It is impossible to justify or approve the decision of the Georgian leader to move Georgian troops into the capital of South Ossetia, a decision that caused the death of many innocent people. Even if only one person had fallen victim of this adventure, the President of Georgia would have been at fault. Besides, by his decision, he even more aggravated the complex situation of his own country and the people. What role did the Russian Federation play in the Georgian-Abkhazian conflict and what was her military answer to Saakashvili’s military greeting?
This last question causes an angry reaction among pseudo-patriotic mass-media and the expert community. In eager rivalry, the pro-Kremlin experts and political scientists both claim that they predicted this. A joke about the mullah-foreteller who pompously predicted for the next day what happened yesterday comes to mind. By the way, the very question about the role of the Russian Federation was considered immoral as Russia’s positive character was not doubted even for a minute.
Following negotiations with the European Union, at a joint press conference with the President of France on 8 September 2008, the President of the Russian Federation said: “Here, one citizen wanted to considerably build up his arsenal. And he did, the size of his army grew big enough. And he decided to solve an old problem of a historical nature with just one stroke, by use of armed forces. He undertook an idiotic trick. People were killed. Now the entire Georgia is paying for it”.
“One citizen” – what a bitter irony! Nevertheless, it is interesting: why is it that Georgia, as an independent state, obtaining independence simultaneously with the Russian Federation, has no right to fatten its arms forces? For 15 years, the Russian Federation has supplied arms to the armies of the two unrecognized republics, including aircraft (which began long before the Georgian army started to receive military equipment from the USA and NATO, as always emphasized in the media). So why are we now talking of Russia’s peacekeeping mission? The nature of this mission is strange. Probably, it is connected, somehow, to the special way the Russian Federation has developed that has been talked so much about in recent years.
Actually, as a product of Russian mass media, peacekeeping has turned into a continuously aggressive myth. When it was announced one and a half thousand civilians had been killed, and the figure was supported with the details of the buses with refugees shelled by the Georgians, the killed women and children, amazed viewers were waiting for video footage of the atrocities to appear on their TVs.
They never saw it. Hence, many began to doubt the figures. There was one scene, however, that was extremely touching: Upon meeting with refugees from Tskhinvali, the Russian Prime-Minister Vladimir Putin, who urgently arrived from Beijing to Vladikavkaz, was horrified by their stories. “It is genocide!” he concluded, when sharing his impressions with President Medvedev in Moscow the following day.
But wasn’t it genocide also when over a hundred civilians were killed and several hundreds wounded as a result of a massive rocket attack by the Russian aircraft on the grocery market in the center of Grozny in November 1999? This is only one episode of many in the massive extermination of the Chechens, sacrificed to Putin’s victorious accession to power. Bombardments of hospitals and maternity hospitals, arbitrary executions in Grozny, Aldakh, Samashki, Argun, Shatoy, Roshni-Chu, and Komsomolky, over a hundred thousand civilians killed only during the second war – wasn’t it genocide? And an earlier bloody massacre of the Ingushs and their exile from Prigorodny district with the help of the Russian troops – wasn’t it genocide?
How should all this be understood? It seems that the territorial integrity of one country is valued higher than the inviolability of the borders of another? Maybe the lives of citizens are valued differently depending on the colour of their skin, their religion, or the degree of their loyalty to the Russian state? Double standards of such nature show up in Russian politics so roughly and clumsily that it is akin to black humor. It is as if the serial killer Chikatilo* who murdered over fifty innocent people would become likened with the cruelty of a drunkard who by accident killed his companion in a fight.
The politicians have transformed this regional conflict, which could have been resolved if there had been sufficient political will and pragmatism, into an almost global one. It feels as if the country is being ruled not by serious politicians but by angered street gangsters. It is of course possible to act as cool guys who spit on everything, it is possible to swagger and frighten neighbours swinging a grenade with a released pin. However, what will you do when you gape in the ecstasy of self-confidence and drop this grenade and it gets under your own buns? Will you sit on it, petrified and waiting for the explosion? Or will you seize it and throw it far away where your house stands to blow it up? The recognition of independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia may become such a grenade for the Russian Federation in the long run.
It turns out that the Chechen Republic had no right to freedom and the entire military power of the Russian Federation was needed to prove to it to her. It became possible to destroy the infrastructure of the republic and to exterminate 250.000 people. Today, the Chechens do not demand independence. The Chechen Republic needs recovery and therefore it will not threaten the integrity of the Russian Federation for some time. However, it will never forget what was done to it. In fact, the Chechen Republic is not the only ethnic republic in the structure of the Russian Federation. Many in such ethnic republics have their own view of the latest events and the role of the Russian Federation in the Caucasus. Russia’s presence here was always accompanied by blood and the suffering of the people.
Even today, the Russian Federation continues the old policy of playing the peoples of the Caucasus up against each other. By the way, the military-religious underground movement in the region, mainly consisting of young people, has an all-Caucasian nature as a result of this policy. The current political and military escalation of the situation in the republics of Northern Caucasus is proof of how Kremlin’s policy of repression with the help of the military and its local commissars has failed. The authorities in Moscow refuse to understand this. But the longer this irresponsible blindness of the authorities continues, the more likely it becomes that the Russian Federation will ultimately lose the Caucasus. Everything could have turned out another way.
* Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo (October 16th, 1936 – February 21st, 1994) was one of the most known Soviet serial killers who from 1978 through 1990 committed 53 established murders (though he himself confessed of 56 murders and the police claim the maniac accomplished more than 65 murders): 21 boys aged 7 through 16 years, 14 girls aged 9 through 17, and 18 girls and women.
