The Truth About Russia in Georgia

[Rusiko Amirejibi-Mullen]

The Truth About Russia in Georgia
August 26, 2008  Michael Totten

(Michael J. Totten is an independent journalist based in Portland,  
Oregon. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street  
Journal, and numerous other publications. The Week named him Blogger  
of the Year in 2007 for his dispatches from the Middle East. Visit his  
website at www.michaeltotten.com.)


TBILISI, GEORGIA ? Virtually everyone believes Georgian President  
Mikheil Saakashvili foolishly provoked a Russian invasion on August 7,  
2008, when he sent troops into the breakaway district of South  
Ossetia. ?The warfare began Aug. 7 when Georgia launched a barrage  
targeting South Ossetia,? the Associated Press reported over the  
weekend in typical fashion.
Virtually everyone is wrong. Georgia didn't start it on August 7, nor  
on any other date. The South Ossetian militia started it on August 6  
when its fighters fired on Georgian peacekeepers and Georgian villages  
with weapons banned by the agreement hammered out between the two  
sides in 1994. At the same time, the Russian military sent its  
invasion force bearing down on Georgia from the north side of the  
Caucasus Mountains on the Russian side of the border through the Roki  
tunnel and into Georgia. This happened before Saakashvili sent  
additional troops to South Ossetia and allegedly started the war.
Regional expert, German native, and former European Commission  
official Patrick Worms was recently hired by the Georgian government  
as a media advisor, and he explained to me exactly what happened when  
I met him in downtown Tbilisi. You should always be careful with the  
version of events told by someone on government payroll even when the  
government is as friendly and democratic as Georgia's. I was lucky,  
though, that another regional expert, author and academic Thomas  
Goltz, was present during Worms' briefing to me and signed off on it  
as completely accurate aside from one tiny quibble.
Goltz has been writing about the Caucasus region for almost 20 years,  
and he isn't on Georgian government payroll. He earns his living from  
the University of Montana and from the sales of his books Azerbaijan  
Diary , Georgia Diary  and Chechnya Diary . Goltz experienced these  
three Caucasus republics at their absolute worst, and he knows the  
players and the events better than just about anyone. Every journalist  
in Tbilisi seeks him out as the old hand who knows more than the rest  
of us put together, and he wanted to hear Patrick Worms' spiel to  
reporters in part to ensure its accuracy.
?You,? Worms said to Goltz just before he started to flesh out the  
real story to me, ?are going to be bored because I'm going to give  
some back story that you know better than I do.?
?Go,? Goltz said. ?Go.?
The back story began at least as early as the time of the Soviet  
Union. I turned on my digital voice recorder so I wouldn't miss  
anything that was said.

  ?A key tool that the Soviet Union used to keep its empire together,?  
Worms said to me, ?was pitting ethnic groups against one another. They  
did this extremely skillfully in the sense that they never generated  
ethnic wars within their own territory. But when the Soviet Union  
collapsed it became an essential Russian policy to weaken the states  
on its periphery by activating the ethnic fuses they planted.

  ?They tried that in a number of countries. They tried it in the  
Baltic states, but the fuses were defused. Nothing much happened. They  
tried it in Ukraine. It has not happened yet, but it's getting hotter.  
They tried it in Moldova. There it worked, and now we have  
Transnitria. They tried it in Armenia and Azerbaijan and it went  
beyond their wildest dreams and we ended up with a massive, massive  
war. And they tried it in two territories in Georgia, which I'll talk  
about in a minute. They didn't try it in Central Asia because  
basically all the presidents of the newly independent countries were  
the former heads of the communist parties and they said we're still  
following your line, Kremlin, we haven't changed very much.?

