Russia

Symbolism seems to always precede Russia into war. In the winter of 1994-5, Chechnya’s capital, Grozny, bloodily fulfilled its Russian translation as “fierce”: thousands died in the wake of Yeltsin’s callous Christmas day invasion.

But Gori, the name of the first Georgian city bombed by Russian aircraft this weekend, translates simply as ‘grief’.

When, at work, I watched the footage of an aftermath of one of these raids, the sacking of an apartment block by Russian planes, I cried, struck by how much the target resembled my grandfather’s building just several hundred miles away, in the southern Russian city of Voronezh; in the expressions of the wounded pensioners who would normally gossip on the benches outside, who had probably fought alongside him in the war and now 65 years later sat bloodied and dazed in the courtyard, there was nothing but simple grief, not even anger.

The raids are numbingly, chokingly absurd: Russia could’ve saved the ignominy and fuel, and bombed Voronezh itself: for we are all citizens of Gori, not because Georgia is ‘actually’ Russia, or should belong to Russia - it is not and cannot - but because the one thing a bomb hurled from a Sukhoi jet can’t ‘neutralise’ is the 80 year story that, however coersively, however cynically, unjustifiably or cruelly, had bound the ex-citizens of the USSR together as inextricably as a rocket binds metal, concrete and flesh. That the same Putin who had famously called the collapse of the USSR the single biggest catastrophe of the 20th century could have unleashed such violence against its still impoverished, shell-shocked orphans is incomprehensible, nauseating, unpardonable.

Yet equally shameful has been the press coverage of this tragedy, by both American and Russian media. In the West, the Guardian has been perhaps the only outlet to have avoided a knee-jerk anti Russian stance. In today’s paper, Peter Walker decries how, “to the UK press, Russia is once again a fierce grizzly bear”:

Most UK papers, while critical of Georgia for triggering the current South Ossetia crisis through its ill-advised intervention in the breakaway region, are beginning to side firmly against Russia.

The Daily Telegraph even manages to squeeze a claim of Russian “ethnic cleansing” into its lead story while, curiously, failing to detail who made the allegation, let alone give any evidence supporting this.

Also in the Guardian, the conservative James Poulos laments the credulous press treatment of Georgia’s role in the violence (it is hardly ever mentioned that Saakashvili had been the first to use the Olympics as cover for a Chechnya-style invasion of Ossetia). He writes that

the anti-Russia lobby is giving the pro-Israel lobby a run for its money, hyping the settling of scores among two European, Orthodox Christian countries as more dangerous to the peace and security of the west than any clash of civilisations or jihad ever was.

Chillingly, he notes the dangers of turning Russia into an enemy: “which, indeed, would be a far more formidable foe than Iran, Hizbullah, and al-Qaida combined”. He quotes a scathing Washington Post editorial, as blatant in its hypocrisy as in its criticism of Russia:

The editors of the Washington Post have railed that:

The principles at stake, including sovereignty and territorial integrity, apply well beyond the Caucasus. To abandon Georgia and its fragile democratic Rose Revolution would send a terrible signal to other former Soviet and Warsaw Pact republics that to Moscow’s dismay have achieved or are working toward democracy and fully independent foreign policies.

Would that these sacrosanct principles had applied to Serbia, which fought on just those grounds to keep Kosovo an integral part of its recognised territory.

Perhaps the most surprising and sick aspect of most Western reporting on the war has been the absence of almost any mention of Ossetia itself: coverage of Russian sorties over Gori had displaced investigation of the alleged 1400 killed in Georgian attacks on Tskhinvali; just as the Russian incursion into Ossetia had displaced the earlier and Georgian raid on the breakaway province, which had come, underhandedly, just hours after the conclusion of negotiations. This conflict has now become another chapter in the Great Game between Russia and the West, fought by named (Georgian) and nameless (Ossetian) proxies. Such exploitation of human suffering in the service of a good guy-bad guy, us vs them, freedom vs authoritarianism re-heating of the Cold War narrative is cheap, and gut-wrenchingly callous.

Somewhat ironically, the right-populist British tabloid the Sun was one of the few to suggest the blunt truth behind at least some of the Western interest in the conflict: “Georgia is pro-Western and has troops in Iraq. The £2 billion Baku-Tbilisi-oil and gas pipeline passes through Georgia on its way to supplying the West”.

Of course, the US and European press were not alone in unquestioningly validating the jingoism of their countries’ leaders. At the same time as Russian “Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin said Sunday that Western media had failed to show the plight of Ossetians and what was left of their capital after it was almost razed by Georgian troops”, the Moscow Times’s Anatoly Medetsky reveals how journalists reporting about Russian violence in Georgia are prevented from going on air. Such was the fate of William Dunbar, a correspondent for Russia Today, whose reports from Gori were blatantly censored:

“The real news, the real facts of the matter, didn’t conform to what they were trying to report, and therefore, they wouldn’t let me report it, [said Dunbar].

“I felt that I had no choice but to resign,” he added.

For their part, Georgian authorities have taken Russian media off the air, and blocked access to any internet sites in the “.ru” domain.

As I write, Russian troops are securing Abkhazia and continuing their advance into Georgia proper; it is not clear how far they will go, how long this tragedy will trample the lives of Ossetian, Georgian, Abkhaz and Russian civilians. It is not clear how Saakashvili will pay for his egregious miscalculation that the West would come to his aid against his northern neighbour; how the Georgian nationalists from whom he drew so much support will punish him for the increasingly irrevocable loss of Georgian control over its breakaway regions; how Ossetians will retaliate for Georgian atrocities in Tskhinvali and the Georgian people ever forgive Russia for its fratricide in Gori.

It is left only to hope against hope that reason and love will, if not prevail, then at least dare to stand firm and tall and strong against this mindless horror; as did Georgia’s Nino Salukvadze and Russia’s Natalya Paderina - sports shooters of all people! - whose simple hug on the Olympic podium pierced, however naively, fleetingly, momemtarily, the fog of war with the possibility of redemption.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 11th, 2008 at 6:27 pm and is filed under Vladimir Putin, Press and Media, 'Near Abroad', Caucuses, War with Georgia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.