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PEACE IN GEORGIA
29 August 2008
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. `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.
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. He earns his living from the
University of Montana and from the sales of his books Azerbaijan Diary,
Georgia Diary and Chechnya Diary. 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.'
`Go,' Goltz said. `Go.'
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.
`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.
They tried that in a number of countries. They tried it in the Baltic
states, but the fuses were defused. Nothing much happened. They tried it in
Ukraine. It has not happened yet, but it's getting hotter. They tried it in
Moldova. There it worked, and now we have Transnitria. 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.'
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. `Now, there's two territories. 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
South Ossetia is inside Georgia, while North Ossetia is inside Russia.
`The fuse was not just lit in Moscow,' he said. `It was also lit in Tbilisi.
There was a guy in charge here, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, a little bit like
[Serbian Nationalist war criminal in Bosnia Radovan] Karadzic. He was a
poet. He was an intellectual. 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. The central control of the state was extremely
weak. The Russians were trying to make things worse. There was a civil war
between Georgians and Tbilisi. But the key thing is that here there were
militias, Georgian militias, and some of them pretty nasty.'
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.' Then he turned to me. `This guy,
[Zviad] Gamsakhurdia, was driven from power from across the street. They
bombed this place.' He meant the Marriott Hotel. 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.'
`Of this building?' I said.
`Yeah,' Goltz said. `That was December 1991. He fled in December 1991.'
`Where did he go?' I said.
`To Chechnya,' Goltz said. `Of course. 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. Then he was buried in Grozny.' He turned then
again to Patrick Worms. `1991,' he said. `Not 1992.'
`1991,' Worms said. `Okay.'
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.
`So in 1991,' Worms said, `things here explode. And basically it gets pretty
nasty. Thomas can tell you what happened. Read his book, it's worth it. 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. And the end result is everybody gets kicked
out. Everybody who is not Abkhaz or Russian gets kicked out. That's about
400,000 people. 250,000 of those still live as Internally Displaced Persons
within Georgia. As for the rest: the Greeks have gone back to Greece, the
Armenians to Armenia, some Abkhaz to Turkey, etc.
`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 was different.
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.
After the war they lived in separate villages. But there were still
contacts. People were talking, people were trading. It wasn't quite as nasty
as it was in Abkhazia.
`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.
`The first thing that Misha [Mikheil Saakashvili] did was try to poke his
finger in [Russian President Vladimir] Putin's eyes as many times as
possible,' Worms said, `most notably by wanting to join NATO. The West, in
my view, mishandled this situation. America gave the wrong signals. So did
Europe.'
`Can you elaborate on that a bit?' I said.
`I will,' he said. `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
Membership Action Plan is the bureaucratic tool NATO uses to prepare
countries for membership. And this despite the fact that military experts
will tell you that the Georgian Army, which had been reformed root and
branch with American support, was now in better shape and more able to meet
NATO aspirations than the armies of Albania and Macedonia which got offered
membership at the same meeting.
`Just a little bit of back story again, in July of 2007 Russia withdrew from
the Conventional Forces Treaty in Europe. This is a Soviet era treaty that
dictates where NATO and the Warsaw Pact can keep their conventional armor
around their territories. Russia started moving a lot of materiel south.
After Bucharest, provocations started. Russian provocations started, and
they were mostly in Abkhazia.
`One provocation was to use the Russian media to launch shrill accusations
that the Georgian army was in Kodori preparing for an invasion of Abkhazia.
Now if you go up there - I took a bunch of journalists up there a few
times - when you get to the actual checkpoint you have a wall of crumbling
rock, a wooden bridge, another wall of crumbling rock, a raging torrent, and
a steep mountainside filled with woods. It's not possible to invade out or
invade in unless you've got air support. Which is why the Abkhaz were never
able to kick these Georgians out. They just kept that bit of territory.'
He paused and looked over at Thomas Goltz as though he was bracing for a
critique.
`I'm just doing what I've done already,' he said, `but this time I'm getting
advice from an expert on how I'm doing.'
Thomas Goltz silently nodded.
`Kodori provocations,' Worms continued, `and other provocations. First the
Russians had a peacekeeping base under a 1994 agreement that allowed them to
keep the peace in both Abkhazia and South Ossetia. They added paratroopers,
crack paratroopers, with modern weaponry there. That doesn't sound a lot
like peacekeeping. A further provocation: they start shooting unmanned
Georgian aircraft drones out the sky. One of them was caught on camera by
the drone as it was about to be destroyed. The United Nations confirmed that
it was a Russian plane that did this. It probably took off from an airbase
that the Russians were supposed to have vacated a few years ago, but they
never let the OSCE [Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe] in
to check.
