BS: War in Georgia

Subject: BS: War in Georgia
From: Emma B
Date: 28 Oct 08 - 01:19 PM

Yhe previous thread was closed but this is the latest news from the BBC in the UK

'The BBC has discovered evidence that Georgia may have committed war crimes in its attack on its breakaway region of South Ossetia in August.

Eyewitnesses have described how its tanks fired directly into an apartment block, and how civilians were shot at as they tried to escape the fighting.

Research by the international investigative organisation Human Rights Watch also points to indiscriminate use of force by the Georgian military, and the possible deliberate targeting of civilians.

Indiscriminate use of force is a violation of the Geneva Conventions, and serious violations are considered to be war crimes.

The allegations are now raising concerns among Georgia's supporters in the West.'

full report

Subject: RE: BS: War in Georgia
From: Peter K (Fionn)
Date: 08 Nov 08 - 08:44 AM

Last night BBCTV broadcast an interview with Ryan Gist, who was heading the OSCE mission in Georgia when the hostilities began. According to OSCE chair Alexander Stoob, Gist - who has since resigned - had been "an excellent civil servant" of the organisation.

Gist supported accounts from eye-witnesses who told Tim Whewell (the first western reporter to get unrestricted access to South Ossetia since the war) that the opening Georgian onslaught included the shelling of civilian areas. The balance of Whewell's report was that some legitimate military intallations had been targeted but that the indiscriminate nature of the assault amounted to a war crime - a verdict already reached earlier by Human Rights Watch.

Gist said it had been obvious on the ground that "something was brewing" and that in fact launched a minor artillery attack seven weeks earlier in "a serious escalation". He had reported this "up the line" but assumed that anxieties had not been relayed on to the OSCE's 56 member countries. Alexander Stoob on the other hand was confident that the mission's reports had been passed on. This would mean that the US and UK governments must have been aware of Georgia's belligerent intentions weeks before they were put into effect.

Gist saw the whole episode as an OSCE failure, which was all the more unfortunate because Georgia's unchecked aggression had given Russia a valid reason for intervention. To the extent that war had not been averted, Stoob agreed that the organisation had failed.

See HERE for a related news item on the BBC website.

Subject: RE: BS: War in Georgia
From: Peter K (Fionn)
Date: 08 Nov 08 - 08:05 PM

Perhaps there's less interest in this now that it's not a simple opportunity for Russia-bashing?

Subject: RE: BS: War in Georgia
From: michaelr
Date: 08 Nov 08 - 10:40 PM

What is OSCE?

Subject: RE: BS: War in Georgia
From: Emma B
Date: 09 Nov 08 - 07:16 AM

The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe is
'the world's largest regional security organization whose 56 participating States span the geographical area from Vancouver to Vladivostok.'

Subject: RE: BS: War in Georgia
From: CarolC
Date: 09 Nov 08 - 07:56 AM

Hopefully this will have a moderating effect on the rhetoric of the US government with regard to Russia (though I won't be surprised if it doesn't).

Subject: RE: BS: War in Georgia
From: Emma B
Date: 09 Nov 08 - 08:31 AM

Hopefully it will also have a moderating effect on the US led rush to incorporate Georgia into Nato

While the the International Institute for Strategic Studies said Russia's reaction to the Georgian move was "disproportionately strong" it went on to say that there was now a risk that the US would press home its attempt to bring Georgia – and Ukraine - into Nato.
But it said the European members of the alliance should resist this.

"Europeans have a strong case to argue that it is in NATO's strategic interest to pause its enlargement policy…Europe will want to invite the US to think strategically, not nostalgically, about the weight it wishes to attach to NATO enlargement in its regional policy."

The Financial Times September 18 2008

Subject: RE: BS: War in Georgia
From: CarolC
Date: 09 Nov 08 - 08:43 AM

Good point.

