Subject: A Response to Hewitt JRL#171 [re: Georgia, Russia]
Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2008
From: "Bob Hamilton" <BHamilton@csis.org>
My first reaction upon reading Professor Hewitt’s article – with its distorted history, opinions masquerading as facts and ad hominem attacks - was to ignore it, since it makes no contribution to informed debate about the conflict between Russia and Georgia. Upon reflection however, I decided I couldn’t let it pass unchallenged. What happened and is still happening between Russia and Georgia is too important to let Hewitt’s opinions stand.
In his article, the professor makes several broad (and mostly unsubstantiated) assertions, which I’ll paraphrase and respond to here:
1. The U.S. “recklessly” armed Georgia over the years and tacitly encouraged it to use force to solve its separatist conflicts:
Meaningful U.S. military assistance to Georgia began in 2002 with the Georgia Train and Equip Program, designed (ironically) to lessen tensions between Georgia and Russia by giving Georgia the capability to project the government’s writ into the Pankisi Gorge, where Russia claimed Chechen fighters were resting and rearming before crossing back into Russia. That program was a success and the Pankisi Gorge was brought under control, after which the Georgian government offered to send the troops trained by the U.S. to Iraq. Using that program as a model, the U.S. trained and equipped two more infantry brigades, which were also subsequently deployed to Iraq. U.S.-trained Georgian troops had also served in Kosovo and were preparing to deploy to Afghanistan when the war with Russia started.
U.S. assistance to Georgia – both in training and in equipment – was limited to what was required to give Georgia a deployable counter-insurgency force that could be used in Iraq, Kosovo, Afghanistan and elsewhere as agreed by Georgia and the international community. U.S. policy was always very clear that capabilities like armor, artillery and attack aviation were off-limits for U.S. assistance – precisely because those capabilities were seen as too provocative vis-à-vis Georgia’s separatist conflicts.
In short, all training and equipment is not the same and the U.S. was always very careful about what capabilities it assisted Georgia in developing. Georgia did – as any sovereign country may – purchase with its own money tanks, artillery and other equipment from Ukraine, the Czech Republic and other countries (including Russia). As a college language professor, Hewitt may be forgiven if his grasp of military affairs is limited (and it obviously is). Unfortunately his limited knowledge did not translate into judicious silence – he insisted on making claims that are uninformed and untrue.
2. The Georgians had long prepared to use force in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and the Georgian incursion into South Ossetia was to be followed by a Georgian incursion into Abkhazia:
In fact, the first shots in this war were fired by South Ossetian forces when, as verified by the U.S. Embassy in Tbilisi and other international observers, they began firing large caliber artillery shells – in violation of the terms of the South Ossetian cease fire agreement – at Georgian peacekeepers and Georgian villages within South Ossetia as early as August 1st. Soon thereafter, “volunteers” from the North Caucasus (in fact, Chechen, Ingush and other irregulars) in tanks and armored vehicles supplied by Russia entered South Ossetia through the Roki Tunnel –again, this is confirmed in multiple media accounts and by the U.S Embassy. By the time Georgian forces began to move toward Tskhinvali late on August 7th, Russian forces had already passed through the Roki tunnel, according to Embassy sources and a September 16th article in the New York Times.
In contrast to the deliberate and pre-planned nature of Russian and South Ossetian actions, Georgia’s reactions were unplanned and often hasty and poorly organized, reflecting the fact that Georgia was reacting to events it could not control, not ramping up to a carefully planned military operation. Most of the Georgian forces did not move out of their garrisons until August 7th: the Georgian 4th Brigade, which formed a major part of the force that moved into South Ossetia to meet the Russians, was in training with U.S. trainers preparing for its Iraq deployment until then. Again, this is substantiated by international observers and multiple media accounts.
The claim that Georgia intended to attack Abkhazia is - as with most of Hewitt’s claims – unsubstantiated and is not borne out by the way the conflict unfolded. Hewitt describes Georgian military equipment stockpiled in the Kodori Gorge; I’d ask that the professor list this equipment and the source for his information. I have been unable to confirm this claim and find it dubious. There were certainly Ministry of Internal Affairs (i.e. – police) forces and equipment in the gorge, and this is allowable under the Abkhaz cease fire agreement. If the professor has proof that significant military equipment was there as well, he should make it public.
