“Our treacherous neighbours”

Published 21 August 2008

Why South Ossetians no longer say "Georgians"

At the moment, South Ossetia is like a ship after a terrible storm. Many of its crew are dead. Others are trying to repair the ship and set a course in one direction: north, towards Russia.

People are in deep shock. Every day, there are funeral ceremonies in Tskhinvali and the surrounding villages, many of which have been burned.

At the funerals, people tell the stories of when and how their relatives were killed. People blame the Georgian government, even Georgian soldiers' mothers - how could they allow them to terrify and kill children and elderly people? But people do not say "Georgians". It is hard for them to articulate the name. Instead, they call them "our treacherous neighbours".

The South Ossetian government reported that 2,100 civilians have been killed by Georgian troops. It is difficult to verify the number because many are still buried in the rubble of the cellars where they were hiding. There is a putrid smell in the streets of Tskhinvali.

Local volunteers and Russian constructors are repairing schools, houses and hospitals and clearing the streets. The Ossetian home-guard men are resting - sleeping at home or, for those whose homes were destroyed, in vehicles captured from the Georgians.

The Russian military are nowhere to be seen in Tskhinvali. Instead, the streets are littered with incinerated Georgian tanks. It must be hard to throw them away with the rubbish.

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9 comments from readers

writeon
21 August 2008 at 22:46

If people in Britain spoke foreign languages they wouldn't be forced to see the world through the controlled filter that's the British media. The bias in the reporting of the complex situation in Georgia is staggering. There is, for the most part, not even an attempt at any form of balance. Views and stories that don't conform to the accepted propaganda framework are few and far between. I've calculated that it's roughly 95% anti-Russian and 5% on the opposite side. This conforms pretty much to the same ratios that existed in relation to the attack on Iraq. Why does the British press so grossly under-represent the widspread opposition to the government's foreign policy? Why is being openly anti-Russian acceptable for journalists, but being anti-American is a virtual death sentence for one's career? As, one can argue we are dealing with two rival, undemocratic, gangster-capitalist, regimes; who are carving up Eurasia between them, why should we bother to choose between them?

Rachel
22 August 2008 at 17:39

Thank you for continually highlighting that the reason for the 'Russian transgression' so harped on about by everybody from the Sun to BBC News is not because they are evil, bloodsucking still-commies but because the Georgians were trigger happy and even a little genocide-y. It astonishes me how easily all the people around me seem to accept what they read and hear without actually thinking.

michaelpetek
24 August 2008 at 21:07

Larisa, I'm a little puzzled about something.

Five years ago ninety per cent of South Ossetians were offered, and freely accepted, Russian citizenship.

Under Georgian law you automatically lost your Georgian nationality, which you probably were more than happy to be rid of.

Now, I rather like my life in the United Kingdom, because I was born and grew up here. So I well understand your emotional attachment to your homeland.

But I would be the first to admit that, if I were to take the citizenship of a foreign country and give up my British citizenship, it would be only fair that I should be subject to immigration control in the UK and should have the right of residence only in the country of my new citizenship.

Until this August, Russia reaffirmed, time and time again, that South Ossetia was part of Georgia, including in Security Council Resolution 1808.

My question is, why did Russia not use the past five years to relocate its newly-naturalised Russian citizens to its own territory?

Perhaps Putin kept you and your people in place and in harm's way so he could engineer a bloodbath for his own cynical geopolitical ambitions.

writeon
25 August 2008 at 17:36

On the contrary. It's Bush that is using the Georgians for his cynical geopolitical ambitions. The Georgian leadership are agents of foreign powers first, and patriotic Georgians second. They have sold their country down the river. The idea that the Americans have the slightest interest in the welfare of the Georgian people is absurd. What they are interested in is using Georgia for their own ends in their conflict with Russia.

Obviously the Russians can't just surrender to the Americans, they have to resist the attempt to control them, Russia isn't the UK after all, that effectively ceased to be an independent state after WW2 and became an American protectorate and loyal servant.

The next 'battleground' between Russia and the United States, when little, plucky, Georgia and it's reckless regime are forgotten; will probably be the Ukraine. The Ukraine is split down the middle and the Americans want to grab control of it and threaten the Russian heartland. The American-backed regime in Kiev supports this strategy, despite internal opposition and problems with the substantial Russian minority in the south and east. The Crimea is probably the fuse. The regime in Kiev wants to throw the Russian Black Sea fleet out of Sebastapol. The Russians would be mad to allow this and have to resist or surrender.

michaelpetek
25 August 2008 at 17:56

Writeon, I think the difference between you and me is this.

I believe in a rule-based international order and in the values of a free society that Europeans have in common with the US. (Not that I believe in the American values not held in common with the Europeans).

You seem to be mesmerised by the lawless uncrowned Tsarism of Putin and Medvedev as a lesser evil than a job with Halliburton.

It isn't obvious why the Russians shouldn't surrender to the Americans, or, better, to the Europeans and the Americans in the sense of adopting the same values we profess: the rule of law, independent judiciaries, human rights, a mixed economy with predictable and enforceable property rights, free trade unions etc.

