Russia has called our bluff over countries we can't defend

If the West had learnt the lessons of the past, it would now be supporting
even the smallest countries' dreams of freedom

    * Neal Ascherson
    * The Observer,
    * Sunday August 17 2008

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/17/georgia.russia

Forty years ago this week, the night sky above Prague began to rumble with
the sound of transport aircraft. On distant frontiers, tanks lurched
forward. The invasion of Czechoslovakia had begun.

Today, there are Russian tank columns driving along Georgian roads. Again, a
small country lies prostrate before the military power of the Kremlin.
Poland, in turn, is informed by a Russian general that by agreeing to
station American missiles, it has made itself a nuclear target - perhaps no
more than a brutal statement of the obvious.

But there are big differences between now and 1968. First, the Georgians
fought back before being overwhelmed, something they will remember in the
years to come. Second, this is something less than total occupation.
Anything may still happen, but this Russian action looks more like a
punitive expedition.

What do the Russians want? The world does not yet know. Possibly the
Russians do not know either; their tradition is to enter a crisis with
several contrary game plans and then to play it by ear. But some short-term
purposes are already clear.

They want to destroy Georgia's military hardware so thoroughly it will take
a decade to rebuild. That is what the roving armoured units are doing. They
want to upgrade their 'peacekeeping' forces in South Ossetia and Abkhazia
so Georgia will never dare to attack across their borders again. They want
to discredit President Mikheil Saakashvili so utterly that the Georgian
people will depose him. They want to show the world the sort of price which
would be paid for taking Georgia into Nato and also to suggest that Georgia
is too erratic to be a Nato partner.

But Russia may also have plans for a new relationship with Georgia. While
Condoleezza Rice and other Western leaders try to implement the cease-fire,
President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin would like to get rid of all
these international mediators, above all the Americans. They would almost
certainly prefer to impose on defeated Georgia a new bilateral treaty with
the Russian Federation. Any such treaty may well include returning to
Russia one or more of the military bases in Georgia which they reluctantly
evacuated a few years ago.

By this weekend, Russian forces had ceased to shoot but Georgia's agony
continued. Much more terrible than the soldiers are the civilians who come
behind them, big-bellied men with machine pistols wearing army jackets
thrown over T-shirts. They are doing the murdering, looting and burning, as
they drive the last Georgians out of South Ossetia. Now they can reach
Georgian territory as far as Gori, so they are following and killing them
there.

They are Ossetians, helped by Chechen volunteers and by ultra-patriotic
Russian 'Cossacks'. A year ago, most of these Ossetians probably lived in
neighbourly peace with the local Georgians in the next village. But the
spark of war ignites madness. The neighbours became traitors, spies,
saboteurs, snipers.

These gunmen are Ossetians, but if Saakashvili's surprise attack had
succeeded, the killers would be Georgians and the victims Ossetians. The
first outrush of Ossetian refugees from the fighting in Tskhinvali reported
that Georgian atrocities against them had already started.

Now the outrush is Georgian. They will become helpless, homeless IDPs -
internal displaced persons - crowded into dirty huts and abandoned
factories with thousands of older IDPs who have been rotting on the fringe
of Georgian society for 15 years.

For all this has happened before.

That is the worst thing about the tragic war over South Ossetia. The
impetuous Georgian resort to force, the appeal to Russian armed strength
giving Russia a chance to weaken Georgia's independence, the terrible
crimes carried out by civilians of the winning side against the helpless
families of the losing side, the ethnic cleansing, the refugees - all these
horrors happened here only 15 years ago.

The trouble in Abkhazia began when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991.
Georgia moved to full independence, asserting that Abkhazia was part of its
territory. The Abkhazians retorted that association with Georgia within the
Soviet framework had been one thing; downgrading to an ethnic minority
directly and exclusively ruled from Tbilisi was quite another. Agitation
began.

Then in August 1992, the Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze suddenly
flung the army against Abkhazia. Like Saakashvili, he tried to reassert
control by bombarding and seizing the capital, Sokhumi. Violent fighting
broke out. In the war that followed, Russian weaponry and air strikes
helped little Abkhazia - with less than a tenth of Georgia's population -
to an unexpected victory.

When it was over, Abkhazia's towns and villages lay in ruins. And atrocities
had followed the fighting troops. At first, it was the Georgian militias
who did their worst against non-Georgian civilians. But then, as the war
turned their way, Abkhazian paramilitaries and the wild north Caucasus
volunteers who had swarmed in to help them took indiscriminate vengeance.
Almost the entire Georgian and Mingrelian population, some 150,000, fled
with the Georgian army. Many of them live in bleak refugee settlements to
this day.

The point of this history is that nobody learnt anything from it, nobody
except the Russians. So history has repeated itself. In the years that
followed, Georgian politicians failed to see that only imaginative
diplomacy, not bombardment by rockets, might bring about some kind of
rapprochement with South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

The Abkhazians, independent but recognised by nobody, have no choice but to
accept unofficial Russian hegemony. But at heart they resent it. They dream
of escaping into the big world and genuine independence. Saakashvili, when
he came to power, could have exploited that resentment by making a fresh
start with Abkhazia. A few gestures and proposals were made. But the
Abkhazian leaders, grimly suspicious, rejected them all as eyewash.
Saakashvili, they insisted, was a nationalist demagogue who intended to
recapture both Abkhazia and smaller South Ossetia by force. Today they are
entitled to say: 'We told you so.'

It's time the West stopped talking about 'Georgian territorial integrity',
and about South Ossetia and Abkhazia as 'breakaway regions of Georgia', as
if their 'illegal secession' can somehow be reversed. It cannot. That
useless dream is dead. The question now is quite different. It is how their
independence can be recognised and made real. Only in that way can the
outside world make it harder for Russia to use them as pawns in the game of
crippling Georgian freedom.

It may not be possible to rescue South Ossetia, tiny and without resources,
from becoming a Russian protectorate or even part of the Russian
Federation - and most of its people seem to want that. But Abkhazia, with
its once-flourishing holiday coast and rich agriculture, can be a perfectly
viable Black Sea state. The European Union has a Black Sea neighbourhood
programme. It's time for the EU to stop pretending that Abkhazia does not
exist, to integrate it into the programme and to give it vigorous help.

And Georgia, that miraculous little nation which contains some of the
world's most talented people, and some of its worst politicians, must
change. It is not Georgia which has been defeated, but a particular
Georgian policy which has again and again played into Russian hands.

We know now that Russia's revival as a big power is under way. Outside
competition for influence over the ex-Soviet nations is going to be
fiercely resisted. After Georgia comes Ukraine, where attempts to join Nato
could end by splitting the nation and, with the Russian fleet still based
in Crimea, bring about a terrifying confrontation.

Nato, with the Americans, can protect its own members against blackmail by
standing firm. But the brutal truth is that if Nato is to survive, it must
not sign up nations for which at heart it is not prepared to fight. The
best way to prevent war is not windy condemnation, but clear, credible
rules of engagement. Bluffing can be fatal.
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