What is Digg?Sponsored by American Express
The Perfect Gift for the Impossible-to-buy For view!
americanexpress.com - Quit guessing and help them get what's on their secret wishlist--with an American Express Gift Card.
2 Comments
- inactive, on 10/27/2008, -0/+5Two great backgrounders on the Georgia/Russia dustup
http://www.truthout.org/article/we-are-all-georgia ...
Unlike most of the armchair generals now posing as experts on the Caucasus, I have actually visited Tskhinvali, a sleepy provincial town in the shadow of the mountains that rise along Russia's southern border. I was there in March 1991, shortly after the city was occupied by Georgian militia units loyal to Zviad Gamsakhurdia, the first freely elected leader of Georgia in seven decades. One of Gamsakhurdia's first acts as Georgian president was to cancel the political autonomy that the Stalinist constitution had granted the republic's 90,000-strong Ossetian minority.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080901/kvh
Blood in the Caucasus
comment in "The Nation" by Katrina vanden Heuvel
"The past week's events in South Ossetia are bound to shock and pain anyone.... Nothing can justify this loss of life and destruction. It is a warning to all."
--Mikhail Gorbachev, Washington Post, August 12
Former Soviet President Gorbachev's condemnation of Georgia's assault on Tskhinvali on the night of August 7, which precipitated the larger Russia-Georgia conflict, reminds us that if we had heeded his vision of a truly post-cold war world, we might not today be confronting such dangerous geopolitical gamesmanship. It should also remind us, as a wobbly cease-fire is put in place, that the conflict has been flagrantly misreported in this country.
I am heartsick at the violence and brutalities on all sides. Georgian, South Ossetian and Russian friends have all suffered. Yet commentary in the US media, almost without exception, has turned a longstanding, complex separatist conflict into a casus belli for a new cold war with Russia, ignoring not only the historical and political reasons for South Ossetia's drive for independence from Georgia but also the responsibility of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili for the current crisis. So eager have commentators been to indict Vladimir Putin's Russia that they have overlooked Washington's contribution to the rising tensions. - HalleBurton, on 10/27/2008, -0/+1Unfortunately true, but what more can we expect from a country that is 36th in the world for press freedoms?