Mind you, I think you're right when you say that the next battleground will be the Ukraine. This country won't be such a pushover, especially with the famine-genocide (holodomor) of the 1930s still fresh in the memory, and with Poland sure to back them.

At least this time the Wehrmacht won't have to drive so far to get to the Volga. Then we'll see what happens to the Caucasus and how the Georgians come out of it.

writeon
25 August 2008 at 21:11

MichaelP,

But the Americans have systematically undermined and destroyed the international rule-based international or you supposedly believe in. The Bush gang has shredded the Constitution at home, and 'international law' abroad.

The Bush circle believes that they are the law, the judge and the jury... and the executioner too. Your version of the West is a fantasy detached from reality to a startling degree.

How on earth you can state that the West supports the values of a free society after we have made torture an integral part of our foreign policy is beyond me, you have to be joking surely? Or maybe you have so arkane and esoteric legal twist that redefines torture as something else?

What characterises Western culture is our ability to delude ourselves and rationalize our acitons, cloaking them in cant and hypocracy about; the rule of law, independent judiciaries, human rights, property rights, free trade unions etc.

I don't actually see that much difference between the United States and Russia, at least in the way they pursue their 'interests' abroad. I think the systems aren't so clashing ideologically, politically or economically, as converging. Two more or less totalitarian, imperialist, capitalist empires, heading for war with each other. If this happens I don't think it'll really matter much who was 'right' or 'wrong', or which was the most emphatically democratic.

And the United States isn't a real, healthy or funtioning democracy at all. It's a deeply flawed democracy sliding seemingly inexorably towards a totalitarian future.

You seem determined to put me on one side of the conflict and force me into an ideological straight-jacket like the one you so clearly inhabit. You have chosen sides, I have not. I don't want to and I refuse to. This American idea that fundamentally 'You are either with us or against us' is a stupid attempt to oversimplify a complex world, a world that objectively is not black and white at all.

And these glib remarks you make about the Wehrmacht and the march to the Volga, are not only tasteless, they are very revealing of the way you think. Given what the Wehrmacht did on their way to the Caucasus to countless towns and villages and their defenceless inhabitants, the only rational conclusion I can come to is that you are, in fact, a Facist.

writeon
25 August 2008 at 21:19

The reason there are so many typos in the above post is because I was so shocked by Michael's remark about the Wehrmacht. I couldn't believe it. I had family murdered by the Wehrmacht in the Ukraine, my grandmother and three aunties, all on the same day, all face down in the same ditch with bulletholes in their heads. I don't think one should make 'jokes' about the German Army in the Ukraine on its 'glorious' way to the Caucasus, not unless that is, one is a Fascist, then it becomes understandable, repugnant and disgusting, to be pitied and dispised, but still understandable.

Lisa Clark
26 August 2008 at 14:59

To writeon:

pls. accept my feelings of solidarity, we forgive all your typos as you reacted to Michael's remark about the Wehrmacht.

To MichaelP:

I agree with practically nothing you say. But I don't think anything I could say would help you change your ideas. Except for one analogy you made (where I found your words so offensive to Larisa):

the correct analogy for South Ossetians receiving Russian citizenship would not be someone living in England (maybe you meant a recent immigrant!), but rather a German-speaking South Tyrolean in that part of northern Italy that borders with Austria (I am writing from Italy). Or, more poignantly, Bosnian Serbs living in Bosnia getting Serb passports (which of course were the only passports they could ever get during the war). Or Kosovan Albanians living in Kosovo getting Albanian passports.

All these examples are of peoples/communities who have always lived in that land: it is the land of their forefathers, where their cultural roots lie. In areas where there is a conflict of a minority (that is, incidentally, a majority in its own region) pitted against a central government, the quick-fix solution you offer (they had five years to move to Russia ...!) is to preach ethnic cleansing at best, genocide at worst. If Larisa and her people did not take the chance they had to get out - you seem to imply - they had it coming to them! I am shocked, but I hope that you had not really worked out the implications of what you said.

Perhaps you should apologize to Larisa, and to writeon, too.

michaelpetek
27 August 2008 at 23:01

Writeon, are you sure it was the Wehrmacht, and not the SS?

Some people who I suspect belonged to my mother's extended family in Poland were buried alive by the SS -she herself grew up as a German-speaker in East Prussia, her parents were Polish and her father set out in 1943-1944 to assassinate Hitler - something which makes me well proud of my granddad!

You also have to remember that many people in the Soviet Union regarded the Wehrmacht as liberators after what Stalin had done to the Ukrainians. The Nazis murdered six million Jews in four years by industrial methods of mass killing. Stalin murdered in one year by starvation no fewer than seven million Ukrainians and probably as many as ten million.

So I hope you'll understand me when I say that, if the Russians try on a caper like that with Ukraine, the outcome should be the occupation of the Caucasus as far as the Volga and ideally of St Petersburg as well.

If it takes the use of the word "Wehrmacht" to twist the knife into the Russians, then so be it. But if you think that I'm advocating another Hitler to stand at the head of it, I'd say we've already got two Hitlers in Putin and Medvedev. In which case I should be on your side of this argument, notmine.