He's right about the massive war between Armenia and Azerbaijan,  
though few outside the region know much about it. Armenians and Azeris  
very thoroughly transferred Azeris and Armenians ?back? to their  
respective mother countries after the Soviet Union collapsed through  
pogroms, massacres, and ethnic-cleansing. Hundreds of thousands of  
refugees fled savage communal warfare in terror. The Armenian military  
still occupies the ethnic-Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh region in  
southwestern Azerbaijan. It's another so-called ?frozen conflict? in  
the Caucasus region waiting to thaw. Moscow takes the Armenian side  
and could blow up Nagorno-Karabakh, and subsequently all of  
Azerbaijan, at any time. After hearing the strident Azeri point of  
view on the conflict for a week before I arrived in Georgia, I'd say  
that particular ethnic-nationalist fuse is about one millimeter in  
length.
?Now the story starts really in 1992 when this fuse was lit in  
Georgia,? Worms said. ?Now, there's two territories. There's Abkhazia  
which has clearly defined administrative borders, and there's South  
Ossetia that doesn't. Before the troubles started, Abkhazia was an  
extremely ethnically mixed area: about 60 percent Georgian, 20 percent  
Abkhaz, and 20 percent assorted others ? Greeks, Estonians, Armenians,  
Jews, what have you. In Ossetia it was a completely integrated and  
completely mixed Ossetian-Georgian population. The Ossetians and the  
Georgians have never been apart in the sense that they were living in  
their own little villages and doing their own little things. There has  
been inter-marriage and a sense of common understanding going back to  
distant history. The Georgians will tell you about King Tamar ? that's  
a woman, but they called her a king ? and she was married to an  
Ossetian. So the fuse was lit and two wars start, one in Abkhazia and  
one in South Ossetia.?
South Ossetia is inside Georgia, while North Ossetia is inside Russia.
?The fuse was not just lit in Moscow,? he said. ?It was also lit in  
Tbilisi. There was a guy in charge here, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, a little  
bit like [Serbian Nationalist war criminal in Bosnia Radovan]  
Karadzic. He was a poet. He was an intellectual. But he was one of  
these guys who veered off into ethnic exclusivism. He made stupid  
declarations like Georgia is only for the Georgians. If you're running  
a multi-ethnic country, that is really not a clever thing to say. The  
central control of the state was extremely weak. The Russians were  
trying to make things worse. There was a civil war between Georgians  
and Tbilisi. But the key thing is that here there were militias,  
Georgian militias, and some of them pretty nasty.?
Thomas Goltz then interjected his only critique of Patrick Worms'  
explanation of events that led to this war. ?It started in 1991,? he  
said, ?but it went into 1992 and 1993, as well.? Then he turned to me.  
?This guy, [Zviad] Gamsakhurdia, was driven from power from across the  
street. They bombed this place.? He meant the Marriott Hotel. We stood  
in the lobby where Worms had set up his media relations operation.  
?There's a horrible picture in my Georgia book of this facade.?
?Of this building?? I said.

  ?Yeah,? Goltz said. ?That was December 1991. He fled in December 1991.?
?Where did he go?? I said.
?To Chechnya,? Goltz said. ?Of course. He led the government in exile  
until he came back in 1993 then died obscurely in the mountains, of  
suicide some people say, others say cancer. Then he was buried in  
Grozny.? He turned then again to Patrick Worms. ?1991,? he said. ?Not  
1992.?
?1991,? Worms said. ?Okay.?
So aside from that quibble, everything else Worms said to me was  
vouched for as accurate by the man who literally wrote the book on  
this conflict from the point of view of both academic and witness.
?So in 1991,? Worms said, ?things here explode. And basically it gets  
pretty nasty. Thomas can tell you what happened. Read his book , it's  
worth it. And by the time the dust settles, there are between 20,000  
and 30,000 dead. Many atrocities committed by both sides, but mostly ?  
at least that's what the Georgians say ? by the Abkhaz. And the end  
result is everybody gets kicked out. Everybody who is not Abkhaz or  
Russian gets kicked out. That's about 400,000 people. 250,000 of those  
still live as Internally Displaced Persons within Georgia. As for the  
rest: the Greeks have gone back to Greece, the Armenians to Armenia,  
some Abkhaz to Turkey, etc.