`The next provocation: On April 16 Putin signs a presidential decree
recognizing the documents of Abkhazians and South Ossetians in Russia and
vice versa. This effectively integrates these two territories into Russia's
legal space. The Georgians were furious. So you have all these provocations
mounting and mounting and mounting. Meanwhile, as of July, various air corps
start moving from the rest of Russia to get closer to the Caucasus. These
are obscure details, but they are available.
`Starting in mid July the Russians launched the biggest military exercise in
the North Caucasus that they've held since the Chechnya war. That exercise
never stopped. It just turned into a war. They had all their elite troops
there, all their armor there, all their stuff there. Everyone still
foolishly thought the action was going to be in Abkhazia or in Chechnya,
which is still not as peaceful as they'd like it to be.
`The Georgians had their crack troops in Iraq. So what was left at their
central base in Gori? Not very much. Just Soviet era equipment and not their
best troops. They didn't place troops on the border with Abkhazia because
they didn't want to provoke the Abkhaz. They were expecting an attempt on
Kodori, but the gorge is in such a way that unless they're going to use
massive air support - which the Abkhaz don't have - it's impossible to take
that place. Otherwise they would have done it already.
`So fast forward to early August. You have a town, Tskhinvali, which is
Ossetian, and a bunch of Georgian villages surrounding it in a crescent
shape. There are peacekeepers there. Both Russian peacekeepers and Georgian
peacekeepers under a 1994 accord. The Ossetians were dug in in the town, and
the Georgians were in the forests and the fields between the town and the
villages. The Ossetians start provoking and provoking and provoking by
shelling Georgian positions and Georgian villages around there. And it's a
classic tit for tat thing. You shell, I shell back. The Georgians offered
repeated ceasefires, which the Ossetians broke.
`On August 3, the head of the local administration says he's evacuating his
civilians. You also need to know one thing: you may be wondering what these
areas live off, especially in Ossetia, there's no industry there. Georgia is
poor, but Ossetia is poorer. It's basically a smuggler's paradise. There was
a sting operation that netted three kilograms of highly enriched uranium.
There are fake hundred dollar bills to the tune of at least 50 million
dollars that have been printed. [South Ossetian `President' Eduard] Kokoity
himself is a former wrestler and a former bodyguard who was promoted to the
presidency by powerful Ossetian families as their puppet. What does that
mean in practice? It means that if you are a young man, you have no choice.
You can either live in absolute misery, or you can take the government's
dime and join the militia. It happened in both territories.
`On top of that, for the last four years the Russians have been dishing out
passports to anyone who asks in those areas. All you have to do is present
your Ossetian or Abkhaz papers and a photo and you get a Russian passport on
the spot. If you live in Moscow and try to get a Russian passport, you have
the normal procedure to follow, and it takes years. So suddenly you have a
lot of Ossetian militiamen and Abkhaz militiamen with Russian passports in
effect paid by Russian subsidies.
`So back to the 3rd of August. Kokoity announces women and children should
leave. As it later turned out, he made all the civilians leave who were not
fighting or did not have fighting capabilities. On the same day,
irregulars - Ingush, Chechen, Ossetians, and Cossacks - start coming in and
spreading out into the countryside but don't do anything. They just sit and
wait. On the 6th of August the shelling intensifies from Ossetian positions.
And for the first time since the war finished in 1992, they are using 120mm
guns.'
`Can I stop you for a second?' I said. I was still under the impression that
the war began on August 7 and that Georgian President Saakashvili started it
when he sent troops into South Ossetia's capital Tskhinvali. What was all
this about the Ossetian violence on August 6 and before?
He raised his hand as if to say stop.
`That was the formal start of the war,' he said. `Because of the peace
agreement they had, nobody was allowed to have guns bigger than 80mm. Okay,
so that's the formal start of the war. It wasn't the attack on Tskhinvali.
Now stop me.'
`Okay,' I said. `All the reports I've read say Saakashvili started the war.'
`I'm not yet on the 7th,' he said. `I'm on the 6th.'
`Okay,' I said. He had given this explanation to reporters before, and he
knew exactly what I was thinking.
`Saakashvili is accused of starting this war on the 7th,' he said.
`Right,' I said. `But that sounds like complete bs to me if what you say is
true.'
Thomas Goltz nodded.
*
I later met wounded Georgian soldiers in a Tbilisi hospital who confirmed
what Patrick Worms had told me about what happened when the war actually
started. I felt apprehensive about meeting wounded soldiers. Would they
really want to talk to someone in the media or would they rather spend their
time healing in peace?
