Thread: The truth about South Ossetia revealed: Georgian aggression and war crimes

The truth about South Ossetia

guardian.co.uk



Oct 31, 2008

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.

Source: guardian.co.uk


The truth about South Ossetia

Georgia (a US client state) has done far more to their seperatists than Serbia ever did.

The Serb's military actions in Kosovo were responses to attacks from the US sponsored KLA terror group. okebrain:


Fears of new war rise around separatist Abkhazia
Shootings on Georgia's border with Abkhazia stoke fears of a new war on the western front


MATT SIEGEL
AP News
Nov 01, 2008 11:30 EST
The crackle of gunfire at night makes sleep all but impossible along Georgia's border with separatist Abkhazia, feeding the fears of so many here that the war they hoped was over may be erupting anew.

A cease-fire ended major hostilities between Georgia and Russia after August's five-day war. But shootings and bombings continue — and nowhere more so than here along the poorly defined, porous border that separates Georgia proper from Abkhazia.


Most of the world's attention has focused on the uneasy peace around war-ravaged South Ossetia, the other Russian-backed separatist region that was at the heart of the fighting.


But Georgians who live along the border with the rugged mountainous region of Abkhazia in western Georgia are terrified that a new war is at hand. They fear the latest violence is aimed at driving them from their homes so Abkhaz forces can sweep in unopposed to take their land.


"We live under constant fear," said Eros, a 50-year-old, out-of-work man. He refused to give his last name, saying he was afraid of retaliation from Abkhaz paramilitaries who move across the border with impunity.
Both Georgia and Abkhazia blame the other for the violence.


On Georgia's side, three police officers have been shot dead from positions just across the border in the last two weeks. In the deadliest attack, the mayor of this border village and a resident were killed by what the Georgian Interior Ministry says was a remotely detonated landmine. A police officer also was severely wounded.


Abkhazia acknowledges its soldiers have fired across the border and may have hit the Georgian police, but says they fire only in response to Georgian attacks.


On the territory of Abkhazia, five people have been killed and several wounded in 13 attacks since Aug. 29, Abkhaz Deputy Foreign Minister Maxim Gvindzhiya told The Associated Press.


He said there was evidence the attacks were carried out by Georgian agents intent on portraying the separatist republic as unstable. Georgia accuses Abkhazia of plotting to use the violence to justify a military incursion into Georgian territory.


"This media campaign against us, saying that we are attacking them every day, it reminds me of the period just before the war," said Georgian Interior Ministry spokesman Shota Utiashvili.


The village of Mujhava sits aside the administrative border that has separated Georgia and Abkhazia since Abkhazia first broke away from Georgian control in the early 1990s.


Nestled in a valley amid densely forested mountain peaks, Mujhava illustrates some of the formidable obstacles in bringing calm to the border: Local police here could not even explain precisely where the border was.
Police blocked a reporter from inspecting the house where the bombing occurred. Curtains fluttered out of open windows, and police said they were afraid to shut the windows, fearing they could be boobytrapped.
Georgian police and villagers blame Abkhaz forces for the violence.


"If I talk to you the Abkhazians will catch me," said one frightened villager, who quickly walked away when he realized that he was speaking to a reporter. "I live around this area, it's too dangerous for me to talk to you."
Abkhazia has claims on as many as 14 villages on the Georgian side of the border, but Gvindzhiya said they will seek the return of what they see as their territory by diplomatic means.


The August war started when Georgia attacked South Ossetia, which also broke from Georgian government control in the early 1990s. Russian forces swiftly repelled the attack, sending troops and heavy weaponry into both South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and then drove deep into Georgia, beyond the two regions.


Russia now has about 3,800 troops in each region and its recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states has badly damaged already strained relations between Moscow and the West.


South Ossetia and its adjacent regions — located north of the Georgian capital — have seen sporadic violence since a French-brokered cease-fire went into effect in September and 225 European Union monitors began patrols the following month.


EU monitors patrolling along the Abkhaz border say Georgian residents have become noticeably more fearful in recent days, said Wolfgang Schafer, an official with the EU's regional field office in Zugdidi. A team of EU monitors was standing just 100 yards away when the blast went off in Mujhava on Oct. 25.


"We are not living here in a paradise, we are living in a crisis situation," he said.


The EU monitors are barred from investigating violent incidents themselves and have to rely on local police reports, which Schafer said complicates their efforts to build confidence in communities more on edge than at any time since the war.


Gvindzhiya, the Abkhaz official, said Georgia "is intentionally trying to destabilize the situation on the border so it can then appeal to the international community to deploy EU patrols on the Abkhaz side." He said the EU monitors are not welcome because they have not offered a plan to provide for their security.


Adding to the tensions was the destruction of two key bridges over the Inguri River, which runs along the border between Georgia and Abkhazia. Both sides accuse the other of destroying the crossings, leaving just one border crossing in the region.


Russia has deployed soldiers to help Abkhazia in patrolling the border and Russian troops control all border crossings. One day last week, a Russian soldier guarding the river border crossing turned away two ethnic Georgian women who were trying to cross into Abkhazia's Gali district — a district that is dominated by ethnic Georgians.


When they told him they were heading to a funeral, he laughed and walked away.


Before the war — when the Abkhaz controlled the border — movement back and forth between the regions was possible, said one of the women, who also declined to give her name out of fear of retribution.
Now with the Russians in control, the link to her home village in Abkhazia has been cut.


"No one really asks the Abkhaz about anything," she said. "They're just here for show."

Source: AP News

VIDEO: BBC NEWS | Programmes | Newsnight | What really happened in South Ossetia?

After gaining exclusive access to South Ossetia, Tim Whewell has discovered evidence Georgia may have committed war crimes in its attack on its breakaway region in August.