Subject: RE: BS: War in Georgia
From: GUEST,beardedbruce
Date: 15 Jun 09 - 10:51 PM

Russia vetoes U.N. mission in Georgia
Story Highlights
Russia: "The U.N. mission's previous mandate has actually ceased to exist"

Russia considers South Ossetia and Abkhazia independent nations from Georgia

Only Nicaragua supports that position

updated 1 hour, 28 minutes agoNext Article in World »


From Terence Burke
CNN
   
UNITED NATIONS (CNN) -- The rift between Russia and Western powers over Georgia burst back into full view on the U.N. Security Council when Russia vetoed a resolution that would have extended the U.N. observer mission in Georgia.

The observer force had been in existence since 1993, but Russia claims that the mission was invalidated by last year's conflict over breakaway regions in Georgia.

"The U.N. mission's previous mandate has actually ceased to exist in the wake of Georgia's aggression against South Ossetia last August," said Vitaly Churkin, Russia's U.N. ambassador, who said it was "unacceptable" to extend the mission.

After the veto Monday night, a statement from the office of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the U.N. would "take all measures required to cease the operations of the United Nations Observer Mission in Georgia effective 16 June."

Ban "will consult with his senior advisors and his special representative on the immediate next steps," the statement said.

Russia and Georgia fought a five-day war last August over the breakaway Georgian provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia -- the first time Russia sent troops abroad in anger since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Both sides blame the other for starting the conflict.

Western powers, including the United States, the United Kingdom and France backed the Georgian government in a conflict that rekindled Cold War sentiments.

The European Union launched a probe to determine how the war began that is due to be completed by the end of next month.

The crux of the controversy remains Georgia's territorial integrity. As a result of last year's war, Russia now considers South Ossetia and Abkhazia sovereign nations independent from Georgia. Russia has no international support for that position aside from the nation of Nicaragua.

The Georgian ambassador to the United Nations, Kakha Lomaia, addressed the Security Council following the vote, saying his nation deeply regrets the apparent end of the mission. He called Russia's position "unconstructive."

The statement from Ban's office added, "the Secretary-General regrets that the Security Council has been unable to reach agreement on the basis of a package of practical and realistic proposals he submitted to the Security Council aimed at contributing to a stabilization of the situation on the ground."

Subject: RE: BS: War in Georgia
From: CarolC
Date: 15 Jun 09 - 10:55 PM

That's what they get for giving a select few countries veto power in the UN. They need to change that one and either get rid of the veto, or create a process like we have in the US in which a certain number of votes can override a veto.

Subject: RE: BS: War in Georgia
From: Lox
Date: 16 Jun 09 - 07:54 AM

Interesting discovery I made recently while researching Shostakovich's relationship with Stalin.


... no I'm not going to be one of many trotting out the same tired old bit of info that Stalin was a Georgian ...


... I'm going to inform you that he was in fact Ossetian!


A turn up for the books eh? ...

Subject: RE: BS: War in Georgia
From: CarolC
Date: 16 Jun 09 - 01:10 PM

Stalin was born in Gori, which is close to South Ossetia, but not actually in it. He had a paternal great grandfather who was Ossetian (there were rumors going around about that during his lifetime, which he tried to suppress). Stalin was no friend to the Ossetians. He was the one who split Ossetia in half.

Subject: RE: BS: War in Georgia
From: John on the Sunset Coast
Date: 16 Jun 09 - 02:29 PM

CarolC (post on June 15) without the one vote veto in the Security Council, there probably would not have been a United Nations. I believe this was instigated by the Soviet Union (although I won't swear to it) which was in process of subverting Eastern European countries, and didn't want the UN to be able to interfere. In any event, Russia, China and the US have all exercised this provision many times for reasons they felt were in their political interest.

BTW, we agree, at least here, that it would be a good thing to override this particular veto.

Subject: RE: BS: War in Georgia
From: CarolC
Date: 16 Jun 09 - 06:09 PM

They should have a mechanism that would prevent certain big and powerful countries from lording it over the rest of the world.. The UN really is pretty useless as long as it's as undemocratic as it is.

