by Patrick Armstrong
Moscow’s version of events in the recent Ossetia war has not varied. It says that Georgia attacked on the night of August 7 and that Russian troops did not arrive until the next day. It is clear, furthermore, that they did not appear in South Ossetia in strength until at least 24 hours after the first Georgian shots were fired.Saakashvili’s story, on the other hand, has changed several times.
On the 7th, a few hours before his forces opened fire, he made a speech on TV, in which he said he had ordered a ceasefire adding “And I am offering the Russian Federation to be a guarantor of the South Ossetian autonomy within Georgia… I offer a very important role to Russia in resolving this conflict… Georgia is a natural ally for Russia… We need a real mediator.”
The next day, when he believed victory was at hand, he made another speech. A Georgian source reported him saying that Georgian forces now controlled “most of South Ossetia” and that “A large part of Tskhinvali is now liberated and fighting is ongoing in the centre of Tskhinvali”. In this he made two assertions to justify the attack: first that “South Ossetian militias responded to his peace initiative on August 7 by shelling Georgian villages” and second that “Georgia had come under aerial attack from Russian warplanes”. There was no mention of Russian troops entering South Ossetia then.
Of course, his victory announcement was premature and a few days later, he needed a bigger justification for the catastrophe. It was then that he started claiming that the Russians moved first. “‘I am sickened by the speculation that Georgia started anything,’ Mr Saakashvili told a conference call with journalists days later on August 13. ‘We clearly responded to the Russians . . . The point here is that around 11 o’clock, Russian tanks started to move into Georgian territory, 150 at first. And that was a clear-cut invasion. That was the moment when we started to open fire with artillery, because otherwise they would have crossed the bridge and moved into Tskhinvali.’”
Then the story changed again: on September 23 in a piece he wrote in the Washington Post, he claimed that “Russia then started its land invasion in the early hours of August 7, after days of heavy shelling that killed civilians and Georgian peacekeepers.” He expected his readership to believe that the Russians had had an 18-hour head start on a 60-kilometre race and that Georgia had invaded anyway. Too preposterous and it seems to have been quietly forgotten.
Saakashvili’s stories are collapsing one after the other: the first story about a response to heavy Ossetian shelling is directly contradicted by two former British officers who were part of the OSCE team in the area: they report “Georgian rockets and artillery were hitting civilian areas in the breakaway region of South Ossetia every 15 or 20 seconds” and deny that there was the shelling of Georgia villages that Saakashvili claimed on the 8th.
The second story of the Russians entering South Ossetia just before – “supported” with the laughable claim of an intercepted telephone call which was mysteriously “lost” for several weeks – collapses in the BBC program of a couple of weeks ago (Part 1, Part 2.)
Americans were finally introduced to the accurate version in the New York Times nearly three months after the war began.
Indeed, evidence is pouring in that Moscow’s story is the correct one: the Johnson Russia List has virtually a whole issue devoted to the story (JRL/2008/205). Most amusingly, as Saakashvili’s various false stories crumble, his stalwart supporters in the US State Department try to change the subject: now the official line is “I think we need to get away from looking at, you know, who did what first, because as I said, I don’t think we’ll ever really get to the bottom of that.”
I guess that’s as close as we’re going to get to the admission that, for months, the State Department has been shading the truth (or, was too incompetent or biased to get the widely-available information at the time). Unfortunately, for the cause of truth, this belated setting the record right by the Western Mainstream Media may be too late to undo the brick that has been added to the edifice of a new cold war with Russia. (I should add that Der Spiegel was an early, and honorable, exception – in its piece on September 1, referring to the reports of OSCE monitors, it wrote: “One source who is personally familiar with the reports summarized the findings as follows: ‘Saakashvili lied 100 percent to all of us, the Europeans and the Americans.’”)
The one consolation is that, as Tbilisi’s stories get ever more fantastical – Saakashvili told US Secretary of State Rice on August 15 that the Russians destroyed Tskhinvali; and Interfax (whose record for dispassionate accuracy of reporting far exceeds that of any Western news outlet during the war) quoted Georgia's Reintegration Minister Yakobashvili as implying that the British officer was suborned by Moscow – objective people will realize that very little that comes out of Saakashvili’s government is true.
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