My translator spoke to some of the doctors in the hospital who directed us
to Georgian soldiers and a civilian who were wounded in South Ossetia and
felt okay enough to speak to a foreign reporter.
`Every day and every hour the Russian side lied,' Georgian soldier Kaha
Bragadze said. `It must be stopped. If not today, then maybe tomorrow. My
troops were in our village, Avnevi. On the 6th of August they blew up our
troops' four-wheel-drives, our pickups. They blew them up. Also in this
village - it was August 5th or 6th, I can't remember - they started bombing
us with shells. Two soldiers died that day, our peacekeepers. The Ossetians
had a good position on the hill. They could see all our positions and our
villages, and they started bombing. They went to the top of the hill, bombed
us, then went down. We couldn't see who was shooting at us.'
`Which day was this?' I said. `The 5th or the 6th?'
`I don't remember,' he said. `But it started that day from that place when
two Georgians were killed.'
`Were they just bombing you the peacekeepers,' I said, `or also civilians
and villages?'
`Before they started bombing us they took all the civilians out of their
villages,' he said. `Then they started damaging our villages - houses, a gas
pipe, roads, yards. They killed our animals. They evacuated their villages,
then bombed our villages.'
Another Georgian soldier, Giorgi Khosiashvili, concurred.
`I was a peace keeper as well,' he said, `but in another village. I was
fired upon on August 6th. On the 5th of August they started shooting. They
blew up our peacekeeping trucks. They put a bomb on the road and when they
were driving they were blown up. They also mined the roads used by
civilians. On the 6th of August they started bombing Avnevi. And at this
time they took the civilians out of Tskhinvali and sent them to North
Ossetia [inside Russia].'
`I saw this on TV,' said Alex, my translator. `They took the civilians,
kids, women, and put them on the bus and sent them to North Ossetia.'
A civilian man, Koba Mindiashvili, shared the hospital room with the
Georgian soldiers. He, too, was in South Ossetia where he lived outside
Tskhinvali.
`When they started bombing my village,' he said, `I was running away and the
soldiers wounded me. They robbed me and shot me in the leg with a
Kalashnikov. I don't know if it was Russians or Ossetians. They took my car,
took my gold chain, and shot me.'
`They didn't care if it was a house or a military camp,' Giorgi Khosiashvili
said. `They bombed everything.'
`You actually saw this for yourself?' I said.
`Yes,' he said. `I saw it. It was the Russian military airplanes. If they
knew it was a Georgian village, they bombed all the houses. Many civilians
were killed from this bombing.'
`It was Russians or Ossetians who did this?' I said.
`It was Russians,' he said. `The Ossetians don't have any jets.'
*
Back at the Marriott Hotel in downtown Tbilisi, Patrick Worms continued
fleshing out the rest of the story. `Let me tell you what happened on the
7th,' he said. `On the 6th, while this is going on, the integration minister
who was until a few months ago an NGO guy and who believes in soft power
things, tried to go there and meet the separatist leadership. The meeting
doesn't happen for farcical reasons. The shelling intensifies during the
night and there is, again, tit for tat, but this time with weapons coming
from the South Ossetian side which are not allowed under the agreement. By
that time, the Georgians were seriously worried. All their armor that was
near Abkhazia starts moving, but they are tanks, they don't have tank
transporters, so they move slowly. They don't make it back in time. On the
7th, this continues. That afternoon, the president announces a unilateral
ceasefire, a different one from the previous ones. It means I stop firing
first, and if you fire, I still won't fire back. That holds until the next
part of the story.
`On the evening of the 7th, the Ossetians launch an all-out barrage focused
on Georgian villages, not on Georgian positions. Remember, these Georgian
villages inside South Ossetia - the Georgians have mostly evacuated those
villages, and three of them are completely pulverized. That evening, the
7th, the president gets information that a large Russian column is on the
move. Later that evening, somebody sees those vehicles emerging from the
Roki tunnel [into Georgia from Russia]. Then a little bit later, somebody
else sees them. That's three confirmations. It was time to act.
`What they had in the area was peacekeeping stuff, not stuff for fighting a
war. They had to stop that column, and they had to stop it for two reasons.
It's a pretty steep valley. If they could stop the Russians there, they
would be stuck in the tunnel and they couldn't send the rest of their army
through. So they did two things. The first thing they did, and it happened
at roughly the same time, they tried to get through [South Ossetian capital]
Tskhinvali, and that's when everybody says Saakashvili started the war. It
wasn't about taking Ossetia back, it was about fighting their way through
that town to get onto that road to slow the Russian advance. The second
thing they did, they dropped a team of paratroopers to destroy a bridge.
