preview.tinyurl.com/6bn2co -> www.michaeltotten.com/archives/2008/08/the-truth-about-1.php?bcsi_scan_F300493B1D0BA974=0&bcsi_scan_filename=the-truth-about-1.php
jpg TBILISI, GEORGIA - Virtually everyone believes Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili foolishly provoked a Russian invasion on August 7, 2008, when he sent troops into the breakaway district of South Ossetia.
Georgia didn't start it on August 7, nor on any other date. The South Ossetian militia started it on August 6 when its fighters fired on Georgian peacekeepers and Georgian villages with weapons banned by the agreement hammered out between the two sides in 1994. At the same time, the Russian military sent its invasion force bearing down on Georgia from the north side of the Caucasus Mountains on the Russian side of the border through the Roki tunnel and into Georgia. This happened before Saakashvili sent additional troops to South Ossetia and allegedly started the war. Regional expert, German native, and former European Commission official Patrick Worms was recently hired by the Georgian government as a media advisor, and he explained to me exactly what happened when I met him in downtown Tbilisi. You should always be careful with the version of events told by someone on government payroll even when the government is as friendly and democratic as Georgia's. I was lucky, though, that another regional expert, author and academic Thomas Goltz, was present during Worms' briefing to me and signed off on it as completely accurate aside from one tiny quibble. Goltz has been writing about the Caucasus region for almost 20 years, and he isn't on Georgian government payroll.
Goltz experienced these three Caucasus republics at their absolute worst, and he knows the players and the events better than just about anyone. Every journalist in Tbilisi seeks him out as the old hand who knows more than the rest of us put together, and he wanted to hear Patrick Worms' spiel to reporters in part to ensure its accuracy. "You," Worms said to Goltz just before he started to flesh out the real story to me, "are going to be bored because I'm going to give some back story that you know better than I do." The back story began at least as early as the time of the Soviet Union. I turned on my digital voice recorder so I wouldn't miss anything that was said. jpg Patrick Worms "A key tool that the Soviet Union used to keep its empire together," Worms said to me, "was pitting ethnic groups against one another. They did this extremely skillfully in the sense that they never generated ethnic wars within their own territory. But when the Soviet Union collapsed it became an essential Russian policy to weaken the states on its periphery by activating the ethnic fuses they planted. jpg A poster on a wall in Tbilisi, Georgia "They tried that in a number of countries. They tried it in the Baltic states, but the fuses were defused. They tried it in Armenia and Azerbaijan and it went beyond their wildest dreams and we ended up with a massive, massive war. And they tried it in two territories in Georgia, which I'll talk about in a minute. They didn't try it in Central Asia because basically all the presidents of the newly independent countries were the former heads of the communist parties and they said we're still following your line, Kremlin, we haven't changed very much." JPG He's right about the massive war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, though few outside the region know much about it. Armenians and Azeris very thoroughly transferred Azeris and Armenians "back" to their respective mother countries after the Soviet Union collapsed through pogroms, massacres, and ethnic-cleansing. Hundreds of thousands of refugees fled savage communal warfare in terror. The Armenian military still occupies the ethnic-Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh region in southwestern Azerbaijan. It's another so-called "frozen conflict" in the Caucasus region waiting to thaw. Moscow takes the Armenian side and could blow up Nagorno-Karabakh, and subsequently all of Azerbaijan, at any time. After hearing the strident Azeri point of view on the conflict for a week before I arrived in Georgia, I'd say that particular ethnic-nationalist fuse is about one millimeter in length. "Now the story starts really in 1992 when this fuse was lit in Georgia," Worms said. There's Abkhazia which has clearly defined administrative borders, and there's South Ossetia that doesn't. Before the troubles started, Abkhazia was an extremely ethnically mixed area: about 60 percent Georgian, 20 percent Abkhaz, and 20 percent assorted others - Greeks, Estonians, Armenians, Jews, what have you. In Ossetia it was a completely integrated and completely mixed Ossetian-Georgian population. The Ossetians and the Georgians have never been apart in the sense that they were living in their own little villages and doing their own little things. There has been inter-marriage and a sense of common understanding going back to distant history. The Georgians will tell you about King Tamar - that's a woman, but they called her a king - and she was married to an Ossetian. So the fuse was lit and two wars start, one in Abkhazia and one in South Ossetia." Georgia Mapjpg Georgia South Ossetia is inside Georgia, while North Ossetia is inside Russia.
But he was one of these guys who veered off into ethnic exclusivism. He made stupid declarations like Georgia is only for the Georgians. If you're running a multi-ethnic country, that is really not a clever thing to say. But the key thing is that here there were militias, Georgian militias, and some of them pretty nasty." jpg Thomas Goltz Thomas Goltz then interjected his only critique of Patrick Worms' explanation of events that led to this war. "It started in 1991," he said, "but it went into 1992 and 1993, as well."
Gamsakhurdia, was driven from power from across the street. We stood in the lobby where Worms had set up his media relations operation. "There's a horrible picture in my Georgia book of this facade." jpg Marriot Hotel (right), Tbilisi, Georgia "Yeah," Goltz said. He led the government in exile until he came back in 1993 then died obscurely in the mountains, of suicide some people say, others say cancer. So aside from that quibble, everything else Worms said to me was vouched for as accurate by the man who literally wrote the book on this conflict from the point of view of both academic and witness.
And by the time the dust settles, there are between 20,000 and 30,000 dead. Many atrocities committed by both sides, but mostly - at least that's what the Georgians say - by the Abkhaz. As for the rest: the Greeks have gone back to Greece, the Armenians to Armenia, some Abkhaz to Turkey, etc. Abkhazia Mapjpg Abkhazia (upper left) "When it's over," he said, "you've got two bits of Abkhazia which are not ethnic Abkhazia. You've got Gali district which is filled with ethnic Georgians. And you've got the Kodori Gorge which is filled with another bunch of Georgians. So there the end result was a classic case of ethnic-cleansing, but the world didn't pay much attention because it was happening at the same time as the Yugoslav wars. Ossetia also had a war that started about the same time, and it was also pretty nasty, but it never quite succeeded in generating a consolidated bit of territory that Ossetians could keep their own. When the dust settled there, you ended up with a patchwork of Georgian and Ossetian villages. Before the war, Ossetians and Georgians lived together in the same villages. South Ossetia MapJPG "Now fast forward to the Rose Revolution," he said. The Rose Revolution was a popular bloodless revolution that brought Georgia's current president Mikheil Saakashvili to power and replaced the old man of Georgian politics Eduard Shevardnadze who basically ran the country Soviet-style.
Putin's eyes as many times as possible," Worms said, "most notably by wanting to join NATO. "But basically the encouragement was given despite stronger and stronger Russian signals that a Georgian accession to NATO would not be tolerated. Fast forward to 2008, to this year, to the meeting of NATO heads of state that took place in Bucharest, Romania, where Georgia was promised eventual membership of the organization but was refused what it really wanted, which was the so-called Membership Action Plan. The Member...
|
http://csua.com/feed/