Missiles Over Tskhinvali
by Thomas de Waal
04.20.2010
Ronald D. Asmus, A Little War that Shook the World: Georgia, Russia, and the Future of the West (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 272 pp., $27.00.
AT
8 PM on March 13, a leading television channel in Georgia sent the
country back to war. The half-hour broadcast on pro-government Imedi TV
unveiled a terrifying scenario for its viewers: Russian tanks were
rolling toward the capital, Tbilisi, aiming to complete the unfinished
business of August 2008, when Moscow brought Georgia to its knees in a
conflict over the breakaway province of South Ossetia; President
Mikheil Saakashvili had either fled or been killed; a "people’s
government” loyal to Moscow was now in charge, led by two former
Georgian officials who had recently crossed over to the opposition; and
three army battalions had joined the Russians.
This was all a
virtual reality. Soon thereafter, an anchor stepped out into the studio
audience and announced that the entire episode had been a hoax designed
to remind everyone of just what their future might hold. The supposedly
live images, including a vindictive President Medvedev, President Obama
apparently expressing alarm, and statements from the British and French
ambassadors in Tbilisi, had all been recut from footage of the earlier
conflict. But thousands of ordinary people, especially outside of the
capital where there are few alternative news sources, genuinely
believed their country was at war once again; there were reports of
panic and overloaded mobile-telephone networks. A friend of a friend
went into premature labor. Crowds gathered to protest the program
outside Imedi’s headquarters.
The next day, speaking to residents
in a small town near the capital, President Saakashvili distanced
himself from the mock-up war, arguing that Imedi should have screened a
caption warning viewers it was only a hoax. But he quickly backtracked,
supporting the stunt by saying, "The major unpleasant thing about
yesterday’s report—and I want people to understand this well—was that
it’s extremely close to what could really happen, and to what Georgia’s
enemy keeps in mind.”
The plot thickened further when a recording
of a tapped telephone conversation, apparently between Imedi head
Giorgi Arveladze and his deputy, was posted on the Web site
www.copoka.net with a Russian transcript. Arveladze, who used to be a
close aide of Saakashvili, was heard to say that the president had
approved the broadcast and indeed had opposed a disclaimer caption
being screened, because "If we do so, then it will lose all its
flavor.” The two executives denied that they had this conversation, and
Georgian officials alleged the tape was a fabrication by the Russian
security services.
During these three days, the collective blood
pressure of the Georgian nation, already high, shot up even further. It
is unlikely to subside anytime soon. Whether or not Saakashvili
directly approved the fake broadcast—given his closeness to Arveladze,
it is hard to believe he did not sanction it—the Georgian leader has
made the "Russia threat” the defining theme of his remaining three
years as president. He routinely warns Georgians that they are facing
the danger of a repeat of 1921, when the Bolsheviks reconquered Georgia
and crushed its first attempt at independence. His rhetoric has only
escalated since the two former officials portrayed as quislings in the
fake broadcast, ex-Speaker Nino Burjanadze and ex–Prime Minister Zurab
Nogaideli, broke the taboo of talking directly to the Russians and met
Saakashvili’s nemesis Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister. The
Georgian leader’s hackles couldn’t be more raised, and the two sides
now routinely trade insults, calling one another traitors and enemies
of Georgia in language that creepily harks back to the nationalist fury
of 1991 and the Stalinist denunciations of the 1930s.
TO
TRULY decode the "Russia threat,” we must inevitably return to the
events of the five-day war of August 2008 and the age-old question:
"Who is to blame?” Ronald Asmus, executive director of the
Transatlantic Center at the German Marshall Fund, has his answer, in
book-long form. For him, the 2008 war was a preplanned Russian military
intervention in Georgia, designed to halt Saakashvili’s choice to "go
West.” Russia was punishing a small neighbor that dared to defy it by
choosing a Western model of democratic development: "The more
successful Tbilisi was, the more hostile and worried Moscow became.” He
goes even further, in language that reminds one of the Cold War:
The
Bush Administration had made the building of a Europe that was whole
and free from the Baltic to the Black Sea a central part of its legacy.
Regardless of what mistakes Tbilisi had made, Moscow had violated that
basic concept and broken some of the cardinal principles upon which
European security was supposed to be based.
In
other words, for Asmus, NATO, not the EU, is the key European
institution and the United States has a duty to be a guarantor of the
security of small nations against a resurgent Russia. And the test of
that strategy came with Georgia, for it presented a brave challenge to
Moscow’s revisionist doctrine. This is a risky thesis, for it commits
NATO to supporting leaders who proclaim pro-Western values but have
their own local agendas with Russia. And it asks us to do so without
examining the fine detail of what their quarrels with Moscow are all
about.
