Articles with the Tag Georgia

More news from freedom loving Georgia

Autoritarianism, War on south Ossetia
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Saakashvili may still be popular with Decents and other wingnuts abroad, but his own people are sick and tired of him:

In recent weeks, anti-Saakashvili posters have appeared all over the capital, while the opposition has also been boosted by a television show featuring a popular singer conducting interviews with opposition activists and local celebrities from a specially constructed “prison cell”. The protest singer Giorgi Gachechiladze – known as Utsnobi, or “The Unknown” – has said that he will remain in self-imposed incarceration until Saakashvili steps down.

Earlier this month, Utsnobi held a protest concert near the president’s residence, drawing several thousand. The 9 April demonstrations are hoped to draw far greater numbers.

The Georgian authorities have accused the opposition of accepting money from Russia to fund its anti-government campaign, although no proof has yet been offered. They have also raised fears that mass protests next month could turn violent after several activists were detained last week on charges of illegally buying weapons and plotting a coup.

[…]

The mood in Tbilisi has become increasingly tense in recent days after the authorities released covertly recorded police videos of opposition activists allegedly buying automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.

“These tapes show there is a group of people who were thinking of toppling the government by violence, and using the demonstration as the place to do it,” said Yakobashvili.

it all sounds remarkable like the warnings the English police has been spewing about a possible “Summer of Discontent” in general and the G-20 protests in particular…

Plucky little Georgia not so innocent after all

Manufacturing Consent, War on south Ossetia
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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.

Georgia should be all Hezbollah now

War on south Ossetia, Warfare & Military history
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According to at least one anonymous US military adviser Georgia should emulate Hezbollah:

A defense analyst I spoke with, who advises American ground forces, said to rebuild the Georgian military along conventional lines might be the wrong approach. Instead he suggested a different force model, that of Hezbollah. What Hezbollah did so effectively, as was shown in the 2006 Lebanon war, was combine modern weaponry with a distributed infantry force that fought in guerrilla fashion. Fighting as distributed networks, Hezbollah rarely presented an inviting target for Israeli air and artillery attack, but their well trained tactical units were able to swarm at the point of attack of Israeli armored incursions and hit the Israelis hard with precision anti-tank weaponry.

Equipped with top-shelf anti-armor systems, such as the U.S. Dragon and Javelin and the Russian-built RPG-29 and AT-14 Kornet, such a force would perhaps better be able to exploit Georgia’s mountainous and urbanized terrain against channelized Russian armored columns than a conventionally organized combat brigade, as Hezbollah did in south Lebanon. The lessons from the initial Russian incursion into Grozny in 1994 are instructive as well. Fighting in small tactical teams organized around close range anti-armor weapons, the Chechens savaged Russian
tank columns.

This “analysis” only makes sense if you believe in the Official Truth of Georgia as innocent victim of the perfidious Russia of course. A Hezbollah style army doesn’t work so well if you actually want to invade any seccessionist areas protected by the neighbouring superpower. Not that this model of resistance would work as well against the Russians as against the Israelis in 2006 as unlike them, the Russians are not that bothered about losing a couple of thousand soldiers subjugating a difficult enemy. The Chechens may have beaten off the Russians back in 1994, but didn’t do quite so well the second time around.

(Via Jamie.)

Georgia: planning and propaganda

Manufacturing Consent, War on south Ossetia
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Jamie is annoyed at how a perfectly natural bit of Russian forward planning is seen as evidence of nefarious intentions:

Have we really got so used to just blundering about that the existence of a plan — in this case the organisation of a response if attacked, the institutional capability to bring it about and the intelligence assets to get the timing right — in itself qualifies the Russians as aggressors?

Apparantly we have, as I’ve not only seen this argument –that their quick response time proved the Russians had planned this conflict and were just waiting for an excuse to attack — in the Danger Room post that irked Jamie, but also in the big NYT
writeup of the war, as well as on various liberal geopolitical blogs. Considering the speed with which the Russians responded — Georgia started its invasion of South Ossetia on August the 7th and by August 10th the Russians had chased them back over the border– it’s a natural conclusion to jump to.