Subject: RE: BS: War in Georgia
From: Lox
Date: 17 Jun 09 - 07:05 AM

Carol,

Briefly - on the subject of Stalin,

"His first name is also transliterated as Josif. His surname, ჯუღაშვილი (Jughashvili), is sometimes transliterated as Dzhugashvili and occasionally rendered as Djugashvili. -შვილი (-shvili) is a Georgian suffix meaning "son of". Neither the word nor the name ჯუღა (Jugha or Dzhuga) belong to the Georgian language. On the other hand, the name "Jugaev" is known among Ossetians. In 1939, Georgi Leonidze wrote a poem about Stalin's early years. The poem claimed that Stalin's ancestors came from South Ossetian village of Geri . The poem was written during the purges and passed censors, and thus can be considered a significant source. These facts could be the basis of the rumors regarding Stalin's allegedly Ossetian ethnical roots."

From
here


That was a 2 minute google so I don't pretend to know any more than you, but it does at least suggest that the discussion merits investigaton before any claims are made or accepted.

Subject: RE: BS: War in Georgia
From: CarolC
Date: 17 Jun 09 - 08:07 AM

I guess that could be explained by his paternal great grandfather.

Subject: RE: BS: War in Georgia
From: Lox
Date: 17 Jun 09 - 09:35 AM

It could, but the issue is clouded by insinuations that the reason his geneology isn't clear is that he was trying to cover up possible Jewish ancestry.

Subject: RE: BS: War in Georgia
From: CarolC
Date: 17 Jun 09 - 10:33 AM

That's interesting.

Subject: RE: BS: War in Georgia
From: beardedbruce
Date: 07 Aug 09 - 01:06 PM

Georgia marks anniversary of war with Russia
         

Jim Heintz, Associated Press Writer – 46 mins ago

TBILISI, Georgia – Georgia marked one year since its war with Russia on Friday with quiet moments and somber ceremonies — a nationwide minute of silence, a human chain in a war-battered town, a soldier's small son gazing at his father's tombstone.

The brief war killed at least 390 people and left a legacy of animosity between leaders and fears among civilians that more fighting may erupt. About 26,000 people displaced by the conflict still live in temporary housing in Georgia, many on less than $3 a day, according to aid group World Vision.

For five days Georgian troops fought to rein in the breakaway region of South Ossetia and push back advancing Russian forces, while on the other side Russian troops and tanks backed the separatist forces against what they called an unprovoked Georgian assault.

Fighting ended with an EU-brokered agreement that left South Ossetia cut off from the rest of Georgia by military checkpoints. Russia, which recognizes South Ossetia as independent, maintains thousands of troops there to support local forces, which have widely been accused of killing ethnic Georgian civilians, burning their houses and driving them at gunpoint from the region.

"We feel there is a great danger in the current situation," Tbilisi resident Lia Tabukashvili said while visiting a memorial to war victims on parliament's steps. "We can only place our faith in God and the international community."

Georgian soldiers watch the tense boundary line from a few hundred meters (yards) away, and European Union monitors use binoculars to survey the South Ossetian side, which Russia refuses to allow them to enter.

Both sides have claimed the other fired mortars or shot at them in recent weeks.

And no one agrees on who started the conflict.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev defended his decision to go to war. "Each time I remember these events, I scroll the tape backward, as they say, and realize that on the one hand, we had no other choice," he said in a statement released by the Kremlin.

For Friday's one-year anniversary of the war, Tbilisi closed its main avenue, Rustaveli Prospekt, for a photo exhibition chronicling Moscow's Soviet-era control, or occupation, of Georgia. Pedestrian traffic through the exhibit was thin as rain fell intermittently throughout the day.

The country observed a minute of silence and church bells tolled Friday afternoon.

In the hard-hit city of Gori, about 80 kilometers (50 miles) west of Tbilisi, several hundred people formed a human flag display at the ruins of a medieval fortress.

Gori's residents later held hands in a human chain through the city of 50,000, which was bombed when the war spread into Georgia proper from South Ossetia.

Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili planned to speak at Gori's cathedral Friday night.

Earlier in Tbilisi the president attended a wreath-laying ceremony, where a 2-year-old boy in a tiny military uniform stood by the grave of his father Emzar Tsilosani, who was killed in the war.

"He will be a soldier, like his father," said widow and mother Teona Tsilosani. "But Emzar is not coming back — that's what Russia brought upon us with this war they created."