They got wiped out, but first they managed to destroy the bridge and about
15 Russian vehicles.
`The Georgians will tell you that they estimate that these two actions
together slowed the Russian advance by 24 to 48 hours. That is what the
world considered to be Misha's game. And you know why the world considers it
that? Because here in South Ossetia was the head of the peacekeeping troops.
He hasn't been in Iraq, he's a peace keeper. What have they been told for
the last four years? They lived in a failed state, then there was the Rose
Revolution - it wasn't perfect but, damn, now there's electricity, there's
jobs, roads have been fixed - and what the Georgians have had drummed into
them is that Georgia is now a constitutional state, a state of law and
order. And everybody here knows that Ossetia is a gangster's smuggler's
paradise. The whole world knows it, but here they know it particularly well.
The peacekeepers had a military objective, and the first rule of warfare
when you're talking to the media is not to reveal to your enemy what you're
going to do. So they weren't going to blather into a microphone and say
well, actually, I'm trying to go through Tskhinvali in order to stop the
Russians. So what did he say instead? I'm here to restore constitutional
order in South Ossetia. And that's it. With that, Georgia lost the
propaganda war and the world believes Saakashvili started it. And the rest
of the story...you know.'
`Let me make a couple of comments,' Goltz said.
`That,' Worms said, `to the best of my knowledge, is all true.'
`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. He turned then to Patrick Worms. `Your presentation was deliciously
comprehensive. Perhaps it was...we'll ask our new friend Michael...too much
information out of the gate to absorb.'
`I absorbed it,' I said.
`Okay,' Goltz said.
`Am I making any mistakes?' Worms said to Goltz. `Am I forgetting anything?'
`Well,' Goltz said, `there are some details that I would chip in. Who are
the Ossetians and where do they live? This is the question that has been
lost in all of the static from this story. This autonomy [South Ossetia] is
an autonomous district, as opposed to an autonomous republic, with about
60,000 people max. So, where are the rest of the Ossetians? Guess where they
live? Tbilisi. Here. There. Everywhere. There are more Ossetians - take a
look around this lobby. You will find Ossetians here. Of those Ossetians who
are theoretically citizens of the Republic of Georgia, 60,000 live there and
around 40,000 live here.'
`What do they think about all this?' I said.
`They're scared as shit,' Goltz said.
`Are they on the side of those who live in South Ossetia?' I said.
`No,' he said. `One of them is Georgia's Minister of Defense. [Correction:
Georgia's Minister of Defense is Jewish, not Ossetian.] Georgia is a
multi-ethnic republic. And the whole point of the Ossetian ethnic question
is this: South Ossetia is part of Georgia.'
`Are reporters receptive to what you're saying?' I said to Worms.
`Everyone is receptive,' he said. `Everyone, regardless of nationality, even
those who love Georgia, genuinely thought Saakashvili started it.'
`That's what I thought,' I said. `That's what everyone has been writing.'
`Yes,' he said. `Absolutely. We've been trying to tell the world about this
for months. If you go back and look at the archives you'll see plenty of
calls from the Georgian government saying they're really worried. Even some
Russian commentators agree that this is exactly what happened. Don't forget,
they sent in a lot of irregulars, Chechens, Cossacks, Ossetians, Ingush -
basically thugs. Not normal Chechens or Ingush - thugs. Thugs out for a
holiday. Many Western camera crews were robbed at gunpoint ten meters from
Russian tanks while Russian commanders just stood there smoking their
cigarettes while the irregulars...that happened to a Turkish TV crew.
They're lucky to still be alive. Some of the Georgians were picked up by the
irregulars. If they happened to be female, they got raped. If they happened
to be male, they got shot immediately, sometimes tortured. Injured people we
have in hospitals who managed to get out have had arms chopped off, eyes
gouged out, and their tongues ripped out.'
Russian rules of engagement, so to speak, go down harder than communism. And
the Soviet era habits of disinformation are alive and well.
`You also have to remember the propaganda campaign that came out,' he said.
`Human Rights Watch is accusing the Russian authorities of being indirectly
responsible for the massive ethnic cleansing of Georgians that happened in
South Ossetia. The Ossetians are claiming that the Georgians killed 2,000
people in Tskhinvali, but when Human Rights Watch got in there a few days
ago and talked to the hospital director, he had received 44 bodies. There
was nobody left in that town. Plus it's the oldest law of warfare: have your
guns in populated areas, and when the enemy responds, show the world your
dead women and children.
`Right,' I said. `That goes on a lot where I usually work, in the Middle
East.'
`Yes,' he said. `That's exactly what the Russians were doing.'
http://dianach.livejournal.com/38352.html
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
PEACE IN GEORGIA
29 August 2008
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. `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.
