Posted on March 5, 2010 - by Venik

Georgia’s olive branch, Russia’s call | Giorgi Badridze

It is a delusion to think that anyone other than the Kremlin calls the shots in South Ossetia and Abkhazia

I was deeply frustrated to read George Hewitt’s article in the Guardian on Georgia’s efforts to mend fences with the occupied territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

It is extraordinary that Hewitt hardly mentions Russia: the country with thousands of troops stationed in both territories; that is forcing the remaining inhabitants to take Russian citizenship and which has systematically ejected more than 350,000 Georgians, the largest ethnic group in Abkhazia, and other nationalities in a brutal ethnic cleansing campaign.

If you only listen to the views of those not thrown out of a territory, a tiny minority in this case, surely it legitimises ethnic cleansing? What about the opinions of displaced people stuck in camps in Georgia? It reminds me of the Sudetenland in the 1930s when Germany occupied territory after invading Czechoslovakia, and then tore it apart and annexed it.

We all know the solution – that we must live together in peace. The challenge is how to get there. President Mikheil Saakashvili is determined to win over the hearts and minds of those remaining in both territories, but equally determined to allow those ethnically cleansed to return to their homes.

Georgia has offered the olive branch. I do hope it will be accepted, but it is wishful thinking to believe this decision will be made in South Ossetia or Abkhazia. It is the Kremlin that calls the shots in both territories and to believe otherwise is either naivety or a delusion.

As for Hewitt’s attempt to bring in Stalin and portray him as a Georgian nationalist, I think it is pathetic and at terrible odds with the historic evidence: recent studies show that Stalin’s Veliko-Russian chauvinist policies make him one of Russia’s most popular leaders ever.

I am sure Hewitt wishes the best for his relatives in Abkhazia. But the sad thing is that, in his euphoria about imaginary independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, he refuses to see that those two depopulated territories have in fact been made parts of North Caucasus, Russia’s lawless war zone, where problems of massive unemployment, rampant corruption and absence of basic human rights are enormous even by Russian standards.

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