Both Russia and South Ossetia contend the war began with a thunderous Georgian artillery assault on Tskhinvali, and that Moscow sent in troops to protect Russian peacekeeping forces and civilians. They claim Saakashvili retains ambitions to seize South Ossetia by force, and have denounced Western military aid to Georgia.

Georgia says it launched the barrage to repel Russian tanks and troops that had begun an invasion before dawn. Saakashvili and other Georgian officials say Russia wants to drive him from power because Moscow resents his efforts to bring Georgia into NATO and the European Union.

Georgia's conduct of the war was a focus of weeks of anti-Saakashvili protests this year, but the opposition laid low Friday. "This should be a demonstration of the unity of the nation," said Irakly Alasania, an opposition leader. South Ossetia leader Eduard Kokoity on Friday claimed Georgian forces had massacred civilians on a road as they fled the Tskhinvali attack.

"The refusal of Georgia or its Western supporters to even acknowledge this massacre is proof of the moral failure by the leaders responsible for last year's war," he said in a statement. Kokoity blamed Saakashvili and Georgian military officers for "making a deliberate and horrible decision to kill innocent people. Why do U.S. and European leaders continue to support such men?"

A Russian Orthodox priest and Cossacks from Moldova's separatist province of Trans-Dniester erected a cross and placed icons near heavily shelled Russian peacekeepers' barracks on the outskirts of the South Ossetian capital, Tskinvali.

"This place is drenched in the blood of our soldiers who stood up against the Georgian aggression," Father Andrei Zizo said.

Subject: RE: BS: War in Georgia
From: robomatic
Date: 08 Aug 09 - 06:36 PM

And there is this somewhat twisted spin-off from the situation, an attempt to bring down Twitter to silence one person:

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Professor Main Target of Assault on Twitter
By JENNA WORTHAM and ANDREW E. KRAMER
The cyberattacks Thursday and Friday on Twitter and other popular Web services disrupted the lives of hundreds of millions of Internet users, but the principal target appeared to be one man: a 34-year-old economics professor from the republic of Georgia.

During the assault — the latest eruption in a yearlong skirmish between nationalistic hackers in Russia and Georgia — unidentified attackers sent millions of spam e-mail messages and bombarded Twitter, Facebook and other services with junk messages. The blitz was an attempt to block the professor's Web pages, where he was revisiting the events leading up to the brief territorial war between Russia and Georgia that began a year ago.

The attacks were "the equivalent of bombing a TV station because you don't like one of the newscasters," Mikko Hyppönen, chief research officer of the Internet security firm F-Secure, said in a blog post. "The amount of collateral damage is huge. Millions of users of Twitter, LiveJournal and Facebook have been experiencing problems because of this attack."

The blogger, a refugee from the Abkhazia region, a territory on the Black Sea disputed between Russia and Georgia, writes under the name Cyxymu, but identified himself only by the name Giorgi in a telephone interview. Giorgi, who said he taught at Sukhumi State University, first noticed Thursday afternoon that LiveJournal, a popular blogging platform, was not working for him. "I decided to go to Facebook," he said. "And Facebook didn't work. Then I went to Twitter, and Twitter didn't work. 'How strange,' I thought, 'What a coincidence they all don't work at once.' "

Security experts say that it is nearly impossible to determine who exactly is behind the attack, which disrupted access to Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal and some Google sites on Thursday and continued to affect many Twitter users into Friday evening.

But Beth Jones, an analyst with the Internet security firm Sophos, said the assault occurred in two stages.

Early Thursday, the attackers sent out a wave of spam under the name Cyxymu, which is a Latin transliteration of the Cyrillic name of the capital of Abkhazia, Sukhumi. This technique, a "joe job," is intended to discredit a Web user by making him appear to be the source of a large amount of junk e-mail. "These hackers wanted to make him look responsible for millions of spam e-mails," said Ms. Jones.

The messages contained links to Giorgi's accounts on several social networks and Web sites, including Twitter.