Even if Georgia had stockpiled military equipment in the Kodori Gorge, the charge that the gorge was to serve as a jumping off point for an incursion into the rest of Abkhazia is ludicrous from a military point of view. Mountainous and isolated with a poor road network, Kodori is far from a suitable place from which to launch a military operation.
In the event, it was the Abkhaz and the Russians who expanded the conflict to Abkhazia, not the Georgians. Abkhaz and Russian forces drove the small Georgian contingent from the Kodori Gorge and crossed from Abkhazia into Georgia proper – destroying both civilian and military infrastructure as they did so.
3. Georgia targeted civilians in South Ossetia (“bombing and shelling unarmed civilians in S. Ossetia”), causing heavy casualties:
There is simply no evidence for this. In a 13 August visit to Tskhinvali, human rights watch documented 44 fatalities there, with the victims being a mixture of soldiers and civilians. In fact, Human Rights Watch characterized Russian claims of heavy casualties among South Ossetian civilians as “exaggerated” and “suspicious.” Even the Russian media has ceased making the ridiculous assertion that there were heavy civilian casualties in South Ossetia; if there were any evidence of Georgian “genocide” or other atrocities the Russian press and government would have long ago presented it. The fact that they haven’t speaks to the absolute falsehood of these accusations. The professor should check his facts before parroting the fantastic claims emanating from Moscow and Tskhinvali about this war.
On the other hand, there is abundant independent evidence of South Ossetian ethnic cleansing of Georgians in South Ossetia and in the self-proclaimed Russian “security zone” in Georgia proper in the wake of this conflict. Both independent Russian human rights monitors and Human Rights Watch have documented – and satellite photos prove (unosat.org) - a widespread campaign of driving ethnic Georgians out of villages in South Ossetia and the Russian self-declared “security zone” in Georgia proper, after which those villages were burned and bulldozed. Predictably, Hewitt is silent on the actual human rights violations in this conflict since they don’t fit neatly into his view of who is right and who is wrong.
4. Georgia precipitated the immediate post-Soviet wars in Abkhazia and South Ossetia through the “madness of nationalism that exploded amongst the Georgians” as the Soviet Union collapsed, and further that “Georgians were the only ones responsible for opening the Pandora's Box of nationalism, and they have to recognise that responsibility and face the consequences (viz. loss of S. Ossetia and Abkhazia as of 1992 and 1992, respectively) rather than run around laying the blame on the Kremlin”:
This might be the most preposterous of Hewitt’s claims. Laying the entire blame for a series of ethnic conflicts on one side is the height of intellectual dishonesty. The origins of the conflicts in South Ossetia and Abkhazia are complicated and there is certainly cause to place some of the blame on the Georgian side in both cases. However, to argue that the Georgians alone opened the “Pandora’s Box of nationalism" is laughable. The Caucasus have been called the “Eurasian Balkans” for a reason: it is a region of complex, deeply-felt and often overlapping ethnic identities over which great powers have often competed and sometimes clashed. In the case of the Abkhaz and South Ossetian wars of the early 1990s, it is a fact documented by every responsible observer that Russia supported the separatist forces as the conflicts unfolded, and that it ensured that the peace agreements that ended the conflicts gave Russia the deciding vote in how - or even whether – they would be resolved. In short, although the conflicts in Georgia erupted primarily as a result of the clash of increasingly nationalistic policies by Georgians, Abkhaz and Ossetes, Russia used the conflicts as an opportunity to gain advantage over a weak, corrupt and disorganized Georgian government. When, after the Rose Revolution, the Georgian government became much more effective and less corrupt, when it stated clearly that its goal was to integrate into the Euro-Atlantic community, Russia attempted to use the separatist conflicts to dissuade the Georgian government from pursuing this objective. When that failed, Russia embarked on its well-documented policy of creeping annexation and escalating provocations, with the August war in Georgia as the end result.
