Georgia: South Ossetia, Abkhazia Update — A New Cold War?

The Georgian president, Mikhail Saakashvili, has responded to recognition of the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia by his Russian counterpart, Dmitri Medvedev. Civil Georgia reports that Saakashvili has called the move a “strategic mistake” in comments made during a televised address to the nation yesterday.

“I want everyone to understand one thing: today’s Russian step is totally illegal, with no legal consequences either for Georgia or the rest of the world,” he said.

In his 20-minute address, Saakashvili focused on, as he put it, the importance of the international support that Georgia had gained following the crisis.

“Today, yesterday and in recent weeks, Russia made unimaginable strategic mistakes and struck an unimaginable blow to its place in the international community and in the history of the contemporary world,” he said. “Now Georgia has gained huge international support and solidarity from all over the world and support for our territorial integrity, and we would have failed to gain such huge support, even if we had tried for 200 years, if not for the mistakes made by Russia.”

“The end of the revival of Russia’s imperialism has started today in Georgia,” Saakashvili added.

The report also quotes Saakashvili as saying that he has asked Western leaders to “accelerate [Georgia’s] integration into NATO in order to prevent a reoccurrence of past mistakes,” as well as the European Union, although many critics of his temperament — something which probably led to the crisis in the first place — are unlikely to agree. In a recent op-ed. for example, former U.S. presidential advisor Pat Buchanan was particularly critical of U.S. support for Saakashvili.

If the Russia-Georgia war proves nothing else, it is the insanity of giving erratic hotheads in volatile nations the power to drag the United States into war.

[…]

The swift and decisive action of Putin’s army in running the Georgian forces out of South Ossetia in 24 hours after Saakashvili began his barrage and invasion suggests Putin knew exactly what Saakashvili was up to and dropped the hammer on him.

What did we know? Did we know Georgia was about to walk into Putin’s trap? Did we not see the Russians lying in wait north of the border? Did we give Saakashvili a green light?

Writing on his Middle East Journal, Michael J. Totten is in Tbilisi and disagrees. Critics might argue that he is only hearing the Georgian side, but the blog also recounts a conversation on the conflict with veteran Caucasus journalist and author, Thomas Goltz.

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. “The warfare began Aug. 7 when Georgia launched a barrage targeting South Ossetia,” the Associated Press reported over the weekend in typical fashion.

Virtually everyone is wrong. 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.

[…] I was lucky, […] 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.

[…]

“Let’s just start at the ass end,” Goltz said to me. “This is your first time to the lands of the former Soviet Union?”

“Yes,” I said.

“The restoration of constitutional order,” he said, “may sound just like a rhetorical flourish with no echo in the American mindset. What it means in the post-Soviet mindset is what Boris Yeltsin was doing in Chechnya. This was the stupidest phrase this guy possibly could have used. That’s why people want to lynch him.”

Goltz was referring to the head of the Georgian peacekeeping forces in South Ossetia.

Registan, however, strongly disagrees and claims that the Georgian’s are succesfully employing spin-doctors to shape worldwide public opinion through the media.

[…] he goes on at length quoting this paid representative of Georgia, who manages to portray Georgia as a reactionary victim of Russian power politics. That is certainly true, to an extent, as this excellent look at the complicated start of the war shows (Matthew Bryza, the U.S. Special Envoy to the Region, surprisingly strongly decries Georgian attacks on civilian targets—the action that formed Russia’s casus belli to invade the rest of Georgia, though to Bryza’s credit, he also lambasts the Russians or not ratcheting down tensions beforehand).

Untold Stories, Dispatches from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, also raises some questions regarding the way the conflict in Georgia is often reported in a black and white fashion by many media outlets. The commentary comes from a speech delivered by the organization’s Executive Director.

As Russia and the U.S. raise the ante — Russia by recognizing the breakaway republics of S. Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states and the U.S. responding by dispatching Vice President Dick Cheney to Georgia in a show of solidarity — Sawyer says there’s plenty of blame on all sides for letting the situation escalate as it has. Among his observations:

I don’t buy the loosely offered analogies to past Russian outrages, whether Poland or Czechoslovakia or Afghanistan. I do see parallels to another August, in 1914, when small-minded politicians spurred on by jingoistic journalism allowed an obscure conflict in a remote corner of Europe to erupt into a brutal world war. My hope is that this time cooler heads will prevail, that the media will play its role more responsibly, and that solutions will be found that put the interests of civilians – not politicians – first.

Meanwhile, although there is some caution in supporting Saakashvili as much as he would like, tensions between Russia and the West are increasing. The British Foreign Minister David Miliband has called for a coalition to be formed against “Russian agression in Georgia” while the U.S. President George W. Bush has condemned the Russian move as irresponsible and in violation of the six-point ceasefire agreement.

