Posted by Damozel | Last week, Georgia’s President Saakashvili accused Russia of
intending to destroy Georgia, and take control of energy routes to
Europe. (BBC Aug. 9)
And last week, Steven Eke, the BBC News Russian Affairs analyst, pointed out that Putin—enraged by Western support for Kosovo’s independence—would treat Kosovo “as a template for its own actions in the pro-Russian, separatist regions of the former USSR.” (BBC News 8-8-08; cf. 4-30-08) Even before then, “there was a strong body of thought in the Russian political and diplomatic worlds, that believed Russian recognition of South Ossetian and Abkhaz independence would be morally and politically justified.” (BBC News 8-8-08; cf. 4-30-08) [See also William Kern’s posting on this, which just went up here.]
The Russians have made it clear that they do not intend to recognize Georgia’s “territorial integrity” (NYT; see below).
So agreement or no agreement, “handover” or no “handover,” it’s really not over yet. At present, for example, the Russians are questioning just what sort of humanitarian aid Bush is providing. (NYT) And they apparently conducted maneuvers today in the port of Poti on the Black Sea. (NYT) , which last week the the Georgian president alleged was devastated by a Russian air raid. (BBC Aug. 9)
And in the meantime, the agreement— cf. earlier news round up— that the Russians have “negotiated for” (demanded from a position of superior bargaining strength) includes a “peacekeeping” role in Georgia. (In fact, one Russian official quoted in The New York Times stated that they’d have taken such a role with or without the agreement.)
From last week, I’ve been boggling at their use of the phrase “peacekeeper” when what they really mean is “heavily armed enforcer.” I really hate that Orwellian doublespeak and I wish the media wouldn’t pick up this usage. Reports vary on how useful the regular army has been in “enforcing” peace (another phrase that makes no sense). Depending on the circumstances, they give different reports of the “peacekeepers’” effectiveness in preventing atrocities, crimes against property, or theft.
As I’ve commented here and here, it’s been reported that the Russian army has been joined by Chechen and Ossetian volunteers. A number of Georgian witnesses have reported that these volunteers “embarked on an orgy of looting, burning, murdering and rape, witnesses claimed, adding that the irregulars had carried off young girls and men.” (The Guardian) These Georgians have described “a campaign of ethnic cleansing” both before and after the ceasefire, “with the apparent support of the Russian army.” (The Guardian2)
The Guardian reports on some of the atrocities reported by Georgians.
Nugzari Jashavili was walking across fields to his house in the Georgian village of Tkviavi. Some 50 metres away, he spotted gunmen approaching his neighbour Gela Chikladze.
“They grabbed him round the shoulder and slit his throat,” Jashavili said. “There were five of them. They had arrived from South Ossetia in a jeep. They were going across the village from house to house.”
Jashavili, 65, said he hid in a cornfield. He watched the Chechen and Ossetian irregulars help themselves to his furniture and 100-watt generator. Further down the road, he said, they shot his cousin Koba. They also executed another man, Shamila Okropridze. (The Guardian)
Villagers say that the Chechen and Ossetian militias are exacting revenge on civilians.
“There are bodies everywhere. I saw hundreds of dead. There are people lying in the streets,” Elene Maisuradze, 73, said. “The villages of Kurta, Chala and Eredvi are full of corpses.”…
“They asked me where my basement was, and shot it up. I was crying. They said: ‘Kill her, kill her.’ My neighbour is a Russian woman and she told them: ‘Don’t do this.’ They fired into the ground instead and said, ‘F*** Saakashvili.’”(The Guardian)
Though the journalists constantly caution that the reports can’t be verified, Human Rights Watch has people on the ground:
The Human Rights Watch said its staff in South Ossetia had “witnessed terrifying scenes of destruction in four villages that used to be populated exclusively by ethnic Georgians.”
