Putin's Wars (42 page)
Wesley K. Clark and Peter L. Levin, “Securing the Information Highway: How to Enhance
the United States’ Electronic Defenses,”
Foreign Affairs
88, no. 6, (November/December 2009), 3.
Asmus,
A Little War That Shook the World
, 21.
Valentina Pop, “Saakashvili Saved Georgia from Coup, Former Putin Aide Says,” interview
with Andrey Illarionov,
EU Observer
(October 14, 2008).
Quoted in Illarionov, “The Russian Leadership’s Preparations for War, 1999–2008,”
83.
“Tskhinvalskiy Pul Spiskom,” December 4, 2008. This list gives thirty-one names.
http://davnym-davno.livejournal.com/6488.html
.
“Donskie kazaki gotovy vstat na zashchitu naroda Yuzhnoy Osetii ot gruzinskoy agressii,”
Nezavisimaya Gazeta,
August 6, 2008.
http://www.ng.ru/regions/2008-08-06/1_kazaki.html
.
“Donskie kazaki gotovy vstat na zashchitu naroda Yuzhnoy Osetii ot gruzinskoy agressii.”
Cf. Marie Jégo, Alexandre Billette, Natalie Nougayrède, Sophie Shihab, and Piotr Smolar,
“Autopsie d’un conflit,”
Le Monde
(August 31–September 1, 2008). In secret reports from the US embassy in Tbilisi sent
to the state department and subsequently published by WikiLeaks, this version of the
facts was confirmed: “Putin has said to him [Saakashvili] that he does not care about
South Ossetia, as long as Georgia avoids a massacre and solves the problem quietly.”
(“La Géorgie, grande perdante du rapprochement russo-américain,”
Le Monde
(December 3, 2010).) This trap is also intimated by Salomé Zourabishvili, a former
Georgian Minister of Foreign Affairs, who has become a fierce critic of Saakashvili.
According to her the Russians must have given an unofficial green light to Georgia
to intervene in South Ossetia to fight the local militias, which Moscow said it “could
no longer control.” Zourabichvili even speaks of the possibility of a “tacit agreement.”
(Zourabichvili,
La tragédie géorgienne 2003–2008: de la révolution des Roses à la guerre
, 317.) But even if such an improbable tacit agreement could have existed, the fact
remains that at the very moment that Saakashvili ordered his attack he no longer had
any illusions about the Russian response. We must also remember that this was not
the first time the Kremlin had tried to disseminate active disinformation by suggesting
that there was disagreement between themselves and the leadership of the self-proclaimed
republics. Putin, for instance, when visiting Paris at the end of May 2008, said to
his French interlocutors that he agreed with a Georgian peace plan that would grant
Abkhazia great autonomy—a position contradicting Putin’s earlier positions. When the
Abkhaz “President” Bagapsh visited Paris one month later, Bagapsh said: “Putin can
agree with this plan, but we don’t and we never will do,” suggesting a difference
of opinion between a “cooperative” Russian government and the “radical” separatists.
(Cf. Piotr Smolar, “L’Abkhazie rejette la responsabilité de la crise sur les autorités
géorgiennes,”
Le Monde
(June 22–23, 2008).)
This shelling of Georgian villages inside South Ossetia by South Ossetian militias
had already started on August 2. According to Martin Malek, “On August 5 a tripartite
monitoring group, which included Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe
(OSCE) observers and representatives of Russian peacekeeping forces in the region,
issued a report. This document, signed by the commander of the Russian ‘peacekeepers’
in the region, General Marat Kulakhmetov, stated that there was evidence of attacks
against several ethnic Georgian villages. It also claimed that South Ossetian separatists
were using heavy weapons against the Georgian villages, which was prohibited by a
1992 ceasefire agreement.” (Martin Malek, “Georgia & Russia: The ‘Unkown’ Prelude
to the ‘Five Day War,’”
Caucasian Review of International Affairs
3, no. 2 (Spring 2009.)
http://cria-online.org/7_10.html
.)
Jégo et al., “Autopsie d’un conflit.”
Asmus,
A Little War that Shook the World
, 31.
Asmus,
A Little War that Shook the World
, 25.
