Martin Wisse – Page 540

The humanitarian cost of the War in South Ossetia

Published on August 11, 2008

Lenny has a good point when he mentions that much of the reporting on the war for South Ossetia has reported extensively on Georgian victims of the war, but less so on Ossetian victims, even though Ossetia has borne the brunt of the fighting:

Incidentally, just so that this point isn’t lost in the deliberately confusing reportage. Yes, Russian jets are attacking Georgian targets and killing civilians. Yes, the reported civilian casualties “on both sides” is reported to be over 2,000. What is quite often not stated or just gently skated over in the reporting, so laden with images of Georgian dead and wounded, is that the estimate of 2,000 civilian deaths comes from the Russian government and it applies overwhelmingly to the Georgian attacks on South Ossetia on Friday. In fact, this is the basis for Vladimir Putin’s claims of a “genocide” against South Osettians by the Georgians (is he deliberately referencing the ICTY judgment about Srebrenica here?).
The Georgian side, by contrast, claims 129 deaths of both soldiers and civilians. So, if Russian figures are good enough to reference, why is the source of the figures and their context obscured? Why is being made to look as if Russian forces are behind most of those alleged deaths? Doesn’t this just amount to a whitewash of the actions of the Georgian army in South Ossetia? And why not mention 30,000 refugees too?

Seeing the reports on the various 24 hours rolling news channels over the weekend (Sky, BBC24, CNN, Euronews and Al-Jazeera) is that footage of the Russian bombardment of Gori was prominent on all of them, but I didn’t see the equivalent from Tskhinvali when the Georgians were bombarding that city. I don’t think this was a deliberate decision on the part of these channels as much as that there just wasn’t much coming in from there. It might seem harsh to talk this way when seeing the obvious suffering of the people cauhgt in the Russian bombardment, but with these images Georgia is winning the propagandawar, if not the war on the ground. Russia and South Ossetia might claim that many more civilians on their side were killed, wounded or driven from their homes, but without pictures these claims remain abstract, miss the immediacy of the Gori footage.

South Ossetia: why this war now?

Published on August 11, 2008

map of Georgia, showing the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia

The one big question that I keep coming back to is what in hell possessed Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili to start this war in the first place. Yes, this has been a crisis that’s been building for some time, with tensions having mounted again in the past month, but there was nothing going on that forced Saakashvili to escalate so drastically. What made him think invading South Ossetia was a good idea when he should know this would bring Russia in and the balance of forces never favoured Georgia, to say the least. As the events of the past few days proved, the Georgian army was no matchfor a serious Russian counteroffensive. Over at A FistFul of Euros, Douglas Muir speculated that it was a gamble on Saakashvili’s part, taking his chance to overrun South Ossetia before the Russians could mobilise:

South Ossetia has always been vulnerable to a blitzkrieg attack. It’s small, it’s not very populous (~70,000 people), and it’s surrounded by Georgia on three sides. It’s very rugged and mountainous, yes, but it’s not suited to defense in depth. There’s only one town of any size (Tsikhinvali, the capital)
and only one decent road connecting the province with Russia.

That last point bears emphasizing. There’s just one road, and it goes through a tunnel. There are a couple of crappy roads over the high passes, but they’re in dreadful condition; they can’t support heavy equipment, and are closed by snow from September to May. Strategically, South Ossetia dangles by that single thread.

So, there was always this temptation: a fast determined offensive could capture Tsikhinvali, blow up or block the tunnel, close the road, and then sit tight. If it worked, the Russians would then be in a very tricky spot: yes, they outnumber the Georgians 20 to 1, but they’d have to either drop in by air or attack over some very high, nasty mountains.

It is the sort of plan that is very tempting when the situation is right, if your own army is ready and willing and you can manage to find a situation in which the enemy is not. But it’s a high risk gamble, as we’ve seen again and it almost never pays off. In Georgia’s case, if Saakashvili did think this way and perhaps took Putin’s presence at the Olympics as a sign that Russia was distracted enough to risk the gamble, he made an awful mistake. He should’ve known the military commander on the gorund in North Ossetia also knows the facts as Doug sketches them above and that his first thought would beto get his troops through the tunnel as quickly as possible, just in case they do need to fight Georgian forces. Trying a blitzkrieg is the most obvious thing for the Georgians to try, so doubtlessly the Russians had contingency plans drawn up for this eventuality long ago.

