Plucky Little Georgia

Foreign correspondents, a cynical tribe, call them “plucky little” stories: plucky little Denmark, saving all those Jews; plucky little Sarajevo, surviving the siege of the Serbs; plucky little Hong Kong, being eaten by the Communist monster. A big bad neighbor, a small population, a steely will.

The latest installment in the “plucky little” series is Georgia, a Caucasus nation of 5 million people which fought a war with Russia in August 2008 and survived, sort of, to tell the tale.
Western audiences mostly hear the tale as the Georgian government tells it. Staffed by young, smart, Anglophone advisors, the administration of President Mikheil Saakashvili has excellent connections to the international media, the global community of non-government organizations, and the highest political circles in Washington and Europe. As these plucky kids tell it, the Russians resent Saakashvili because he’s democratic, uncorrupt, and eager to join NATO, and they have long harbored a desire to unseat him. Last August they provoked Georgia into war with South Ossetia, and then seized the moment to roll over an internationally recognized border, supposedly to “protect” the South Ossetians but really to overthrow the Georgian government.

Saakashvili is still in power and the Russians stopped short of Tbilisi. But not very short. In conversation, government ministers are likely to mention more than once that Russian troops are just a half an hour from the Georgian capital (if your presidential motorcade drives awfully fast). The threat is palpable.

Geographical realities support this version of the narrative. The territory of South Ossetia, where the war was fought, remains largely closed to outsiders because the Russians control it, and don’t want international monitors messing around in it. That makes it hard to assess the damage caused by Georgian forces during the war. But Georgia is wide open, so it’s easy to see the pitiable results of Russia’s incursion. Along the road to South Ossetia stand rows and rows of newly-built houses, sad little Georgian Levittowns, where thousands of people displaced by the war have been resettled. This is no tent city of refugees. These people are here to stay.

They are ethnic Georgians who were burned out of their homes by marauding South Ossetian militias in mid-August last year. Most of them lost everything they owned, and some of them lost friends and family members who were executed by the South Ossetians while Russian soldiers looked on. These are war crimes. Because they were part of a widespread and systematic effort to chase ethnic Georgians from their homes, a tribunal might rule them crimes against humanity. The prosecutor for the International Criminal Court is said to be examining the case, although he’s launched no formal investigation. Russia, as the de facto occupying power in South Ossetia at the time, had a responsibility to maintain order and prevent such crimes from taking place. Instead, in many cases Human Rights Watch found, they abetted them.

After war comes accounting. The Georgian government used indiscriminate and disproportionate force in its attacks on Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital, firing Soviet-era GRAD rockets in districts where civilians were still cowering in basements. It also used cluster munitions, a weapon that 96 nations have signed a treaty to ban. The Georgian media have no access to victims of Georgian bombing, and television does not report news unfavorable to the Georgian government anyway. Local non-governmental organizations evince more independence, but the population who suffered under Georgian bombardment are locked behind a new, de facto border that Russian troops patrol.

That makes it the responsibility of Georgia’s international partners, particularly the governments of Europe and the United States, to insist that Georgia provide a full accounting for how it fought the war. Who gave the command to attack Tskhinvali with GRAD rockets, and what did they know about the presence of civilians in the city at the time? Failing to take appropriate care to protect civilians in war is a serious violation of international humanitarian law. Deliberately targeting civilians is a war crime that requires prosecution.

Such an accounting will be difficult for President Sakaashvili to undertake because the fact is, he lost the war. His enthusiastic and hawkish backers in Washington may have made him feel stronger than he really was. He told me he was on the phone with his military commanders ten times a day during those tense days in August, which is understandable. But if he was ordering them to rain death down on the South Ossetian capital, then it will be awkward for any investigation to follow the trail all the way to the commander who’s most responsible.

Investigating war crimes in Georgia runs counter to the “plucky little” narrative that has so dominated international coverage of the war. But the willingness to openly examine its own record will do more to secure Georgia’s future than NATO membership. The United States and the Europeans are unlikely to go to war with Russia over Georgia. But they must continue to defend, for audiences in Georgia and Russia as well as at home, what democratic values really stand for, and for the basic principle that serious crimes cannot go unaddressed.