Certainly, in August 2008 Moscow ruthlessly exploited
Tbilisi’s long-running territorial disputes over the provinces of
Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which broke away from Georgia’s rule in the
early 1990s as the Soviet Union fell apart. The Russians first executed
a military defeat of Saakashvili’s country and then recognized the
independence of the two territories, pulling them closer into Moscow’s
orbit.
Russian officials also miss no opportunity to disparage
Saakashvili. President Dmitri Medvedev recently called him a "persona
non grata” and said relations with Georgia would only get back to
normal once Saakashvili had left office. During the war, Vladimir Putin
famously told French President Nicolas Sarkozy that he wanted to hang
Saakashvili "by the balls.” That continues to feed Georgian fears about
Moscow’s intentions; Russian troops are still deployed only thirty
miles from Tbilisi. But might it be that the Russians are content to
have a crippled Georgian president mired in his own domestic squabbles,
unable to pursue a pro-Western agenda? For this allows Moscow the space
to consolidate the status quo won on the ground, while focusing on
other issues, such as the "reset” with the United States.
If only Georgia were simple. The trouble with A Little War that Shook the World
is that it is does not deal with local reality in the Caucasus. Asmus
has talked to senior officials in the Bush administration, NATO and the
EU—but not to Russians or Ossetians, and to few ordinary Georgians not
in government. This is the region as seen from a satellite photograph.
Georgia
has long been the most attractive of the former Soviet republics. In
1924, the writer Odette Keun compared the country to "a
racehorse—palpitating, furious, rushing forward blindly it knows not
where; rearing at the least check, not having yet learnt what is
required of it, or what it can do.” I too plead guilty to the Georgia
bug, but Caucasian dash can take you to dangerous places. Georgian brio
inspired the street protests of the 2003 Rose Revolution that brought
the charismatic young Mikheil Saakashvili to power, but other, duller
qualities were required to tackle the country’s longer-term problems.
After 2004, there began to be two Georgias. There was the Georgia that
President Saakashvili sold abroad with remarkable success, marketing
the Rose Revolution as a brand for a successful model of post-Soviet
pro-Western transformation; and there was the Georgia that persistently
stayed stuck in local realities, still trapped in nationalism,
factionalism, and politics as plot and brawl.
ASMUS HAS
bought the foreign brand without inspecting the local product very
closely, and his idealized account ultimately does the real Georgia no
favors. Critically, Asmus gives a version of events of the war of 2008
that completely exempts the Georgian leadership of blame:
Georgian
president Mikheil Saakashvili put down the phone. It was 2335 the night
of August 7 in Tbilisi. He had just given the order for his armed
forces to attack what his intelligence had reported to be a column of
Russian forces moving from the small South Ossetian town of Java just
south of the Russian-Georgian border toward the city of Tskhinvali, the
capital of the small separatist enclave, as well as Russian forces
coming through the Roki Tunnel on the Russian-Georgian border into
Georgia. He had also ordered his armed forces to suppress the shelling
by South Ossetian militia of Georgian villages in that province that
were under the control of Georgian peacekeepers and police. That
shelling had been taking place on and off for the previous week, but it
had resumed and escalated that evening in spite of a unilateral
ceasefire he had ordered. Georgian civilians and peacekeepers had been
wounded and killed. He paused, picked up the phone again, and gave a
third command: "Minimize civilian casualties.”
This
version of the start of the August war is wrong on all its main counts:
on whether it was the Russians who made the first aggressive move,
whether the South Ossetians shelled Georgian villages in the hours
before Tbilisi’s assault and whether the Georgian leadership was
interested in avoiding civilian casualties. Saakashvili transmits a
message in which his country was the unambiguous victim—the Russians
invaded to steal Georgian territory after the South Ossetians
needlessly attacked Georgian civilians. It is well pitched for
consumption in Western capitals but a long way short of the whole truth.
The
first assertion—that a Russian military column invaded Georgian
territory by moving into South Ossetia shortly before midnight on
August 7—can even be questioned using only official Georgian sources.
In fact, the claim was not made by Georgian leaders until two days into
the war. On August 8, the powers that be in Tbilisi made a statement to
the United Nations Security Council in New York that Russian forces had
first come through the tunnel at 5:30 AM that day, six hours after the
Georgian attack. A similar argument was proffered in the decree of
martial law presented by the president to the Georgian parliament on
August 9.