  ?When it's over,? he said, ?you've got two bits of Abkhazia which  
are not ethnic Abkhazia. You've got Gali district which is filled with  
ethnic Georgians. And you've got the Kodori Gorge which is filled with  
another bunch of Georgians. So there the end result was a classic case  
of ethnic-cleansing, but the world didn't pay much attention because  
it was happening at the same time as the Yugoslav wars. Ossetia was  
different. Ossetia also had a war that started about the same time,  
and it was also pretty nasty, but it never quite succeeded in  
generating a consolidated bit of territory that Ossetians could keep  
their own. When the dust settled there, you ended up with a patchwork  
of Georgian and Ossetian villages. Before the war, Ossetians and  
Georgians lived together in the same villages. After the war they  
lived in separate villages. But there were still contacts. People were  
talking, people were trading. It wasn't quite as nasty as it was in  
Abkhazia.
?Now fast forward to the Rose Revolution,? he said.
The Rose Revolution was a popular bloodless revolution that brought  
Georgia's current president Mikheil Saakashvili to power and replaced  
the old man of Georgian politics Eduard Shevardnadze who basically ran  
the country Soviet-style.
?The first thing that Misha [Mikheil Saakashvili] did was try to poke  
his finger in [Russian President Vladimir] Putin's eyes as many times  
as possible,? Worms said, ?most notably by wanting to join NATO. The  
West, in my view, mishandled this situation. America gave the wrong  
signals. So did Europe.?
?Can you elaborate on that a bit?? I said.
?I will,? he said. ?But basically the encouragement was given despite  
stronger and stronger Russian signals that a Georgian accession to  
NATO would not be tolerated. Fast forward to 2008, to this year, to  
the meeting of NATO heads of state that took place in Bucharest,  
Romania, where Georgia was promised eventual membership of the  
organization but was refused what it really wanted, which was the  
so-called Membership Action Plan. The Membership Action Plan is the  
bureaucratic tool NATO uses to prepare countries for membership. And  
this despite the fact that military experts will tell you that the  
Georgian Army, which had been reformed root and branch with American  
support, was now in better shape and more able to meet NATO  
aspirations than the armies of Albania and Macedonia which got offered  
membership at the same meeting.
  ?Just a little bit of back story again, in July of 2007 Russia  
withdrew from the Conventional Forces Treaty in Europe. This is a  
Soviet era treaty that dictates where NATO and the Warsaw Pact can  
keep their conventional armor around their territories. Russia started  
moving a lot of materiel south. After Bucharest, provocations started.  
Russian provocations started, and they were mostly in Abkhazia.
?One provocation was to use the Russian media to launch shrill  
accusations that the Georgian army was in Kodori preparing for an  
invasion of Abkhazia. Now if you go up there ? I took a bunch of  
journalists up there a few times ? when you get to the actual  
checkpoint you have a wall of crumbling rock, a wooden bridge, another  
wall of crumbling rock, a raging torrent, and a steep mountainside  
filled with woods. It's not possible to invade out or invade in unless  
you've got air support. Which is why the Abkhaz were never able to  
kick these Georgians out. They just kept that bit of territory.?
He paused and looked over at Thomas Goltz as though he was bracing for  
a critique.
?I'm just doing what I've done already,? he said, ?but this time I'm  
getting advice from an expert on how I'm doing.?
Thomas Goltz silently nodded.
  ?Kodori provocations,? Worms continued, ?and other provocations.  
First the Russians had a peacekeeping base under a 1994 agreement that  
allowed them to keep the peace in both Abkhazia and South Ossetia.  
