Ïî ìíåíèþ àâòîðà, â ñàìîì íà÷àëå àâãóñòîâñêîãî êîíôëèêòà çàïàäíûå ÑÌÈ ñîîáùàëè î ïðîèñõîäÿùåì íà Êàâêàçå îòíîñèòåëüíî îáúåêòèâíî, íî áûñòðî ïåðåêëþ÷èëèñü â ðåæèì "õîëîäíîé âîéíû" ïîñëå òîãî, êàê Ðîññèÿ âûñòóïèëà ïðîòèâ êëèåíòà ÑØÀ è ïðîòèâ ðàñøèðåíèÿ ÍÀÒÎ â ýòîì ðåãèîíå. À ñâèäåòåëüñòâà òîãî, êòî æå íà÷àë ýòó âîéíó, áûëè ïðîñòî ñêðûòû ïðè ïîìîùè âûñîêîýôôåêòèâíîé ïèàð-àêöèè Òáèëèñè.
Îòìåòàÿ îáâèíåíèÿ â ñâîé àäðåñ, êîëóìíèñò ïðèâîäèò ïîÿâèâøèåñÿ íà ýòîé íåäåëå äàííûå ïðàâîçàùèòíîé îðãàíèçàöèè Human Rights Watch, ïî ìíåíèþ êîòîðîé íå ìåíåå 300-400 ìèðíûõ æèòåëåé ïîãèáëè â Öõèíâàëè â íî÷ü íà 7 àâãóñòà. _________________ A la guerre comme a la guerre èëè âòîðàÿ ðåäàêöèÿ Çàáóãîðíîâà
So now they tell us. Two months after the brief but bloody war in the Caucasus which was overwhelmingly blamed on Russia by western politicians and media at the time, a serious investigation by the BBC has uncovered a very different story.
Not only does the report by Tim Whewell – aired this week on Newsnight and on Radio 4's File on Four - find strong evidence confirming western-backed Georgia as the aggressor on the night of August 7. It also assembles powerful testimony of wide-ranging war crimes carried out by the Georgian army in its attack on the contested region of South Ossetia.
They include the targeting of apartment block basements – where civilians were taking refuge – with tank shells and Grad rockets, the indiscriminate bombardment of residential districts and the deliberate killing of civilians, including those fleeing the South Ossetian capital of Tskinvali.
The carefully balanced report – which also details evidence of ethnic cleansing by South Ossetian paramilitaries – cuts the ground from beneath later Georgian claims that its attack on South Ossetia followed the start of a Russian invasion the previous night.
At the time, the Georgian government said its assault on Tskinvali was intended to "restore constitutional order" in an area it has never ruled, as well as to counter South Ossetian paramilitary provocations. Georgian intelligence subsequently claimed to have found the tape of an intercepted phone call backing up its Russian invasion story – but even Georgia's allies balk at a claim transparently intended to bolster its shaky international legal position .
Naturally the man who ordered the Georgian invasion of South Ossetia, president Mikheil Saakashvili, denies the war crimes accusations. But what of his Anglo-American sponsors, who insisted at the time that "Russian aggression must not go unanswered"?
British foreign secretary David Miliband now accepts Georgia was "reckless" and says he treats the war crimes allegations "extremely seriously". US assistant secretary of state, Daniel Fried, meanwhile concedes Georgia's attack on Tskhinvali was "wrong on several levels", but feels that discussion of its war crimes is "not terribly useful".
In the wake of the Georgian attack, Russian troops moved into Georgia proper, destroying Georgian military facilities used to mount the original assault – and inflicting their own civilian casualties in the process, notably in Gori. Earlier this month they pulled back from their Georgian buffer zone into now nominally-independent South Ossetia.
At the start of the August conflict, western media reporting was relatively even-handed, but rapidly switched into full-blown cold war revival mode as Russia turned the tables on the US's Georgian client regime and Nato expansion in the region. Clear initial evidence of who started the war and Georgian troops' killing spree in Tskhinvali was buried or even denied in a highly effective PR operation from Tbilisi.
Within a week, the former Foreign Office special adviser David Clark was for example accusing me on Comment is free of making an "important error of fact" by stating that "several hundreds civilians" had been killed by Georgian forces in Tskhinvali.
