Clarity in the Caucasus?
The Facts and Future of the 2008 Russian-Georgian War
Article Summary and Author Biography
The recent EU report on the 2008 Russia-Georgia War confirms that both Georgia and Russia acted irresponsibly before and during the war. But it misses an opportunity to outline how the long-running territorial disputes of the Caucasus might be best resolved.
CHARLES KING is Chair of the Faculty and a Professor at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. His most recent book is The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus.
Essay
The August war over South Ossetia has rekindled a superpower rivalry and showed the West that Moscow no longer heeds multilateral institutions.
Letter From
With a new visa-free travel regime and other overtures of "soft power," Georgia is attempting to win the favor of the citizens of the Russian North Caucasus. Is Moscow right to fear Tbilisi's new plan?
Few people believed that the fact-finding investigation into the 2008 Russia-Georgia war by the European Union -- which released its final report on September 30 -- would reveal new facts. But the report does confirm that Georgia acted irresponsibly in attempting to reconquer the secessionist region of South Ossetia by force, and that Russia acted irresponsibly in militarily intervening to prevent Georgia from overrunning South Ossetian militias and Russian peacekeepers. Yet in declaring a plague on all the houses involved in the five-day war, the EU report misses an opportunity to outline how the long-running territorial disputes of the Caucasus might be best resolved.
In the sweltering August of last year, as Russian tanks headed into Georgia and Georgian forces retreated in municipal buses and old Zhiguli automobiles, the EU emerged as the critical broker in trying to halt the violence. When the smoke cleared, part of the EU’s plan for reconciliation was to charge a high-level working group with investigating the origins and conduct of the war. All sides justified their actions in terms of international law, with Georgia arguing that it acted to prevent violent secession, and Russia arguing that it was protecting ethnic Ossetians and Russian peacekeepers from indiscriminate, even genocidal, attacks. The working group -- formally established in December 2008 and chaired by Heidi Tagliavini, a senior Swiss diplomat with experience in the Caucasus -- was to judge these claims.
Over the spring and summer of 2009, the mission’s members solicited expert analysis, conducted interviews, and received thousands of pages of official documents from Russians, Georgians, South Ossetians, and Abkhaz. The resulting report, which is three volumes and runs more than 1,000 pages, is the first of its kind in EU history. Historians will consider it a major resource, on par with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s famous 1913 report on the origins of the Balkan wars...
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