(Untitled)

[shreena]

I'm very confused about the whole Georgia and Russia thing.  The TV news that I saw while on holiday seemed to be unequivocally blaming Russia for the most part with a bit of nuance only arriving a few days after the story broke.  But, on the face of it, it doesn't seem to be that clear-cut to me.  I'm also confused about the fact that everyone

Comments

[oedipamaas49]

[disclaimer: this is probably wrong in parts. I've not been paying much attention, because I find reading media reports of wars highly unpleasant

[alacsony]

>partly to look after ethnic Russians there

There are few ethnic Russians over there, but a lot of Russian citizens.

[srk1]

This is owing to the Russian policy of giving a passport to whoever in South Ossetia wanted one. Ossetians are actually a separate ethnic group, neither Russian nor Georgian, though they were considered to be one of the more pro-Soviet ethnic groups during that era.

[alacsony]

>they were considered to be one of the more pro-Soviet ethnic groups during that era.

Well, both Abkhazia and S.Ossetia have effectively boycotted the Georgian independence referendum.

[alacsony]

1. Ossetians are Christians. Abkhazians are Muslims. Their ethnic background is also different.
2. Both S.Ossetia and Abkhazia were autonomous provinces within Soviet Georgia.
3. When Georgia became independent, it abrogated their autonomy.
4. They tried to secede and Georgia tried to put the secession down.
5. Georgia failed.
6. Russia has brokered peace deals between Georgia and separatists and put its troops as peacekeepers in both conflict zones.
7. In early 2000s, using a legal loophole, Russia gave its citizenship to most residents of Abkhazia and S.Ossetia.
8. This August when Georgia rather bizarrely tried to crush S.Ossetia, Russia moved to 'protect its citizens' and crushed Georgia.

[shreena]

I was hoping that you'd comment.

Re: #7, did these residents of Abkhazia and S.Ossetia have Georgian citizenship prior to this or are they now dual citizens or .. ?

[srk1]

My understanding is that they already had de facto dual citizenship as there was an arrangement by which they could enter/work/live in Russia without visas. This arrangement was formalised by the "passportisation" (an excellent word which I make sure to use at least four times a day, often in inappropriate contexts)

[alacsony]

>as there was an arrangement by which they could enter/work/live in Russia without visas

That was prior to giving out of passports. From the year 2000 Russia required visas for entry of Georgian citizens, but the requirement didn't apply to Abkhazia or S.Ossetia.

Passports were given out a couple of years later. A wonderful hypocrisy about the 'passportisation' was that Abkhazians were given 'external' passports, which have almost no legal standing inside Russia (yes, we're still blessed with that shitty by-product of Soviet era - 'internal' passports)

[smhwpf]

Well, I'm inclined to < a href="http://smhwpf.livejournal.com/165552.html"> distribute blame more evenly.

See also this rather interesting article (if also long) in the International Herald Tribune on the diplomatic goings-on leading up to the crisis

[gonzo21]

Indeed. What the West is consistantly failing to recognise is that the Americans pushing ahead with their (illegal) anti-ballistic missile plans, and placing the interception sites in Poland, the Russians feel directly threatened by the American nuclear arsenal in a way that we haven't seen since the height of the cold war.

[srk1]

"They're not talking about Abkhazia so much - and I think it's much easier to pronounce than Tshkinvali, the capital of S. Ossetia - because there hasn't been a(nother) war there yet."

There has been conflict. Some of the troops deployed by Russia into Georgia proper came through Abkhazia, notably those who raided the Georgian military base at Senaki. The Abkhaz separatists also launched attacks on Georgian forces in the Kodori Gorge which was the only part of Abkhazia still controlled by the Georgian government. These included air attacks which suggests Russian support. They now claim to have taken control of the Kodori Gorge.

Any settlement is likely to also incorporate a settlement for Abkhazia, presumably on similar terms as for South Ossetia.

[smhwpf]

Yes, indeed, though the conflict has not been on the scale of S. Ossetia (although I think even that technically won't qualify as a 'war', which typically requires at least 1000 'battle-related' deaths in a year. Which the initially claimed casualty figures exceeded, but that now seems a gross exaggeration.)

I suspect there won't be a 'settlement' of any sort in either Abkhazia or S. Ossetia. Hopefully there will be relative peace and quiet, and hopefully the Russians will get out of Georgia proper before long, and the two regions will doubtless become de facto even more separated from Georgia - but there can be no final settlement, because Georgia will never accept losing territory, and the two regions (with Russian support) will never accept being ruled by Georgia.

[aphenine]

The descriptions of what's happening seem to be better than I can come up with, so I thought I'd fill some background

[thalassius]

Partly a reply to you, partly to other comments.

While Saakashvili appears to be at best unwise and intemperate, and the Georgian government not by any means blameless, I'm sensing rather too much of 'two wrongs make a right' here. If the elected Georgian government wants to cosy up to America (as they have been), that's their prerogative. With Russia as a neighbour, I don't blame them. They have every right to - just as Cuba has every right to do the reverse, though given that Cuba is a dictatorship, the Castros don't have anything like the level of consent Saakashvili has been given to make his mistakes.

Equally, the Russians are justified in seeing the missile shield in Eastern Europe as a threat to them, and the Georgians are not justified in using military force against two formerly autonomous regions whose people don't want to be part of Georgia. And Britain and America did invade another country for totally spurious reasons, (at which point millions of people in those two countries and elsewhere took to the streets to

[kathrid]

However, our government and media are largely backing the Georgian government and almost completely ignoring the Georgians attack on South Ossetia which started the whole fight. Such blatant disregard for an unwarranted attack (started just hours after they'd signed a peace-treaty with the South Ossetian leaders) isn't exactly what I'd call justifiable either.