They added paratroopers, crack paratroopers, with modern weaponry  
there. That doesn't sound a lot like peacekeeping. A further  
provocation: they start shooting unmanned Georgian aircraft drones out  
the sky. One of them was caught on camera by the drone as it was about  
to be destroyed. The United Nations confirmed that it was a Russian  
plane that did this. It probably took off from an airbase that the  
Russians were supposed to have vacated a few years ago, but they never  
let the OSCE [Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe] in  
to check.
?The next provocation: On April 16 Putin signs a presidential decree  
recognizing the documents of Abkhazians and South Ossetians in Russia  
and vice versa. This effectively integrates these two territories into  
Russia's legal space. The Georgians were furious. So you have all  
these provocations mounting and mounting and mounting. Meanwhile, as  
of July, various air corps start moving from the rest of Russia to get  
closer to the Caucasus. These are obscure details, but they are  
available.
  ?Starting in mid July the Russians launched the biggest military  
exercise in the North Caucasus that they've held since the Chechnya  
war. That exercise never stopped. It just turned into a war. They had  
all their elite troops there, all their armor there, all their stuff  
there. Everyone still foolishly thought the action was going to be in  
Abkhazia or in Chechnya, which is still not as peaceful as they'd like  
it to be.
?The Georgians had their crack troops in Iraq. So what was left at  
their central base in Gori? Not very much. Just Soviet era equipment  
and not their best troops. They didn't place troops on the border with  
Abkhazia because they didn't want to provoke the Abkhaz. They were  
expecting an attempt on Kodori, but the gorge is in such a way that  
unless they're going to use massive air support ? which the Abkhaz  
don't have ? it's impossible to take that place. Otherwise they would  
have done it already.
?So fast forward to early August. You have a town, Tskhinvali, which  
is Ossetian, and a bunch of Georgian villages surrounding it in a  
crescent shape. There are peacekeepers there. Both Russian  
peacekeepers and Georgian peacekeepers under a 1994 accord. The  
Ossetians were dug in in the town, and the Georgians were in the  
forests and the fields between the town and the villages. The  
Ossetians start provoking and provoking and provoking by shelling  
Georgian positions and Georgian villages around there. And it's a  
classic tit for tat thing. You shell, I shell back. The Georgians  
offered repeated ceasefires, which the Ossetians broke.

  ?On August 3, the head of the local administration says he's  
evacuating his civilians. You also need to know one thing: you may be  
wondering what these areas live off, especially in Ossetia, there's no  
industry there. Georgia is poor, but Ossetia is poorer. It's basically  
a smuggler's paradise. There was a sting operation that netted three  
kilograms of highly enriched uranium. There are fake hundred dollar  
bills to the tune of at least 50 million dollars that have been  
printed. [South Ossetian ?President? Eduard] Kokoity himself is a  
former wrestler and a former bodyguard who was promoted to the  
presidency by powerful Ossetian families as their puppet. What does  
that mean in practice? It means that if you are a young man, you have  
no choice. You can either live in absolute misery, or you can take the  
government's dime and join the militia. It happened in both territories.
?On top of that, for the last four years the Russians have been  
dishing out passports to anyone who asks in those areas. All you have  
to do is present your Ossetian or Abkhaz papers and a photo and you  
get a Russian passport on the spot. If you live in Moscow and try to  
get a Russian passport, you have the normal procedure to follow, and  
it takes years. So suddenly you have a lot of Ossetian militiamen and  
Abkhaz militiamen with Russian passports in effect paid by Russian  
subsidies.
  ?So back to the 3rd of August. Kokoity announces women and children  
should leave. As it later turned out, he made all the civilians leave  
who were not fighting or did not have fighting capabilities. On the  
same day, irregulars ? Ingush, Chechen, Ossetians, and Cossacks ?  
start coming in and spreading out into the countryside but don't do  
anything. They just sit and wait. On the 6th of August the shelling  
intensifies from Ossetian positions. And for the first time since the  
war finished in 1992, they are using 120mm guns.?