The second claim, that Saakashvili’s order to attack
was made after sustained South Ossetian shelling of Georgian villages
on the evening of August 7, does not fit with the report of the three
international monitors of the Organization for Security and Cooperation
in Europe (OSCE) who took shelter in a Tskhinvali basement that night
and would have been able to hear, especially in the hours of darkness,
any artillery bombardment on those villages. Their confidential
report—an open secret among diplomats in Tbilisi which was leaked to
the New York Times three months later—said that the evening of August 7 was quiet until the Georgian government’s assault began.
As
for the Georgian president’s supposed call to minimize civilian
casualties, dozens of regular Ossetians did die in the artillery
bombardment of August 7–8, and the fact that others did not perish
probably can be attributed more to a large-scale evacuation of the city
in the preceding days than to the mercy of the Georgian army. As the
former citizens of Grozny know well, the Soviet-era
multiple-rocket-launched Grad (the word means "hail” in Russian) that
the Georgians fired at targets in Tskhinvali is an indiscriminate
weapon that is almost guaranteed to maim and kill civilians in an urban
area. In its report on the Georgia war, Amnesty International concluded
that their "representatives also observed damage caused by Grad
missiles during the night of August 7 in built up areas [of Tskhinvali]
at least half a kilometre” from predetermined targets, such as the
bases of the Russian peacekeepers and munition and fuel depots on the
southern and western fringes of town.
WE NOW know most of
the truth of how war broke out, especially following the detailed 2009
European Union report on the conflict. It is very different from the
standard Western media accounts of the time. The real version is more
or less as follows: on August 7, 2008, after weeks of low-intensity
skirmishes in the breakaway province of South Ossetia, President
Saakashvili made a decision to attack and recapture its capital
Tskhinvali. The Russians had been building up their presence among
their increasingly partisan peacekeepers for weeks and were very likely
preparing an operation of their own, perhaps to depose the alternative
pro-Georgian leader resident in the territory. Saakashvili was
certainly acting under equal parts threat and provocation on the
ground—but it was he who struck first. The Russians were briefly taken
by surprise—in fact, Vladimir Putin was out of the country having just
flown to Beijing for the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games—and it
took them half a day to respond properly.
Tbilisi’s troops
captured most of Tskhinvali and for twenty-four hours, Saakashvili was
a hero to many Georgians. He and his fellow leaders talked of the
"liberation” of South Ossetia. But the Georgian offensive quickly ran
out of professional troops, reservists were not up for a fight and
reinforcements were late in arriving from their deployment in Iraq. And
the Kremlin was only a few hours behind. Presented with a golden
opportunity to take revenge on a foreign leader he loathed, Putin could
extend his ambitions. Russian planes bombed Georgia proper and Russian
ground forces began to exert superiority in both numbers and
technology: they first rolled the Georgians out of Tskhinvali and then
rampaged through the rest of the country. It has been called the
"five-day war,” but the fighting really lasted less than two days.
Why
rake over these old details? As Winston Churchill said, "the use of
recriminating about the past is to enforce effective action in the
present.” The point here is that there were two proximate causes of the
August war. One was Vladimir Putin’s Russia flexing its neocolonial
muscles in its neighborhood (and the brutality the Russians unleashed
on Georgia was indeed a horrible sight). But the second impetus for
Putin’s actions was that the Georgian leadership gave him cover,
raising the temperature in both breakaway regions by building up
Georgia’s armed forces on their borders and proclaiming that Tbilisi’s
recovery of the two provinces was only just over the horizon.
Saakashvili’s impetuous efforts to recover the two territories
rebounded on him disastrously. Tensions in Abkhazia and South Ossetia
had escalated to a point where war was already in the air early in
2008. The Georgian president eventually went for the military option
that summer, apparently believing he could pull off a swift
twenty-four-hour operation in South Ossetia and live with American
rebukes afterward as he celebrated victory.
Saakashvili faced a
difficult choice. That fateful night he made a snap judgment in a
highly pressurized environment in which the Russian threat in South
Ossetia was very real. In this small, multiethnic patch of land, ethnic
Georgian and Ossetian villages adjoined one another in a complex jigsaw
puzzle. The severing of a road here or a new roadblock there threatened
encirclement or expulsion for one community or the other. Saakashvili
took a gamble. In that sense he was, strange to say, less to blame than
his Western friends—chiefly the ones in Washington—who could see the
bigger picture and the bigger dangers but still did not manage to
restrain the Georgian leader from his worst instincts. In South
Ossetia, a local dispute was allowed to go global. It is a lesson the
United States needs to remember if it wants again to go head-to-head
with Moscow in Russia’s immediate neighborhood.
