Marc Champion at WSJ:
Both Russia and Georgia claimed vindication Wednesday after a nine-month European Union investigation into last year’s war in the Caucasus found that Tbilisi triggered the conflict, but that Moscow acted illegally in the extent of its invasion of Georgia and allowed “ethnic cleansing.”
The roughly 1,000-page report, released on Wednesday by Swiss diplomat Heidi Tagliavini, found no evidence to support Russian claims Georgia committed genocide the night of Aug. 7-8, 2008.
The conflict, which briefly brought the U.S. and Russia into Cold War-style confrontation, left hundreds of people dead and 35,000 displaced, and severely weakened Europe’s security agreements. Russian forces remain in occupation of two Georgian territories, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Moscow has recognized them as independent states.
Ms. Tagliavini’s conclusions were nervously awaited by both sides, each of which has brought lawsuits against the other in international courts.
The EU’s findings are, quite frankly, bizarre.
Only the most ardent Georgian nationalists believe that Mikheil Saakashvili was other than a reckless fool in his actions leading up to the Russian invasion. However, once one recognizes — as the EU panelists here explicitly do — that Abkhazia and South Ossetia are part of Georgia, it no longer much matters.
If sovereignty means anything, it means that leaders of a state have license to take actions within the confines of their borders as they see fit, so long as they don’t create adverse spillover effects for their neighbors. Saakashvili’s actions against internal groups conducting illegal activities within the borders of his country, while unwise and perhaps even provocative, are simply no justification for an illegal invasion of its sovereign territory by another member of the United Nations. Period. End of story.
Similarly, the United States, Israel, Ukraine, and Georgia are all member states of the United Nations. Georgia was not under any sort of UN Security Council sanction nor was it or is it now a threat to its neighbors. Why, then, are the first three not allowed to sell or give arms to Georgia as they please? Georgia is a staunch ally in the war on al Qaeda and were even participants in helping secure Iraq until illegal violation of its own territory forced them to bring troops home. The United States is particular, then, had every reason in the world to augment Georgia’s military power and none not to. Indeed, if their military were weaker, there’s plenty of reason to believe Russian forces would be even further into “Georgia Proper” now, perhaps even going so far as to remove the duly elected president by force.
Joshua Foust at Registan responds to Joyner:
Secondly, I gotta raise a big red flag over the whole “Georgia helps us with al Qaeda and Iraq” thing. Georgia deployed its troops in a very obvious quid-pro-quo for substantial American technical and military training assistance—that is why there was such an enormous U.S. presence in the country during Russia’s advance. In 2006, Nathan Hodge even interviewed Georgian soldiers who viewed their arrangement with the U.S. as being preparation work for forcibly retaking their wayward territories, which would be a violation of the UN-brokered cease-fire.
Then there’s that al Qaeda bit. Unless James knows of something else, most of the concern about “al Qaeda in Georgia” really amounts to 2002-era concern-trolling over the Pankisi Gorge (this article in Time is a good representation). The thing is, until 9/11 the big concern in Pankisi was actually Chechen fighters using the area as a safe haven for their war with the Russian Army—which takes us back to that whole sovereignty bit (namely, just how tacit, from either party, was the approval for such groups for so long?). In other words, the United States has been inserting itself—indirectly, but not very subtly—into both Georgia’s conflict with Russia, and with Russia’s own internal conflicts. Which doesn’t really leave the United States as a neutral partner to the conflict, hence the limitations on its arms sales.
Bringing it all back around, it’s a tough sell to call the Russo-Georgian War a clear cut open-and-closed example of one country violating another’s sovereignty. Russia has staffed a UN peacekeeping force in both of Georgia’s breakaway territories for years, and lest we forget—Georgia started shelling Tskhinvali, which necessitated a Russian response of some sort.