“The territorial integrity and borders of Georgia must be respected, just as those of Russia or any other country. Russia’s action only exacerbates tensions and complicates diplomatic negotiations,” he said. “We expect Russia to live up to its international commitments, reconsider this irresponsible decision, and follow the approach set out in the six-point agreement.”

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“In accordance with United Nations Security Council Resolutions that remain in force, Abkhazia and South Ossetia are within the internationally recognized borders of Georgia, and they must remain so.”

Russia, however, is accusing the United States of clandestinely bringing in weapons under the guise of humanitarian assistance to Georgia. Civil Georgia reports that Washington denies the allegations although the operation does send an albeit limited message to Moscow. Thankfully, avoiding a direct confrontation, the U.S. Coast Guard cutter is reported to have docked in Batumi rather than in Poti where Russian troops are still occupying the town.

“That’s ridiculous,” Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman, told journalists on August 26. “I can assure you that these are purely humanitarian aid shipments that are going into Georgia and nothing else.”

A U.S. Coast Guard cutter, the USS Dallas, is currently heading towards Georgia to bring another shipment of humanitarian aid. Earlier a destroyer, the USS McFaul, delivered about 80 tons of aid to Batumi, a town south of Poti. The port in Batumi has a much smaller capacity that that in Poti. The USS McFaul has already left Batumi, but it remains in the Black Sea, according to the U.S. Navy.

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He also said that the U.S. had made it “very clear to the Russians what the purpose of the U.S. military is [in Georgia], and we are not anticipating any problems with our ability to deliver humanitarian assistance.”

Nevertheless. Russia has warned the West against re-arming Georgia.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement on August 26 that “re-arming” Georgia would lead “to new adventures.”

“The United States and some European capitals are promising [Mikheil] Saakashvili NATO defense and are calling for the re-arming of the regime in Tbilisi, and have already started new arms deliveries to him,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said.

“It is a direct invitation for new adventures,” it added.

But other concerns still linger. In addition to occupying Poti, apparently in contravention of the armistice, there are renewed reports of the ethnic cleansing of Georgian villages north of Gori, the strategic town linking East and West which was until recently also under Russian military occupation. The blame for the new exodus has been firmly laid on South Ossetian militia who are already known to have raped, looted, pillaged and razed villages to the ground.

Several hundred Georgians were forced to flee from Russian-controlled villages north of the town of Gori reportedly because of renewed harassment and intimidation by South Ossetian militias.

[…]

“The IDPs who have fled the Georgian villages in the buffer zone next to the South Ossetian border told UNHCR staff that they have made the decision to leave due to massive harassment by Ossetian militias in the past two days. They claimed that the number of Ossetian militia in the Georgian villages and the brutality of their attacks have increased considerably since Sunday, 24 August,” the UN refugee agency said in its emergency operation update under the headline “New humanitarian tragedy unfolding in Gori.”

Meanwhile, a Reuters correspondent reported from the village of Mosabruni close to the town of Akhalgori that heavily-armed Georgian special police had to withdraw from the village after South Ossetian militiamen supported by Russian soldiers and Mi-24 helicopter gunships rolled into the village. No fighting was reported.

And contrary to Moscow’s official line that the invasion of Georgia was to protect its citizens in South Ossetia, there still remain signs that the actual goal is to instead dismantle Georgia from inside and enact regime change in the pro-Western former Soviet Republic. Even if Saakashvili over-reacted to Russian provocation, and even if he unilaterally overstepped the mark without it, Moscow’s continuing occupation of parts of Georgia is hard to justify.

Given Russia’s apparent interest in flexing its muscles and reigning in any of its former republics which move too far away from its orbit, there is once again talk of pushing for a new geopolitical shift in the region. Via Unzipped, The Turkish Daily News carries an op-ed by Amberin Zaman, Turkey correspondent for The Economist and wife of the Acting U.S. Ambassador to Armenia. According to her, the situation in the South Caucasus offers a remarkable opportunity for Ankara.

[…] The recent crisis between Georgia and Russia, offers Turkey a unique chance to bolster its regional clout, to check Russian and Iranian influence, and to help secure the flow of Western-bound oil and natural gas from former Soviet Central Asia and Azerbaijan.

Will Turkey’s leaders rise to the occasion? Turkey’s proposal to create a �Caucasus Stability and Coop­eration Platform,� a scheme calling for new methods of crisis management and conflict resolution, is a step in the right direction. […]

Not everyone in Baku or Yerevan is likely to agree with such an opinion given that it would require major concessions from both Armenia and Azerbaijan as well as Turkey. However, the recent military conflict in Georgia has highlighted the threat instability in the region poses to its member countries. Moreover, with NATO expansion eastwards meeting resistance from Moscow, some argue that regional integration would create a counterbalance to Russian influence.

Photos: Mikhail Saakashvili, Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia, Russian checkpoint, Gori, Republic of Georgia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 2008