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. He earns his living from the
University of Montana and from the sales of his books Azerbaijan Diary,
Georgia Diary and Chechnya Diary. 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.'
`Go,' Goltz said. `Go.'
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.
`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.
They tried that in a number of countries. They tried it in the Baltic
states, but the fuses were defused. Nothing much happened. They tried it in
Ukraine. It has not happened yet, but it's getting hotter. They tried it in
Moldova. There it worked, and now we have Transnitria. 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.'
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. `Now, there's two territories. 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
South Ossetia is inside Georgia, while North Ossetia is inside Russia.
`The fuse was not just lit in Moscow,' he said. `It was also lit in Tbilisi.
There was a guy in charge here, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, a little bit like
[Serbian Nationalist war criminal in Bosnia Radovan] Karadzic. He was a
poet. He was an intellectual. 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. The central control of the state was extremely
weak. The Russians were trying to make things worse. There was a civil war
between Georgians and Tbilisi. But the key thing is that here there were
militias, Georgian militias, and some of them pretty nasty.'
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.' Then he turned to me. `This guy,
[Zviad] Gamsakhurdia, was driven from power from across the street. They
bombed this place.' He meant the Marriott Hotel. 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.'
`Of this building?' I said.
`Yeah,' Goltz said. `That was December 1991. He fled in December 1991.'
`Where did he go?' I said.
`To Chechnya,' Goltz said. `Of course. 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. Then he was buried in Grozny.' He turned then
again to Patrick Worms. `1991,' he said. `Not 1992.'
`1991,' Worms said. `Okay.'
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.
`So in 1991,' Worms said, `things here explode. And basically it gets pretty
nasty. Thomas can tell you what happened. Read his book, it's worth it. 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. And the end result is everybody gets kicked
out. Everybody who is not Abkhaz or Russian gets kicked out. That's about
400,000 people. 250,000 of those still live as Internally Displaced Persons
within Georgia. As for the rest: the Greeks have gone back to Greece, the
Armenians to Armenia, some Abkhaz to Turkey, etc.
`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 was different.
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.
After the war they lived in separate villages. But there were still
contacts. People were talking, people were trading. It wasn't quite as nasty
as it was in Abkhazia.
`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.
`The first thing that Misha [Mikheil Saakashvili] did was try to poke his
finger in [Russian President Vladimir] Putin's eyes as many times as
possible,' Worms said, `most notably by wanting to join NATO. The West, in
my view, mishandled this situation. America gave the wrong signals. So did
Europe.'
`Can you elaborate on that a bit?' I said.
`I will,' he said. `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
Membership Action Plan is the bureaucratic tool NATO uses to prepare
countries for membership. And this despite the fact that military experts
will tell you that the Georgian Army, which had been reformed root and
branch with American support, was now in better shape and more able to meet
NATO aspirations than the armies of Albania and Macedonia which got offered
membership at the same meeting.
`Just a little bit of back story again, in July of 2007 Russia withdrew from
the Conventional Forces Treaty in Europe. This is a Soviet era treaty that
dictates where NATO and the Warsaw Pact can keep their conventional armor
around their territories. Russia started moving a lot of materiel south.
After Bucharest, provocations started. Russian provocations started, and
they were mostly in Abkhazia.
`One provocation was to use the Russian media to launch shrill accusations
that the Georgian army was in Kodori preparing for an invasion of Abkhazia.
Now if you go up there - I took a bunch of journalists up there a few
times - when you get to the actual checkpoint you have a wall of crumbling
rock, a wooden bridge, another wall of crumbling rock, a raging torrent, and
a steep mountainside filled with woods. It's not possible to invade out or
invade in unless you've got air support. Which is why the Abkhaz were never
able to kick these Georgians out. They just kept that bit of territory.'
He paused and looked over at Thomas Goltz as though he was bracing for a
critique.
`I'm just doing what I've done already,' he said, `but this time I'm getting
advice from an expert on how I'm doing.'
Thomas Goltz silently nodded.
`Kodori provocations,' Worms continued, `and other provocations. First the
Russians had a peacekeeping base under a 1994 agreement that allowed them to
keep the peace in both Abkhazia and South Ossetia. They added paratroopers,
crack paratroopers, with modern weaponry there. That doesn't sound a lot
like peacekeeping. A further provocation: they start shooting unmanned
Georgian aircraft drones out the sky. One of them was caught on camera by
the drone as it was about to be destroyed. The United Nations confirmed that
it was a Russian plane that did this. It probably took off from an airbase
that the Russians were supposed to have vacated a few years ago, but they
never let the OSCE [Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe] in
to check.