When discussing the conflict’s ultimate blame, however, Georgia cannot be singled out. Russia has undoubtedly behaved provocatively as well, whether issuing Russian passports to Ossetians and Abkhazians, or through its outrageous and unjustifiable lightning thrust into the country. Realizing both countries bear substantial blame for the conflict does not require apologizing or moral equivalency for either side, but rather realizing the situation is both legally and ethically kind of murky, and that, in fact, both countries can be in the wrong. I mean, that isn’t so hard, is it?
Nathan Hodge at Wired:
Russian troops pushed well outside the boundaries of the disputed enclave of South Ossetia; opened a second front in Abkhazia; and were followed by militias who conducted a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Georgians in South Ossetia.
Not surprisingly, the Kremlin spin machine is going into overdrive on this one — they don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story. But if you read the fine print, you’ll note that the report dismisses allegations of “genocide” — a term that was thrown around rather loosely by Russian politicians and press — and faults Russia for handing out Russian Federation passports to Abkhaz and South Ossetians before the war, among many other things.
The report was awaited with some trepidation here in Georgia, especially after the German magazine Der Spiegel ran a story suggesting it would be an indictment of Georgia. But it’s not a document that is going to change facts on the ground.
Doug Bandow at The American Spectator:
There’s much to blame on Russia, particularly its brutal, disproportionate response to Georgia’s attack. But for the West, which attacked Serbia in 1989 in order to detach Kosovo from Belgrade’s control, to complain about Moscow’s support for South Ossetian and Abkhazian independence is rather rich in hypocrisy. Washington cares about the territorial integrity of nations only when it’s convenient. The U.S. can hardly complain about Russia not behaving in a more principled fashion.
But the most important lesson of the Russia-Georgia war is how foolish it would be to extend NATO membership to a country which is not only irrelevant to American security but prone to start wars with nuclear-armed powers. It was one thing for America to risk all to protect Europe from the Evil Empire. But to contemplate a nuclear confrontation on behalf of a country prepared to foolishly initiate hostilities against Moscow? Such a step would make America less, not more, secure.
Virtually everyone is wrong. Georgia didn’t start it on August 7, nor on any other date. The South Ossetian militia started it on August 6 when its fighters fired on Georgian peacekeepers and Georgian villages with weapons banned by the agreement hammered out between the two sides in 1994. At the same time, the Russian military sent its invasion force bearing down on Georgia from the north side of the Caucasus Mountains on the Russian side of the border through the Roki tunnel and into Georgia. This happened before Saakashvili sent additional troops to South Ossetia and allegedly started the war.
Regional expert, German native, and former European Commission official Patrick Worms was recently hired by the Georgian government as a media advisor, and he explained to me exactly what happened when I met him in downtown Tbilisi. You should always be careful with the version of events told by someone on government payroll even when the government is as friendly and democratic as Georgia’s. I was lucky, though, that another regional expert, author and academic Thomas Goltz, was present during Worms’ briefing to me and signed off on it as completely accurate aside from one tiny quibble.
Goltz has been writing about the Caucasus region for almost 20 years, and he isn’t on Georgian government payroll. He earns his living from the University of Montana and from the sales of his books Azerbaijan Diary
, Georgia Diary
“You,” Worms said to Goltz just before he started to flesh out the real story to me, “are going to be bored because I’m going to give some back story that you know better than I do.”
“Go,” Goltz said. “Go.”
David Lindsay at Post Right:
The massively “elected”, mind-bogglingly corrupt, mentally defective Saakashvili sent in his forces to exterminate the population of a territory which had never been part of Georgia until Stalin (yes, Stalin) redrew the map, which had not been run by Georgia since the fall of the Soviet Union, and whose people were Russian citizens closely connected to those in the neighbouring part of Russia from whom and from which they had only ever been sundered by fiat of one of the worst mass murderers of all time.
He did so in order to prevent that territory from taking a stand against the three closely interrelated forces of global capital, European federalism, and American “full spectrum dominance”.
Between that day and this, all three of those have collapsed.
Think on.
Around The Sphere 