Putin's Wars
Page 35
Notes
1. Wesley K. Clark and Peter L. Levin, “Securing the Information Highway: How to Enhance the United States’ Electronic Defenses,” Foreign Affairs 88, no. 6, (November/December 2009), 3.
2. Asmus, A Little War That Shook the World, 21.
3. Valentina Pop, “Saakashvili Saved Georgia from Coup, Former Putin Aide Says,” interview with Andrey Illarionov, EU Observer (October 14, 2008).
4. Quoted in Illarionov, “The Russian Leadership’s Preparations for War, 1999–2008,” 83.
5. “Tskhinvalskiy Pul Spiskom,” December 4, 2008. This list gives thirty-one names. http://davnym-davno.livejournal.com/6488.html.
6. “Donskie kazaki gotovy vstat na zashchitu naroda Yuzhnoy Osetii ot gruzinskoy agressii,” Nezavisimaya Gazeta, August 6, 2008. http://www.ng.ru/regions/2008-08-06/1_kazaki.html.
7. “Donskie kazaki gotovy vstat na zashchitu naroda Yuzhnoy Osetii ot gruzinskoy agressii.”
8. Cf. Marie Jégo, Alexandre Billette, Natalie Nougayrède, Sophie Shihab, and Piotr Smolar, “Autopsie d’un conflit,” Le Monde (August 31–September 1, 2008). In secret reports from the US embassy in Tbilisi sent to the state department and subsequently published by WikiLeaks, this version of the facts was confirmed: “Putin has said to him [Saakashvili] that he does not care about South Ossetia, as long as Georgia avoids a massacre and solves the problem quietly.” (“La Géorgie, grande perdante du rapprochement russo-américain,” Le Monde (December 3, 2010).) This trap is also intimated by Salomé Zourabishvili, a former Georgian Minister of Foreign Affairs, who has become a fierce critic of Saakashvili. According to her the Russians must have given an unofficial green light to Georgia to intervene in South Ossetia to fight the local militias, which Moscow said it “could no longer control.” Zourabichvili even speaks of the possibility of a “tacit agreement.” (Zourabichvili, La tragédie géorgienne 2003–2008: de la révolution des Roses à la guerre, 317.) But even if such an improbable tacit agreement could have existed, the fact remains that at the very moment that Saakashvili ordered his attack he no longer had any illusions about the Russian response. We must also remember that this was not the first time the Kremlin had tried to disseminate active disinformation by suggesting that there was disagreement between themselves and the leadership of the self-proclaimed republics. Putin, for instance, when visiting Paris at the end of May 2008, said to his French interlocutors that he agreed with a Georgian peace plan that would grant Abkhazia great autonomy—a position contradicting Putin’s earlier positions. When the Abkhaz “President” Bagapsh visited Paris one month later, Bagapsh said: “Putin can agree with this plan, but we don’t and we never will do,” suggesting a difference of opinion between a “cooperative” Russian government and the “radical” separatists. (Cf. Piotr Smolar, “L’Abkhazie rejette la responsabilité de la crise sur les autorités géorgiennes,” Le Monde (June 22–23, 2008).)
9. This shelling of Georgian villages inside South Ossetia by South Ossetian militias had already started on August 2. According to Martin Malek, “On August 5 a tripartite monitoring group, which included Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) observers and representatives of Russian peacekeeping forces in the region, issued a report. This document, signed by the commander of the Russian ‘peacekeepers’ in the region, General Marat Kulakhmetov, stated that there was evidence of attacks against several ethnic Georgian villages. It also claimed that South Ossetian separatists were using heavy weapons against the Georgian villages, which was prohibited by a 1992 ceasefire agreement.” (Martin Malek, “Georgia & Russia: The ‘Unkown’ Prelude to the ‘Five Day War,’” Caucasian Review of International Affairs 3, no. 2 (Spring 2009.) http://cria-online.org/7_10.html.)