But it’s the wrong one. There’s nothing strange about the quick Russian response, considering the crisis had been simmering for months, had just heated up in July and gotten active in the first week of August. All armies make contingency plans and it makes sense for the Russian troops stationed in North Ossetia to have a plan on how to deal with a Georgian invasion of South Ossetia. Furthermore, because there’s only one route between the two Ossetias, one that could be cut off relatively easy, it also makes sense for the Russians to start moving troops the moment Georgia attacks in earnest, as they can’t afford to be stuck on the wrong side of that tunnel when that happens. They need to establish a foothold outside the tunnel, keep it open for reinforcements and of course keep the Georgians from blowing it up. The Russian commander might even have standing orders to move in if Georgia gets too aggresive.

Now if we look what happened two weeks ago, we saw the Russians responding almost exactly in the pattern I just described. Their local forces moved into South Ossetia in a hurry, with some local air support but no air superiority and got to Tskhinvali roughly a day after the Georgians had started their invasion. At that time the Georgians were largely in control of that city, but there were still pockets of resistance. The Russian counterattack drove the Georgian forces from the city, but wasn’t strong enough to prevent them from regrouping and going back on the offensive. It was only after the weekend, on Monday and Tuesday that the Georgians fled South Ossetia and the Russians moved into Georgia proper. And it was then that I first saw stories saying that the Russians had planned this invasion.

By the time it became clear Saakashvili had gambled and lost, it was this narrative –that Russia had lured him into invading as to have a pretext for dealing with Georgia once and for all– that became established in the western media. With Georgian territory now in firm Russian control, it was easy to show Russia as the aggressor, as long as Saakashvili’s blunder could be ignored or whitewashed. The idea that Russia entrapted Saakashvili was tailor made for this.

War is over (if Putin wants it)

Manufacturing Consent, War on south Ossetia
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And for the moment it seems he wants it, as long as Georgia agrees to his terms:

The key demands are that the Georgian leader pledges, in an agreement that is signed and legally binding, to abjure all use of force to resolve Georgia’s territorial disputes with the two breakaway pro-Russian provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia; and that Georgian forces withdraw entirely from South Ossetia and are no longer part of the joint “peacekeeping” contingent there with Russian and local Ossetian forces.

Medvedev also insisted the populations of the two regions had to be allowed to vote on whether they wanted to join Russia, prefiguring a possible annexation that would enfeeble Georgia and leave Saakashvili looking crushed. If he balked at the terms, said Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister: “We will be forced to take other measures to prevent any repetition of the situation that emerged because of the outrageous Georgian aggression.”

Saakashvili wanted a quick blitzkrieg war to forcibly rejoin South Ossetia with Georgia, confident in his army’s ability to defeat the Ossetian militia after all the financial support and training it had gotten from the Americans. He never prepared for the worst case scenario, but that’s what he got. Even now he’s belligerent, despite the loss of not just South Ossetia, but also Abkhazia and with the Russians having crushed his army, when it actually fought and not ran away that is. He’s the perfect example of how infectious the neocon/Bushite mentality is, in that he seems to think that bellowing loudly about how evil the Russians are and dodgy metaphors about Munich 1938 can change the reality of the crushing, unnecessary defeat his country has suffered.

The Russians on the other hand must be nearly as happy as The War Nerd –who was just happy to see a proper war for once– with this war. At last they got to humiliate one of the upstart breakaway republics that used to be theirs, not to mention the yanks by proxy, got Abkhazia and South Ossetia handed them on a platter and an opportunity how magnanimous they are by not overrunning Georgia entirely.

Fair point to Saakashvili though, he does seem to have won the media war, as most western media seem to either accept that Russia was the outright agressor, or that it somehow “forced” Saakashvili to invade South Ossetia, despite all evidence to the contrary. As The Exile calls it, Georgia made full use of “the CNN effect”, by quickly getting its talking points about the war across to the opinion makers, as well as having Saakashvili looking all western and decent and talking English, contrasting well with the much less western looking, odd talking Russians. Even the Russian spokespeople speaking English did so with thick accents and saying loony things; one I heard threatened nuclear war if the Ukraine made good on its threat to deny Russia’s Black Sea fleet a return to harbour. Moreover, the Georgians were better at getting moral support by showing footage of Russian atrocities, as I wrote on Monday. This went so far that CNN used footage of Tskhinvali ruins caused during the Georgian offensive when talking about the Russian attack on Gori! Well played Saakashvili, but it didn’t matter in the end.