An armed clash in South Ossetia has raised tensions region-wide:
Accounts of the number killed and injured vary. South Ossetia claims six civilians killed and 22 injured after Georgian forces reportedly fired on and later shelled the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, during the night of August 1-2. Tbilisi, for its part, claims that six civilians and one policeman were injured when South Ossetian forces allegedly shelled four Georgian-controlled villages in the conflict zone.
Tbilisi initially blamed Moscow for the clash, saying Russia seeks to subvert recently intensified international conflict resolution efforts. Tskhinvali, on the other hand, charges that Tbilisi is trying to make a grab for South Ossetia. Separatist leaders vowed to retaliate. “We are not going to put up with this anymore,” South Ossetia’s de facto interior minister, Mikhail Mindzayev, said in an interview with Media News. “Should another provocation take place, we will strike back at Georgian cities.”
Hrm. South Ossetia has been ignored recently given all of the talk surrounding Abkhazia (which appears to have broken down), but the conflict is far from resolved. But the violence is worrying locals enough for them to send their children into Russia for safe keeping. Perhaps we should be paying more attention to the separatist issues there as well.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1771 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
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Both South Ossetia and Abkhazia deserve to be freed from the fascist Georgian regime. Now the whole world supports Kosovo, that same world should support Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Enough is enough. The Georgian government is crazy, shelling their own Georgian villages and afterwards show journalists and diplomats those villages, claiming that South Ossetians have shelled them. South-Ossetia hasn’t got its recourses collected yet to begin shelling. Georgia is misleading the world and the world should open its eyes. Georgia is a country where the governement is put together by the US. The Georgian government has only one task and that is to bully Russia. The Georgian people live in poverty while the Georgian government is putting all its resources into its army. NATO wake up!!!! EU wake up! The only countries understanding the situation here are the US and Russia. It is the cold war firing up again.
I agree more attention needs to be paid to the Georgian separatists, but accusing Georgia of “bullying Russia” is just silly silly silly.
I appreciate that Seraphiel has a strong affinity towards South Ossetia, having traveled there, as well as North Ossetia. The Caucasus is a very complicated patchwork of nationalities and languages, much like the Russian Federation. It seems to me that while Georgia could certainly manage the various factions better, it’s hardly able to with Russia breathing down its neck. The idea that Georgia would snub Russia and look to the EU or NATO seems to me to be one of the driving forces in this conflict.
South Ossetia and Abkhazia, I’m afraid, are just caught in the middle, since they are non-Russian, non-Georgian nationals between the unfriendly states. Russia’s recent history is spattered by random outbreaks of anti-Georgian sentiment, and to accuse Georgia of being the bully is inappropriate to the situation. Their ability to bully Russia is non-existent at best. It’s their very powerlessness against Russia that is the issue here.
Now, South Ossetia and Abkhazia are similarly powerless in this struggle – any action they make will be made vicariously through Russian force, it seems…
…but will it wait for the Olympics to finish? It does all seem to be following a very political time-table.
Seraphiel, I was there for the protests outside of parliament last October and I heard many of the same sentiments. But it just isn’t right.
While I do believe that the current Georgian regime is far less than pure, Josh is entirely right to claim that it can hardly bully Russia.
I would like nothing more than to see Imedi back on the air as a fully independent institution, as I think it would be a fantastic move back towards democracy for Georgia, but I also don’t think the elections were exactly rigged.
What ideas do politicians outside of the government actually have for the country?
There’s a much deeper problem of developing a long-term civil society that has to be addressed.
But yes, there’s great, great poverty as well. How would you fix that exactly?