10. Jégo et al., “Autopsie d’un conflit.”
11. Asmus, A Little War that Shook the World, 31.
12. Asmus, A Little War that Shook the World, 25.
13. Felgenhauer estimated the Georgian army to be seventeen-thousand-strong, supported by up to five thousand police officers (two thousand of Georgia’s elite 1st Infantry Brigade were deployed in Iraq. They were flown back but arrived after the war was over). The overall number of Russian troops that took part in the war in Georgia in August 2008 was approximately forty thousand. They were supported by ten thousand to fifteen thousand separatist militias. This makes the power ratio 2.5:1—illustrating the clear numerical superiority of the Russian forces, even without including differences in equipment. (Cf. Pavel Felgenhauer, “After August 7: The Escalation of the Russia-Georgia War,” in The Guns of August 2008: Russia’s War in Georgia, eds. Cornell and Starr, 170–173.)
14. Svante E. Cornell and S. Frederick Starr, “Introduction,” in The Guns of August 2008: Russia’s War in Georgia, eds. Cornell and Starr, 9.
15. Cornell and Starr, “Introduction.”
16. Jonathan Littell, “Carnet de route,” Le Monde 2 (October 4, 2008), 18. This version of the facts was confirmed in a testimony before Congress, made by Dan Fried, at that time Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, who said the Georgians “believed at the time—that they thought the Russian forces were coming through the Roki tunnel (linking Russia with South Ossetia) and they were in imminent danger.” (Daniel Dombey, “Congress Attacks Stance on Georgia,” Financial Times (September 11, 2008).)
17. Quoted by Malek, “Georgia & Russia: The ‘Unkown’ Prelude to the ‘Five Day War.’”
18. Quoted in “Soldaty govoryat, chto pribyli v Yuzhnuyu Osetiyu eshche 7 Avgusta” (Soldiers Say That They Were Already on August 7 in South Ossetia), Polit.ru, (September 10, 2008). http://www.polit.ru/news/2008/09/10/seven/print/.
19. “Soldaty govoryat, chto pribyli v Yuzhnuyu Osetiyu eshche 7 Avgusta.”
20. The article was quoted on the same day by the news agency Newsru.com. The agency concluded: “Thus the captain was on the Southern side of the Caucasus ridge, already on Georgian territory, and saw the shelling of Tskhinvali and the position of the peacekeepers during the night of August 8.” (“SMI: Rossiyskie voyska voshli v Yuzhnuyu Osetiyu eshche do nachala boevykh deystviy,” NEWSru.com (September 11, 2008).)
21. “S saita ‘Krasnoy Zvezdy’ udaleno intervyu kapitana Sidristogo o vtorzhenii Rossiyskikh voysk v Yu O do napadeniya Gruzii,” NEWSru.com (September 15, 2008).
22. “S saita ‘Krasnoy Zvezdy’ udaleno intervyu kapitana Sidristogo o vtorzhenii Rossiyskikh voysk v Yu O do napadeniya Gruzii.”
23. The story of the changed and subsequently removed article in Krasnaya Zvezda raised doubts for even the German magazine Der Spiegel, which after the war published an article extremely critical of Saakashvili (he was called “the choleric ruler of Tbilisi”). “Did Moscow’s deployment start, after all, earlier than it was until now admitted?” asked the authors. (Ralf Beste, Uwe Klussmann, Cordula Meyer, Christian Neef, Matthias Schepp, Hans-Jürgen Schlamp, and Holger Stark, “Wettlauf zum Tunnel,” Der Spiegel no. 38 (September 15, 2008), 132. http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-60135192.html.)
Chapter 15
The War with Georgia, Part III
The Propaganda War
After the opening of the hostilities the Russian propaganda machine immediately swung fully into action, helped by the massive presence in Tskhinvali of the reporters and cameramen from the national TV channels and print media, who had arrived days before the events started. The Russian press agencies began publishing stories of the atrocities supposedly committed by the Georgians against the South Ossetian civil population. A prominent place in these stories was reserved for the accusation that Georgia had committed in South Ossetia a genocide.