I based that on several reports, including in the Observer. Clark insisted there was "no independent support for this claim". But, as reported by the BBC this week, Human Rights Watch now regards the figure of 300-400 civilian dead in Tskhinvali as a "useful starting point".
Meanwhile, with the exception of a small item in the Independent, Whewell's significant new evidence about what actually took place in a conflict likely to have far-reaching strategic consequences has been simply ignored by the rest of the mainstream media. _________________ A la guerre comme a la guerre èëè âòîðàÿ ðåäàêöèÿ Çàáóãîðíîâà
We can ask the world to give Obama breathing space to get his thoughts in order before, as Joe Biden had it, other countries "test" him with all manner of impossible crises. Not as preposterous as it sounds, this notion of asking the world to hold off, considering Obama generates so much genuine goodwill abroad and, after all, his decisions will shape other countries' futures significantly.
Any countries found to be misbehaving prematurely will instantly get the dog-in-a-manger treatment, for with George Bush gone, whose fault could it be but their own? But no, the Taliban won't stay their barbarism an extra hour for popularity's sake.
Perhaps we can adjust our view of the world, instead, so crises just don't seem as imminent or morally exigent. The latter approach seems to be prevailing. Witness the recent sudden uptick in media noise about the Russia-Georgia conflict.
On Nov. 6, in a long expository article, The New York Times informed us that, according to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), Tbilisi had (a) initiated the hostilities and (b) done so with indiscriminate bombing of the South Ossetian capital without regard to civilian casualties--despite Georgian claims to the contrary. All sides consider the OSCE to be a highly dependable, impartial, monitoring body with long experience in the region.
On Nov. 8, the BBC Web site carried an oddly inchoate report that the OSCE had failed to warn member countries of the impending conflict. It quoted a senior OSCE official, who has since resigned, as saying he had "warned of Georgia's military activity before its move into the South Ossetia region" and his bosses failed to pass it on. His bosses deny his claims.
Whatever the BBC is pretending to report there, their subtext sneaks through loud and clear--Georgia invaded first. If Georgia invaded first, Russia was provoked, Russia could not but respond, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili is a trigger-happy maniac, we should back off from confrontation with Moscow, this is no incipient or even full-fledged Cold War casus belli to test Obama, he can press the refresh button and the new world will pop up as a tabula rasa.
In the G.W. era this would fall under "faith-based" as opposed to "reality-based" reasoning. The Times and BBC can lay out their dream narrative all they want, but it's unlikely that Obama--as sober and intentional a politician as it's possible to wake up to with a hangover--will buy into it. Biden certainly won't.
Either way, they won't have a choice as Ex-President Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev ply their brutalist imperial course. Medvedev made his sentiments clear when he delivered his Moscow State of the Union speech sans any single reference to the U.S. election results. Meaning: Russia acts unilaterally no matter what happens elsewhere.
And Georgia? I have publicly defended Georgia's actions in this space, and others and I count Georgian President Saakashvili as a personal friend. Nothing has changed. Here's the real continuum of events, as I can best decipher them, that led to Aug. 7 and Aug. 8 when the hostilities escalated into full blown conflict.
First off, I cannot dispute the OSCE and the Times reports that the Georgian attack resulted in civilian casualties. I certainly never thought the Georgians carried out precise bombardments and I don't think they're capable of it. Neither are the Russkies.
I also believe the Georgians radically upped the confrontation--in effect, they attacked first. But they did so because they knew about the column of Russian tanks coming in through the Roki Tunnel that connects North and South Ossetia, that is, connects Russian territory to the breakaway region. A Russian invasion was in progress. The Times report addresses this glancingly toward the end:
"Neither Georgia nor its Western allies have as yet provided conclusive evidence that Russia was invading the country or that the situation for Georgians in the Ossetian zone was so dire that a large-scale military attack was necessary, as Mr. Saakashvili insists.
"Georgia has released telephone intercepts indicating that a Russian armored column apparently entered the enclave from Russia early on the Aug. 7, which would be a violation of the peacekeeping rules. Georgia said the column marked the beginning of an invasion. But the intercepts did not show the column's size, composition or mission, and there has not been evidence that it was engaged with Georgian forces until many hours after the Georgian bombardment; Russia insists it was simply a routine logistics train or troop rotation."
This is disingenuous. It makes no sense that the Russkies had some 200 fully armed, fueled tanks halfway into Georgia within two days, as a spontaneous and unplanned response to aggression. They're not that efficient. Both sides knew what was going down.
