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No signs of Russia claim of genocide by Georgia in South Ossetia

South Ossetia's capital, Tskhinvali, slowly emerges from shell shock,
but the damage doesn't appear to be on the scale Russia claimed.
Residents blame the bloodshed on Georgia and regard Russia as savior.

By Megan K. Stack

Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

August 18, 2008

TSKHINVALI, GEORGIA =E2=80=94 A visit to this war-strafed city Sunday turne=
d
up no proof of Russian claims that more than 2,000 people died here.
Nor were there any ready signs of what Prime Minister Vladimir Putin
referred to as "genocide."

The downtown of Tskhinvali, the capital of Georgia's breakaway
republic of South Ossetia, sustained heavy damage in a five-day
barrage of rockets and missiles as Russian troops and their local
allies battled Georgian forces, and dozens of deaths have been
documented. There is still no running water in the city, and
residents are tremulous and shellshocked.

Tskhinvali Regional Hospital had confirmed the deaths of 40 people as
of Sunday, though the number was expected to grow, said Tina
Zakharova, an Ossetian doctor who showed The Times a log of deaths.
That figure included both civilians and combatants: people who died
at the hospital, whose bodies were brought to the hospital or whose
families reported burying their dead in villages.

It has been more than a week since Georgia launched a military
operation in South Ossetia, to bring the pro-Russian rebel region
under the control of the central government. Instead, Georgian
soldiers met a humiliating defeat in an overwhelming Russian
counterattack.

South Ossetian authorities are still laboring to figure out how many
people died in the battles for the capital, Zakharova said. The task
was complicated because some families simply buried their dead in
their yards, unable to bring the corpses to the hospital to be
registered. "There will be more," she said.

Russian officials have claimed that the city was flattened, comparing
the wreckage to the Battle of Stalingrad during World War II. Leaders
in Moscow have repeatedly used the term genocide, and spoke of
thousands of corpses.

Burned-out tanks remain scattered on the streets of Tskhinvali, but
the city's roads and bridges remain basically unscathed. Many
buildings had windows shattered and roofs destroyed; some appear to
have caught fire and burned to charred shells. The streets around the
government center seem to have borne the brunt of the fighting, but
few walls appear to have fallen in the assault.

"You can't explain how it felt. It was horrible," said Soslan
Borisovich, a vice colonel with the breakaway republic's militia, who
fought alongside Russian troops and manned a checkpoint at the
southern edge of Tskhinvali. "For two days, the ground was shaking
nonstop."

Many Ossetians spoke with anger about the Georgian troops who had
battled their way into Tskhinvali, only to be driven back by the
Russians.

"They were the closest to us before the war, and now they are the
most frightening enemy," said Evelina Kulumbekova, 49, who holed up
in the basement of her apartment building during the fighting. "It
feels like your own brother has cut off your head."

The question of how many people died here is significant in part
because Moscow has used the shocking death toll to justify its
overwhelming military response. Russia sent troops pouring over the
border, unleashed airstrikes and seized control of wide chunks of
Georgia outside South Ossetia and another breakaway republic,
Abkhazia, shutting down the country's main road and severing
transportation links between the capital and the Black Sea coast.

The Kremlin has come out heavily in support of independence for
Georgia's breakaway republics, a move that would redraw the borders
of the post-Soviet Caucasus region. Critics accuse Russia of trying
to engineer a de facto annexation of the neighboring lands, a charge
Moscow firmly denies.

Russia's relationship with the West has abruptly soured with the
military incursion. The Bush administration was infuriated, and
post-Soviet politics were reshaped by a new understanding of the
threat Russia may pose to its Western-leaning neighbors.

Russian leaders say the campaign was necessary to protect the people
of South Ossetia, who feel historical kinship with Russia stretching
back to czarist times. South Ossetians rebelled against Georgian rule
shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and have been
largely autonomous since then.

"After what happened, it should be clear that they should have
self-determination," Konstantin Zatulin, the first deputy chairman of
the Russian State Duma's committee for the Commonwealth of
Independent States said on Sunday. "The reality is that for 15 years,
at least, South Ossetia and Abkhazia have been independent, in fact."

Seated in a conference room in the main government building of South
Ossetia, Zatulin said he was in charge of a $100-million Russian
initiative to rebuild a section of Tskhinvali. The project, he said,
would create a "Moscow zone" in the city.

"Russia is not annexing. Russia is not invading," he said. "It's not
true. The goal of Russia is peace in the Caucasus."

Zakharova, the doctor, spent the days of heavy fighting in the rancid
basement of the hospital, where staff members set up metal cots and
thin mattresses and treated patients under the glow of bare
lightbulbs. She insisted that visitors climb down to see the
basement, where cobwebs clot the ceiling and the air is thick with
the stench of human waste and blood.

"The world should know," she said firmly. "This should not happen
again."

Recalling the arrival of Russian troops, her blue eyes flooded with
tears. "They were our saviors," she said.

By Sunday, Ossetians were out in the streets, tidying up and swapping
stories of their ordeals as refugees or cowering in bomb shelters.
Wreckage was piled along the sides of the roads in the town's leafy
center, and talk was beginning to turn to the future.

It is unclear what will come next for South Ossetia. Russia has
pledged to back the province's drive for independence from Georgia.
Many people here say they already count themselves as Russians; most
hold Russian passports, the Russian ruble is the going currency, and
the elderly receive pensions from Russia.

Across town, South Ossetian spokeswoman Irina Gagloyeva sat with
other officials in the yard of the government building. Ossetian
militiamen milled around in ragtag camouflage, with knotted bandannas
and half-grown beards. Ordinary life was beginning to stir on the
streets -- girls in flowered dresses wandered past, and clusters of
old men gathered.

"You see what the Georgians have done here," Gagloyeva said. "They
see Georgians as murderers."

South of town, past the checkpoint where Ossetian militiamen sprawled
on a junked bed, the silent country road ran back into Georgia
proper. All along the way, Russian soldiers had dug in. They hauled
tree branches and cinder blocks into the road to erect checkpoints,
and pitched their tents in encampments.

The Russian soldiers were practically the only glimmer of life in a
war-drained landscape.

The stench of death hung in the nearly deserted villages around
Tskhinvali. At least two corpses were sprawled on the main road,
swelling in the summer heat. A few old women wobbled along in
flapping dresses and head scarves. Every once in a while, a skinny
Georgian man would appear on the roadside, trying to hitch a ride
south to join his countrymen.

megan.stack at latimes.com
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This WSJ columnist has a good feel for the current divisions within the US
foreign policy establishment, which are more than trivial. Once the US is
engaged in a confrontation, as in Iraq and now in Georgia, these difference=
s
are papered over and there is a unified response to the crisis in order to
salvage victory from defeat. The larger strategic question, however, turns
on how to avoid such blunders - through the predominant exercise of "hard
power" or "soft power" - and is the major fault line presently dividing
the Republican and Democratic parties.


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     WALTER LIPPMANN
     Los Angeles, California
     Editor-in-Chief, CubaNews
     http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/
     "Cuba - Un Para=C3=ADso bajo el bloqueo"
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