Russia Accuses Georgia of Genocide
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev himself took the lead, declaring on August 11: “The ferocity with which the actions of the Georgian side were carried out cannot be called anything else but genocide, because they acquired a mass character and were directed against individuals, the civilian population, peacekeepers who carried out their fu
nctions of maintaining peace.”[1] The Russian ambassador in Tskhinvali mentioned that “at least 2,000 people were killed in Tskhinvali.”[2] In a fact sheet by the news agency RIA Novosti, issued one month later, this number had shrunk to 1,500 civilians. It was announced that “Russian prosecutors, on orders from President Dmitry Medvedev, are currently gathering evidence to support allegations of genocide committed by Georgia against South Ossetians.”[3] By August 21, this commission had already made a first estimate of 133 civilians killed by the Georgian forces.[4] When, on December 23, 2008, the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor’s Office of the Russian Federation at last published the final results of its inquiry, instead of 2,000 victims in Tskhinvali alone, the Committee found a total of 162 civilian victims for the whole of South Ossetia.[5] However, the false, Soviet-style accusations directed at the Georgian government were never officially revoked, and until today the accusations of genocide find a prominent place in official and unofficial Russian publications on the war with Georgia.
Apparently, these accusations were prepared in advance by the Russian leadership to construct a semblance of similarity between NATO’s humanitarian intervention in Kosovo and Russia’s intervention in Georgia.[6] The accusations against Georgia were extremely cynical, taking into account the abuses committed by the Russian military in Chechnya, where in two wars at least 10 percent of the population had been killed. Yekaterina Sokiryanskaya of the human rights group Memorial commented: “Talking about the right for independence, about genocide and the war crimes of Mr Saakashvili, Russia’s leaders are perhaps forgetting about the tens of thousands of civilians who were killed by Russia’s bombardment of Grozny and who were executed, cleansed, and tortured by the Russian military in Chechnya.”[7] The Kremlin’s accusations were a clear case of what Robert Amsterdam in a striking comparison has called “the Doppelgänger Theory”: “the Kremlin’s habit of charging their critics with the very activities in which they themselves engage.”[8] It was, by the way, not the first time Georgia was accused of genocide. Already in 1993 Vladimir Zhirinovsky wrote: “Today Georgia is killing Abkhazians, Ossetians, and Europe keeps silent. . . . There are not many Abkhazians, but they are a people, they want to live on their land and in freedom. But they [the Georgians] are taking this right away. This is a genocide, this is racism and it is happening today. Who is going to stop this?”[9] Especially the accusation of “racism” was particularly unexpected, coming from a politician, who, in the same book, only some pages earlier, compared immigrants from the South with tarakany—cockroaches.
The Kremlin has made a habit of accusing others of crimes of which it has been accused of itself. Yekaterina Sokiryanskaya mentioned already the massive, indiscriminate bombardments of Grozny in the winter of 1999–2000 with thousands of victims amongst the civil population of Chechnya. These bombardments and other atrocities committed in Chechnya made another prominent Russian human rights activist, Sergey Kovalyov, write: “What is new this time around is that Russian society as a whole is prepared to carry out genocide. Cruelty and violence are no longer rejected.”[10]
Ethnic Cleansing and Cluster Bombs
The cynical accusations of genocide, made by the Kremlin, were followed by accusations by Georgia that it was Russia that had practiced ethnic cleansing. The dirty work in this case was mostly done by the South Ossetian militias that had followed the advancing Russian army in armored patrol vehicles with covered licence plates. “Refugees from Karaleki and nearby [Georgian] villages,” wrote Luke Harding of The Guardian, “gave the same account: South Ossetian militias that had swept in on August 12, killing, burning, stealing and kidnapping. . . . South Ossetian militias, facilitated by the Russian army, are carrying out the worst ethnic cleansing since the war in former Yugoslavia. Despite the random nature of these attacks, the overall aim is clear: to create a mono-ethnic greater South Ossetia in which Georgians no longer exist.”[11] South Ossetians did not attempt to deny that their aim was ethnic cleansing, they even proclaimed it openly. “We did carry out cleaning operations, yes,” admitted Captain Elrus, the militia leader, when asked by Luke Harding. And why shouldn’t he? Had not South Ossetian president, Eduard Kokoity, in an interview in the Russian paper Kommersant, proudly declared: “We have flattened practically everything there [in the Georgian villages].”[12] In a note of the Georgian government one could read that “deliberate attempts by the Russian government to exaggerate the number of people killed in the conflict also provoked revenge attacks on Georgian villagers.”[13] The Russian lies concerning a genocide committed by Georgians had the perverse effect of inciting South Ossetian militias to kill, rape, and loot Georgian citizens with even more fervor.
