This is a fairly complicated situation, and I'm not sure who to blame for what yet (blame everybody seem a good option at the moment ...), so I thought I'd just post some of the analyses from the serious UK newspapers:
The Guardian: Georgia's decision to shell Tskhinvali could prove 'reckless'Observers had little doubt that the operation to take South Ossetia back under Georgian control bore the hallmarks of a planned military offensive.
It was not the result of a ceasefire that had broken down the night before - it was more a fulfilment of the promise the Georgian president, Mikhail Saakashvili, had made to recapture lost national territory, and with it a measure of nationalist pride.
The assault appears to be have carefully timed to coincide with the opening of the Olympics when the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin, was in Beijing.
Tom de Waal, of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting and an expert on the region, said: "Clearly there have been incidents on both sides, but this is obviously a planned Georgian operation, a contingency plan they have had for some time, to retake (the South Ossetian capital) Tskhinvali.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/08/russia.georgia1Background: the tussle for South OssetiaQ&A: why they are fightingHow the frozen conflict turned into a flash fireEditorial: Prisoner of the CaucasusBy the time the international community realised what was happening, it was already too late. It is like that in the Caucasus, a zone of self-igniting conflicts that burn as fiercely as they do instantly. A day which started with a Georgian military offensive to retake South Ossetia - a pro-Russian enclave they had lost control of 14 years ago - ended with Russian warplanes bombing Georgian airfields. Columns of Russian tanks were headed into Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, and refugees were streaming out.
Disentangling claim and counter-claim is as hard as working out the real sequence of events. But there can be little doubt that Georgia's attack with assault troops, multiple-rocket launchers and artillery was a planned military operation. It was not just a reaction to Russian bombing the day before, or a ceasefire that somehow went wrong. The timing of the offensive, when Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin, was in Beijing for the opening of the Olympic games, was also significant. Georgia may have calculated that Mr Putin might be constrained by the company he was keeping in Beijing, not to order an instant counterattack.
Anyone familiar with the history of the region could have predicted that Russia would hit back hard. First, the majority of the 75,000 Ossetians are pro-Russian, and have long been angling to join North Ossetia, which is part of the Russian Federation. Second, many Ossetians have now got Russian citizenship and passports. Third, this is a dispute that predates both the Georgian president, Mikhail Saakashvili, and the Putin era. Fourth, rushing to the aid of separatists was a precedent set by the west in Kosovo. Russia gave us fair warning of the consequences.
Rather than keep the dispute within a local compass, Mr Saakashvili has done everything in his power to internationalise it. He has banged loudly on Nato's door, and some US leaders have been taken in. The Republican candidate John McCain got a St George's Cross for visiting the Georgian part of South Ossetia last year. The Germans and the French on the other hand resisted Georgia's demand for a membership action plan at the last Nato summit in Bucharest. Georgia's actions yesterday show just how wise Berlin was.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/09/georgia.russia The Independent: Kremlin has its work cut out to avoid a new defeatThe outbreak of military hostilities between Russia and Georgia in the tiny, mountainous region of South Ossetia might seem to have come out of the blue. But the prospect of open war between the two countries has been feared for years.
South Osseita, an enclave on the border of the two countries, with a largely ethnic Russian and non-Georgian population, has been a flashpoint at least since the Soviet Union collapsed, and Georgia regained its independence at the end of 1991. It is one of three such minority regions – Adjaria and Abkhazia are the others – which are in Georgia, but not of it. Having enjoyed quasi-autonomous status in Soviet times, they challenged their inclusion in Georgia in 1992, precipitating a brief, but messy, civil war.
Georgia's "rose revolution" of 2003, when a nationalist and pro-Western wave propelled the US-educated Mikheil Saakashvili to power, reopened the issue of Georgia's territorial integrity. Fearing a new attempt by Georgia to impose rule by force, Adjaria sued for peace, but South Ossetia and Abkhazia held referendums and declared independence unilaterally. In the absence of international recognition, they looked to Russia for more than moral support, which arrived in the form of "peacekeepers". Their declared purpose was to protect the ethnic Russians – many of whom now held Russian passports – from what they feared would be enforced assimilation by Georgia.
The presence of these unrecognised independent enclaves has been a perpetual irritant to the Georgian government. But the same could be said of Georgia's brazenly pro-Western stance to Russia, which also accused Georgia of protecting separatists fighting in Chechnya. Recent months have seen an escalating war of words between Georgia and Russia, along with periodic skirmishes involving unauthorised over-flights and stray missiles.
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/mary-dejevsky-kremlin-has-its-work-cut--out-to-avoid-a-new-defeat-889265.html The Times: Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili banked on Russia not having will to fightt looks, in retrospect, like a ruse that went badly wrong. After days of heavy skirmishing between Georgian troops and Russian-backed separatist militias in the breakaway republic of South Ossetia, Mikhail Saakashvili, the Georgian President, went on television on Thursday evening to announce that he had ordered an immediate unilateral ceasefire.
Just hours later his troops began an all-out offensive with tanks and rockets to “restore constitutional order” to a region that won de facto independence in a vicious civil war that subsided in 1992.
...
Major-General Marat Kulakhmetov, the commander of a small force of Russian peacekeepers in Tskhinvali, said: “Heavy artillery shelling conducted for several hours has practically demolished the town,” The South Ossetians used grenade launchers to hit back against Georgia’s heavy military vehicles, and appealed for help from Russia, the country that has propped up the impoverished republic despite Moscow’s official support for Georgia’s territorial integrity.
Mr Saakashvili, who took office in 2004 promising to restore Georgian rule over South Ossetia, appeared to have misjudged Moscow’s resolve, perhaps calculating that Vladimir Putin would not dare to respond militarily while he was in Beijing for the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article4488803.ece 
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
