By Paul Kellogg
The sudden outbreak of fighting between Russian forces and Islamic rebels in Dagestan is completely linked to the politics of oil in the region.
The Russians are not fighting a massive, popular uprising. They are confronting a group of maybe 2,000 rebels who want an independent Dagestan, but who seem to have little support from the people in the country.
Those people are pawns in a power play involving the Great Powers.
Caspian Sea
Dagestan, an impoverished country of two million, is on the western border of the Caspian Sea.
The Caspian Sea area is home to the biggest reserves of oil outside of the Middle East.
There is now a huge contest in the region both for the control of the oil deposits and for the control of the pipelines which will take the oil to the west.
Currently, the Russians control a pipeline running through Dagestan and neighbouring Chechnya.
But that pipeline has been lying in disuse for two months because of sabotage in Chechnya.
There are plans for a new pipeline that would go through Dagestan, but bypass Chechnya on the way to the Black Sea.
The rebellion in Dagestan puts this planned pipeline in jeopardy.
Waiting in the wings is the United States.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States and its allies have been steadily pushing east to extend their influence towards the Caspian sea.
They are pushing for a pipeline through an allied country, preferably Turkey.
They could also live with a pipeline through Iran or Afghanistan.
What they don't want is for the transportation of oil to be entirely controlled by Russia.
At stake are the massive profits, enhanced political and military authority to be had by whoever controls the transport of this black gold.
This was in part behind the recent war in the Balkans.
NATO is pushing east, trying to hem in its old rival Russia. The addition of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to NATO, and the military occupation of first Bosnia and now Kosovo, has extended NATO's reach deep into areas it has been locked out of since the Second World War.
But the big power politics don't stop there.
An article in 1995 in Eurasian Studies claimed that Russia was supporting Kurdish rebels in Turkey in order to destabilize that country and make it impossible for it to host the pipeline. The same article linked the rebellion in Chechnya to attempts to, in turn, destablize Russia's ability to control the pipeline.
It is not clear how accurate these claims are.
And the rebellion in Chechnya was principally about years of repression, even if it might have become mixed up in the oil politics of the region.
But what is clear is that the interests of the people in the region are being subordinated to the machinations of the Great Powers in their lust for oil profits.
What is also clear is that politics, at the end of the twentieth century, has fallen backwards to resemble politics in the nineteenth century.
Then it was the British empire, in its long contest with the Russian empire, that fuelled wars and unrest in Afghanistan and the Caspian Sea area.
Now it is the United States empire wrestling with Russia.
There has been no progress in a century of politics. At the end of the twentieth century, just as in the middle of the nineteenth century, it is still the peasants and workers of the region who suffer -- living in terrible poverty, and dying as cannon fodder in the wars.