?Can I stop you for a second?? I said. I was still under the  
impression that the war began on August 7 and that Georgian President  
Saakashvili started it when he sent troops into South Ossetia's  
capital Tskhinvali. What was all this about the Ossetian violence on  
August 6 and before?
He raised his hand as if to say stop.
?That was the formal start of the war,? he said. ?Because of the peace  
agreement they had, nobody was allowed to have guns bigger than 80mm.  
Okay, so that's the formal start of the war. It wasn't the attack on  
Tskhinvali. Now stop me.?
?Okay,? I said. ?All the reports I've read say Saakashvili started the war.?
?I'm not yet on the 7th,? he said. ?I'm on the 6th.?
?Okay,? I said. He had given this explanation to reporters before, and  
he knew exactly what I was thinking.
?Saakashvili is accused of starting this war on the 7th,? he said.
?Right,? I said. ?But that sounds like complete bs to me if what you  
say is true.?
Thomas Goltz nodded.
*
I later met wounded Georgian soldiers in a Tbilisi hospital who  
confirmed what Patrick Worms had told me about what happened when the  
war actually started. I felt apprehensive about meeting wounded  
soldiers. Would they really want to talk to someone in the media or  
would they rather spend their time healing in peace?
My translator spoke to some of the doctors in the hospital who  
directed us to Georgian soldiers and a civilian who were wounded in  
South Ossetia and felt okay enough to speak to a foreign reporter.
  ?Every day and every hour the Russian side lied,? Georgian soldier  
Kaha Bragadze said. ?It must be stopped. If not today, then maybe  
tomorrow. My troops were in our village, Avnevi. On the 6th of August  
they blew up our troops' four-wheel-drives, our pickups. They blew  
them up. Also in this village ? it was August 5th or 6th, I can't  
remember ? they started bombing us with shells. Two soldiers died that  
day, our peacekeepers. The Ossetians had a good position on the hill.  
They could see all our positions and our villages, and they started  
bombing. They went to the top of the hill, bombed us, then went down.  
We couldn't see who was shooting at us.?
  ?Which day was this?? I said. ?The 5th or the 6th??
?I don't remember,? he said. ?But it started that day from that place  
when two Georgians were killed.?
?Were they just bombing you the peacekeepers,? I said, ?or also  
civilians and villages??
?Before they started bombing us they took all the civilians out of  
their villages,? he said. ?Then they started damaging our villages ?  
houses, a gas pipe, roads, yards. They killed our animals. They  
evacuated their villages, then bombed our villages.?
Another Georgian soldier, Giorgi Khosiashvili, concurred
  ?I was a peace keeper as well,? he said, ?but in another village. I  
was fired upon on August 6th. On the 5th of August they started  
shooting. They blew up our peacekeeping trucks. They put a bomb on the  
road and when they were driving they were blown up. They also mined  
the roads used by civilians. On the 6th of August they started bombing  
Avnevi. And at this time they took the civilians out of Tskhinvali and  
sent them to North Ossetia [inside Russia].?
?I saw this on TV,? said Alex, my translator. ?They took the  
civilians, kids, women, and put them on the bus and sent them to North  
Ossetia.?
A civilian man, Koba Mindiashvili, shared the hospital room with the  
Georgian soldiers. He, too, was in South Ossetia where he lived  
outside Tskhinvali.

  ?When they started bombing my village,? he said, ?I was running away  
and the soldiers wounded me. They robbed me and shot me in the leg  
with a Kalashnikov. I don't know if it was Russians or Ossetians. They  
took my car, took my gold chain, and shot me.?
?They didn't care if it was a house or a military camp,? Giorgi  
Khosiashvili said. ?They bombed everything.?
?You actually saw this for yourself?? I said.
?Yes,? he said. ?I saw it. It was the Russian military airplanes. If  
they knew it was a Georgian village, they bombed all the houses. Many  
civilians were killed from this bombing.?
?It was Russians or Ossetians who did this?? I said.
