If there ever was a texbook example of Chomsky’s and Herman’s propaganda model in action, it was the way in which the conventional narrative about the War for South Ossetia was created this August. It was …interesting… to see how quickly western media, (with a little prompting from Washington and London) settled on a cod-Cold War story of plucky little Georgia standing up to the mad and dangerous Russian bear, while still reporting the war as it happened. On the one hand you had journalists correctly reporting how escalating tensions finally led to a Georgian invasion of South Ossetia followed by a Russian response, on the other hand you had the op-ed pages and other commentary roundly condemning this latest example of Russian aggression. As the news cycle moved on the facts of the war disappeared, eclipsed by new news events while the story remained, now firmly established as background assumptions to further reports about the war and its aftermath.
Which is why it’s good to see the BBC reporting that the Georgians were not so innocent after all, even if it comes months too late:
Marina Kochieva, a doctor in the regional capital Tskhinvali’s main hospital, told our reporters that she and three relatives were targeted by a Georgian tank as they were trying to escape by car from the town on the night of 9 August.
She said the tank fired on her car and two other vehicles, leading them to crash into a ditch. The firing continued as she and her companions lay on the ground, she added.
Georgy Tadtayev, a 21-year-old dental student, was one of the Ossetian civilians killed during the fighting.
His mother, Taya Sitnik, 45, told the BBC he bled to death in her arms on the morning of 9 August after a fragment from a Georgian tank shell hit him in the throat as they were both sheltering from artillery fire in the basement of her block of flats.
It confirms what I thought from the start: Saakashvili tried to ethnically cleanse the Ossetians and it backfired, not so much on him as on the Georgian inhabitants of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, who in turn were cleansed from those regions. Saakashvili gambled that Russia was too weak to intervene or that his western backers would help him and he lost.