In Georgia, official websites are being defaced with pictures comparing President Saakashvili to Hitler… The blog – I Love Bonnie – has this screenshot from the Georgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs site:
Georgia's Saakashvili as Hitler
Civil.ge has good coverage, or see our snapshot on netvibes.
The international response to events in Georgia is still at the declaratory stage, and some analysts predict a long struggle. It’s not a good sign when the Finns are talking about “fully-fledged war” (the Finns don’t have a lot of luck: the had the EU presidency during the Lebanon war in 2006, and now they’re chairing the OSCE).
But a couple of things seem clear already. Firstly, this war is not going to end the way the Georgians presumably wanted: a lightning move by their forces creating a fait accompli in South Ossetia that Russia would have to accept. Russia has already nixed that, so Georgia is in a position where it cannot achieve its initial war aim. (I am at a loss to imagine how the Georgians ever thought they could achieve it, as doing so would have required an element of surprise that they couldn’t pull off, but whatever). Logically, it should pull back and look for a deal to consolidate some gains, but that’s not what tends to happen in the cases…
The second thing that’s pretty clear is that South Ossetia is in an unholy mess. As Jules points out, it’s tiny, and there are increasingly credible reports of a death toll in the hundreds – the Ossetes are claiming 1000+. Out of a population of 60,000. Media images imply that physical destruction has been significant. And if the Georgians decide to try to slug it out with the Russians, not only in Ossetia but in Abkhazia and Georgia proper, this damage is going to spread and intensify.
(NB: the really scary scenario is that the Georgians will now decide that their best hope of winning global sympathy, or even direct military aid, is to fall back into their own territory and get lots of CNN coverage of their heroic resistance. Logically, the Russians should refuse to play along, but again, I don’t trust in that).
What seems probable is that, after an indeterminate period of violence, we will end up with a situation in which South Ossetia is under full or partial Russian control, and a wreck. If there was a ceasefire, two basic options would be on the table. Russia could declare South Ossetia a separate state, or even part of Russia – the West would not recognize this, and the Russians would have to handle clearing up the wreckage, as they did in Chechnya. If the outcome is less clear-cut, however, it may be necessary for the international community to (i) patrol a ceasefire line and (ii) pick up a least part of the reconstruction burden.
As far as the peacekeeping part goes, I rather doubt we’ll return to the status quo ante: a dysfunctional mixed force of Russians, Georgians and Ossetes doing joint patrols, monitored by OSCE military observers. The likely alternatives are (i) a light Ceasefire Observation Mission, which could well be created out of the OSCE presence, or by enlarging the UN Observer Mission in Georgia, which currently only watches the Abkhazia situation and (ii) a heavier interpositional military mission, along the lines of the UN forces in Cyprus and the Golan Heights, though probably not on the scale of that in Lebanon. I think we can rule out any larger civilian-military peacebuilding mission – the reconstruction will stay separate.
If you were going for the interpositional military option, who’d do it? NATO is out of the question, and the OSCE doesn’t do military forces beyond the unarmed observer level. That leaves (i) the EU (suggested by the Estonians, but might look too like NATO in Disguise to the Russians), (ii) the UN (not impossible, although if we’re talking about European troops, they’ll want a special command structure that reduces their reliance on UNHQ, as they have in Lebanon) or (iii) an ad hoc multinational force. In all cases, I’d expect the bulk of the force to be European. The obvious lead country is Germany: it has a history of trying to sort out the Caucasus, and it’s got some troops to spare, unlike France and the UK…
In theory, I’d prefer a force made up of higher-end Latin Americans (Argentina, Brazil, Chile) as they’re intelligent peacekeepers and relatively impartial – the problem for any European force, whatever its flag, is that it’ll be pulled in all directions by the EU’s splits over Russia policy. But the LAs are in Haiti, and I don’t think that EU governments would accept such a slight to their collective ego.
I expect to be proved wrong by events. It will all look different in the morning.
Bemused by events in Georgia? Help is at hand – head over to Global Dashboard’s netvibe page where you’ll find a digest of news, blogs, tweets, images and video about Georgia.
It’s been fairly quickly put together – so there’s some extraneous stuff in there, but I’ll attempt to clean up over the next day or so. Also, please add suggestions for sources to the comment below. Not mainstream news sources, really. What would be more interesting is accounts from within the country or more detailed analysis.
Finally, if you want to import all our Netvibes feeds, including those from Georgia, into your RSS reader, download the file here.
More Global Dashboard coverage here.
As Jules’s post on the sudden descent into a shooting war in Georgia implies, one of the West’s principal reasons for being interested in Georgia is that the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline flows through it, bringing oil from the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli oil field in the Caspian to the Mediterranean coast in Turkey – handily avoiding Russian pipelines in the process.
Interestingly, the conflict in the Caucausus has kicked off at the same time as an explosion on the Turkish section of the pipeline has closed it down for the next 21 days. Kurdish rebels have claimed responsibility for the attack, but the cause of the explosion can’t be ascertained for sure until the fire (which is currently still burning) has been put out.
Ordinarily, say BP, one of the alternatives would be to shift oil from Azerbaijan via rail links through Georgia. Unfortunate, then, that according to energy analysts the conflict in South Ossetia makes that option look rather less attractive.
Suspension of the pipeline’s operation won’t have a massive effect on world markets, as it supplies a small proportion of total world supply. But its political importance – as a statement of intent towards diversified supplies and pipeline routes to the west – is much greater. With Kurdish rebels reportedly threatening more attacks, it’ll be interesting to see how things pan out from here…
Pretty amazing pictures from Georgia, where the Russian tanks are on the roll again, prompting dark memories of Afghanistan, Prague, Berlin…
This all for a separatist province with a population of….60,000. That’s about the same as Guildford.
I was wondering, if Russia invades South Ossetia, as it has, if that is technically an act of war – it’s a separatist province, after all, that denies it is part of Georgian territory, so it’s debatable whether this is an infringement of Georgian territory. But then Putin helpfully clarified matters. ‘War has started’, he said. Good, glad we got that cleared up.
The president of Georgia, Mikhail Saakashvili, has been on CNN begging for American assistance. “It’s not about Georgia anymore. It’s about America, its values,” he said. John McCain would no doubt agree, but I’m not sure the American people are that keen to leap to Georgia’s defence, though no doubt the headline ‘Russia invades Georgia’ will alarm some of the hicks down south… ‘Git mah gun, John Boy, the Russkies will be headin’ for Alabama next!’.
Meanwhile George Bush is busy watching the Olympics in Beijing, and is only likely to get really agitated if the Russian tanks roll down the main motorway in Tblisi, which is named after him. Russian tanks on George Bush highway, that would be something.
It’s notable that Saakashvili didn’t even mention the EU. This is, after all, the first war on European soil since the Yugoslav War of the 1990s. A decade on, and the EU is still nowhere near being able to police its own backyard.