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WAR IN SOUTH OSSETIA – TIME TO MAKE WISE DECISIONS STILL REMAINS
ZAAL ANJAPARIDZE,
Political analyst, Tbilisi
The guns are bellowing now in South Ossetia and Georgia, and muses of those who might mull over the solution of the grave crisis, are still silent. Many things including the people’s lives depend on how long the diplomats and policy-makers will be inactive. This must be realized in Moscow, Tbilisi, Washington, EU and Tskhinvali. It appears that the first steps have already been taken. Europe represented by the ambitious French president Nicolas Sarkozy is going to act as a mediator between Russia and Georgia. However, in wartime and in the time pressure situation the diplomats are unlikely to make the decisions that would be acceptable for all the parties concerned. Whatever the peace agreement might have been it is less likely to lead to “win-win” situation.
At present, one can say almost with certainty that one party’s obstinacy and inexplicable toughness have made the other party act toughly too, which eventually led to the armed conflict. Now the parties are paying and probably will pay in the future their own prices for unleashing the conflict. This equally concerns Georgia and Russia. It concerns the West that definitely has not been an outside observer in these processes.
To all appearances, when the Georgian authorities were making the difficult decision on large-scale offensive against the South Ossetian separatists, the opinion of those, who believed that a successful “blitzkrieg” with minimal casualties would not be severely criticized by the West, pervailed. If Georgia could manage to regain Tskhinvali, the West most likely would only slightly reprove the Georgian and Ossetian parties for their failure to negotiate and then it would support Tbilisi politically and diplomatically to consolidate the achievement. At the imminent follow-up negotiations, Georgia would talk with the Ossetian and Russian parties as a winner, feeling its Western allies’ support. This is one of the scenarios that the Tbilisi ruling circles probably considered when they embarked on hostilities against Ossetian separatists. However, Russia did its utmost to undermine this scenario and a large scale military operation in the various parts of Georgian territory was the main component of the Russian response.
If Russia increases its military presence in Georgia and the South Ossetian separatists, who have been virtually defeated, receive a Russian military backing to continue their resistance, the situation may lead to grave and unpredictable consequences for Georgia. The country is not ready for a long war at all, even if it would be local. The Western community evidently does not want Georgia to be engaged into a lengthy and devastating war. The West is well aware that in case of a large scale and continued war it will face a hard choice: either to interfere in the conflict more actively or simply “surrender” Georgia. The latter would mean for the West the surrender of a strategically important ally, surrender of a transit area for the energy resources going to Europe bypassing Russia and this would be a serious surrender of the Western positions in the post-Soviet space. Thus, the South Ossetian conflict and related problems are far more complicated, far-reaching.
One of Russia’s tasks is to make the Tskhinvali conflict procrastinated, which can result in rapid exhaustion of Georgia’s resources, leading to domestic social and political upheavals, and prompting the West to revise its attitude to the conflicts in Georgia. Now after all that have happened there is a higher probability that Georgia might lose South Ossetia and Abkhazia for a long time.
Despite the hostilities it is important that in Tbilisi and Moscow the opinion of those, who can take a sober view of things and are inclined to make compromises, should prevail. The decision by President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev to cease Russian military operations in Georgia, no matter what the reasons behind this decision are, is the omen of turning the situation to the channel of political negotiations.
August 12, 2008
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