Untold Stories

Of Georgia, Jamtland and the Texas Solution

Thomas Goltz, special to the Pulitzer Center

(Thomas Goltz is an adjunct professor of Political Science at Montana State University, Bozeman, and author among other books of Georgia Diary: A Chronicle of Political Chaos and War in the Post-Soviet Caucasus, M.E. Sharpe, 2006, soon to be re-issued in paperback with a new Epilogue.)

Tbilisi/Baku, August 28, 2008

      Well, it seems to be over, surprise, surprise, unless it turns into WW III, which I hope it does not.
     The Caucasus War of 8.8.8 that is, the two-week (or two day) hurly burly in the mountainous southwest corner of the defunct Soviet Union that was a national debacle for West-obsessed Georgia and a crushing victory for a resurgent Russia.
      For those of you who chose to watch the Beijing Olympics instead, which seemed to be timed almost purposely to create maximum distraction from the seismic events happening in the place that gave rise to the legend of Pandora’'s Box getting re-opened, geo-politically speaking, let me fill you in on a fistful of details.

Articles and other resources from the Pulitzer Center's Caucasus conflicts project.

Georgia, Russia and a whiff of 1914

Pulitzer Center Executive Director Jon Sawyer spoke to the World Affairs Council of Houston Tuesday night (8/26), addressing the Caucasus conflict -- its roots, the media coverage of the Georgia/Russia war, and likely repercussions. He drew on his own reporting from Georgia and South Ossetia two years ago and on the current Pulitzer-funded reporting by Jason Maloney, Kira Kay and Zygmunt Dziesciolowski.

As Russia and the U.S. raise the ante -- Russia by recognizing the breakaway republics of S. Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states and the U.S. responding by dispatching Vice President Dick Cheney to Georgia in a show of solidarity -- Sawyer says there's plenty of blame on all sides for letting the situation escalate as it has. Among his observations:

I don’t buy the loosely offered analogies to past Russian outrages, whether Poland or Czechoslovakia or Afghanistan. I do see parallels to another August, in 1914, when small-minded politicians spurred on by jingoistic journalism allowed an obscure conflict in a remote corner of Europe to erupt into a brutal world war. My hope is that this time cooler heads will prevail, that the media will play its role more responsibly, and that solutions will be found that put the interests of civilians – not politicians – first.

Read the complete speech.

Abkhazia: Recognition at Last?

Zygmunt Dzieciolowski, for the Pulitzer Center, from Moscow.

They’ve dreamed about it for years.  In 1999, in a national referendum, Abkhazia’s citizens voted overwhelmingly in favor of independence.  When I met top Abkhaz politicians only few weeks ago, “independence” and “sovereign state” were terms they used frequently and longingly.  For them, return to Georgia was simply unacceptable. They called Russia their “window to the world”.  However, they also remembered periods during the Yeltsin years when their neighbor to the North did not always seem to be a reliable ally.  Abkhaz parliament speaker Nugzar Ashoba told me how much they were afraid in the nineties that the Russians might sign a compromise agreement with then-Georgian president Edouard Shevardnadze.  And for years the Kremlin refused to lift sanctions imposed on Abkhazia.

Abkhazia’s relations with the Kremlin have improved considerably since 2000. The new Russian president, Vladimir Putin, understood much better than his predecessor how useful the Abkhazia and South Ossetia cards could be in his geopolitical game in the South Caucasus. Step-by-step, Russia penetrated Abkhaz politics and the economy. Russian companies started investing in the local tourist industry and more and more Russians were ready to ‘risk’ a vacation on the Abkhaz Black Sea coast. At some point, Moscow agreed to give Russian passports to residents of the breakaway republic. It allowed its youth to study at Russian universities. But the Kremlin also did its best to control the internal politics of Abkhazia and was quite frustrated when its own enthusiastically-supported candidate, Raul Khajimba, lost a presidential election in 2004.  Moscow’s emissaries spared no threats or warnings in trying to enforce their will on Abkhazia’s politicians.  Only last-minute, backstage negotiations, conducted through friendly Russian parliamentarians, helped reach a compromise agreement. The Kremlin finally agreed to let Sergei Bagapsh become president, while its own candidate, Khajimba, got the job of top deputy.

The Creeping Caucasus Catastrophe

Thomas Goltz, special to the Pulitzer Center

(Thomas Goltz is an adjunct professor of Political Science at Montana State University, Bozeman, and author among other books of Georgia Diary: A Chronicle of Political Chaos and War in the Post-Soviet Caucasus, M.E. Sharpe, 2006)

Tbilisi, Georgia, August 23, 2008

Russian troops and tanks may have at least partially completed their pull-out from territory seized during its August 8 blitz of this tiny post-Soviet country, but that should be little reason to celebrate, as the real (if creeping) catastrophe has just begun.

Learn more on the Caucasus Conflicts project

The view from Abkhazia

Zygmunt Dzieciolowski, for the Pulitzer Center
(Photo credit: El Tirador Solitario/ Picasa Web Albums)

The Georgian war was only a week away when in the capital city of Sukhumi we met Abkhazian President Sergei Bagapsh. We had luck. Having arrived in Sukhumi we found that on the next morning Bagapsh was to fly out to Moscow. With the president's press secretary impossible to find it looked like we had missed our chance to meet the Abkhazian head of state.