The next leg of the attack, Ms. Jones said, was a distributed denial of service, or D.D.O.S., attack aimed at knocking Giorgi off the Web. The hackers used a botnet, a network of thousands of malware-infected personal computers, to direct huge amounts of junk traffic to Cyxymu's pages on Twitter, LiveJournal, YouTube and Facebook in an attempt to disable them, Ms. Jones said.

The junk messages overwhelmed the services, slowing them, and in the case of Twitter and LiveJournal, shutting them down entirely for a time.

Giorgi said his pages were providing a place for refugees from Abkhazia to exchange memories of their home. The Twitter page had a sepia photograph of a palm-lined city street. "It was nostalgia," he said.

This week, he began posting day-by-day accounts of the run-up to the conflict that drew partly on posts from his readers inside of Abkhazia, who he said had been describing how the Russian army staged its forces in the region in early August 2008.

"I feel a bit ashamed for the people who lost service because my blog was blocked," said Giorgi.

The hundreds of millions of Internet users affected were simply "collateral damage," said Ms. Jones.

The attacks and their aftermath show just how vital Web tools and services are becoming to political discourse — and how vulnerable they are to disruption.

"They aren't set up to play the role of a global communications network, but very quickly they've come to represent that," said John Palfrey, a law professor and co-director of Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

The attacks that felled Twitter shed light on the fragility of the popular microblogging service, especially compared to its competitor Facebook, which quickly recovered from the pummeling, said Stefan Tanase, a researcher at Kaspersky Lab, an Internet security firm. Twitter, a small San Francisco company, has been struggling to improve its security even as it tries to manage hypergrowth in the number of users and messages it handles.

But, Mr. Tanase said, "Twitter is definitely a company that is learning fast and reacting fast."

The outage frustrated many Twitter users. Some migrated over to better-functioning social networks like Facebook and FriendFeed to send messages and follow conversations, said Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst at Forrester Research and a prolific tweeter.

"If Twitter goes down or shuts down permanently, the conversation just shifts somewhere else," he said.

For others, solving the problem wasn't quite as simple.

Soren Macbeth, founder and chief executive of StockTwits, a service that lets investors trade news and information about companies, said his service, which is built on Twitter's infrastructure, was offline Thursday and still hadn't fully recovered Friday.

"Having the service be intermittent is almost worse than having it be totally down," he said. "It makes it seem more like our issue, a problem with our service."

Mr. Macbeth said the service, which receives as many as 10,000 postings a day, had been at Twitter's mercy since its inception. "It's very challenging to run a business on top of Twitter," he said. The difficulties of working with Twitter had already prompted StockTwits to begin developing a stand-alone platform, which the company plans to introduce on Sept. 1.

But for most businesses, Twitter is merely a supplemental marketing tool.

Ben Van Leeuwen, who runs trucks that serve scoops of ice cream to customers around New York City, said he didn't even notice the service was down. "Sales were the same yesterday as they were the day before," he said.

Aaron Magness, who heads up new business development and marketing at Zappos.com, an online shoe retailer with a sizable following on Twitter, said in an e-mail message that the outage didn't affect the company.

"Twitter is one of many communication tools we utilize," he said. "Luckily, we love talking to our customers and Twitter going down doesn't impact our phones."

Subject: RE: BS: War in Georgia
From: Lox
Date: 30 Sep 09 - 03:58 PM

On the BBC today.

Georgia started it.

Subject: RE: BS: War in Georgia
From: GUEST,Teribus
Date: 01 Oct 09 - 02:29 AM

That the good old impartial, objective, trustworthy BBC Lox??

The same BBC that reported the bombing of a Maternity Hospital in Baghdad and continued to transmit its reports of that incident even after it had been established by its own reporter from the scene that:

A) No hospital had been hit
B) The rocket had landed in a square that contained a Maternity Clinic
C) That as the attack had occured at 03:30 in the morning there had been no casualties, no-one killed, none wounded.

But according to the BBC - "Maternity Hospital struck by missile."

What is the purpose of provocation Lox??

Subject: RE: BS: War in Georgia
From: Stu
Date: 01 Oct 09 - 04:00 AM

How is that relevant to this discussion Teribus?



