The Guns of August (2)
Times: 'Putin has given us an order that everyone must leave or be shot'
“The soldiers told us they had an order from Putin - leave or be killed.” Manana Dioshvili showed no emotion as she described how Russian troops forced her to flee her home. Her former neighbours nodded in agreement, huddled together in a kindergarten whose windows had been blown out by a Russian bomb.
“That's how they explained themselves to us,” she recalled of the moment they fled the ethnic Georgian village of Kurta, near the capital of South Ossetia, Tskhinvali.
“They said, ‘Putin has given us an order that everyone must be either shot or forced to leave'. They told us we should ask the Americans for help now because they would kill us if we stayed.”
Vardo Babutidze, 79, was not lucky enough to be visited by Russian soldiers. Her husband Georgi, 85, was shot twice through the chest by an Ossetian paramilitary who came to their house...
While Russian apologists (from the "paleocon" far-right who never met a fascist, white Christian nation they didn't like, to the "anti-war" far-left who sympathize with their communist allies of the former Soviet Union) try to justify a resurgent Russia's imperial aggression, pundits point fingers at each other, and Obama body-surfs while occasionally muttering the magical words "United Nations", South Ossetia is being ethnically cleansed of Georgians. Tens of thousands of Georgians are fleeing South Ossetia to Georgia, only there aren't as many cameras there to film them as there were in Kosovo to film the fleeing Albanians. We expect this sort of thing from tin can dictators and other despots. But when one of the world's nuclear-superpowers starts practicing ethnic cleansing, everyone should be concerned. Fast.
Things are not much better in Georgia proper.
Six Russian checkpoints have been set up on the road from Tbilisi to Gori, starting at the village of Igoeti, the closest to the capital that occupying troops have been since the conflict started on August 7. Troops searched the few cars that were allowed on to the road by Georgian police, who blocked the highway three miles away and fumed at the latest indignity heaped upon them by the Russians.
The heavy military presence all along the route offered no indication that Russian forces were preparing to comply with President Medvedev's promise by withdrawing today.
From the Telegraph:
Trenches have been dug and tanks, camouflaged with tree branches, are scattered through fields and in forests ever closer to the Georgian capital Tbilisi.
In the town of Gori, under occupation for a fifth day, residents are cut off from the outside world and running short of food. Orthodox priests handed out a loaf of bread to each of the few remaining residents in the eerily deserted town.
[...] Justified by Russian claims of atrocities committed by Georgia in the provocative advance through breakaway South Ossetia that provoked the conflict, the reprisals in Gori have been swift and brutal.
Guja Chumburidze, an unemployed 26-year-old resident, was one of those who fell victim to the wrath of rampaging South Ossetian irregulars, who were able to enter the town as their Russian allies advanced into undisputed Georgian territory.
With his two-month-old son and his ageing mother Iamze, Guja cowered in his home on the outskirts of Gori, listening to the sounds of breaking glass and bursts of gunfire as the irregulars embarked on drunken looting sprees.
Then everything went quiet. Refusing to listen to the pleas of his mother, Guja ventured outside to see if it was safe to look for food.
Within seconds, he was stopped by a gang of looters. They had seen him, they said, on the streets of Tskhinvali, the Ossetian capital. He was a war criminal and a looter and there was only one punishment for looters and war criminals.
"They beat him until he fell to the ground," said Iamze, who had rushed onto the street to plead for her son's life. "They shot him in the back of the head."
Last week, until orders came from Moscow to rein them in, the Russian troops occupying Georgian territory either did little to stop the irregulars from looting or committing atrocities or actively encouraged them.
From the beginning of hostilities, officials in Moscow were quick to declare that "genocide" was taking place and that up to 2,000 people had been killed in attacks deliberately aimed at Tskhinvali's civilian population.
Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, went on television to claim that Georgian tanks were crushing children and Georgian soldiers were beheading civilians.
Yet the first independent human rights activists attempting to calculate the civilian death toll have so far only been able to confirm the deaths of 44 people according to records from Tskhinvali's only hospital.
According to Human Rights Watch, the respected New York-based body, the Kremlin's deliberate exaggeration of the civilian death toll was inevitably contributing to the scale of reprisals against Georgians.
Asked whether he had personally seen any children crushed by Georgian tanks, one fighter, Sulim replied: "No, but I heard Putin say it so it must be true."
Russian propaganda has been so convincing that not even the few independent media outlets that normally criticise the Kremlin in Russia have spoken out against the Georgia war.
Instead, many Russians believe that the West has rushed to support Georgia, despite the fact that President Mikheil Saakashvili is, in their eyes, guilty of genocide.
Sulim and his fellow fighters are convinced that Ukrainians, Estonians and even Chinese and westerners were fighting against them in South Ossetia. They claimed that dents in the front of their tank were caused by a bomb dropped from an American jet.
Believing that the world is against them but that right is on their side, the Russian people are convinced that, ceasefire or no ceasefire, their army must stay in Georgia for as long as is necessary.
A Russian naval blockade is being set up off the coast of Georgia, in the Black Sea. Russia has moved SS-21 air-to-ground missiles into northern Georgia, where they can strike the Georgian capital of Tiblisi. We have about 1,000 Marines and other units at the Vaziani airbase southeast of Tbilisi, where they have been training Georgian's military in the years prior to this Russian invasion (I know someone from my hometown who spent 6 months in Georgia with the Marines doing just that). It hasn't been reported in the mainstream media yet, but the U.S. Navy has been tasked by their Commander in Chief to send capital ships into the Black Sea.
Welcome to 1962.
Put away the "color terror alert level" chart for a moment and dust off the old "DEFCON" level chart.