Ms Neistat told The Times of devastation in four villages where numerous houses had been burnt and the population had fled, leaving only a few elderly residents who had been unwilling or unable to leave. Russian troops have since been preventing Ossetian irregulars from entering the villages, she said. (Times Online)
One Russian newspaper, Novoie Izvestia, reported on looting of ethnic Georgians by “special forces personnel,” describing “the shame of a South Ossetian commander” when they”fired into homes in Georgian ethnic villages before kicking down doors and helping themselves to stereo equipment and other valuables.” (Times Online)
Reaching the village of Nul, where unripe vines and unmilked cows could be still be seen, the Ossetian forces sprayed the village with bullets from afar,” it said. Alan, one of the irregular fighters, said that: most of the residents ran away after but the soldiers decided to “clean out” the village in case any locals were lying in wait. “We do not want Georgians to return here again. We will build a base for peacekeepers in villages like Nul. They will belong to Russia and to South Ossetia,” he said. (Times Online)
Here’s a report from Haaretz.com of a Russian soldier robbing four journalists at gunpoint.
Four Israeli journalists, including Haaretz correspondent Anshel Pfeffer and photographer Nir Kafri, were robbed at gunpoint by Russian soldiers in the Georgian city of Gori on Thursday.
None of the Israelis was injured in the incident, which occurred as a number of foreign journalists gathered near a Russian checkpoint stationed at the entrance to the city. The Russian troops opened fire on the journalists without warning, trying to disperse the crowd.
Meanwhile, a Russian soldier armed with a Kalashnikov rifle approached the vehicle in which the Israeli journalists were traveling.
He shot at the ground next to reporter Tzur Sheizaf, of Yedioth Ahronoth’s online site Ynet, and ordered the other three journalists - which included Channel Two’s Carmel Luzzati - to exit the car and leave the site.
The four journalists escaped unharmed to Georgian forces stationed 300 meters away. The rifle-toting Russian soldier, meanwhile, took the reporters’ car and joined his comrades…..
Sheizaf went on to say that after 20 minutes or so the soldier returned with the car, with the journalists’ belongings intact. “Fortunately, the theft happened in view of Russian army commanders who would not stand up for that sort of behavior,” Sheizaf told Ynet.
Times Online discusses the claims of Russia and Georgia respectively concerning human rights violations.
Moscow and the Georgians have been trading charges of atrocities and ethnic cleansing since the outbreak of the fighting last Friday but alarm grew today after witnesses reported brutality, in particular by South Ossetian militia.
Even a senior South Ossetian commander acknowledged that looting had been taking place, saying “war is war’. The Russian Government continued to accuse President Mikhail Saakashvili of unleashing genocide and killing 2,000 civilians, but it promised to punish any troops found looting.
A volunteer from Human Rights Watch says that the Russian claims of genocide in South Ossetia are “wildly exaggerated” and “irresponsible.” “The result was to fan hatred for Georgians among neighbours who had previously been friendly to them, she said. ” (Times Online) But Human Rights Watch has collected claims of atrocities by Georgians in South Ossetia as well. (Times Online)
So it seems, as I noted earlier, that the conflict is far from over. In fact, you could say that for the US, it might just be beginning. The Russians made it clear when they struck the deal that they weren’t going to concede that the breakaway enclaves are part of Georgia. (NYT)
A day after Mr. Bush demanded that Russia pull its forces from Georgia and sent humanitarian aid there, the Kremlin orchestrated a wide-ranging response that suggested that tensions between the two powers were not subsiding.
Russia’s president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, held a televised meeting with the leaders of the two breakaway regions, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and pledged that Russia would provide whatever they needed to secede lawfully from Georgia. (NYT)
The Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, says that Georgia can “forget about” its territorial integrity.(NYT) He is now saying that the Russian government has committed so many atrocities in the separatist regions that they could never live under Georgian rule. (NYT) There is little doubt, of course, that the Russians have been doing their utmost over the years to foster this feeling in the separatist regions. (BBC News 8-8-08; 4-30-08)
On August 11, Professor Charles King wrote in The Christian Science Monitor:
South Ossetia and Abkhazia are now completely lost. It is almost impossible to imagine a scenario under which these places – home to perhaps 200,000 people – would ever consent to coming back into a Georgian state they perceive as an aggressor.
Armed volunteers have already been flooding into South Ossetia from other parts of the Caucasus to fight against Georgian forces and help finally “liberate” the Ossetians from the Georgian yoke.
Despite welcome efforts to end the fighting, the Russo-Georgian war has created yet another generation of young men in the Caucasus whose worldviews are defined by violence, revenge, and nationalist zeal. (The Christian Science Monitor)
And here at The Moderate Voice, historian Elrod, after analyzing the historical factors at work here, was coldly pragmatic about our government’s impotence to interfere with “Russia’s vigorous expansionism and authoritarianism.”