There is an argument that in shooting first, Saakashvili lost the moral propaganda advantage. It instantly looked like he had provoked a reaction. The other option was to let the Russkies invade and complain later from atop the moral high ground. He decided to fight first. He knew he wasn't going to win. The Russians owned the air. But worse, he knew that his allies were going to do nothing either way.
My bet is, he contacted the White House and they told him, as they'd done consistently up to then, that he was on his own. Think of the timing--Bush is in Beijing, the U.S. has an election coming, Saakashvili is abroad, everyone is on vacation--including all his allies. So the Georgians decide to attack South Ossetian capital Tskhinvali? No, I don't think so.
There is an additional misconception that underlies much of the programmatic left/right, Democrat/GOP, détente/Cold War binary thinking on the matter: that the Bush administration encouraged Saakashvili to confront the Russians or at least bolstered his sense of allied support.
This is manifestly untrue. Tbilisi insiders told me that Georgia had been asking the Bushies for anti-aircraft missiles for some years. The Bushies consistently refused. Georgia had managed to acquire some from Israel, but the supply abruptly stopped in early summer this year--nobody knows why but it's likely that the Russians had a conclusive word with Israel. The Russkies regularly overflew Georgian territory as constant provocation, dropping a stray bomb here and a missile there, by mistake, in open countryside.
Furthermore, the Bush administration had no practical measures in train for interceding Moscow's invasion. It wasn't until the scathing Wall Street Journal editorial of Aug. 12--"so far the administration has been missing in action"--that Washington was stung into taking practical measures. The White House even issued a press release specifically citing the Journal's editorial claims as inaccurate. But it followed the Journal's menu of suggestions precisely: send in Condi, supplies, boatlift and the like.
We probably have the Journal's editorial board to thank for Condi's hurried departure to Tbilisi at a time when Russian warplanes were still flying overhead--and with her arrival, perhaps even the halting of Russkie tanks short of Tbilisi.
The Georgians were always way down on the list of priorities for a fumble-prone White House. Saakashvili was never Washington's irreplaceable ally, at any rate never enough to keep the Russians at bay. Putin knew it. It may be a brave new post-Bush world, but he still knows it.
Melik Kaylan, a writer based in New York, writes a weekly column for Forbes.com. His story "Georgia In The Time of Misha" is featured in The Best American Travel Writing 2008. _________________ A la guerre comme a la guerre èëè âòîðàÿ ðåäàêöèÿ Çàáóãîðíîâà
Íå îñïàðèâàÿ ñîîáùåíèÿ ÎÁÑÅ è The New York Times î òîì, ÷òî íàïàäåíèå ãðóçèíñêîé ñòîðîíû ïðèâåëî ê æåðòâàì ñðåäè ìèðíîãî íàñåëåíèÿ, àâòîð çàìå÷àåò, ÷òî íè ðóññêèå, íè ãðóçèíñêèå ñèëû íå ñïîñîáíû îñóùåñòâëÿòü òî÷å÷íûå îáñòðåëû.
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By C. J. CHIVERS and ELLEN BARRY
Published: November 6, 2008
TBILISI, Georgia — Newly available accounts by independent military observers of the beginning of the war between Georgia and Russia this summer call into question the longstanding Georgian assertion that it was acting defensively against separatist and Russian aggression.
Georgia moved forces toward the border of the breakaway region of South Ossetia on Aug. 7, at the start of what it called a defensive war with separatists there and with Russian forces.
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Instead, the accounts suggest that Georgia’s inexperienced military attacked the isolated separatist capital of Tskhinvali on Aug. 7 with indiscriminate artillery and rocket fire, exposing civilians, Russian peacekeepers and unarmed monitors to harm.
The accounts are neither fully conclusive nor broad enough to settle the many lingering disputes over blame in a war that hardened relations between the Kremlin and the West. But they raise questions about the accuracy and honesty of Georgia’s insistence that its shelling of Tskhinvali, the capital of the breakaway region of South Ossetia, was a precise operation. Georgia has variously defended the shelling as necessary to stop heavy Ossetian shelling of Georgian villages, bring order to the region or counter a Russian invasion.
