Brutality of Russia-Georgia war emerging

At least 17 Georgian villages were destroyed by South Ossetian militias, a researcher said.

McClatchy Newspapers

TBILISI, Georgia — When Russia’s tanks and fighter jets invaded Georgia last August, the Kremlin said its aim was to stop genocide in the breakaway Georgian republic of South Ossetia. In a few days, Georgia’s military had slaughtered some 2,000 people there, Russian officials and their allies in the South Ossetian government claimed.

Last month, however, the head of the Russian federal prosecutor’s task force examining the war said the toll was just 162 civilians and 48 Russian soldiers killed.

The disinformation and brutality are among the lingering questions about last summer’s five-day war that President Barack Obama’s new foreign-policy team faces, and the answers will help shape U.S. relations with Georgia and, more important, with a resurgent Russia.

Eleven days before leaving office, the Bush administration signed a “strategic partnership” charter with Georgia that pledged cooperation with the former Soviet republic on defense, energy security and democratic development but made no specific U.S. commitments. To what extent Obama follows through may hinge on how the new president interprets the events of the Russia-Georgia war.

Russia’s false allegations of genocide paved the way for what now appear to be war crimes: Protected by Russian tanks, South Ossetian militias looted and torched Georgian villages in an attempt to “cleanse” ethnic Georgians from the small mountainous region of South Ossetia.

“Clearly, torture, execution, rape, these are war crimes,” said Giorgi Gogia, a researcher with Human Rights Watch in Georgia who said that his organization had documented that behavior by South Ossetians.

In addition, Gogia said, Russian forces in many cases participated in the looting and burning of ethnic Georgian homes or stood by as their South Ossetian counterparts did so. At least 17 ethnic Georgian villages in South Ossetia were “pretty much razed to the ground,” according to Gogia, a conclusion bolstered by satellite imagery from the United Nations. More than 20,000 ethnic Georgians are said to have fled to other parts of the country.

The South Ossetian fighters, who were or should have been under Russian control, tortured at least four Georgian military prisoners of war and executed three others, Gogia said.

“As an occupying power in Georgia, Russia failed overwhelmingly ... to ensure law and order,” Gogia said.

The extent of the damage is still unknown because Russia and South Ossetia have blocked international observers from patrolling the area and have allowed only tightly controlled access by the news media.

A review of the battle, however, suggests that all sides engaged in reckless behavior during the first few days of fighting. South Ossetia in part provoked the Georgians with a series of attacks. Georgia responded with an ill-advised and disproportionate assault Aug. 7 on the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali. Russia invaded a sovereign country on false, or at least exaggerated, premises.

After that initial stage of the conflict, though, it was almost exclusively the Russians and South Ossetians who violated the laws of war, according to witnesses’ accounts and McClatchy Newspapers’ reporting in Georgia during and after the fighting.

Russian troops destroyed Georgian military and civilian infrastructure, joined in looting and set the countryside on fire in places. South Ossetian militias brutalized Georgian villages behind the protection of Russian tanks.

Russian officials said they were compelled to enter Georgia because of unchecked Georgian violence against South Ossetia. Many experts and eyewitnesses agree that Georgia’s attack on Tskhinvali included heavy barrages of indiscriminate rocket fire, and South Ossetians describe hellish scenes from the Georgian push into the city.

“The Georgians shot from everything that could shoot. Residents buried their dead right in their courtyards and gardens,” said Dmitry Medoev, the South Ossetian president’s envoy in Russia. “Snipers shot at ambulances. Tanks ran over people.”

Though there was damage to Tskhinvali from the initial Georgian attack and subsequent fighting with Russian units, it paled in comparison with what South Ossetian irregulars later visited upon Georgian enclaves in South Ossetia.

Satellite imagery and analysis released by a research arm of the U.N. estimated that 5.5 percent of the buildings in Tskhinvali were visibly affected by attacks, a figure that squares roughly with what a McClatchy reporter saw there in August.

In the nearby ethnic Georgian village of Kvemo Achabeti, however, almost 52 percent of the buildings were affected, the majority of which were counted as destroyed, according to the U.N. satellite photos and analysis. In the village of Tamarasheni, the figure was almost 51 percent.

Tamarasheni, an ethnic Georgian village of some 361 buildings, had 183 that were destroyed or severely damaged. Tskhinvali, a town of about 4,211 buildings, had 230.

Because Russian authorities have given only limited access to Tskhinvali and almost none to the outlying villages, the satellite images taken in August are a main source of information about the scale of destruction.

South Ossetia’s minister of internal affairs, Valery Valiev, told McClatchy that the damage to the villages was caused by fighting during the war. “Nobody burned them,” he said. However, the U.N. satellite imagery indicates that damage to the ethnic Georgian enclaves occurred days or weeks after Georgia’s military retreated from the area.

The imagery also makes it clear that much of the destruction came not from the heat of battle, as was the case in Tskhinvali, but from a systematic campaign that the Russians did nothing to stop.