?It was Russians,? he said. ?The Ossetians don't have any jets.?
*
Back at the Marriott Hotel in downtown Tbilisi, Patrick Worms  
continued fleshing out the rest of the story. ?Let me tell you what  
happened on the 7th,? he said. ?On the 6th, while this is going on,  
the integration minister who was until a few months ago an NGO guy and  
who believes in soft power things, tried to go there and meet the  
separatist leadership. The meeting doesn't happen for farcical  
reasons. The shelling intensifies during the night and there is,  
again, tit for tat, but this time with weapons coming from the South  
Ossetian side which are not allowed under the agreement. By that time,  
the Georgians were seriously worried. All their armor that was near  
Abkhazia starts moving, but they are tanks, they don't have tank  
transporters, so they move slowly. They don't make it back in time. On  
the 7th, this continues. That afternoon, the president announces a  
unilateral ceasefire, a different one from the previous ones. It means  
I stop firing first, and if you fire, I still won't fire back. That  
holds until the next part of the story.
  ?On the evening of the 7th, the Ossetians launch an all-out barrage  
focused on Georgian villages, not on Georgian positions. Remember,  
these Georgian villages inside South Ossetia ? the Georgians have  
mostly evacuated those villages, and three of them are completely  
pulverized. That evening, the 7th, the president gets information that  
a large Russian column is on the move. Later that evening, somebody  
sees those vehicles emerging from the Roki tunnel [into Georgia from  
Russia]. Then a little bit later, somebody else sees them. That's  
three confirmations. It was time to act.
?What they had in the area was peacekeeping stuff, not stuff for  
fighting a war. They had to stop that column, and they had to stop it  
for two reasons. It's a pretty steep valley. If they could stop the  
Russians there, they would be stuck in the tunnel and they couldn't  
send the rest of their army through. So they did two things. The first  
thing they did, and it happened at roughly the same time, they tried  
to get through [South Ossetian capital] Tskhinvali, and that's when  
everybody says Saakashvili started the war. It wasn't about taking  
Ossetia back, it was about fighting their way through that town to get  
onto that road to slow the Russian advance. The second thing they did,  
they dropped a team of paratroopers to destroy a bridge. They got  
wiped out, but first they managed to destroy the bridge and about 15  
Russian vehicles.
?The Georgians will tell you that they estimate that these two actions  
together slowed the Russian advance by 24 to 48 hours. That is what  
the world considered to be Misha's game. And you know why the world  
considers it that? Because here in South Ossetia was the head of the  
peacekeeping troops. He hasn't been in Iraq, he's a peace keeper. What  
have they been told for the last four years? They lived in a failed  
state, then there was the Rose Revolution ? it wasn't perfect but,  
damn, now there's electricity, there's jobs, roads have been fixed ?  
and what the Georgians have had drummed into them is that Georgia is  
now a constitutional state, a state of law and order. And everybody  
here knows that Ossetia is a gangster's smuggler's paradise. The whole  
world knows it, but here they know it particularly well. The  
peacekeepers had a military objective, and the first rule of warfare  
when you're talking to the media is not to reveal to your enemy what  
you're going to do. So they weren't going to blather into a microphone  
and say well, actually, I'm trying to go through Tskhinvali in order  
to stop the Russians. So what did he say instead? I'm here to restore  
constitutional order in South Ossetia. And that's it. With that,  
Georgia lost the propaganda war and the world believes Saakashvili  
started it. And the rest of the story...you know.?
  ?Let me make a couple of comments,? Goltz said.
?That,? Worms said, ?to the best of my knowledge, is all true.?
?Let's just start at the ass end,? Goltz said to me. ?This is your  
first time to the lands of the former Soviet Union??
?Yes,? I said.
?The restoration of constitutional order,? he said, ?may sound just  
like a rhetorical flourish with no echo in the American mindset. What  
it means in the post-Soviet mindset is what Boris Yeltsin was doing in  
Chechnya. This was the stupidest phrase this guy possibly could have  
used. That's why people want to lynch him.?