President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia has characterized the attack as a precise and defensive act. But according to observations of the monitors, documented Aug. 7 and Aug. 8, Georgian artillery rounds and rockets were falling throughout the city at intervals of 15 to 20 seconds between explosions, and within the first hour of the bombardment at least 48 rounds landed in a civilian area. The monitors have also said they were unable to verify that ethnic Georgian villages were under heavy bombardment that evening, calling to question one of Mr. Saakashvili’s main justifications for the attack.
Senior Georgian officials contest these accounts, and have urged Western governments to discount them. “That information, I don’t know what it is and how it is confirmed,” said Giga Bokeria, Georgia’s deputy foreign minister. “There is such an amount of evidence of continuous attacks on Georgian-controlled villages and so much evidence of Russian military buildup, it doesn’t change in any case the general picture of events.”
He added: “Who was counting those explosions? It sounds a bit peculiar.”
The Kremlin has embraced the monitors’ observations, which, according to a written statement from Grigory Karasin, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, reflect “the actual course of events prior to Georgia’s aggression.” He added that the accounts “refute” allegations by Tbilisi of bombardments that he called mythical.
The monitors were members of an international team working under the mandate of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, or O.S.C.E. A multilateral organization with 56 member states, the group has monitored the conflict since a previous cease-fire agreement in the 1990s.
The observations by the monitors, including a Finnish major, a Belarussian airborne captain and a Polish civilian, have been the subject of two confidential briefings to diplomats in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, one in August and the other in October. Summaries were shared with The New York Times by people in attendance at both.
Details were then confirmed by three Western diplomats and a Russian, and were not disputed by the O.S.C.E.’s mission in Tbilisi, which was provided with a written summary of the observations.
Mr. Saakashvili, who has compared Russia’s incursion into Georgia to the Nazi annexations in Europe in 1938 and the Soviet suppression of Prague in 1968, faces domestic unease with his leadership and skepticism about his judgment from Western governments.
The brief war was a disaster for Georgia. The attack backfired. Georgia’s army was humiliated as Russian forces overwhelmed its brigades, seized and looted their bases, captured their equipment and roamed the country’s roads at will. Villages that Georgia vowed to save were ransacked and cleared of their populations by irregular Ossetian, Chechen and Cossack forces, and several were burned to the ground.
Massing of Weapons
According to the monitors, an O.S.C.E. patrol at 3 p.m. on Aug. 7 saw large numbers of Georgian artillery and grad rocket launchers massing on roads north of Gori, just south of the enclave.
At 6:10 p.m., the monitors were told by Russian peacekeepers of suspected Georgian artillery fire on Khetagurovo, an Ossetian village; this report was not independently confirmed, and Georgia declared a unilateral cease-fire shortly thereafter, about 7 p.m.
During a news broadcast that began at 11 p.m., Georgia announced that Georgian villages were being shelled, and declared an operation “to restore constitutional order” in South Ossetia. The bombardment of Tskhinvali started soon after the broadcast.
According to the monitors, however, no shelling of Georgian villages could be heard in the hours before the Georgian bombardment. At least two of the four villages that Georgia has since said were under fire were near the observers’ office in Tskhinvali, and the monitors there likely would have heard artillery fire nearby.
Moreover, the observers made a record of the rounds exploding after Georgia’s bombardment began at 11:35 p.m. At 11:45 p.m., rounds were exploding at intervals of 15 to 20 seconds between impacts, they noted.
At 12:15 a.m. on Aug. 8, Gen. Maj. Marat M. Kulakhmetov, commander of Russian peacekeepers in the enclave, reported to the monitors that his unit had casualties, indicating that Russian soldiers had come under fire.
By 12:35 a.m. the observers had recorded at least 100 heavy rounds exploding across Tskhinvali, including 48 close to the observers’ office, which is in a civilian area and was damaged.
Col. Gen. Anatoly Nogovitsyn, a spokesman for the Russian Defense Ministry, said that by morning on Aug. 8 two Russian soldiers had been killed and five wounded. Two senior Western military officers stationed in Georgia, speaking on condition of anonymity because they work with Georgia’s military, said that whatever Russia’s behavior in or intentions for the enclave, once Georgia’s artillery or rockets struck Russian positions, conflict with Russia was all but inevitable. This clear risk, they said, made Georgia’s attack dangerous and unwise.