And to quote Sammuel L. Jackson in Jurassic Park, "everyone hold onto your butts."
“The soldiers told us they had an order from Putin - leave or be killed.” Manana Dioshvili showed no emotion as she described how Russian troops forced her to flee her home. Her former neighbours nodded in agreement, huddled together in a kindergarten whose windows had been blown out by a Russian bomb.
“That's how they explained themselves to us,” she recalled of the moment they fled the ethnic Georgian village of Kurta, near the capital of South Ossetia, Tskhinvali.
“They said, ‘Putin has given us an order that everyone must be either shot or forced to leave'. They told us we should ask the Americans for help now because they would kill us if we stayed.”
Vardo Babutidze, 79, was not lucky enough to be visited by Russian soldiers. Her husband Georgi, 85, was shot twice through the chest by an Ossetian paramilitary who came to their house...
While Russian apologists (from the "paleocon" far-right who never met a fascist, white Christian nation they didn't like, to the "anti-war" far-left who sympathize with their communist allies of the former Soviet Union) try to justify a resurgent Russia's imperial aggression, pundits point fingers at each other, and Obama body-surfs while occasionally muttering the magical words "United Nations", South Ossetia is being ethnically cleansed of Georgians. Tens of thousands of Georgians are fleeing South Ossetia to Georgia, only there aren't as many cameras there to film them as there were in Kosovo to film the fleeing Albanians. We expect this sort of thing from tin can dictators and other despots. But when one of the world's nuclear-superpowers starts practicing ethnic cleansing, everyone should be concerned. Fast.
Things are not much better in Georgia proper.
Six Russian checkpoints have been set up on the road from Tbilisi to Gori, starting at the village of Igoeti, the closest to the capital that occupying troops have been since the conflict started on August 7. Troops searched the few cars that were allowed on to the road by Georgian police, who blocked the highway three miles away and fumed at the latest indignity heaped upon them by the Russians.
The heavy military presence all along the route offered no indication that Russian forces were preparing to comply with President Medvedev's promise by withdrawing today.
From the Telegraph:
Trenches have been dug and tanks, camouflaged with tree branches, are scattered through fields and in forests ever closer to the Georgian capital Tbilisi.
In the town of Gori, under occupation for a fifth day, residents are cut off from the outside world and running short of food. Orthodox priests handed out a loaf of bread to each of the few remaining residents in the eerily deserted town.
[...] Justified by Russian claims of atrocities committed by Georgia in the provocative advance through breakaway South Ossetia that provoked the conflict, the reprisals in Gori have been swift and brutal.
Guja Chumburidze, an unemployed 26-year-old resident, was one of those who fell victim to the wrath of rampaging South Ossetian irregulars, who were able to enter the town as their Russian allies advanced into undisputed Georgian territory.
With his two-month-old son and his ageing mother Iamze, Guja cowered in his home on the outskirts of Gori, listening to the sounds of breaking glass and bursts of gunfire as the irregulars embarked on drunken looting sprees.
Then everything went quiet. Refusing to listen to the pleas of his mother, Guja ventured outside to see if it was safe to look for food.
Within seconds, he was stopped by a gang of looters. They had seen him, they said, on the streets of Tskhinvali, the Ossetian capital. He was a war criminal and a looter and there was only one punishment for looters and war criminals.
"They beat him until he fell to the ground," said Iamze, who had rushed onto the street to plead for her son's life. "They shot him in the back of the head."
Last week, until orders came from Moscow to rein them in, the Russian troops occupying Georgian territory either did little to stop the irregulars from looting or committing atrocities or actively encouraged them.
From the beginning of hostilities, officials in Moscow were quick to declare that "genocide" was taking place and that up to 2,000 people had been killed in attacks deliberately aimed at Tskhinvali's civilian population.
Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, went on television to claim that Georgian tanks were crushing children and Georgian soldiers were beheading civilians.
Yet the first independent human rights activists attempting to calculate the civilian death toll have so far only been able to confirm the deaths of 44 people according to records from Tskhinvali's only hospital.
According to Human Rights Watch, the respected New York-based body, the Kremlin's deliberate exaggeration of the civilian death toll was inevitably contributing to the scale of reprisals against Georgians.
Asked whether he had personally seen any children crushed by Georgian tanks, one fighter, Sulim replied: "No, but I heard Putin say it so it must be true."
Russian propaganda has been so convincing that not even the few independent media outlets that normally criticise the Kremlin in Russia have spoken out against the Georgia war.
Instead, many Russians believe that the West has rushed to support Georgia, despite the fact that President Mikheil Saakashvili is, in their eyes, guilty of genocide.
Sulim and his fellow fighters are convinced that Ukrainians, Estonians and even Chinese and westerners were fighting against them in South Ossetia. They claimed that dents in the front of their tank were caused by a bomb dropped from an American jet.
Believing that the world is against them but that right is on their side, the Russian people are convinced that, ceasefire or no ceasefire, their army must stay in Georgia for as long as is necessary.
A Russian naval blockade is being set up off the coast of Georgia, in the Black Sea. Russia has moved SS-21 air-to-ground missiles into northern Georgia, where they can strike the Georgian capital of Tiblisi. We have about 1,000 Marines and other units at the Vaziani airbase southeast of Tbilisi, where they have been training Georgian's military in the years prior to this Russian invasion (I know someone from my hometown who spent 6 months in Georgia with the Marines doing just that). It hasn't been reported in the mainstream media yet, but the U.S. Navy has been tasked by their Commander in Chief to send capital ships into the Black Sea.
Welcome to 1962.
Put away the "color terror alert level" chart for a moment and dust off the old "DEFCON" level chart.
And to quote Sammuel L. Jackson in Jurassic Park, "everyone hold onto your butts."