Sunday Business Post, Ireland

Comment: Further hardship on battered people as old battle resumes
17 August 2008

There were just 70,000 people in South Ossetia when the conflict
started, fewer than the 90,000 at the opening of the Olympic
Games. Yet many saw conflict as inevitable, writes Timothy Phillips.

Very few people in the West had heard of South Ossetia before the
events of the last fortnight; fewer still empathized with its people’s
desire for sovereignty.

Perhaps surprisingly, our ignorance was mirrored by a lack of interest
closer to the region, among the enclave’s neighbours, including most
ordinary Georgians and Russians. The catalysts for the current
bloodshed lie elsewhere.

I first visited the town of Gori ten years ago. I went because it was
the birthplace of Josef Stalin and one of the few places in the world
that still had a statue of the dictator in its main square. Friends
elsewhere in Georgia warned me to be polite about Stalin while I was
there.

The local population still held him in high regard as a man who ruled
all of Russia, defeated Germany, and carved the world up with
Roosevelt and Churchill. During the past week, there must be some in
Gori who wished for a strong deliverer once more.

Like the rest of Georgia, the town feels bewildered and
frightened. South Ossetia, whose war has been this summer’s grim
televisual alternative to the Olympic Games, is only a 20-minute drive
away.

The Georgian president invaded the place on August 7, re-establishing
control for the first time in 18 years. It was taken back off him by
the Russian armed forces three days later, on August 10.For Georgians,
the first event was more surprising than the second.

The citizens of Gori watched wide-eyed as their compatriots drove
north, and gaped open-mouthed as they retreated under air bombardment
and heavy artillery fire, giving way to a Russian occupation of the
town that, at the time of writing, is still ongoing.

On my visits to Gori, people often told me how close we were to South
Ossetia. I remember passing a turnoff to a road which was said to be
too dangerous to drive along. There was regret among my hosts that
Georgia had had to surrender control of the Ossetian region, but not
much venom.

Poverty and crumbling infrastructure were making it hard enough for
the rest of the country to get along. A dangerously xenophobic
nationalist government in the early 1990s was generally understood to
have harmed its own citizens through poorly-picked and even more
poorly executed fights with Georgia’s ethnic minorities, including the
South Ossetians.

People had no desire to do that again in a hurry. Russia’s moral
support for the South Ossetian cause, though irritating, was one
powerful reason for this reticence. Better that the Georgians have
independence from Moscow for the first time in 200 years than that the
Kremlin have any excuse to reinvade.

Years later, I found myself in Beslan in the south of Russia, staring
at one of the only other public statues of Stalin to survive. It was
here, in 2004, that more than 300 children, parents and teachers were
killed after being held hostage in their local school.

The town is located in North Ossetia, which, though across an
international border, is South Ossetia’s sister state. The people of
Beslan felt sympathy with the South Ossetians, their ethnic brothers,
but were also concerned about how any further moves towards
independence might rebound on them.

During the first phase of the conflict in 1991, tens of thousands of
refugees flooded across the border into North Ossetia, already one of
Russia’s poorest regions. They brought with them the baggage that
accompanies all displaced peoples: pressure on local jobs, housing and
services, and allegations of crime.

Far from being a priority, the creation of an Ossetian nation, within
the Russian Federation and straddling the massive Caucasus mountain
range, was not even an ambition for most people in Beslan. More keenly
felt by North Ossetians was the threat from their compatriots in the
neighbouring Russian regions of Chechnya and Ingushetia.

They wanted Vladimir Putin, the then Russian president, to liquidate
the Islamic extremism on their doorstep much more than they wanted him
to unite all Ossetians.

Stalin’s policies as the Commissar for Nationalities led directly to
the current conflict. The decision to give South Ossetia
semi-autonomous status in 1922 was his. It had nothing to do with
protecting the rights of a small ethnic group and was all about
weakening Georgia’s ability to exist outside the Soviet Union.

Similar fixes were made in Abkhazia – also formally part of Georgia
and now involved in the current dispute – Azerbaijan
(Nagorno-Karabakh) and Moldova (Transdniestria).

In all cases, the expectations of local populations were raised
unfairly, creating constant ethnic squabbling, which in Soviet times
could only be overcome through intercession with Moscow.

The fall of the USSR made the status of these places untenable. The
new countries they were now part of tended to distrust the people
there intrinsically: for instance, an ultra-nationalist Georgian
government unforgivably cancelled South Ossetia’s autonomy in 1990.

Brief wars ended inconclusively, as new governments, including
Georgia’s, reluctantly realised that victory would be difficult to
achieve and bring few tangible benefits. The South Ossetians were left
genuinely frightened of the Georgians.