Senior Georgia officials, a group with scant military experience and personal loyalties to Mr. Saakashvili, have said that much of the damage to Tskhinvali was caused in combat between its soldiers and separatists, or by Russian airstrikes and bombardments in its counterattack the next day. As for its broader shelling of the city, Georgia has told Western diplomats that Ossetians hid weapons in civilian buildings, making them legitimate targets.
“The Georgians have been quite clear that they were shelling targets — the mayor’s office, police headquarters — that had been used for military purposes,” said Matthew J. Bryza, a deputy assistant secretary of state and one of Mr. Saakashvili’s vocal supporters in Washington.
Those claims have not been independently verified, and Georgia’s account was disputed by Ryan Grist, a former British Army captain who was the senior O.S.C.E. representative in Georgia when the war broke out. Mr. Grist said that he was in constant contact that night with all sides, with the office in Tskhinvali and with Wing Commander Stephen Young, the retired British military officer who leads the monitoring team.
“It was clear to me that the attack was completely indiscriminate and disproportionate to any, if indeed there had been any, provocation,” Mr. Grist said. “The attack was clearly, in my mind, an indiscriminate attack on the town, as a town.”
Mr. Grist has served as a military officer or diplomat in Northern Ireland, Cyprus, Kosovo and Yugoslavia. In August, after the Georgian foreign minister, Eka Tkeshelashvili, who has no military experience, assured diplomats in Tbilisi that the attack was measured and discriminate, Mr. Grist gave a briefing to diplomats from the European Union that drew from the monitors’ observations and included his assessments. He then soon resigned under unclear circumstances.
A second briefing was led by Commander Young in October for military attachés visiting Georgia. At the meeting, according to a person in attendance, Commander Young stood by the monitors’ assessment that Georgian villages had not been extensively shelled on the evening or night of Aug. 7. “If there had been heavy shelling in areas that Georgia claimed were shelled, then our people would have heard it, and they didn’t,” Commander Young said, according to the person who attended. “They heard only occasional small-arms fire.”
The O.S.C.E turned down a request by The Times to interview Commander Young and the monitors, saying they worked in sensitive jobs and would not be publicly engaged in this disagreement.
Disentangling the Russian and Georgian accounts has been complicated. The violence along the enclave’s boundaries that had occurred in recent summers was more widespread this year, and in the days before Aug. 7 there had been shelling of Georgian villages. Tensions had been soaring.
Each side has fresh lists of grievances about the other, which they insist are decisive. But both sides also have a record of misstatement and exaggeration, which includes circulating casualty estimates that have not withstood independent examination. With the international standing of both Russia and Georgia damaged, the public relations battle has been intensive.
Russian military units have been implicated in destruction of civilian property and accused by Georgia of participating with Ossetian militias in a campaign of ethnic cleansing. Russia and South Ossetia have accused Georgia of attacking Ossetian civilians.
But a critical and as yet unanswered question has been what changed for Georgia between 7 p.m. on Aug 7, when Mr. Saakashvili declared a cease-fire, and 11:30 p.m., when he says he ordered the attack. The Russian and Ossetian governments have said the cease-fire was a ruse used to position rockets and artillery for the assault.
That view is widely held by Ossetians. Civilians repeatedly reported resting at home after the cease-fire broadcast by Mr. Saakashvili. Emeliya B. Dzhoyeva, 68, was home with her husband, Felix, 70, when the bombardment began. He lost his left arm below the elbow and suffered burns to his right arm and torso. “Saakashvili told us that nothing would happen,” she said. “So we all just went to bed.”
Neither Georgia nor its Western allies have as yet provided conclusive evidence that Russia was invading the country or that the situation for Georgians in the Ossetian zone was so dire that a large-scale military attack was necessary, as Mr. Saakashvili insists.
Georgia has released telephone intercepts indicating that a Russian armored column apparently entered the enclave from Russia early on the Aug. 7, which would be a violation of the peacekeeping rules. Georgia said the column marked the beginning of an invasion. But the intercepts did not show the column’s size, composition or mission, and there has not been evidence that it was engaged with Georgian forces until many hours after the Georgian bombardment; Russia insists it was simply a routine logistics train or troop rotation.
Unclear Accounts of Shelling
Interviews by The Times have found a mixed picture on the question of whether Georgian villages were shelled after Mr. Saakashvili declared the cease-fire. Residents of the village of Zemo Nigozi, one of the villages that Georgia has said was under heavy fire, said they were shelled from 6 p.m. on, supporting Georgian statements.