Felgenhauer estimated the Georgian army to be seventeen-thousand-strong, supported
by up to five thousand police officers (two thousand of Georgia’s elite 1st Infantry
Brigade were deployed in Iraq. They were flown back but arrived after the war was
over). The overall number of Russian troops that took part in the war in Georgia in
August 2008 was approximately forty thousand. They were supported by ten thousand
to fifteen thousand separatist militias. This makes the power ratio 2.5:1—illustrating
the clear numerical superiority of the Russian forces, even without including differences
in equipment. (Cf. Pavel Felgenhauer, “After August 7: The Escalation of the Russia-Georgia
War,” in
The Guns of August 2008: Russia’s War in Georgia
, eds. Cornell and Starr, 170–173.)
Svante E. Cornell and S. Frederick Starr, “Introduction,” in
The Guns of August 2008: Russia’s War in Georgia
, eds. Cornell and Starr, 9.
Cornell and Starr, “Introduction.”
Jonathan Littell, “Carnet de route,”
Le Monde 2
(October 4, 2008), 18. This version of the facts was confirmed in a testimony before
Congress, made by Dan Fried, at that time Assistant Secretary of State for European
and Eurasian Affairs, who said the Georgians “believed at the time—that they thought
the Russian forces were coming through the Roki tunnel (linking Russia with South
Ossetia) and they were in imminent danger.” (Daniel Dombey, “Congress Attacks Stance
on Georgia,”
Financial Times
(September 11, 2008).)
Quoted by Malek, “Georgia & Russia: The ‘Unkown’ Prelude to the ‘Five Day War.’”
Quoted in “Soldaty govoryat, chto pribyli v Yuzhnuyu Osetiyu eshche 7 Avgusta” (Soldiers
Say That They Were Already on August 7 in South Ossetia),
Polit.ru
, (September 10, 2008).
http://www.polit.ru/news/2008/09/10/seven/print/
.
“Soldaty govoryat, chto pribyli v Yuzhnuyu Osetiyu eshche 7 Avgusta.”
The article was quoted on the same day by the news agency
Newsru.com.
The agency concluded: “Thus the captain was on the Southern side of the Caucasus ridge,
already on Georgian territory, and saw the shelling of Tskhinvali and the position
of the peacekeepers during the night of August 8.” (“SMI: Rossiyskie voyska voshli
v Yuzhnuyu Osetiyu eshche do nachala boevykh deystviy,”
NEWSru.com
(September 11, 2008).)
“S saita ‘Krasnoy Zvezdy’ udaleno intervyu kapitana Sidristogo o vtorzhenii Rossiyskikh
voysk v Yu O do napadeniya Gruzii,”
NEWSru.com
(September 15, 2008).
“S saita ‘Krasnoy Zvezdy’ udaleno intervyu kapitana Sidristogo o vtorzhenii Rossiyskikh
voysk v Yu O do napadeniya Gruzii.”
The story of the changed and subsequently removed article in
Krasnaya Zvezda
raised doubts for even the German magazine
Der Spiegel
, which after the war published an article extremely critical of Saakashvili (he was
called “the choleric ruler of Tbilisi”). “Did Moscow’s deployment start, after all,
earlier than it was until now admitted?” asked the authors. (Ralf Beste, Uwe Klussmann,
Cordula Meyer, Christian Neef, Matthias Schepp, Hans-Jürgen Schlamp, and Holger Stark,
“Wettlauf zum Tunnel,”
Der Spiegel
no. 38 (September 15, 2008), 132.
http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-60135192.html
.)
The Propaganda War
After the opening of the hostilities the Russian propaganda machine immediately swung
fully into action, helped by the massive presence in Tskhinvali of the reporters and
cameramen from the national TV channels and print media, who had arrived days before
the events started. The Russian press agencies began publishing stories of the atrocities
supposedly committed by the Georgians against the South Ossetian civil population.
A prominent place in these stories was reserved for the accusation that Georgia had
committed in South Ossetia a genocide.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev himself took the lead, declaring on August 11: “The
ferocity with which the actions of the Georgian side were carried out cannot be called
anything else but genocide, because they acquired a mass character and were directed
against individuals, the civilian population, peacekeepers who carried out their functions
of maintaining peace.”
[1]
The Russian ambassador in Tskhinvali mentioned that “at least 2,000 people were
killed in Tskhinvali.”