Sabre-rattling by the neoconservatives has never looked more buffoonish than now. Even with the aid of a united Europe, we hold no cards against a resurgent Russia in the Caucasus….
It’s ironic that after eight years characterized by two wars in Muslim countries, the Bush Administration has been kneecapped by a conflict having little to do with the War on Terror. The West - and America in particular - has been rendered impotent in this crisis. We can only hope that Russia does not occupy all of Georgia, depose Saakashvili and take over or destroy the BTC pipeline….
Opinions vary about where the blame lies.
Elsewhere in the world, Seumas Milne, in an opinion peace at the lefty British Guardian, accuses the Bush administration of hypocrisy.
The outcome of six grim days of bloodshed in the Caucasus has triggered an outpouring of the most nauseating hypocrisy from western politicians and their captive media. As talking heads thundered against Russian imperialism and brutal disproportionality, US vice-president Dick Cheney, faithfully echoed by Gordon Brown and David Miliband, declared that “Russian aggression must not go unanswered”. George Bush denounced Russia for having “invaded a sovereign neighbouring state” and threatening “a democratic government”. Such an action, he insisted, “is unacceptable in the 21st century”.
Could these by any chance be the leaders of the same governments that in 2003 invaded and occupied - along with Georgia, as luck would have it - the sovereign state of Iraq on a false pretext at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives? Or even the two governments that blocked a ceasefire in the summer of 2006 as Israel pulverised Lebanon’s infrastructure and killed more than a thousand civilians in retaliation for the capture or killing of five soldiers?
You’d be hard put to recall after all the fury over Russian aggression that it was actually Georgia that began the war last Thursday with an all-out attack on South Ossetia to “restore constitutional order” - in other words, rule over an area it has never controlled since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Milne further charges:
The CIA has in fact been closely involved in Georgia since the Soviet collapse. But under the Bush administration, Georgia has become a fully fledged US satellite. Georgia’s forces are armed and trained by the US and Israel. It has the third-largest military contingent in Iraq - hence the US need to airlift 800 of them back to fight the Russians at the weekend. Saakashvili’s links with the neoconservatives in Washington are particularly close: the lobbying firm headed by US Republican candidate John McCain’s top foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, has been paid nearly $900,000 by the Georgian government since 2004.
But in an article published in the conservative British Telegraph, the author considers that we are seeing the outcome of Russia’s evolving attitude toward the west.
[It] is exasperated with the West and also contemptuous of it. In the Georgian conflict, as in the more subtle variants of energy diplomacy. Russians have shown a harshly utilitarian asperity in connecting means and ends. In exchange, we appear to present an unfocused commitment to values and process. Our democracy agenda has earned the resentment not only of Russia’s elite but of the ordinary people who are delighted to see Georgia being taught a lesson.
And here's one commenter's take (Ramsay):
What we can understand is that Russia's attitude to herself and the nations that surround her is partly our fault. When the USSR was dissolved in 1991, the west, and the fault can be laid at Washington’s door, failed to welcome Russia into the community of nations.
The attitude was completely triumphalist – public gloating from members of the Bush (father) administration, rejoicing that “We won the Cold War. Godless Communism is dead.” Boris Yeltsin offered Russia as a partner in the community of nations, especially in his speech to Congress during his first Washington visit, but he was largely ignored. Winston Churchill’s dictum that one should be magnanimous in victory obviously meant nothing to Washington, and instead they concentrated in humiliating Russia under Yeltsin. And the result was that we got Putin, complete with his ex-KGB mindset and old fashioned belief that Russia has a manifest destiny to get her own way in western Asia.
My own sense, which isn’t worth much since it’s just based on what I’ve read or heard others say, is that Russia has been setting this situation up for years now, and that our government has countered by backing Saakashvili—who in pursuit of his own agenda just forced us into a confrontation we’re not in a position to carry through on. As always, when the big powers are calling the shots, it’s the civilian population who just want to get on with their lives who are certain to suffer.
At any rate, I imagine that Georgia is going to lose the disputed territories.
Georgia Declares Itself to be in a State of War Against Russia; Conflict Expands
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