In a world of economy giants thirsty for oil, political decisions are unlikely to achieve any social benefit. In fact, innocent people end up paying the highest price of power conflicts.
Even after Georgia and Russia agreed to cease-fire in South Ossetia last week, the facts of the armed conflict are still as unclear as the reasons behind it. Both countries blamed each other as being the real aggressor, and local and international biased media contributed in building a propaganda war in which casualties were added and subtracted deliberately and inconvenient information and viewpoints were omitted.
On Aug. 7, Georgian troops entered into South Ossetia to regain control over this de facto independent region. Russia, which supports South Ossetia’s independence economically and politically, responded the invasion by sending its troops to the region and to Abkhazia, another breakaway republic.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said Russia sent the troops to assure peace in the region and protect Russian citizens living in South Ossetia, which include most South Ossetians and Abkhazians as Russia has granted them Russian passports since 2004.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has urged Russia to pull out its troops from Georgian territory. However, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov told the press the troops will stay until peace is completely assured in the region.
Russia’s official reports showed that the attacks caused more than 2,000 deaths; while Georgian Health Minister Alexander Kvitashvili said last week in a TV briefing 175 people had died since the first attacks.
Paul Reynolds wrote for the BBC that one problem has been the lack of reporting from inside South Ossetia. Reynolds wrote that Russia not only failed to back up its declarations on Georgian attacks but also didn’t allow the press to do so.
“Georgia made all kinds of claims that Russia was invading, including a statement that Russian troops had taken over the town of Gori which proved not to be so,” Reynolds said.
Amanda Kekoeva, a Georgian 12-year-old who witnessed the first attacks in South Ossetia, told Fox News she wanted to make clear she had run from Georgian troops and not Russian, which actually helped her and her family avoid danger.
When Kekoeva’s aunt, who accompanied her during the interview, said the real aggressor was Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili, newscaster Shepard Smith interrupted her to go to a commercial cut.
“I know, you don’t want to hear this,” Kekoeva’s aunt said.
Although Russia, Georgia and the South Ossetian separatists have had constant conflicts over the past years, the friction intensified when Georgia conducted a referendum for a NATO membership. Most countries agreed to the referendum but in the 2008 NATO summit, the membership was postponed.
“The conflict probably puts this off into the distant future,” Reynolds said.
Clifford J. Levy wrote for the New York Times that this conflict “has stirred some of the deepest divisions between world powers since the cold war.”
The U.S. and the U.K. support the Georgian government and have declared that the conflict is a Russian aggression. France and Germany don’t support Georgia’s entrance to NATO because of its conflictive borders.
This conflict guaranteed countries against Georgia’s entrance to NATO that its membership won’t be granted any time soon. After signing the cease-fire agreement Friday, Saakashvili said to the press that Western Europe helped the Russian intervention in South Ossetia by not accepting Georgia’s entrance to NATO.
“There are no good guys here,” Andrey Kroupnik, an analyst at an investment bank in Moscow, told the BBC. “Not Saakashvili, not Putin, not the South Ossetian separatists, not the politicians from the West.”
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