One can only wonder about how President Saakashvili of Georgia and his government argued themselves into launching a military attack on the breakaway province of South Ossetia. Humanitarian considerations aside for the moment, there was simply no logic to it. If one is a rabbit with no cover one simply does not go about prodding an irascible bear; that is to invite a level of retaliation one might not be able to deal with. As it is, an unknown number of Georgia’s military and civilians have been killed and wounded; her boats in the Black Sea port of Poti lie partly submerged in the harbour; the town of Gori is badly damaged from Russian shelling and air strikes; the population nearest the Ossetian border has been displaced; and now she has no hope whatever of regaining control of either South Ossetia or the equally recalcitrant province of Abkhazia, for that matter.
Not, mind you, that the Georgians had much hope of talking the Ossetians into remaining within the perimeters of their country in any case, but bombing and shelling their tiny capital of Tskhinvali into submission was guaranteed to turn the citizens against Tbilisi for ever and possibly open the way for Russia to bring off a kind of Kosovo arrangement in the Caucasus. In other words, Georgia is in a much worse position than she was before she launched the ill-advised assault on South Ossetia on August 7, and so, interestingly, in terms of its interests in the region, might be the United States.
The problem for Tbilisi has always been that two-thirds of the population of South Ossetia are not Georgian at all, but belong to the same ethnic group as the people of North Ossetia, an autonomous region within the Russian Federation. Different news agencies have given different figures, but it appears that anywhere between 50-70% of South Ossetian inhabitants have Russian passports – a clear indication of where their loyalties lie.
In 1991-92, the South Ossetians launched a war of independence from Georgia, and although they declared themselves independent, no country has recognized them up to this point. Nevertheless, for all intents and purposes Georgian government writ did not run to Tskhinvali, and an important element in Mr Saakashvili’s platform when he first came to office in 2004 was that he would bring the breakaway province back into the Georgian fold. He first offered them autonomy within Georgia, but they rejected this, and in 2006 they held an unofficial referendum for independence, which a majority of the voters backed. For all its lack of status, the referendum sent an unambiguous message to Tbilisi about the Ossetian mindset. Furthermore, the Russians have had ‘peace-keepers’ in the province since the independence war, as well as troops stationed on the border to the north, all of which gave the South Ossetians additional reason to thumb their noses at Tbilisi. In addition, did the Georgian government really think these forces were going to stand by and do nothing if South Ossetia were invaded?
Given that President Saakashvili had no hope of forcing the Ossetians into submission in any case, there was no rationalization to hand which would excuse the humanitarian cost of the decision to use force. The international media have not concentrated on the destruction and deaths caused by the Georgian action, partly because it was overtaken by the destruction and deaths caused by the Russians in Georgia itself.
Georgia is a small country, but it sits in the Caucasus, a strategically critical region. The Caucasus is situated at the fulcrum of the Eurasian continent; it is oil-rich, in addition to which its oil pipelines too play an important role in the big-power game. The stakes are high for the Russians in particular, who have never got over the loss of territories around the Black Sea – not just Georgia, but also the Ukraine. In fact the Russian Black Sea fleet has its home in the Ukrainian port of Sebastapol in the Crimea. As Nato advances eastward, therefore, Russia gets increasingly hostile, as demonstrated after the western military alliance told Georgia it could join in April this year. From then on, the BBC has reported, the Russians stepped up their relations with the separatists, and in July Russian planes violated Georgian airspace over Ossetia in order, it was said, “to cool hot heads in Tbilisi.”
There is of course, too, the matter of the US missile defence shield, which has angered the Russians, especially now that Poland has agreed to accommodate a base on its territory. Russia feels it is being encircled, and has made no secret of its objections to the new missile arrangements; the White House, however, has been deaf to its concerns. There is one other source of concern to the Russians as well, and that is Chechnya, which is not far from Georgia. Russia in the past has accused the Georgians of turning a blind eye to the activities of Islamist separatists in the Pankisi Gorge, through which they funnel their fighters and equipment, and where it has been reported, they have some of their training camps.
Of course, since April the Russians have been baiting the Georgians with a series of incidents and now foolishly the latter have risen to the bait. It is a kind of war by proxy, but a war in which the Georgians and their western backers have the most to lose. It may be that in the long term Russia is playing to recover Georgia, but in the meantime it can make life difficult for any government in Tbilisi which does not play the Russian game, and there will not be a great deal that the US can do about it. Up to the time of writing, the Russians still had not withdrawn their forces from Georgia, despite the fact that they had signed a cease-fire agreement. Certainly the language of the White House which has been addressing the Kremlin in the imperative, is unlikely to secure the desired end. What might put more pressure on Moscow is the international media, which have been covering the Russian occupation of parts of Georgia, and running the footage in the prime-time newsreels. As the BBC put it, while Georgia has lost the war, Russia has lost the propaganda war.
So given the odds against him, what caused President Saakashvili to make such a flawed decision in relation to South Ossetia? Perhaps the prospect of joining Nato at some point caused him to indulge the fantasy of the White House knight charging in to back the Georgians up with some military forces, although there was and is virtually nil likelihood of that happening; the most the Americans have risen to is humanitarian assistance. One does not know, of course, what advice the US had been proffering in the run-up to this latest crisis, and exactly what mistaken impressions Tbilisi had derived in relation to possible western support.
Some of the international media have said too that Mr Saakashvili had become very unpopular at home because of failed economic policies, and that the South Ossetian decision was designed to play to nationalist sentiment. If so, it seems to have succeeded to some extent, since the Georgians have rallied around their head of state, the loss of the war notwithstanding. Whether that nationalistic outpouring will last, however, remains to be seen. Sooner or later, one would have thought, a Georgian commentator will draw the attention of citizens to what has effectively been a strategic mistake.