`The next provocation: On April 16 Putin signs a presidential decree
recognizing the documents of Abkhazians and South Ossetians in Russia and
vice versa. This effectively integrates these two territories into Russia's
legal space. The Georgians were furious. So you have all these provocations
mounting and mounting and mounting. Meanwhile, as of July, various air corps
start moving from the rest of Russia to get closer to the Caucasus. These
are obscure details, but they are available.
`Starting in mid July the Russians launched the biggest military exercise in
the North Caucasus that they've held since the Chechnya war. That exercise
never stopped. It just turned into a war. They had all their elite troops
there, all their armor there, all their stuff there. Everyone still
foolishly thought the action was going to be in Abkhazia or in Chechnya,
which is still not as peaceful as they'd like it to be.
`The Georgians had their crack troops in Iraq. So what was left at their
central base in Gori? Not very much. Just Soviet era equipment and not their
best troops. They didn't place troops on the border with Abkhazia because
they didn't want to provoke the Abkhaz. They were expecting an attempt on
Kodori, but the gorge is in such a way that unless they're going to use
massive air support - which the Abkhaz don't have - it's impossible to take
that place. Otherwise they would have done it already.
`So fast forward to early August. You have a town, Tskhinvali, which is
Ossetian, and a bunch of Georgian villages surrounding it in a crescent
shape. There are peacekeepers there. Both Russian peacekeepers and Georgian
peacekeepers under a 1994 accord. The Ossetians were dug in in the town, and
the Georgians were in the forests and the fields between the town and the
villages. The Ossetians start provoking and provoking and provoking by
shelling Georgian positions and Georgian villages around there. And it's a
classic tit for tat thing. You shell, I shell back. The Georgians offered
repeated ceasefires, which the Ossetians broke.
`On August 3, the head of the local administration says he's evacuating his
civilians. You also need to know one thing: you may be wondering what these
areas live off, especially in Ossetia, there's no industry there. Georgia is
poor, but Ossetia is poorer. It's basically a smuggler's paradise. There was
a sting operation that netted three kilograms of highly enriched uranium.
There are fake hundred dollar bills to the tune of at least 50 million
dollars that have been printed. [South Ossetian `President' Eduard] Kokoity
himself is a former wrestler and a former bodyguard who was promoted to the
presidency by powerful Ossetian families as their puppet. What does that
mean in practice? It means that if you are a young man, you have no choice.
You can either live in absolute misery, or you can take the government's
dime and join the militia. It happened in both territories.
`On top of that, for the last four years the Russians have been dishing out
passports to anyone who asks in those areas. All you have to do is present
your Ossetian or Abkhaz papers and a photo and you get a Russian passport on
the spot. If you live in Moscow and try to get a Russian passport, you have
the normal procedure to follow, and it takes years. So suddenly you have a
lot of Ossetian militiamen and Abkhaz militiamen with Russian passports in
effect paid by Russian subsidies.
`So back to the 3rd of August. Kokoity announces women and children should
leave. As it later turned out, he made all the civilians leave who were not
fighting or did not have fighting capabilities. On the same day,
irregulars - Ingush, Chechen, Ossetians, and Cossacks - start coming in and
spreading out into the countryside but don't do anything. They just sit and
wait. On the 6th of August the shelling intensifies from Ossetian positions.
And for the first time since the war finished in 1992, they are using 120mm
guns.'
`Can I stop you for a second?' I said. I was still under the impression that
the war began on August 7 and that Georgian President Saakashvili started it
when he sent troops into South Ossetia's capital Tskhinvali. What was all
this about the Ossetian violence on August 6 and before?
He raised his hand as if to say stop.
`That was the formal start of the war,' he said. `Because of the peace
agreement they had, nobody was allowed to have guns bigger than 80mm. Okay,
so that's the formal start of the war. It wasn't the attack on Tskhinvali.
Now stop me.'
`Okay,' I said. `All the reports I've read say Saakashvili started the war.'
`I'm not yet on the 7th,' he said. `I'm on the 6th.'
`Okay,' I said. He had given this explanation to reporters before, and he
knew exactly what I was thinking.
`Saakashvili is accused of starting this war on the 7th,' he said.
`Right,' I said. `But that sounds like complete bs to me if what you say is
true.'
Thomas Goltz nodded.
*
I later met wounded Georgian soldiers in a Tbilisi hospital who confirmed
what Patrick Worms had told me about what happened when the war actually
started. I felt apprehensive about meeting wounded soldiers. Would they
really want to talk to someone in the media or would they rather spend their
time healing in peace?
