How Russia Defines Genocide Down

New York Times
August 9, 2009

By CLIFFORD J. LEVY

MOSCOW ‘ After the conflict between Russia and Georgia broke out a
year ago, each side accused the other of atrocities, but the Russians
went farther.

They spoke of marauding Georgian soldiers who systemically killed
hundreds if not thousands of civilians in the separatist enclave of
South Ossetia. Georgia was guilty not just of war crimes, they said.

It was genocide.

`Eyewitnesses say Georgian army units ran over women and children with
their tanks, drove people into houses and burned them alive,’ Vladimir
V. Putin, the prime minister and former president declared. `What was
it if not genocide?’

That word became a Russian rallying cry. But it also served to
underscore how the Kremlin seemed to mishandle the campaign to shape
public opinion worldwide ‘ a pivotal arena as Russia and Georgia
sought to cast blame over who started the fighting.

It was as if senior Russian officials pulled out a dog-eared Soviet
propaganda playbook that called for hurling the most outlandish
charge, without recognizing that in the modern global media climate,
their credibility would quickly suffer if the facts proved otherwise.

In the old days, credibility might not have mattered. Language could
be marshaled by the Kremlin in discomfiting ways to advance the ideals
of Communism and the West just expected it. But now, Mr. Putin has
presented himself and his country as democratic and forward-looking,
and that same language is held to a different standard.

And so it was that reporters entered South Ossetia after the five-day
war, and Russian and local officials could not explain where all the
bodies were, even at one point suggesting that they had been hastily
buried by family members in backyards.

It later became clear that the death toll was far lower. The Kremlin
now acknowledges that 162 South Ossetian civilians died in the war,
out of a population of roughly 70,000. The figure was higher on the
Georgian

Last week, as Russia used the anniversary of the war to undertake a
public relations effort to press its case that Georgia caused it, the
genocide charge was largely absent. The Georgian conduct was instead
labeled criminal.

(As is customary these days, given that both countries have hired
Western public relations agencies, the Georgians issued their own
dossier, maintaining that Russia was responsible for the war.)

Asked on Thursday about genocide, a deputy Russian foreign minister,
Grigory B. Karasin, seemed to concede that in the turbulent days of
last August, the Russian side may have overstepped.

Still, Mr. Karasin emphasized that the allegation had to be understood
in the context of regional history, saying that South Ossetians had
long believed that the Georgians wanted to exterminate their culture.

`Those people, I think, on an emotional line, not on a legal line, but
on an emotional line, have their own right to refer to the policy of
Tbilisi toward the minorities, and toward South Ossetians, as a type
of genocide,’ Mr. Karasin said.

Mr. Karasin did not mention it, but there was another factor. Last
August, the Kremlin appeared to jump at the opportunity to turn the
tables on the West over the issue of ethnic clashes and breakaway
regions.

Russia had long been indignant over Western support for Kosovo, the
enclave in Serbia that won recognition as independent last year. The
NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, which was intended to prevent the
Serbs from suppressing ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, had especially
angered people here.

With the South Ossetian conflict, the Kremlin saw hypocrisy, asking
why it was proper for the West to deploy force to support Kosovo in
the face of supposed Serbian violence against civilians, but not for
Russia to do the same thing for South Ossetia.

The Russians, in other words, ventured that if the West can call the
Serbian actions genocide, then the term fit the Georgians as well.

Questioned about the genocide claim five weeks after the war, Russia
vedev, replied with scorn.

`It is laughable when people suggest that we should first count the
dead, implying that if there was such and such a number, it would be
genocide, but 100 people less and it is not genocide,’ Mr. Medvedev
said. `Of course, only people who used their aircraft to bomb Yugoslav
territory for 90 days could think this way.’

While the Russians have avoided mentioning the word recently, their
South Ossetian allies have not entirely done so. Last week, they
unveiled a series of exhibits dedicated to the war. They are housed at
the Museum of Genocide.

inreview/09levy.html

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress