps more about where you're coming from than where I'm coming from, to be honest. But anyway, going to conflict resolution, this is a great question. And the last slide, which I didn't get to show, shows, ah. Mika Nishrini from Georgia. Mika Azulian from Armenia. My wife, myself, Massis Malian, who won a car back, Berthia Hearn, who was one of the signatories of the Good Friday Agreement with Tony Blair, of course, leaving his counterpart. Vladimir Yasterchak from Transnistria, former Foreign Minister of Transnistria. And so recently, I'm here in my backyard with a whole group of people together with Maxine Vinge of Abkhazia, who was for many years an acolyte of Shamba in many administrations in Tsukumi. So I did, yes, sorry? Yes, and I invited. And this actually is interesting. I don't want to go down this road now because it's not exactly what the question is. I did actually invite, ah, you see, here we go again. The thing is, I did invite, they did accept, and at the very last minute, I mean, if you would like me to forward you, they pulled out, and actually it's the reason why in this book that you advertise, I actually also had a contributor from Azerbaijan who pulled out under government pressure because there's no freedom of thought, unfortunately, in many spheres in Azerbaijan. That's a reality, I think, that you have to deal with. Not try and put the emphasis on me of why I don't include people from Azerbaijan. I invite them, they accept, and then they talk to people back home, and they say, actually we can't come because there's going to be somebody from the other side and that's not going to be helpful for me when I go back. That's been my experience. I'm just speaking from where I'm coming from, from practical experience. Not an abstract ideal, not a theory, not a policy position of a government. That sounded like an accusation. Well, it was a statement of my experience, anyway. The conflict resolution, Northern Ireland, this is why I emphasize it because I invited the author of the Good Fight Agreement to meet these people from the regions and so we could try and look at it in a powerful context. I'm less optimistic, to be honest, about conflict resolution in these regions with the exception of maybe Moldova Transnistria, whereas I said I don't think it's as passionate because of the lack of an ethnic dimension to it in large part, but in the caucuses I'm very pessimistic compared to Northern Ireland. Let me tell you why because, and it comes back to the point made by our representative from Georgia, when the populations were expelled as a result of war, and we won't get into the whereabouts of why these wars started, but when they were expelled, the population that was involved in expelling them more or less believed now that the conflict is over. In Northern Ireland you had two communities almost evenly divided and they still exist in Northern Ireland. About 50% want to be part of United Ireland, 50% want to join with the United Kingdom. We have to find a way for those people to live together and also, and this is crucial, and it may sound like an accusation to some, we had two democratic sovereign governments, the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom, who felt more in common with each other than they did with their ethnic kin in Northern Ireland. So for example, our Bertie Hearn will say, was going to Tony Blair and say, how will we sort out Northern Ireland together? They weren't listening to those in Northern Ireland who were saying you should support us because you're the same ethnicity as us. They were going to each other and saying, how do we solve this common problem together? Those were crucial elements which do not exist in the South Caucasus to state the obvious. The people in Abkhazia and in Nagorno-Karabakh who currently live there view the situation as one that's been more or less solved because they've expelled the populations. And that's something that was different in Northern Ireland. You had the populations living together. And secondly, to stress the obvious, you don't have consolidated democracies in the Caucasus. So you have governments which are two varying degrees authoritarian to dictatorial. I don't know of any history of conflict resolution where you get dictatorships more or less solving conflicts in any kind of systematic or long lasting sustainable way. So until those issues are resolved, I'm very pessimistic to be honest. And I'm simplifying, of course. I mean, everybody I think when they ask a question assumes that I'm leaving out something. I'm only leaving out something because I've only very little time to answer these questions. But in short, I'm pessimistic. And the final question about formal and informal checks, it's a very good question. But again, I fall back on my defensive armor that I used against the first question, that it was not my focus to look at the institutions. But since you asked it, the checks and balances are not particularly good in Aprasia, in Transnistria. They're a little bit better in Transnistria, not good in Nagorno-Karabakh necessarily, because usually what you have is the party of the president or the acolytes of the president are usually in control of parliament. Our parliament is so weak that it can never possibly challenge the power of the president. The civil society, it depends. And Aprasia is quite strong. For example, Karabakh is not strong. Transnistria, not that strong. So it varies again from state to state. So yeah, I would be saying there's not strong. If, again, to give a very short answer to a very complicated question, the checks and balances are not good. A good example, Aprasia recently, I say this, I'm interested because I'm a professor, Bruno Coppeter, some of you may have heard of him. He's a professor, a Flemish professor, Belgian professor, I should say, who is an author of many works on Georgia, on Aprasia. He went to give some guest lectures in Tsukumi recently at the university on ethnicity and conflict resolution and whatnot. And Angfab himself vetoed, he gave one lecture, I think, and he vetoed the rest of them, saying that he wasn't going to have the students of Aprasia propagandized by this foreign professor and students from Aprasia were not able to travel to the European Union, so why should European Union professors be coming to Aprasia and giving lectures? That shows you an authoritarian streak in Angfab, but it also shows you how much power he can arbitrarily exert, that he can say to a university, which should be an independent freedom of thought kind of a place, he can say who will actually give a lecture and who will not give a lecture. So to answer your question, yeah, I'm glad you raised it, but it wasn't the focus of my thing, because if I was to go down that road, that's a huge area of institutions and checks and balances. This is another research project in its entirety, and I have enough on my plate just dealing with the electoral processes. So that would be my answer to that. Okay, we're already a couple of minutes over time, so I think we're gonna have to wrap this up. I wanna thank you all again for coming and please let's give a warm round of applause to our guests.