[2]
In a fact sheet by the news agency RIA Novosti, issued one month later, this number
had shrunk to 1,500 civilians. It was announced that “Russian prosecutors, on orders
from President Dmitry Medvedev, are currently gathering evidence to support allegations
of genocide committed by Georgia against South Ossetians.”
[3]
By August 21, this commission had already made a first estimate of 133 civilians
killed by the Georgian forces.
[4]
When, on December 23, 2008, the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor’s Office
of the Russian Federation at last published the final results of its inquiry, instead
of 2,000 victims in Tskhinvali alone, the Committee found a total of 162 civilian
victims for the whole of South Ossetia.
[5]
However, the false, Soviet-style accusations directed at the Georgian government
were never officially revoked, and until today the accusations of genocide find a
prominent place in official and unofficial Russian publications on the war with Georgia.
Apparently, these accusations were prepared in advance by the Russian leadership to
construct a semblance of similarity between NATO’s humanitarian intervention in Kosovo
and Russia’s intervention in Georgia.
[6]
The accusations against Georgia were extremely cynical, taking into account the
abuses committed by the Russian military in Chechnya, where in two wars at least 10
percent of the population had been killed. Yekaterina Sokiryanskaya of the human rights
group Memorial commented: “Talking about the right for independence, about genocide
and the war crimes of Mr Saakashvili, Russia’s leaders are perhaps forgetting about
the tens of thousands of civilians who were killed by Russia’s bombardment of Grozny
and who were executed, cleansed, and tortured by the Russian military in Chechnya.”
[7]
The Kremlin’s accusations were a clear case of what Robert Amsterdam in a striking
comparison has called “the Doppelgänger Theory”: “the Kremlin’s habit of charging
their critics with the very activities in which they themselves engage.”
[8]
It was, by the way, not the first time Georgia was accused of genocide. Already
in 1993 Vladimir Zhirinovsky wrote: “Today Georgia is killing Abkhazians, Ossetians,
and Europe keeps silent. . . . There are not many Abkhazians, but they are a people,
they want to live on their land and in freedom. But they [the Georgians] are taking
this right away. This is a genocide, this is racism and it is happening today. Who
is going to stop this?”
[9]
Especially the accusation of “racism” was particularly unexpected, coming from
a politician, who, in the same book, only some pages earlier, compared immigrants
from the South with
tarakany—
cockroaches.
The Kremlin has made a habit of accusing others of crimes of which it has been accused
of itself. Yekaterina Sokiryanskaya mentioned already the massive, indiscriminate
bombardments of Grozny in the winter of 1999–2000 with thousands of victims amongst
the civil population of Chechnya. These bombardments and other atrocities committed
in Chechnya made another prominent Russian human rights activist, Sergey Kovalyov,
write: “What is new this time around is that Russian society as a whole is prepared
to carry out genocide. Cruelty and violence are no longer rejected.”
[10]
The cynical accusations of genocide, made by the Kremlin, were followed by accusations
by Georgia that it was Russia that had practiced ethnic cleansing. The dirty work
in this case was mostly done by the South Ossetian militias that had followed the
advancing Russian army in armored patrol vehicles with covered licence plates. “Refugees
from Karaleki and nearby [Georgian] villages,” wrote Luke Harding of
The Guardian
, “gave the same account: South Ossetian militias that had swept in on August 12,
killing, burning, stealing and kidnapping. . . . South Ossetian militias, facilitated
by the Russian army, are carrying out the worst ethnic cleansing since the war in
former Yugoslavia. Despite the random nature of these attacks, the overall aim is
clear: to create a mono-ethnic greater South Ossetia in which Georgians no longer
exist.”
[11]
South Ossetians did not attempt to deny that their aim was ethnic cleansing, they
even proclaimed it openly. “We did carry out cleaning operations, yes,” admitted Captain
Elrus, the militia leader, when asked by Luke Harding. And why shouldn’t he? Had not
South Ossetian president, Eduard Kokoity, in an interview in the Russian paper
Kommersant
, proudly declared: “We have flattened practically everything there [in the Georgian
villages].”
[12]
In a note of the Georgian government one could read that “deliberate attempts by
the Russian government to exaggerate the number of people killed in the conflict also
provoked revenge attacks on Georgian villagers.”
[13]
The Russian lies concerning a genocide committed by Georgians had the perverse
effect of inciting South Ossetian militias to kill, rape, and loot Georgian citizens
with even more fervor.