PanARMENIAN.Net

U.S. searching for State Department officials who incited Georgia to
aggression against South Ossetia
04.10.2008 15:44 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ A new front has opened between Georgia and Russia,
now over which side was the aggressor whose military activities early
last month ignited the lopsided five-day war. At issue is new
intelligence, inconclusive on its own, that nonetheless paints a more
complicated picture of the critical last hours before war broke out,

According to the publication, Georgia has released intercepted
telephone calls purporting to show that part of a Russian armored
regiment crossed into South Ossetia nearly a full day before Georgia’s
attack on the capital, Tshkinvali, late on Aug. 7.

The intercepts circulated last week among intelligence agencies in the
United States and Europe, part of a Georgian government effort to
persuade the West and opposition voices at home that Georgia was under
invasion and attacked defensively. Georgia argues that as a tiny and
vulnerable nation allied with the West, it deserves extensive military
and political support.

The back and forth over who started the war is already an issue in the
American presidential race, with Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, the
Republican vice presidential candidate, contending that Russia’s
incursion into Georgia was "unprovoked," while others argue that
Georgia’s shelling of Tshkinvali was provocation. Georgia claims that
its main evidence – two of several calls secretly recorded by its
intelligence service on Aug. 7 and 8 – shows that Russian tanks and
fighting vehicles were already passing through the Roki Tunnel linking
Russia to South Ossetia before dawn on Aug. 7.

By Russian accounts, the war began at 11:30 that night, when President
Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia ordered an attack on Russian positions
in Tshkinvali. Russian combat units crossed the border into South
Ossetia only later, Russia has said.

General Lieutenant Nikolai Uvarov of Russia, a former United Nations
military attach?, who served as a Defense Ministry spokesman during
the war, insisted that Georgia’s attack surprised Russia and that its
leaders scrambled to respond while Russian peacekeeping forces were
under fire. He said President Dmitri Medvedev had been on a cruise on
the Volga River. Putin was at the Olympics in Beijing.

"The minister of defense, by the way, was on vacation in the Black Sea
somewhere," he said. "We never expected them to launch an attack."

Matthew Bryza, the deputy assistant secretary of state who coordinates
diplomacy in the Caucasus, said the contents of the recorded
conversations were consistent with what Georgians appeared to believe
on Aug. 7, in the final hours before the war, when a brief cease-fire
collapsed.

"During the height of all of these developments, when I was on the
phone with senior Georgian officials, they sure sounded completely
convinced that Russian armored vehicles had entered the Roki Tunnel,
and exited the Roki Tunnel, before and during the cease-fire," he
said. "I said, under instructions, that we urge you not to engage
these Russians directly."

By the night of Aug. 7, he said, he spoke with Eka Tkeshelashvili,
Georgia’s foreign minister, shortly before President Saakashvili
issued his order to attack, The International Herald Tribune reports.

Meanwhile, according European media reports, certain intercepts prove
that some high-ranking American officials were inciting the Georgian
leadership to aggression against South Ossetia. An investigation
initiated by the U.S. Congress is underway, the reports say.
From: Baghdasarian