They were finally convinced that nothing less than total secession
from the country would be enough, but this is the one solution that
will be impossible to achieve through negotiation alone. The stalemate
that replaced the conflict after 1992 has been terrible for the people
who live in this corrupt and embittered enclave, but crucially has not
had too many ill-effects on others close by.

According to some commentators, a renewal of violence over South
Ossetia was inevitable at some point: the war had only been
interrupted, never actually won or lost. But this need not have been
so. When Georgian troops marched into Tskhinvali, there were only
70,000 people left in the separatist region. At the very same moment,
90,000 were in a stadium watching the opening ceremony of the Olympic
Games.

Even in the Balkans, states don’t usually go to war for fewer than a
million people – Bosnia has four million, Kosovo a population of at
least two million. What changed in 2008 to make this war inevitable?
Could it be that two men’s patience wore thin and then finally snapped
altogether?

Putin, now prime minister of Russia, had already grown tired of
Georgia’s endless courting of the US and its goal of Nato membership,
which he sees as politically damaging for the Kremlin, but also
intrinsically distasteful.

But the key event – the one that Putin could not let pass unnoticed
and that made him set his sights on South Ossetia – happened in
February, when Kosovo declared independence.

Moscow protested that the territorial integrity of a sovereign state,
Serbia, had been infringed, in contravention of international law.

In Russia’s eyes, this had been allowed to happen because of a global
conspiracy to enfeeble the Slavs. The Russian foreign ministry issued
a statement saying that “the declaration of sovereignty by Kosovo and
its recognition will undoubtedly be taken into account in Russia’s
relations with Abkhazia and South Ossetia”.

>From then on, Putin offered more explicit support to the separatists
than at any time in the past: public statements of support for the
South Ossetian world view increased. Russian passports had already
been handed out to most of the population.

This year, Russian jets began flying low over Georgian airspace with
increased frequency. (Georgia says that sometimes they dropped bombs.)
Unable to stop Kosovan independence, Putin decided to use it to his
advantage.

Through his actions, he dared the western world to condemn him and,
thereby, convict themselves of a double standard – why were the South
Ossetians less deserving of the right to self-determination than the
Kosovars?

The other man whose patience wore thin was the Georgian president,
Mikheil Saakashvili. He had promised to bring all the country’s
rebellious regions back under central control in his manifesto in
2003.

He says he decided to bomb Tskhinvali now to put a stop to the
mafia-friendly regime that ran South Ossetia. But, in reality, he
reached the end of his tether with the clever Putin.

In Soviet times, Russia often described itself as the older brother of
the other 14 states of the USSR. And so it has been in recent months,
with Moscow’s taunting often resembling that of an older sibling:
sufficiently subtle to go unnoticed by parents in the international
community, it has had an infuriating impact on the younger brother.

Eventually, the government in Tbilisi cracked and lashed out. Even
Saakashvili’s supporters around the world were perplexed by the
suddenness of his onslaught. Georgia’s bombardment of South Ossetia
was an overreaction, giving the Kremlin the excuse it needed to rush
to Tskhinvali’s defence.

That Russian forces make unlikely peacekeepers is obvious and has been
underlined by the manner and extent of their incursions into
Georgia. But, here too, Putin would point to Serbia for a defence:
specifically to Nato’s aerial destruction of parts of Belgrade in
1999.

This war, whether short or long, is unlikely to serve the interests of
ordinary people in the region. Today, South Ossetia is empty of
Ossetians; all have fled to Beslan and other towns in the north.

They will probably get to go home in a few weeks’ time, but to what
sort of destruction and destitution? Russia’s barely accountable
regime is brimming with confidence and the hawks have answered all
remaining questions about the relative importance of Putin and Dmitry
Medvedev, the Russian president.

Saddest of all are the ordinary Georgians who, time after time, appear
to be shocked by the actions of their president, while remaining
reluctantly but understandably supportive of him as the Russians, the
old enemy, close in and circle overhead.

On Monday, I received a text message from a friend who lives in
Tbilisi. His words described the contradictions most Georgians are
feeling.

“They’ve been bombing the country from the air, and they’re still
bombing now. Not just Gori, but Poti, Zugdidi and the Kodori Gorge as
well. This morning, they bombed the outskirts of Tbilisi. I was woken
up by the horrifying sound of the explosion.

“Thankfully, there have been relatively few casualties amongst the
civilian population so far, but there have been some. Dozens of
people, rather than hundreds. My family and I are alright, but how can
you live a normal life in a place like this, when your friends are
being gathered up and sent to fight in a danger zone like South
Ossetia.

“I thought we had chosen a different path. For me, this was something
totally unexpected. But they will not break us. Russia is now removing
its mask, so all the world can see what it is really like.’

As in chess, it is sometimes better to settle for a stalemate than to
risk all in pursuit of an unlikely victory.

Timothy Phillips is the author of Beslan: The Tragedy of School No. 1,
published by Granta Books