South Ossetia Conflict Heats Up

In the peaceful, shaded yard of a church in central Tskhinvali, women prepare a huge bowl of plov – food for their menfolk when they return from their night-time defensive positions on the outskirts of the South Ossetian capital.

“Daytime is quiet, but at night it all starts up, it’s scary,” said a young woman who, like many people in Tskhinvali (called Tskhinval by the Ossetians) was unwilling to identify herself to foreign journalists. The Georgians “want this land, but they never owned it and they never will”, she said, and then refused to say any more.

Georgia’s long-frozen conflict in South Ossetia, a sparsely populated territory backing up against the south side of the Caucasus mountain range, is heating up. For the last few nights, there have been heavy exchanges of gunfire on the outskirts of Tskhinvali, with both sides accusing the other of using not only small arms, but also large 120-mm mortars and the cannons of armoured vehicles.

Reports of casualties are impossible to verify, but the trend appears to be towards more aggressive action, as large numbers of volunteers on both sides take to the field. On August 12, Georgian officials reported three of their men killed, while South Ossetia’s chief surgeon reported 15 Ossetians wounded.

“Until two days ago, it was only provocations,” said Colonel Alexander Kiknadze, commander of a Georgian battalion that is supposed to be keeping the peace alongside Russian and Ossetian battalions, said. “Yesterday and the day before, it was war.”

Tension has been rising in South Ossetia since June, after more than a decade of uneasy but stable peace that followed the 1990-92 conflict in which the region de facto seceded and then later unilaterally declared independence from Tbilisi.

But in mid-June, following his success in the rebel province of Ajaria, Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili’s government shut down the huge Ergneti market on the outskirts of Tskhinvali. The Georgians said the market was an economic black hole into which vast amounts of Russian contraband fuel, cigarettes, alcohol and wheat flour were pouring – robbing Georgia of revenues and propping up the breakaway region.

Today, the sprawling market is a ghost town of abandoned kiosks, huts, and row upon row of rusting petrol containers.

The Georgian government says the loss of Ergneti means the South Ossetian administration’s days are numbered. However, the closure has also hurt thousands of ordinary traders, and has reinforced pro-Russian sentiment and a siege mentality in the rebel province.

“They say they are on the side of peace, but they don’t allow anything to come in here,” said Boris Chochiev, South Ossetia’s minister for special affairs and one of its chief negotiatiors. “Russia has shown that it is our main guarantor today.”

The South Ossetian authorities make no secret of their ties with Russia – the vast majority of their citizens have taken up Russian passports – or of their desire for unification with the autonomous Russian province of North Ossetia, across the mountains.

“Our working language is Russian, our industry is Russian, our economy is tied to Russia of course… a whole generation has grown up that virtually does not know Georgian,” Murat Jioev, minister of foreign affairs for the unrecognised republic, said in an interview.

The Georgian government has complained bitterly about what it says is Moscow’s interference, and has alleged that Russian military aircraft have repeatedly crossed into Georgian airspace over South Ossetia.

When a car carrying a senior Russian parliamentarian, Andrei Kokoshin, came under fire in South Ossetia recently, he blamed “extremist forces in Tbilisi”. But the Georgians claimed the incident was staged by South Ossetians to whip up anti-Georgian feelings in Russia.

“They played some good theatrics and showed it on all the television channels,” said Kiknadze, the Georgian peacekeepers’ commander.

Exactly who is behind the night-time shooting remains unclear. The three 500-man peacekeeping battalions are the only forces authorised to be in the conflict zone. However, unknown numbers of armed men have taken up position on both sides, and there are now about nine unauthorised Ossetian military posts, and between 16 and 22 Georgian ones, according to various estimates.

Trust between the three battalions mandated to keep the peace is at rock bottom. The Ossetian authorities blame the Georgian battalion, which now includes the United States-trained elite of Tbilisi’s impoverished army, for the fighting. “This has never happened before in course of the last 12 years,” said Chochiev.

Tbilisi says that Ossetian troops are not only equipped, trained and led by officers from Russia, but that the Russian peacekeeping battalion has itself taken sides. “They clearly support the Ossetians,” said Kiknadze.

After three days of talks in Moscow, Georgian defence minister Giorgi Baramidze signed an agreement on August 11 to pull back all “unauthorised forces”, but he stressed that the withdrawal of Georgian troops was conditional on the Ossetians doing the same.

Both sides agree that such a move would do much to reduce tensions. But it may already be too late, given the reports of bloodshed.

Saakashvili, who has dedicated his presidency to restoring Georgia’s territorial integrity, says he has no desire for war, but insists progress has to be made on a political settlement.

The situations in South Ossetia and Abkhazia “are no longer frozen, but they are not like full- blown conflicts”, he told a group of journalists in Tbilisi. “Some people would like to take them into a war-like situation, and some into serious negotiations.”

Saakashvili said he was offering South Ossetia “ten times more autonomy” than it had before the war in the early Nineties. He promised compensation for victims of that war, and assistance for the tens of thousands of people who fled and have still not returned.

This, says Georgia’s radical reformist government, is the only way to restore control over South Ossetia – through hearts and minds, not war.

“Why would I be so crazy as to start a war when we have everything ahead?” asked Saakashvili.

Sebastian Smith is IWPR’s Caucasus trainer-editor.