THOMAS DE WAAL: Civilians pay for politicians' errors in South Ossetia

LONDON — In the space of a few days, a catastrophe has unfolded in the Caucasus, sparked by a conflict over a tiny piece of land.

It is a conflict that easily could have been averted.

South Ossetia is a tiny and vulnerable place with more than 75,000 inhabitants in a patchwork of villages and one sleepy provincial town in the foothills of the Caucasus.

Yet Russia and Georgia have clashed over which nation would control the territory since the early 1990s, when a brief, bitter war led to South Ossetia declaring its independence from Georgia. The fighting left more than 1,000 people dead and a huge legacy of animosity between Georgia and Russia.

For more than a decade after the fighting, however, both sides managed to observe an uneasy truce. South Ossetia became a shady backwater and a smugglers' haven. While the region was outside Tbilisi's control, Ossetians and Georgians went back and forth across the unrecognized border, trading vigorously with each other at an untaxed market in the village of Ergneti.

Then Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili came to power in 2004, with heady promises to restore his country's lost territories. He quickly moved to shut down the market in Ergneti and took a hard line against what he called a breakaway province.

For their part, the Russians responded by effecting a "soft annexation" of the territory, handing out Russian passports to South Ossetians and installing their own officials in government posts. Russian soldiers, who had been performing a peacekeeping function since the initial conflict in the 1990s, became an informal occupation army.

Saakashvili also made clear his intention to form closer ties with the West, including membership in NATO, a step that Russia has vowed to prevent at all costs.

Sporadic clashes continued over the years, with both sides accusing the other of attempting to provoke a wider conflict.

Then, on Aug. 7, in response to the latest series of clashes between Georgians and South Ossetians, Saakashvili announced that he had ordered Georgian villagers to put down their weapons and said he planned to offer South Ossetia "unlimited autonomy" within the Georgian state, with Russia to be a guarantor of the arrangement.

Both sides said they were discussing a meeting the next day to discuss how to defuse the clashes.

Later that day, however, Saakashvili chose to order a massive artillery attack on Tskhinvali, the capital of the breakaway region, followed the next day by a ground assault involving tanks.

Tskhinvali is a city with no pure military targets, full of civilians who had been given no warning of the coming assault and were expecting peace talks to get under way at any moment.

The attack appears to have been designed to take everybody by surprise - perhaps because much of the Russian leadership was in Beijing for the opening of the Summer Olympics at the time.

Hundreds of civilians were killed in the initial attack. Russian peacekeeping troops based in South Ossetia were also among those killed in the Georgian assault.

Gosha Tselekhayev, a resident of Tskhinvali contacted by telephone after the assault, said, "I am standing in the city center, but there's no city left." Aside from the high cost in human lives, the assault also destroyed the negotiating and peacekeeping arrangements, under the aegis of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, that have been in place for 16 years.

Georgia's ill-conceived military action was followed by the inevitable Russian military response. Moscow cares little about the fate of South Ossetians themselves, merely seeing the territory as a pawn in its bid to bring Georgia and its neighbors back into its sphere of influence.

By early this week, Russian troops reportedly entered Georgia from Abkhazia, another breakaway region supported by Moscow, as the conflict appeared to be broadening.

While Saakashvili was hoping that an internationally backed ceasefire would take hold, fighting throughout the region continued.

The concern now is that Moscow will use the conflict in South Ossetia as an excuse to seek the overthrow of the Western-leaning Saakashvili government. There is almost certainly a debate going on within the Russian leadership about how far to go militarily - whether to stop now and claim the moral high ground in South Ossetia, or carry on and effect "regime change" in Tbilisi, ignoring Western outrage.

Former Russian president and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who has a personal feud with Saakashvili, appears to be in charge.

It was Putin who flew down to Vladikavkaz, the capital of North Ossetia, to coordinate the Russian handling of the crisis and made the ominous comment that the Georgian people would "pass objective judgment on their own leadership." The tragedy is that both Moscow and Tbilisi have cynically disregarded the well-being of those who live in South Ossetia in order to pursue their own political and territorial ambitions.

If politicians on both sides had shown more restraint and wisdom, this conflict could have been avoided.

Source: islandpacket.com