A DECADE
and a half ago, the main American sin in the Caucasus was not over-keen
interest, but neglect. Ron Asmus certainly has a point when he writes,
"had the international community applied the same political will,
strategic imagination, and resources to this region and created an
international process to resolve these status issues as it did in the
Balkans, I . . . believe progress could have been made [in Abkhazia] as
well.” I have a lot of sympathy for this view. Western countries
committed thousands of troops to the Balkans in the mid-1990s after the
implosion of Yugoslavia and the bloody conflicts that followed; the UN
sent little more than one hundred unarmed monitors to Abkhazia and the
OSCE dispatched a mere handful in South Ossetia. This timid engagement
stemmed from the unfortunate calculation that this was not an area of
vital Western interest; it was much harder to change the situation on
the ground in 2008 than it was in 1993. Instead, it was Russia which
was allowed to secure the situation inside both Abkhazia and South
Ossetia with peacekeeping troops who were basically enforcing a Pax
Russica.
Yet it was in this land of unresolved conflicts,
graveyards of ancient armies and historic Russian influence that Asmus
and others launched a bid to push Georgia into NATO. I put it this way
round because, keen as Saakashvili and his friends naturally were to
join the Western alliance, they would surely not have raised their
hopes so high if they had not seen a green light coming from
Washington. Had Western leaders told them that Georgia would be
better-off emulating Finland—seeking to move toward Europe by economic
means, not through a military alliance—the Georgians would not have
been pleased, but they would have accepted the message and recalibrated
their plans accordingly.
In fact, the biggest successes of
Saakashvili’s Georgia were economic. In the first two-and-a-half years
of his administration, government revenues grew almost tenfold, thanks
to a big drive for investment, massive public-sector reform and a major
crackdown on corruption. Paradoxically, the more the new Georgia was
praised as a "beacon of democracy,” the more it actually veered from
that path. As Asmus himself allows, "Saakashvili soon became a poster
child for the Bush Administration’s ‘freedom agenda’ and democracy
promotion efforts.” Saakashvili was Bush’s natural soul mate: a young,
energetic, U.S.-educated leader with little time for the caution of old
Europe, the Georgian president committed troops to Iraq and wowed
American audiences with his fluent English. With the sheen of the other
colored revolutions fading, Saakashvili’s Georgian experiment became
more and more celebrated, its deficiencies overlooked.
Back in
Tbilisi, as the Georgian analyst Ivlian Khaindrava memorably puts it,
Saakashvili had a "government by day” and a "government by night.”
Washington and CNN studios saw the young, articulate, English-speaking
reformers, but they did not see men like Vano Merabishvili,
Saakashvili’s interior minister and chief enforcer, or Niko Rurua, an
ex-paramilitary fighter who is now the minister of culture. It is men
like these who sit with the president late at night in his office,
making the big decisions. And it was they who supervised the crackdown
against antigovernment demonstrators in November 2007, when riot police
cleared the streets of Tbilisi and smashed up the studios of Imedi,
then an opposition channel—an episode that barely figures in Asmus’s
book. For men like Merabishvili and Rurua, it is more about control
than about democracy. In November 2009, Transparency International
reported that "Georgia’s media is less
free and pluralistic than it was before the Rose Revolution in 2003 and
the ousting of President Eduard Shevardnadze.”
These shadowy figures were also behind
the massive buildup of the Georgian armed forces that preceded the 2008
war. Asmus honestly concedes that there were plans to launch a military
operation in South Ossetia in 2004—a plan scotched in Washington—and
for a "preemptive Georgian military move” on Abkhazia in the spring of
2008, as the Russians were increasing their military presence there.
Presidents Bush and Saakashvili had a misunderstood conversation in
which the latter apparently believed he had been given the go-ahead for
military action. It took high-level diplomatic intervention to dispel
the impression. U.S. officials delivered repeated messages in private
that they would not support a military campaign, but they never said so
strongly in public. Here, it seems, was the flashing amber light that
made Saakashvili think that if he did launch a quick military strike,
he would be allowed to get away with it.