But even had the Georgians succeeded in blitzkrieging South Ossetia, they still wouldn’t be in a good situation, as there still would be Abkhazia, the other, much larger breakaway region to content with. A Georgian victory would’ve brought them a long, slow guerilla war in South Ossetia and a Russian reinforced Abkhazia that would offer the constant threat of a second front. Which makes the decision to invade South Ossetia even more strange, with Abkhazia left alone. Perhaps Saakashvili thought that the latter was a lost cause anyway, even when conquered too easily invaded from Russia again and took the risk that had the gamble succeeded Russia would be content with bluster rather than military attack.

South Ossetia: taking sides?

Published on August 9, 2008

Yesterday I said that it would interesting to see how the west will handle the war in South Ossetia, as after the support for the secession of Kosovo from Serbia, countries like the US, UK or Germany could hardly oppose the Ossentians doing the same, or could they? Well, Bush’s big speech on the subject seems to confirm that
the west has firmly chosen the Georgian side in the conflict and consistency of principle be damned.

The conflict between Georgia, South Ossetia (not to mention Abkhazia, the other breakaway region) and Russia is complex and should not be reduced to some black and white schematic pitting good Georgians vs bad Russians, but that seems to be the spin being decided upon it by western media. So yesterday we had the CIA connected Jamestown Foundation talking about “The Goals Behind Moscow’s Proxy Offensive in South Ossetia“, ignoring that this time it was Georgia that unnecesarrily escalated the conflict. At the Guardian’s Comment is Free, it was Svante Cornell who got the opportunity to say it was all Russia’s fault while at Crooked Timber, as always a reliable weathervane for the sensible transatlantic academic/liberal blogosphere, it was Maria Farrell who did the same.

It reminds me of what happened during the breakup of Yugoslavia, when it was decided quite soon in that it was the Serbs that were the baddies, while the Croats and Bosnian Muslims were jugded to be the victims of Serbian aggression, ignoring the much more complicated reality of Croatian and Bosnian warcrimes in favour of a clean narrative. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili has attempted to create a same of narrative for this conflict, presenting his country as the victim and himself as the democratic defender of a modern, western state, when he has been behaving in the same autocratic manner as a Putin, frex having the riot police fire on demonstrators. The fact that he speaks English seems to help an awful lot.

Not good

Published on August 8, 2008

Georgia invades breakaway region of South Ossetia, Russia responds by sending troops to defend it, with all the danger of turning this into a fullscale war between Georgia and Russia. Der Spiegel has the best coverage in English that I’ve seen, while the main Georgian English language news service Civil.ge, which was up earlier today now seems to have been slashdotted.

Tensions had been high for a while, with the root of the conflict going back to the last days of the Soviet Union, when newly resurgant Georgian nationalism met head to head with its Ossentian counterpart. Russia helped end the war that started when the USSR collapsed completely and has since made South Ossetia into a protectorate, providing most of the population with Russian passports. For Russia, separatist regions like this and Abkhazia have always been a way to keep a hand in its “Near Abroad”, but it also has an interest because of its own North Ossetia, which you might remember from the school siege of Breslan.

Now this socalled “frozen conflict” has occasionally erupting into open violence again but never as bad as today. This time it looks like it’s becoming a real shooting war between Georgia and Russia. But why now? Tensions had been ratcheting up in the past year, with various incidents including alleged Russian incursions of Georgian airspace, as well as Georgian attacks on South Ossetian targets and Ossetian attacks on Georgian soil. Then again, these things have all happened before and never degenerated as fast as this time.

Now Georgia’s president, Mikhail Saakashvili, came to power in one of those coloured revolutions that are usually massively backed by the CIA and western business interests like George Soros. Which meant the US got an important new ally, who showed his gratitude by sending 2,000 Georgian troops to Iraq, half of which he now wants back to stop the “Russian aggression”, but that’s of lesser concern. What was important that with Georgia being pro-western, Caspian Sea oil could now be transported through a brand spanking new pipeline to Europe, without the Russians having the ability to shut down the tap. In return for this Georgia got a lot of American assistance in rebuilding its army. Thanks to this support Saakashvili has already manage to force one breakaway region, Adzharia, back into Georgia properly and while America probably isn’t keen to see its puppet engage in a shooting war with Russia, it must’ve known something was up and if not given its blessing, at least agreed to look the other way.

From what I can make out, Georgia is clearly the aggressor here, having been largely responsible for creating much of the tension in the first place, than used this as an excuse to invade South Ossetia proper. With Russia taking the bait and coming to the Ossetians’ aid, Saakashvili now can portray his country as the victim of Russian aggression and because the west is predisposed to believe the worst about post-Putin Russia anyway, he may get away with this. On the other hand, if Russia gets too riled, he may have bitten off a lot more than he could chew.

It will be …interesting… to see how our great leaders deal with this crisis. Since they gave Kosovo the right to secede from Serbia, they can hardly deny South Ossetia the same right, can they?