In two other villages, interviews did not support Georgian claims. In Avnevi, several residents said the shelling stopped before the cease-fire and did not resume until roughly the same time as the Georgian bombardment. In Tamarasheni, some residents said they were lightly shelled on the evening of Aug. 7, but felt safe enough not to retreat to their basements. Others said they were not shelled until Aug 9.
With a paucity of reliable and unbiased information available, the O.S.C.E. observations put the United States in a potentially difficult position. The United States, Mr. Saakashvili’s principal source of international support, has for years accepted the organization’s conclusions and praised its professionalism. Mr. Bryza refrained from passing judgment on the conflicting accounts.
“I wasn’t there,” he said, referring to the battle. “We didn’t have people there. But the O.S.C.E. really has been our benchmark on many things over the years.”
The O.S.C.E. itself, while refusing to discuss its internal findings, stood by the accuracy of its work but urged caution in interpreting it too broadly. “We are confident that all O.S.C.E. observations are expert, accurate and unbiased,” Martha Freeman, a spokeswoman, said in an e-mail message. “However, monitoring activities in certain areas at certain times cannot be taken in isolation to provide a comprehensive account.” _________________ A la guerre comme a la guerre èëè âòîðàÿ ðåäàêöèÿ Çàáóãîðíîâà
IT IS IMPORTANT to know which side initiated the war in August between Russia and Georgia. If primary blame falls on Russia, as Georgia's President Mikheil Saakashvili claims, a new Obama administration will have limited latitude in rebuilding relations with Russia. If it turns out that Georgia is mostly to blame, the new President Obama will have to make sure Saakashvili understands that a reliable ally does not defy the will of Washington and recklessly implicate America in an unnecessary confrontation with Russia.
Which is why Obama should take note of emerging accounts about the beginning of the war from seasoned monitors sponsored by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Those monitors, who were on the ground in the breakaway region of South Ossetia when hostilities commenced the night of Aug. 7, reported seeing Georgian artillery and rocket launchers assembling just outside South Ossetia at 3 p.m. that day, well before any Russian convoy had crossed into the enclave.
They also observed unprovoked shelling of South Ossetia's capital, Tskhinvali, that night. The shells were falling on civilians huddled in their homes. And the monitors heard nothing that would confirm Saakashvili's claim that Georgian artillery attacks on Tskhinvali were in response to the shelling of ethnic Georgian villages.
There is no reason to doubt the competence or honesty of the OSCE monitors. The inescapable conclusion is that Saakashvili started the war and lied about it. The Kremlin may have done its part to provoke Georgia over a period of time - and its reaction to the Georgian attacks was deliberately harsh - but that is no excuse for Saakashvili allowing himself to be provoked. _________________ A la guerre comme a la guerre èëè âòîðàÿ ðåäàêöèÿ Çàáóãîðíîâà
Ref Mary Dejevsky: Why did the West ignore the truth about the war in Georgia?
Thank goodness, they might be thinking at the US State Department and the British Foreign Office, for the financial crisis. Were it not for the ever-blacker news about the Western world's economy, another scandal would be vying for the headlines – and one where the blame would be easier to apportion. It concerns our two countries' relations with Russia and the truth about this summer's Georgia-Russia war.
Over the past couple of weeks, a spate of reports has appeared in the American and British media, questioning many assumptions about that war, chief among them that Russia was the guilty party. Journalists from the BBC, The New York Times and Canada's Embassy magazine, among others, travelled to South Ossetia, the region at the centre of the conflict, in an effort to establish the facts.
Not the "facts" as told by the super-slick Georgian PR machine at the time, nor the "facts" as eventually dragged from the hyper-defensive and clod-hopping communicators of the Kremlin. But the facts as experienced on the ground by those who were there: civilians, the local military commander, and the small number of unarmed monitors stationed in the region by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
The journalists travelled to the region separately and by different routes. They spoke to different people. But their findings are consistent: Georgia launched an indiscriminate military assault on South Ossetia's main town, Tskhinvali. The hospital was among the buildings attacked; doctors were injured even as they operated.
