From: "Georgi Sturua" <delegats@mtu-net.ru>
Subject: Re: Gordon Hahn in JRL #173
Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2008
Efforts to comply a more or less detailed chronology of events leading to the five-day war in the South Caucasus should be commended. It is a very daunting and frustrating task because an unbiased observer enters a realm of claims and counterclaims which are currently, more often than not, impossible to verify. The task is also a very delicate one because for such a chronology to make any positive impact, one should be very careful in the selection of the claims to be highlighted as well as chosen wording in presenting these assertions.
One cannot fail to agree fully with Dr. Hahn’s when he states that “it will be a good starting point for further investigation”. However, due to the very nature of sources available, the idea, also put forward by Dr. Hahn, that the timeline presented should help to determine who bears what responsibility in the conflict seems to be unnecessary overambitious.
The chronology prompts certain technical whys as to what is in it and one really big why as an impression one gets from it.
(1) Why Dr. Hahn defines the war as "Georgian" in the first place? Is it a point that he does not feel really too important to focus on, or, on the contrary, does it reflect his well thought-out understanding of the nature of the war? Usually, wars in the history of international relations go down as, at least, a bilateral undertaking, for instance, German-French war of 1870 or Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973? If the “multilateral” definition appears more appropriate, then how, from Dr. Hahn’s point of view, the war should be named in history books?
(2) Why did Dr. Hahn totally omit from his timeline considerations found in a balanced and widely discussed September 16 New York Times report regarding “intercepted telephone calls purporting to show that part of a Russian armored regiment crossed into the separatist enclave of South Ossetia nearly a full day before Georgia’s attack on the capital, Tskhinvali, late on Aug. 7”?
(3) Finally, and more importantly, an ever increasing bewilderment the chronology creates: why in those late July-early August days when the tensions in the region only mounted to an unprecedented level, the Kremlin diplomacy machine suddenly went AWOL? Could Dr. Hahn, as an acute observer of the events in the region, share his thoughts on why the Kremlin, which vehemently defended his right to be a sole peacekeeper in the region, failed to undertake high-level diplomatic efforts standard in such situations (say, directly appealing to and convening a meeting between the Georgian and South Ossetian leaders, urgent involvement of the UN Security Council, etc)? Why did the Kremlin kept mum and did not issue at least a stern public warning to Georgia if it indeed amassed 12,000 troops on its border to South Ossetia by August 7 - a fact which, by default, could not have been overlooked by Russian intelligence in this small area with narrow passes to and from (by the way, Dr. Hahn deems this piece of information revealed in a Der Spiegel report so significant that he mentions it in both of his postings in JRL #173)? Soviet diplomacy mastered the technique with those famous “Pravda” front-page pieces “TASS is authorized to state…” You know, people listened.
Since Dr. Hahn’s chronology is a history text in such concentrated form, it becomes an eye-opener in one respect. Hence, I feel that a straightforward question should be put: does the chronology imply and even builds a strong case with the two major and undisputed facts – total Kremlin high-level diplomatic inactivity on the verge of the hostilities and a wide scale pre-conflict evacuation of the South Ossetian civilians to Russia never initiated before – that the Kremlin was truly laying a trap for Tbilisi in which the latter did fell, perhaps too eagerly?