5. And finally, that Georgia is not a democracy worthy of the name, as witnessed by its crackdown against opposition protests in November 2007 and several other recent events:
The Georgian government’s reaction to the November 2007 protests was a significant mistake and an overreaction that we in the West should not and did not defend. I was in Tbilisi when it happened and was as dismayed as any other Western observer to see police breaking up protests with water cannon and tear gas. However, it should be noted that these demonstrations had been ongoing for five days before the authorities decided to break them up, and there had been no violence to this point. The number of protestors by the morning of November 7th had dwindled to a couple hundred, but they were still blocking Rustaveli Avenue, the main artery through Tbilisi, so the police attempted to move them to the sidewalk. The protestors resisted and in a matter of a couple of hours they had used their cell phones to call in others swelling their numbers to several thousand. At this point the situation rapidly spun out of control and the government over-reacted, calling in the water cannon and tear gas-wielding riot police.
However, once the government realized it had overreacted, it quickly sought to make amends and restore its democratic credentials. President Saakashvili called new Presidential elections for January 2008, and included a referendum on the date of the next parliamentary elections, which was one of the issues that spawned the November 2007 protests. In these elections, characterized by the OSCE observer mission and the numerous observer missions from foreign embassies in Tbilisi as essentially free and fair (although often disorganized and chaotic in places), Saakashvili was re-elected and parliamentary elections were set for spring 2008. Those elections went off in May and were characterized by international observers as a significant improvement over the January presidential elections. The point here is that although far from perfect, the Georgian government is making a good faith attempt to develop democratic institutions worthy of the name and the U.S. and other Western partners are rightly assisting it in this effort.
Contrast this with the situation within Russia and its client statelets of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Russia's drift into authoritarianism is well-documented, with extra-judicial killings, fixed elections, politically-motivated prosecutions and an almost completely state-controlled media now indisputable facts. In fact, Freedom House scored Russia a 6 - the lowest possible score - in political freedom in their 2008 report, which was written even before the farcical, stage-managed election of Dmitri Medvedev to the presidency. In their next report, Freedom House will certainly note that the downward trend in Russia has accelerated. Georgia, by comparison, received a score of 4 in political freedom, down from a 3 the year before. Since the Freedom House report was written immediately after the events of November 2007, it reflects the damage these events did to Georgia's reputation but does not reflect the positive trends noted in the 2008 presidential and parliamentary elections.
In summary, for Hewitt to claim that Georgia is not a democracy worthy of Western support as he simultaneously cheers the violent secession of Abkhazia and South Ossetia with the support of Russia is the height of hypocrisy. Instead of a future as members of a multi-ethnic Georgia making the transition to democracy and market economy, South Ossetia and Abkhazia now face a future as backward, non-viable statelets under Russia's control, or - more likely - as backwaters in an increasingly authoritarian and bellicose Russia with an unsustainable oil-fueled and largely state-controlled economy.
A few more random Hewitt misrepresentations and baseless claims:
- Abkhazia and South Ossetia are “since 26th August 'de iure' independent states”: only if you believe that Russia makes the laws for the international community. The only other country to recognize these Russian-sponsored statelets is Nicaragua – even reliable Russian allies like Belarus and Venezuela have failed to rush to recognize them despite considerable Russian pressure to do so.
- “GEORGIA PROPER, WHERE 70% OF THE NATIONAL BUDGET HAS BEEN WASTED ON THE MILITARY OVER RECENT YEARS”: this is a complete fabrication. The Georgian state budget for 2007 was 5.324 billion Lari; the ministry of Defense received 1.495 billion Lari, or about 28% of the budget. Even if you add in the budgets of the Ministry of the Interior and other “power ministries” the total spending on defense and security is well under 50% of the state budget. Go to the Ministry of Defense (www.mod.gov.ge) or Ministry of Finance (http://www.mof.ge/default.aspx?sec_id=2539&lang=2) websites for details. The largest shares of the government budget for 2008 is allocated to “Health and Social Welfare” and "Other Expenditures (including transfers to territorial budgets)”. Defense and Security comes in third.
LTC Robert E. Hamilton
U.S. Army Fellow
Center for Strategic and International Studies
(202) 775-3288
bhamilton@csis.org
robert.e.hamilton@us.army.mil.