The timing of the Georgian attack, as of the arrival of the first Russian reinforcements two days later, coincides for the most part with the original Russian version. It was only then that the Russians crossed into Georgia proper in the invasion of sovereign territory that has been universally decried. For the record, it should be added that Russia has now withdrawn from uncontested Georgian territory, in accordance with the agreement mediated by President Sarkozy.
Now you could argue – and the State Department and the Foreign Office have done pretty much from the start – that it really does not matter who started the war; there had long been provocations on both sides and the priority was bringing hostilities to an end. You could also argue – more plausibly – that while Russia might have had a case at the start, it put itself in the wrong by applying excessive force and then recognising South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent.
But surely it does matter, crucially, how this conflict began. It matters legally and morally. And it is bound, rightly so, to affect how we view the two countries concerned. Yet the general fuzziness of official US and British accounts left the impression that Russia was the guilty party, and Georgia a brave little democracy that big bad Russia wanted to snuff out. Not only did this version gain almost instantaneous acceptance, but it was almost impossible for Russia to contest, confirming as it did every existing negative stereotype.
What has now transpired, however, is that the US and Britain had no excuse for not knowing how the war began. They were briefed by the OSCE monitors at a very early stage, and those monitors included two highly experienced former British Army officers.
So why were British and US officials so cagey about acknowledging, or perhaps even believing, what had really happened? Why did the Conservative leader, David Cameron, rush to Tbilisi to support Georgia as the unquestioned victim? And why – except to trump Mr Cameron – did the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, give a tub-thumping speech in Kiev shortly afterwards that perpetuated the impression (without actually using the words) that the war was all about Moscow's supposed ambition to reconstitute its empire?
Was it ignorance? Or was it rather ideological blindness? Did they choose not to acknowledge the unreliability of their Georgian protégé, lest it discredit their whole project for spreading democracy and recruiting allies among former Soviet republics? It is only now, three months on, that either Mr Miliband or US officials have brought themselves to describe Georgia's action as "reckless".
Actions, though, tell another story. Earlier this week, Britain quietly lifted its objections to the start of EU talks on a new partnership treaty with Russia – talks that it, almost alone, had held up in sympathy with Georgia. So the latest bout of official harrumphing against Russia would seem to be over. Ill-feeling in Moscow, though, will persist, until someone in London or Washington concedes how badly they got the Russia-Georgia war wrong. _________________ A la guerre comme a la guerre èëè âòîðàÿ ðåäàêöèÿ Çàáóãîðíîâà
Êðèñòîô îòìå÷àåò, ÷òî Ðîññèÿ âåäåò ñåáÿ áåçîòâåòñòâåííî – â ÷àñòíîñòè, îáåùàåò ðàçìåñòèòü ðàêåòû áëèç ïîëüñêîé ãðàíèöû, à ïîòîìó ó àäìèíèñòðàöèè Îáàìû áóäåò ñîáëàçí ïðîäîëæàòü ðàñøèðåíèå ÍÀÒÎ.
"Âìåñòî ýòîãî äàâàéòå ñîòðóäíè÷àòü ñ Ðîññèåé òî÷íî òàê æå, êàê ñ Êèòàåì, õîòÿ íàì è ñëåäóåò áåç îáèíÿêîâ îò÷èòûâàòü Ðîññèþ çà åå íåêóëüòóðíîå ïîâåäåíèå", – çàêëþ÷àåò àâòîð, ïîä÷åðêèâàÿ, ÷òî äðàçíèòü íåâîñïèòàííûõ ìåäâåäåé – ýòî íå àëüòåðíàòèâà òðåçâûì äèïëîìàòè÷åñêèì óñèëèÿì. _________________ A la guerre comme a la guerre èëè âòîðàÿ ðåäàêöèÿ Çàáóãîðíîâà
Loanka
: 06.04.2006 : 3745 : Paris
: , 20 2008, 15:08:29 :
:
Ñåðäèòûé ðàíåíûé ìåäâåäü òåðçàåò ïðåêðàñíóþ ñòðàíó, êîòîðàÿ áîãîòâîðèò Àìåðèêó è êîòîðàÿ èñêîðåíèëà êîððóïöèþ, – òàê îïèñûâàåò îáîçðåâàòåëü The New York Times Íèêîëàñ Êðèñòîô.
FAQ
òóò ÿ ÷óòü íå ïîäàâèëàñü! ûûûûûû.... 