Goltz was referring to the head of the Georgian peacekeeping forces in  
South Ossetia. He turned then to Patrick Worms. ?Your presentation was  
deliciously comprehensive. Perhaps it was...we'll ask our new friend  
Michael...too much information out of the gate to absorb.?
?I absorbed it,? I said.
?Okay,? Goltz said.
?Am I making any mistakes?? Worms said to Goltz. ?Am I forgetting anything??
?Well,? Goltz said, ?there are some details that I would chip in. Who  
are the Ossetians and where do they live? This is the question that  
has been lost in all of the static from this story. This autonomy  
[South Ossetia] is an autonomous district, as opposed to an autonomous  
republic, with about 60,000 people max. So, where are the rest of the  
Ossetians? Guess where they live? Tbilisi. Here. There. Everywhere.  
There are more Ossetians ? take a look around this lobby. You will  
find Ossetians here. Of those Ossetians who are theoretically citizens  
of the Republic of Georgia, 60,000 live there and around 40,000 live  
here.?
  ?What do they think about all this?? I said.
?They're scared as shit,? Goltz said.
?Are they on the side of those who live in South Ossetia?? I said.
?No,? he said. ?One of them is Georgia's Minister of Defense.  
[Correction: Georgia's Minister of Defense is Jewish, not Ossetian.]  
Georgia is a multi-ethnic republic. And the whole point of the  
Ossetian ethnic question is this: South Ossetia is part of Georgia.?
?Are reporters receptive to what you're saying?? I said to Worms.
?Everyone is receptive,? he said. ?Everyone, regardless of  
nationality, even those who love Georgia, genuinely thought  
Saakashvili started it.?
?That's what I thought,? I said. ?That's what everyone has been writing.?
  ?Yes,? he said. ?Absolutely. We've been trying to tell the world  
about this for months. If you go back and look at the archives you'll  
see plenty of calls from the Georgian government saying they're really  
worried. Even some Russian commentators agree that this is exactly  
what happened. Don't forget, they sent in a lot of irregulars,  
Chechens, Cossacks, Ossetians, Ingush ? basically thugs. Not normal  
Chechens or Ingush ? thugs. Thugs out for a holiday. Many Western  
camera crews were robbed at gunpoint ten meters from Russian tanks  
while Russian commanders just stood there smoking their cigarettes  
while the irregulars...that happened to a Turkish TV crew. They're  
lucky to still be alive. Some of the Georgians were picked up by the  
irregulars. If they happened to be female, they got raped. If they  
happened to be male, they got shot immediately, sometimes tortured.  
Injured people we have in hospitals who managed to get out have had  
arms chopped off, eyes gouged out, and their tongues ripped out.?
Russian rules of engagement, so to speak, go down harder than  
communism. And the Soviet era habits of disinformation are alive and  
well.
?You also have to remember the propaganda campaign that came out,? he  
said. ?Human Rights Watch is accusing the Russian authorities of being  
indirectly responsible for the massive ethnic cleansing of Georgians  
that happened in South Ossetia. The Ossetians are claiming that the  
Georgians killed 2,000 people in Tskhinvali, but when Human Rights  
Watch got in there a few days ago and talked to the hospital director,  
he had received 44 bodies. There was nobody left in that town. Plus  
it's the oldest law of warfare: have your guns in populated areas, and  
when the enemy responds, show the world your dead women and children.
?Right,? I said. ?That goes on a lot where I usually work, in the  
Middle East.?
?Yes,? he said. ?That's exactly what the Russians were doing.?


Michael J. Totten is an independent journalist based in Portland,  
Oregon. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street  
Journal, and numerous other publications. The Week named him Blogger  
of the Year in 2007 for his dispatches from the Middle East. Visit his  
website at www.michaeltotten.com.