P.S. Nice to see you back! Missed a bit of the old rough 'n' tumble mate - hope you're keeping well.

Subject: RE: BS: War in Georgia
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 01 Oct 09 - 03:49 PM

A cursory glance at that link shows that the headline is Georgia 'started unjustified war' - with the quote marks indicating that it was not the BBC making that judgement.

The finding that Georgia kicked things off by shelling Ossetian targets was made by a report "commissioned by the Council of the European Union, and written by Swiss diplomat Heidi Tagliavini, with the help of 30 European military, legal and history experts."

And the BBC story stated that this report also found that "both sides violated international law".   

In fact this was indeed a case of "the good old impartial, objective, trustworthy BBC". As it usually is, in my experience.

Subject: RE: BS: War in Georgia
From: Lox
Date: 01 Oct 09 - 04:05 PM

"That the good old impartial, objective, trustworthy BBC Lox??"

er ... I'm only aware of one BBC Teribus ...



"What is the purpose of provocation Lox??"

er ... I suppose the purpose of provocation would be to provoke something ...

... quite a vague question ...

Are you disagreeing with the BBC report, or the report it is reporting about, or do you see my post as some type of provocation ...


I have no idea.


In the meantime, I saw the BBC report, I was reminded of the mudcat discussion and I provided a link.

It makes an interesting post-script wouldn't you agree?

Subject: RE: BS: War in Georgia
From: robomatic
Date: 01 Oct 09 - 04:27 PM

I can't help but add the very next line from the article linked by Lox (Is a Lox link close to a missing link?):

"However, the attack followed months of provocation, and both sides violated international law, the report said."

When I heard about it on the NPR a couple days ago they also said The Russian attacks deep into Georgia were out of all proportion to the initial conflict and the Ossetians were singled out by the report for anti-civilian attacks as well.

Subject: RE: BS: War in Georgia
From: Lox
Date: 01 Oct 09 - 05:03 PM

"I can't help but add the very next line from the article linked by Lox (Is a Lox link close to a missing link?):"

Hello - that's very witty ... you've taken the word "link" (an internet tool that makes it easier for one internet user to direct other interested internet users to a web page of their choice) and you've taken the term "missing link" and you've bashed them together like a couple of rocks and seem very proud of your achievement.

Good job of reading - and indeed quoting the article. You show a high degree of literacy for one so easily pleased.


In the meantime, am I to understand that we are now seeing the BBC report as "impartial and objective" after all?


If we are casting doubt on it then are we also disagreeing with the bit that says Georgia suffered extreme provocation?

And if we are not casting doubt on it then are we agreeing that the report says that Georgia started the war?

Or is my opinion in dispute?

My opinion was that the article made an interesting postscript.

I still think it is no matter how adversarial or indeed sycophantic my critics might be.

Subject: RE: BS: War in Georgia
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 01 Oct 09 - 07:35 PM

"The Russian attacks deep into Georgia were out of all proportion to the initial conflict."

A certain parallel there with what has happened in Afghanistan since 2001...

Subject: RE: BS: War in Georgia
From: robomatic
Date: 01 Oct 09 - 08:17 PM

I think Russia waged a campaign of provocation including the Ossetian actions. I think Georgia foolishly fell into the trap, apparently under the impression that Washington was not only disposed but in a position to back her. I think the Bush Administration tried to discourage Georgia's actions, maybe not enough.

My breakdown of the events is not unlike a big guy going into a bar ready to tear someone apart. In order to get a victim on the hook, big guy has a little buddy who goes around spilling drinks, hitting on girlfriends, stepping on toes until someone takes umbrage, then big guy comes in and pulverizes that someone for picking on his friend.

Lox I was making a very minor remark to introduce levity, as is my wont.

Subject: RE: BS: War in Georgia
From: CarolC
Date: 02 Oct 09 - 12:49 AM

Well, there is a lot of rhetoric on record coming from Saakashvilli about his intention to attack South Ossetia, and this was ongoing for a matter of years. So it's not necessarily accurate to say that Russia instigated it and Georgia fell into the trap. Saakashvilli had in mind to do what he did for a long time, independent of anything Russia did or didn't do.