Balkanalysis.com

This analysis, originally published one year ago, recounts the heated events leading up to Georgia’s stymied attempt at starting a war with its neighbors. Although he had been empowered by the Americans in the so-called ‘Rose Revolution,’ President Mikheil Saakashvili learned that there is a limit to everything.

The aggressive tone Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili has taken up over the past two months in regard to Russia’s backing for the separatist region of South Ossetia picked up considerably last week, with the announcement that Georgia should prepare for war with Russia.However, considering that Georgia’s civil wars in the 1990’s, with Abkhaz and Ossetian separatists ended rather poorly, one marvels at the little country’s prospects against a giant like Russia. The latter too seems bemused, with the Russian Foreign Ministry on Saturday stating that recent Georgian threats “…are not even worth of commenting [on] because of their absurdity.”

On 27 August, AFP reported that the president is planning an Israeli-style civilian reserve force, because Georgia is “…very close to a war with Russia and the population must be prepared.” Apparently, whether they want to or not, all Georgian citizens must be ready to pitch in because the “…the enemy must know that in case of aggression he will face not only the Army, but the entire nation.” The “tens of thousands” of willing reservists will include women and girls, said the president, drawing a direct parallel with Israel’s similar setup. This is one way to keep the average Georgian from thinking about their dire economic straits, we suppose.

On the same day, Interfax reported that a first reservist battalion has been successfully trained, after a one month training course at the Osiauri base, located close to South Ossetia. Defense Minister Giorgi Baramidze confirmed that the 350-strong battalion had been trained by an elite corps of officers who had “earlier been trained by American military instructors.” The American instructors first arrived in the spring of 2002, under the pretext of helping Georgia deal with suspected Islamic terrorists hiding out in the Pankisi Gorge near Chechnya. Although some stated that only Chechen refugees were actually holed up there, the Americans stayed.

The American-Georgian military cooperation began during the tenure of deposed president Eduard Shevardnadze, but has only increased under the rule of his successor, and Columbia Law graduate, Saakashvili. Last week, Defense Minister Baramidze explained a shake-up in army leadership specifically in terms of this continuing pro-Western orientation.

“…The new leadership of the General Staff of the Armed Forces will be a team of western-educated co-thinkers,” Baramidze recently said. According to Civil Georgia, his General Staff holds parallel prerequisites with the president: new Chief of Staff Major Vakhtang Kapanadze graduated from the US Army War College, and his deputies, Colonels Levan Nikoleishvili and Davit Nairashvili are both graduates of the US Army Command and General Staff College in Kansas, as well as the NATO Defense College.

The appointments come in the wake of 16 military deaths in recent actions in South Ossetia, which Georgian media speculated may have prompted the ouster of the former Chief of Staff, Givi Iukuridze on 25 August. Speculation emerged following Georgian State Minister Goga Khaindrava’s statement on Tbilisi’s Imedi Radio that the casualties were “inadmissible.”

For his part, Iukuridze declared that his soldiers had followed all orders and achieved their objectives, while implying that Baramidze was ultimately responsible for the death toll, considering that he “was in charge of this operation,” according to RFE/RL.

The appointments were quite clearly political, Saakashvili conceded that Iukuridze was history partially because he had been educated in a Russian military academy: “…we are creating a new army which must meet NATO’s standards and so appointing U.S.-educated people to key positions in the General Staff.”

Further sign of its American allegiances came on Friday, when Georgia announced that 50 of its specialized mountain infantry soldiers will be deployed to Afghanistan, following two weeks of training in Germany.

These developments seem all the more mystifying in that they have been provoked almost entirely by the Georgian side. If Saakashvili intends to realize his national greatness scheme through taking on Russia, things might not turn out as he had planned. It is true that Georgia’s civil wars of the 90’s – which led to the current mess – were a sort of proxy war with Russia. However, they were also complicated by the disunity of various Georgian factions, militia groups which fought one another as well as the separatist Abkhaz or Ossetians. And they did not involve open confrontation with Russian troops, who still retain two military bases on Georgian soil. In an additional threat this weekend, Saakashvili ordered Moscow to leave the bases by spring, “or we will make them leave.”

The war of words continued Friday when the Ossetians claimed Georgia has sent 50 of its Special Forces soldiers into the area, in violation of a pullout agreement reached on 19 August. For its part, Georgia continued to urge Russian maritime captains – whose vessels it warned last month would be sunk – to avoid Abkhazian waters.

Russia has also stopped issuing visas to Georgians, in reaction to the increasingly hostile rhetoric and a stunt that smacks suspiciously of “Rose Revolution” tactics, in which young Georgians started playing loud music and using lasers generated from their laptop computers to “cast anti-Russian messages” on the walls of the embassy, thus keeping true to the new Georgian strategy of creating slick mass spectacles. What’s next, the president emerging from dry ice with an electric guitar?

While Evgeni Ivanov, secretary of the Russian Embassy, claimed the visa freeze had nothing to do with the protests, he did say that “it obstructed the working process in the embassy,” and that “the Georgian government [does] not want or cannot deal with the mentioned issue, that is the violation of the international norms of cooperation with the Diplomatic Corps.” In light of the fact that the protests were not stopped, the Russians charged Saakashvili’s government with tacit support for the protest, charging that this ‘complicity’ was a breach of the Vienna Convention on diplomatic
relations.

Russia not only stopped issuing visas, but also halted talks on resolving the Ossetian crisis. A Russian Foreign Ministry statement quoted by Reuters declared that, “…while the scenes of bacchanalia outside the Russian embassy in Tbilisi continue, it will be impossible to hold any contacts or talks with Georgia, either on military issues or a ‘big’ agreement.”

P
redictably enough, the Georgian efforts produced a reflexive reaction on Friday in Moscow, where protesters led by the youth wing of Putin’s United Russia party and the Union of Young Alania (representing North Ossetia) converged on the Georgian embassy, holding signs comparing Saakashvili to Hitler. Hundreds of people, including South Ossetians, took part in the protest. While the ‘Fascist’ charge may be an exaggeration, Saakashvili does not help himself by making eerie statements such as “betrayers will be punished.” But hey, this is national greatness we’re talking about.

A wild card in all this is Chechnya. At least one Georgian parliamentarian has expressed open support for the righteousness of the Chechen struggle for independence. However, while it might seem natural for Georgia to look to the Chechens to fulfill the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” dictum, they have had severe antagonisms in the past. The latter have their suspicions too, as the pro-Chechen website Kavkazcenter.com stated yesterday: “…Washington is not making its hostile attitude towards the Chechen Resistance a secret… this is why Saakashvili will never allow any real cooperation with Chechens unless Washington issues proper instructions.”

Indeed, Muslim Chechnya has long been on the wrong side of the war on terror. When one adds Candidate Bush’s famously close relations with Putin, and the possibility of Russia sending 40,000 troops to Iraq, one has to wonder whether the Georgian adventures in invoking national greatness are indeed irresponsible and unrealistic. Saakashvili is indeed a friend of America, but there may be much bigger long-term factors at work than aiding Georgia in its quest for territorial reconquest.

At the end of the day, one can only hope that the conflict will be resolved peacefully, and that the only resurgence of violence will be of the good-old Caucasus criminal variety- like the bomb that exploded yesterday near Georgia’s Parliament.