Asmus berates Western
leaders for not being firmer in offering Georgia a NATO Membership
Action Plan at the Bucharest Summit of April 2008. Yet, this surely
would have presented the Russians with an even-clearer provocation. And
Asmus never convincingly makes the case that the main Western military
alliance should have admitted a country with two conflict zones on its
territory whose de facto authorities regarded Russia as the guarantor
of their security. Pushing this agenda was always going to be a game
Western countries would lose. When it came to these sphere-of-influence
contests, Russia would play harder and dirtier. The Russians
successfully exploited Abkhazian and South Ossetian fears of Georgia to
tighten their de facto control of those territories. Then, when
Saakashvili struck on August 7, the Russians vented their pent-up
frustrations on a series of issues—Kosovo, Iraq, NATO expansion into
Central and Eastern Europe—on unfortunate Georgia.
SAAKASHVILI
STILL has almost three years to run on his second term. This year may
be his toughest yet. The $1 billion aid program allocated by America at
the end of the war will be almost gone by December 2010, and U.S.
financial assistance is set to drop to little more than $60 million in
the years to follow. The wave of privatization auctions launched
earlier in Saakashvili’s tenure is coming to an end, so there is not
much new revenue to be expected from that source. The end result is
likely to be a sharp economic crisis this fall, which Georgia has been
cushioned from for the last two years. This, perhaps more than
anything, could threaten the stability of Georgia and the length of
Saakashvili’s tenure.
As ever, Saakashvili seems to be choosing
all options at once. Temur Yakobashvili, the minister responsible for
negotiating with Abkhazia and South Ossetia, has launched an
enlightened new strategy for the breakaway regions which commits the
Georgian government to abandoning its policy of isolation for one of
economic engagement with the current residents of Abkhazia and South
Ossetia. It is almost certainly too late, as critics point out, but
still a policy worth pursuing. Other Georgian officials are planning to
reform the corrupt judiciary and introduce jury trials. At the same
time, Saakashvili is not afraid to hurl the most vicious political
abuse at his opponents and authorizing the kind of scare tactics that
made people believe in the fake Russian invasion.
All eyes are
now on the mayoral election in Tbilisi, as it is likely to be an
indicator of the much larger political future of Georgia. Up to a
quarter of Georgia’s population live in the capital city, and
Saakashvili suffered the indignity of losing the popular vote there in
the January 2008 presidential election. This is a chance for him to
gather back his pride. The mayoral incumbent, Gigi Ugulava, one of
Saakashvili’s inner circle, is the favorite. He is busy performing
high-profile public works round the city and will benefit from a new
electoral law, under which he needs just 30 percent of the vote to win,
and from what post-Soviet officials call "administrative
resources”—that age-old advantage of incumbents to use the levers of
power to advance their electoral prospects.
But Ugulava’s main
opponent is an impressive man. Irakli Alasania was probably
Saakashvili’s most enlightened official. As his chief negotiator with
Abkhazia, he came tantalizingly close to a framework peace plan before
Saakashvili vetoed him and had Alasania transferred to be ambassador to
the United Nations. Alasania also has patriotic credentials: his father
was one of the Georgian leaders in Abkhazia who was murdered at the end
of the war in 1993. Yet, having joined the opposition, Alasania is
struggling to remake himself into a public politician. He appears too
good mannered, too diplomatic and too hesitant to succeed.
With
Georgian politics in new ferment, Alasania’s calm demeanor could yet
play to his advantage, and perhaps even allow him to pull off an upset.
That would mark the beginning of the end for the Georgian president.
Conversely, if Ugulava is seen to defeat Alasania fairly, that will
demoralize Georgia’s fractured opposition and reinvigorate Saakashvili.
The
mayoral election, of course, is not the be-all and end-all. Even if his
man wins fair and square, it will not be unqualified good news for the
president. Saakashvili’s team is broken into different, jealous
factions. And in typical Georgian political fashion, if elected mayor
of the capital city, Ugulava might well start positioning himself to be
the next president, distancing himself from his patron in the process.
It could be merely the opening of a new front in Georgia’s manic
political battles.
Faced with these multiple challenges, it is
hard to say what Georgia’s unpredictable president will do and whether
his better or worse instincts will come to the fore. Saakashvili’s
invocation of the Russian threat could become a self-fulfilling
prophecy on one of the porous de facto boundaries with Abkhazia and
South Ossetia; a small provocation there by either side could escalate
into something much more dangerous. Now, even more than a few years
ago, Georgia needs disinterested help. Many Western leaders who called
themselves Georgia’s friends have not served it well over the past six
years. If the need arises to steady the ship through the next storm, we
can only hope they are not looking the other way.
Thomas de Waal is a senior associate for the Caucasus with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His book, The Caucasus: An Introduction, will be published this summer by Oxford University Press.
http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=23230