It was late afternoon but luckily in the nearly empty large administration complex located directly at the Black Sea Coast we found Parliament Speaker Nugzar Ashoba. He was still in his office. He stayed longer as in just two days he was supposed to go on vacation. Yes, he agreed, he could call the president and support our request.

Amanda's video on Fox News

Jason Maloney, for the Pulitzer Center

A Fox News video clip in very heavy circulation in Russia these days, on local television and on video sharing websites, is of an interview done by Fox News’ Shepard Smith of a young Ossetian girl and her aunt.  The girl, Amanda Kokoeva, had been visiting family in South Ossetia when the fighting began, but managed to escape and make it all the way back to Walnut Creek, California, where she lives.  The graphic shown during the segment reads “12-YR-OLD BAY AREA GIRL CAUGHT IN CONFLICT” so it seems clear that the segment was booked as a kind of ‘hometown hero’ feature.  And surely it starts off that way, with Amanda telling Smith where she was when the attacks started and what she did.  But seconds later, it all goes off the rails.

Amanda, at some point in her narrative, stops to make the explicit point that it was the Georgians that were doing the bombing and adds:  “I want to say thank you to the Russian troops that were helping us out.”  Then Kokoeva’s aunt joins in, blaming Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili directly for starting the violence.  Smith awkwardly interrupts her, saying that a commercial break will come in 4 seconds “whether we want to or not” to which the aunt replies “I know that you don’t want to hear that.”  Smith does come back to the pair after the commercial at which point the aunt resumes her description of the situation, but Smith then cuts it short again, claiming the show is ending and saying something about “grey areas” in times of war.

Russian/Georgian Conflict: Dzieciolowski reports on Russian radio

Zygmunt Dzieciolowski has contributed to the following Russian radio stations on the Georgian conflict and its consequences:

Radio Svoboda (American funded Liberty radio)
BBC Russian service
City FM (popular Moscow news radio belonging to Gazprom Media)
Russkoye Radio (Russian Radio, nationwide)
Serebryannyj Dozhd (Silver Rain, popular Moscow radio station)

Learn more about this reporting project

Georgia, Russia and the march to folly

Thomas Goltz, special to the Pulitzer Center

(Thomas Goltz is a professor at Montana State University/Bozeman and author, most recently, of "Georgia Diary--A Chronicle of War and Political Chaos in the Post-Soviet Caucasus." He has specialized in reporting from the Caucasus for two decades, since his first trip there as a fellow at the Institute for Current World Affairs. What follows are excerpts from his most recent report from the region. See also his report last week for the Overseas Press Club and his audio report for IAGblog Podcasts. Goltz also recommends the excellent piece by Peter Spiegel and Borzou Daragahi in Sunday's Los Angeles Times. For a corrective on much of the superficial and ideologically slanted reporting that characterized the first days of the war, meanwhile, see Michael Dobbs's reconstruction of what went wrong in the Outlook section of Sunday's Washington Post. -- Jon Sawyer, Pulitzer Center.)

That Mikhail Saakashvili’s Georgia would eventually come into direct conflict with its huge neighbor to the north, the Russian Federation, was long a given.

The Columbia Law School graduate became the darling of US-styled ‘regime-change’ causes long before his accession to power via the Rose Revolution of 2003 which ousted Soviet era strong-man (and USSR
foreign minister) Eduard Shevardnadze, mainly because Georgians were just sick and tired of being stuck with ‘the Silver Fox’ for their entire lives. In contrast to Shevy, who was old, cagy and ‘Soviet’ (even though he was pals with the international Old Guard of people such as James Baker III, George H Bush, Helmut Kohl and Margaret Thatcher), Misha was young, brash and ‘western’ (even though he had served as Shevy’s Minister of Justice in the late 1990s for a spell).

Clashes in Georgia: Featured on NewsHour.com

Freelance video journalist Jason Maloney, who was filming in Georgia for the Pulitzer Center at the time of the fighting, describes the tensions that preceded the clashes and the impacts on the region. (MP3)

Listen to Jason's dispatch on Newshour.com

Learn more about this project and see all related reporting.

Georgia: Carjacking in Gori

Jason Maloney, for the Pulitzer Center

The last contact I had with the Georgian member of our reporting team, a man named Sergo, had been a text message I received a week ago with the name and number of a reliable taxi driver who would be able to take me out of Georgia and across the border into Armenia.  Sergo had been with us in Tbilisi during the first days of fighting, but as the war was intensifying all around us, he’d managed to find a way to get to Batumi, Georgia’s coastal resort town, where his wife, mother and mother-in-law were all at a relative’s house.  Last I knew, as I left the country on Monday, he was in a relatively safe place that was, in any case, less than 10 miles from the Turkish border.

I’d written Sergo and his wife from Yerevan, Armenia, trying to make sure they were OK, but I never got a reply.  Phone communications were very iffy in Georgia as I left and I imagined e-mail wasn’t fairing much better.  But I now know why it was impossible to reach him:  at the same time that I was making my way in a US Embassy convoy to Armenia, Sergo and his wife were leaving the safety of Batumi and heading out to report on the war underway in their country.