Plenty of blame to go around
Thomas de Waal in the Observer:
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…
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.
From the NYT in June: Russian President “Medvedev told Mr. Saakashvili that his quest for NATO membership would not help resolve the simmering tensions in the separatist Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. ‘We have stressed again that Georgia would not be able to achieve this by artificially pulling itself into NATO because this would lead to another stage of confrontation’.” And how.
August 11th, 2008 at 2:14 am
Plenty of blame to go around
Yep.
Two rhetorical questions:
1. If we’ve known for years that Saakashvili is a loose cannon, why was Bush trying to get Georgia into NATO?
2. As Putin leaves Beijing to direct the Russian onslaught against an American ally, why is Bush letting himself be photographed with bikini-clad volleyball players?
Maybe he knows some tremendously good news of which the rest of us are not yet aware.
That’s one possibility. There are others.
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Even thuggish imperialists can have arguable pretexts. Consider how supportive the Enlightened Nations were of Kosovo’s secession from Russian ally Serbia.
Cold comfort is better than no comfort: the Russians are paying lip service to the diplomatic process.