My translator spoke to some of the doctors in the hospital who directed us
to Georgian soldiers and a civilian who were wounded in South Ossetia and
felt okay enough to speak to a foreign reporter.
`Every day and every hour the Russian side lied,' Georgian soldier Kaha
Bragadze said. `It must be stopped. If not today, then maybe tomorrow. My
troops were in our village, Avnevi. On the 6th of August they blew up our
troops' four-wheel-drives, our pickups. They blew them up. Also in this
village - it was August 5th or 6th, I can't remember - they started bombing
us with shells. Two soldiers died that day, our peacekeepers. The Ossetians
had a good position on the hill. They could see all our positions and our
villages, and they started bombing. They went to the top of the hill, bombed
us, then went down. We couldn't see who was shooting at us.'
`Which day was this?' I said. `The 5th or the 6th?'
`I don't remember,' he said. `But it started that day from that place when
two Georgians were killed.'
`Were they just bombing you the peacekeepers,' I said, `or also civilians
and villages?'
`Before they started bombing us they took all the civilians out of their
villages,' he said. `Then they started damaging our villages - houses, a gas
pipe, roads, yards. They killed our animals. They evacuated their villages,
then bombed our villages.'
Another Georgian soldier, Giorgi Khosiashvili, concurred.
`I was a peace keeper as well,' he said, `but in another village. I was
fired upon on August 6th. On the 5th of August they started shooting. They
blew up our peacekeeping trucks. They put a bomb on the road and when they
were driving they were blown up. They also mined the roads used by
civilians. On the 6th of August they started bombing Avnevi. And at this
time they took the civilians out of Tskhinvali and sent them to North
Ossetia [inside Russia].'
`I saw this on TV,' said Alex, my translator. `They took the civilians,
kids, women, and put them on the bus and sent them to North Ossetia.'
A civilian man, Koba Mindiashvili, shared the hospital room with the
Georgian soldiers. He, too, was in South Ossetia where he lived outside
Tskhinvali.
`When they started bombing my village,' he said, `I was running away and the
soldiers wounded me. They robbed me and shot me in the leg with a
Kalashnikov. I don't know if it was Russians or Ossetians. They took my car,
took my gold chain, and shot me.'
`They didn't care if it was a house or a military camp,' Giorgi Khosiashvili
said. `They bombed everything.'
`You actually saw this for yourself?' I said.
`Yes,' he said. `I saw it. It was the Russian military airplanes. If they
knew it was a Georgian village, they bombed all the houses. Many civilians
were killed from this bombing.'
`It was Russians or Ossetians who did this?' I said.
`It was Russians,' he said. `The Ossetians don't have any jets.'
*
Back at the Marriott Hotel in downtown Tbilisi, Patrick Worms continued
fleshing out the rest of the story. `Let me tell you what happened on the
7th,' he said. `On the 6th, while this is going on, the integration minister
who was until a few months ago an NGO guy and who believes in soft power
things, tried to go there and meet the separatist leadership. The meeting
doesn't happen for farcical reasons. The shelling intensifies during the
night and there is, again, tit for tat, but this time with weapons coming
from the South Ossetian side which are not allowed under the agreement. By
that time, the Georgians were seriously worried. All their armor that was
near Abkhazia starts moving, but they are tanks, they don't have tank
transporters, so they move slowly. They don't make it back in time. On the
7th, this continues. That afternoon, the president announces a unilateral
ceasefire, a different one from the previous ones. It means I stop firing
first, and if you fire, I still won't fire back. That holds until the next
part of the story.
`On the evening of the 7th, the Ossetians launch an all-out barrage focused
on Georgian villages, not on Georgian positions. Remember, these Georgian
villages inside South Ossetia - the Georgians have mostly evacuated those
villages, and three of them are completely pulverized. That evening, the
7th, the president gets information that a large Russian column is on the
move. Later that evening, somebody sees those vehicles emerging from the
Roki tunnel [into Georgia from Russia]. Then a little bit later, somebody
else sees them. That's three confirmations. It was time to act.
`What they had in the area was peacekeeping stuff, not stuff for fighting a
war. They had to stop that column, and they had to stop it for two reasons.
It's a pretty steep valley. If they could stop the Russians there, they
would be stuck in the tunnel and they couldn't send the rest of their army
through. So they did two things. The first thing they did, and it happened
at roughly the same time, they tried to get through [South Ossetian capital]
Tskhinvali, and that's when everybody says Saakashvili started the war. It
wasn't about taking Ossetia back, it was about fighting their way through
that town to get onto that road to slow the Russian advance. The second
thing they did, they dropped a team of paratroopers to destroy a bridge.
