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| Europe |
| Georgia's volatile risk-taker has gone over the brink |
| 2008-08-10 |
| The Caucasus is the kind of place where, when the guns start firing, it's hard to stop them. That is the brutal reality of South Ossetia, where a small conflict is beginning to spread exponentially. Leave aside the geopolitics for the moment and have pity for the people who will suffer most from this, the citizens - mostly ethnic Ossetians but also Georgians - who have already died in their hundreds. It is a tiny and vulnerable place, with no more than 75,000 inhabitants of both nationalities mixed up in a patchwork of villages and one sleepy provincial town in the foothills of the Caucasus. Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili seems to care less about these people than about asserting that they live in Georgian territory. Otherwise he would not on the night of 7-8 August have launched a massive artillery assault on the town of Tskhinvali, which has no purely military targets and whose residents, the Georgians say, lest we forget, are their own citizens. This is a blatant breach of international humanitarian law. Moscow cares as little about the Ossetians as it does the Georgians it is bombing, regarding South Ossetia as a pawn in its bid to bring Georgia and its neighbours back into a Russian sphere of influence. Ordinary South Ossetians have also been cursed by a criminalised leadership which would long ago have lost power had they not been the rallying point for defence against Georgia. This conflict was entirely avoidable. Its origin lies in one of the many majority-minority disputes that accompanied the break-up of the Soviet Union. The Ossetians, a divided people with one part living on the Russian north side of the Caucasus, the other in Georgia, generally felt more comfortable with Russian rule than in a new post-Soviet Georgian state. A small nasty war with Tbilisi in 1990-91 cost 1,000 lives and left huge bitterness. But outside high politics, ethnic relations were never bad. For a decade after South Ossetia's de facto secession from Georgia in 1991, it was a shady backwater and smugglers' haven. It was outside nominal Georgian control, but Ossetians and Georgians went back and forth and traded vigorously with one another at an untaxed market in the village of Ergneti. Then Saakashvili came to power in 2004 with heady promises to restore his country's lost territories. He closed the Ergneti market and tried to cut off South Ossetia, triggering a summer of violence. Modelling himself on the medieval Georgian king David the Builder, he said Georgian territorial integrity would be re-established by the end of his presidency. He has sought to tear up the imperfect Russian-framed negotiating framework for South Ossetia, but has not come up with a viable alternative. For their part, the Russians upped the stakes and baited Saakashvili, their bête noire, by effecting a soft annexation of South Ossetia. Moscow handed out Russian passports to the South Ossetians and installed Russian officials in government posts there. Russian soldiers, notionally peacekeepers, have acted as an informal occupying army. Saakashvili is a famously volatile risk-taker, veering between warmonger and peacemaker, democrat and autocrat. On several occasions international officials have pulled him back from the brink. On a visit to Washington in 2004, he received a tongue-lashing from then Secretary of State Colin Powell who told him to act with restraint. Two months ago, he could have triggered a war with his other breakaway province of Abkhazia by calling for the expulsion of Russian peacekeepers from there, but European diplomats persuaded him to step back. This time he has yielded to provocation and stepped over the precipice. The provocation is real, but the Georgian President is rash to believe this is a war he can win or that the West wants it. Both George Bush and John McCain have visited Georgia, made glowing speeches praising Saakashvili and were rewarded with the Order of St George. But Bush, at least in public, is now bound to be cautious, calling for a ceasefire. The reaction in much of Europe will be much less forgiving. Even before this crisis, a number of governments, notably France and Germany, were reporting 'Georgia fatigue'. Though they broadly wished the Saakashvili government well, they did not buy the line that he was a model democrat - the sight last November of his riot police tear-gassing protesters in Tbilisi and smashing up an opposition TV station dispelled that illusion. And they have a long agenda of issues with Russia, which they regard as more important than the post-Soviet quarrel between Moscow and Tbilisi. Paris and Berlin will now say they were right to urge caution on Georgia's Nato ambitions at the Bucharest Nato summit. Both sides are behaving badly. It is outrageous that Russia is seizing the chance to attack Georgian towns and airfields. Dozens of Georgian civilians are now dying too. But Georgia needs to be restrained, for its own sake. Otherwise Saakashvili looks set to lose both the economic stability he has achieved and hope of Nato membership. He already looks now to have forfeited his other lost territory of Abkhazia and the prospect of return there for the quarter of a million Georgians who fled the region during the 1992-93 war. Now it looks as though the Abkhaz are going on the offensive, taking the opportunity to tell the world that they will never return to Georgian rule. Thomas de Waal is Caucasus Editor at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting in London |
| Posted by:john frum |