Human Rights Watch accused Russia of having used cluster bombs against civil targets.[14] Cluster munitions contain dozens and sometimes hundreds of smaller submunitions, or “‘bomblets.” They cause unacceptable suffering because they are spread over a broad area and kill civilians indiscriminately during strikes. Because many bomblets fail to explode, these become landmines that kill and maim people months and even years later. In May 2008, 107 nations agreed to a total ban on cluster munitions. Russia and Georgia were not among the signatories. According to a report by Human Rights Watch, on August 12, 2008, Russian aircraft dropped RBK-250 cluster bombs on the Georgian town of Ruisi, which killed three and wounded five civilians. The same day the Russian army also bombed the market in the center of the town of Gori with cluster bombs. The bombs were launched with an Iskander missile. Eight civilians were killed, and dozens were wounded. Among the dead was Stan Storimans, a Dutch TV cameraman.[15] Novaya Gazeta journalist Yuliya Latynina wrote: “The most precise weapon of Russia, ORTK ‘Iskander,’ already first developed in the 1980s, though only a few examples are today in the possession of the army, struck Georgia twice: on the oil pipeline Baku-Supsa and on the market of Gori on which humanitarian goods were being distributed—the Dutch TV operator Stan Storimans was killed by it. . . . ‘Iskander’ is a high precision weapon, meaning that either it proved not so precise when it fell on the market, or that the market was targeted, and in that case it was the first time in history that a high precision weapon has been used against the civil population.”[16]
The Dutch government sent a fact-finding commission to Georgia to establish the facts. In its report[17] one could read that the bombardment took place after military and police units of Georgia had already left the town. The bomb clearly targeted the civilian population. At 10:45 a.m. there were twenty explosions in the air, as well as on the ground. Each explosion spread a huge number of small 5mm metal balls. One of these hit and killed Storimans. He was killed by submunitions of a cluster bomb launched with a Russian Iskander SS-26 missile. In a letter to the Dutch Parliament, the Dutch minister of foreign affairs, Maxime Verhagen, wrote that although the use of cluster bombs was not yet forbidden, “parties in a situation of an armed conflict should always make a sharp distinction between military and civilian targets,” and, “taking into account that on August 12 the Georgian military and police had left Gori, the Russian forces should have abstained from using [these weapons]. In light of this I find the conclusion of the investigatory committee very serious and I have explained this to the Russian authorities.”[18] Three days after the attack on Gori, Colonel-General Anatoly Nogovitsyn, deputy chief of Russia’s general staff, categorically denied that such weapons had ever been used in Georgia. “We never use cluster bombs,” he said. “There is no need to do so.”[19] Moreover, the unequivocal findings of the fact-finding commission of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not change the Kremlin’s version of the facts. Commenting on the death of Storimans the spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry not only denied the use of cluster bombs, but he went even further and “asserted that there was not enough evidence to conclude that Storimans had been killed as a result of the use of [any] weapons by the Russian side.”[20] In November 2008, some weeks after the publication of the Dutch report, Human Rights Watch wrote:
“Russia has continued to deny using cluster munitions in Georgia, but Human Rights Watch finds the evidence to be overwhelming. Human Rights Watch believes that Russia’s use of cluster munitions in populated areas was indiscriminate, and therefore in violation of international humanitarian law.”[21]