They got wiped out, but first they managed to destroy the bridge and about
15 Russian vehicles.
`The Georgians will tell you that they estimate that these two actions
together slowed the Russian advance by 24 to 48 hours. That is what the
world considered to be Misha's game. And you know why the world considers it
that? Because here in South Ossetia was the head of the peacekeeping troops.
He hasn't been in Iraq, he's a peace keeper. What have they been told for
the last four years? They lived in a failed state, then there was the Rose
Revolution - it wasn't perfect but, damn, now there's electricity, there's
jobs, roads have been fixed - and what the Georgians have had drummed into
them is that Georgia is now a constitutional state, a state of law and
order. And everybody here knows that Ossetia is a gangster's smuggler's
paradise. The whole world knows it, but here they know it particularly well.
The peacekeepers had a military objective, and the first rule of warfare
when you're talking to the media is not to reveal to your enemy what you're
going to do. So they weren't going to blather into a microphone and say
well, actually, I'm trying to go through Tskhinvali in order to stop the
Russians. So what did he say instead? I'm here to restore constitutional
order in South Ossetia. And that's it. With that, Georgia lost the
propaganda war and the world believes Saakashvili started it. And the rest
of the story...you know.'
`Let me make a couple of comments,' Goltz said.
`That,' Worms said, `to the best of my knowledge, is all true.'
`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. He turned then to Patrick Worms. `Your presentation was deliciously
comprehensive. Perhaps it was...we'll ask our new friend Michael...too much
information out of the gate to absorb.'
`I absorbed it,' I said.
`Okay,' Goltz said.
`Am I making any mistakes?' Worms said to Goltz. `Am I forgetting anything?'
`Well,' Goltz said, `there are some details that I would chip in. Who are
the Ossetians and where do they live? This is the question that has been
lost in all of the static from this story. This autonomy [South Ossetia] is
an autonomous district, as opposed to an autonomous republic, with about
60,000 people max. So, where are the rest of the Ossetians? Guess where they
live? Tbilisi. Here. There. Everywhere. There are more Ossetians - take a
look around this lobby. You will find Ossetians here. Of those Ossetians who
are theoretically citizens of the Republic of Georgia, 60,000 live there and
around 40,000 live here.'
`What do they think about all this?' I said.
`They're scared as shit,' Goltz said.
`Are they on the side of those who live in South Ossetia?' I said.
`No,' he said. `One of them is Georgia's Minister of Defense. [Correction:
Georgia's Minister of Defense is Jewish, not Ossetian.] Georgia is a
multi-ethnic republic. And the whole point of the Ossetian ethnic question
is this: South Ossetia is part of Georgia.'
`Are reporters receptive to what you're saying?' I said to Worms.
`Everyone is receptive,' he said. `Everyone, regardless of nationality, even
those who love Georgia, genuinely thought Saakashvili started it.'
`That's what I thought,' I said. `That's what everyone has been writing.'
`Yes,' he said. `Absolutely. We've been trying to tell the world about this
for months. If you go back and look at the archives you'll see plenty of
calls from the Georgian government saying they're really worried. Even some
Russian commentators agree that this is exactly what happened. Don't forget,
they sent in a lot of irregulars, Chechens, Cossacks, Ossetians, Ingush -
basically thugs. Not normal Chechens or Ingush - thugs. Thugs out for a
holiday. Many Western camera crews were robbed at gunpoint ten meters from
Russian tanks while Russian commanders just stood there smoking their
cigarettes while the irregulars...that happened to a Turkish TV crew.
They're lucky to still be alive. Some of the Georgians were picked up by the
irregulars. If they happened to be female, they got raped. If they happened
to be male, they got shot immediately, sometimes tortured. Injured people we
have in hospitals who managed to get out have had arms chopped off, eyes
gouged out, and their tongues ripped out.'
Russian rules of engagement, so to speak, go down harder than communism. And
the Soviet era habits of disinformation are alive and well.
`You also have to remember the propaganda campaign that came out,' he said.
`Human Rights Watch is accusing the Russian authorities of being indirectly
responsible for the massive ethnic cleansing of Georgians that happened in
South Ossetia. The Ossetians are claiming that the Georgians killed 2,000
people in Tskhinvali, but when Human Rights Watch got in there a few days
ago and talked to the hospital director, he had received 44 bodies. There
was nobody left in that town. Plus it's the oldest law of warfare: have your
guns in populated areas, and when the enemy responds, show the world your
dead women and children.
`Right,' I said. `That goes on a lot where I usually work, in the Middle
East.'
`Yes,' he said. `That's exactly what the Russians were doing.'
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From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress