Under fire from opponents who say he walked into a war Georgia could not possibly win, Saakashvili defended his actions of the night of August 7 during televised testimony before a bipartisan parliamentary commission probing the war.

Saakashvili remains popular among voters, but Georgia’s fractious opposition is using the five-day conflict and its consequences to mount a fresh challenge to the pro-Western president, who came to power with the 2003 “Rose Revolution.”

Saakashvili’s defense was aimed primarily at a domestic audience. Western states did condemn Russia’s intervention, but have not disguised their dissatisfaction with Georgia’s assault on the rebel region. NATO looks certain to again deny Tbilisi a roadmap to membership when alliance foreign ministers meet on Dec 2-3.

Saakashvili dismissed as “utter nonsense” testimony this week by Georgia’s ex-ambassador to Russia, Erosi Kitsmarishvili, who said Tbilisi had been the aggressor having mistakenly convinced itself it had the blessing of the United States.

“We acknowledge and confirm … that the Georgian government took the decision to undertake a military operation in order to offer resistance to a widescale Russian intervention, a widescale assault on a peaceful population,” Saakashvili said.

Defense Minister David Kezerashvili told the commission on Thursday that Georgia attacked the rebel capital Tskhinvali on Aug 7-8 because Russian forces were pouring across the border and it was a matter of time before they began attacking Georgian-populated villages.

But at the time, there was no public statement from the Georgian leadership that Russian forces were invading. The shelling of Tskhinvali after a ceasefire of several hours and the subsequent ground assault was justified as a response to rebel shelling of Georgian villages.

Saakashvili repeated the claim made later that Russia had already invaded and forced his hand, recalling “the most difficult choice of my life.” Russia says the claim is nonsense, and that it intervened in its ex-Soviet neighbor only to defend South Ossetian civilians.

“RED LINE”

“Our answer to the question whether we have undertaken military action is ‘Yes’,” he told the commission. “It was a difficult decision, but it was an inevitable one.”

“It’s the responsibility of any democratically elected leader to defend his country, borders and peaceful population,” he said. “I couldn’t believe they (Russia) would cross that red line, I couldn’t believe they would be first to take this step.”

The war that ensued piled pressure on already strained relations between the West and Russia and deepened concern over the security of the Caucasus as a transit route for oil and gas to Western markets, bypassing Russia.

There had been skirmishes for months in South Ossetia, a pro-Russian region which threw off Tbilisi’s rule in 1991-92.

Russia’s counter-strike to the Georgian assault of August 7 drove the Georgian army out. Moscow’s troops then pushed further into Georgia, saying they needed to prevent further Georgian attacks, but withdrew in October.

The West condemned Russia’s “disproportionate response,” but shied away from imposing sanctions on what for many European states is a vital energy supplier.

Moscow recognized South Ossetia and Georgia’s other rebel region, Abkhazia, as independent states.

Georgia says 228 Georgian civilians and 169 military personnel were killed, while tens of thousands of Georgian refugees have yet to return to their homes.

Reuters

Amnesty says all sides in the August conflict may have committed abuses. In its new report, Amnesty says Georgian and Russian forces and militia fighters in the breakaway South Ossetia region should be investigated for war crimes during the conflict.

Amnesty’s John Dalhuisen says there is strong evidence of human rights violations, noting concerns over “indiscriminate attacks by Georgian forces on entering Tskhinvali and then Russian forces in reply.

“Amnesty is also very concerned with the “looting, pillaging and destruction of civilian property essentially by South Ossetian forces and militia groups in aftermath of the conflict,” said Dalhuisen.

The war erupted when Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili launched a military operation against separatists in the breakaway province of South Ossetia to bring them under Tbilisi’s control.

Russia responded with overwhelming military force, pushing deep inside Georgia. Dalhuisen says an in-depth investigation needs to take place and recommends an international humanitarian fact-finding commission established under the Geneva convention that both Georgia and Russia agree to.

The New York-based group, Human Rights Watch agrees. It says Georgian and Russian forces used cluster bombs in the conflict and the group’s representative in Tbilisi, Giorgi Gogia, says those bombs that failed to explode have now become de-facto landmines.

“We have called for both sides to provide the strike data to the de-mining organizations to raise awareness and conduct education programs for the civilians that have gone back in the affected areas,” said Gogia. He says Human Rights Watch is also calling on both sides to sign the Cluster Bomb treaty in December.

Professor Sergei Arutiunov, a Caucasus expert at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, says abuses in South Ossetia must be exposed. But, he says, the army also needs the support of trained police forces in the breakaway region.

“Armies are not geared for police work, to maintain order,” he said. “Marauding and criminal activity happens even after a short war.” This “chaos must be rooted out.”

Though the hostilities have ended, human rights groups say there are more than 20,000 ethnic Georgians unable to return to their homes in South Ossetia – with no prospect of doing so in the near future.

VOA News

Pro-Moscow separatist forces had been shelling his hometown of Avnevi, an ethnic-Georgian village inside the breakaway region, pretty much nonstop since the beginning of August until Georgian troops entered the enclave around midnight on August 7-8.

“The war did not start on August 7 for us, it started on August 2,” Kapanadze, who now lives in a shelter for displaced persons in Tbilisi, told RFE/RL’s Georgian Service in a recent interview.

Dozens of eyewitness accounts like Kapanadze’s, collected by RFE/RL correspondents on the ground, contradict recent media reports — most prominently a November 7 article in “The New York Times” — suggesting that Georgia attacked the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, unprovoked on August 7.

Tbilisi has long claimed that in sending troops to South Ossetia, it was acting defensively against separatist and Russian aggression.

The eyewitness accounts are also consistent with a report, issued on August 5, by a tripartite monitoring group, which included Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) military observers and representatives of Russian peacekeeping forces in the region.

The report, signed by the commander of Russian peacekeepers in the region, General Marat Kulakhmetov, said there was evidence of attacks against several ethnic-Georgian villages in South Ossetia. The report also claims that South Ossetian separatists were using heavy weapons against the Georgian villages, which was prohibited by a 1992 cease-fire agreement.

Much recent media attention — including reports aired by RFE/RL’s Georgian Service as well as the November 7 “New York Times” article — has focused on Tskhinvali and accusations that Georgian forces began bombing the South Ossetian capital with indiscriminate force on the night of August 7-8.

Breaking An Uneasy Peace

Supported by Russia, South Ossetia fought a brutal war to secede from Georgia in the early 1990s after the breakup of the Soviet Union. A 1992 cease-fire ended the fighting and established a peacekeeping contingent comprising Russian, Georgian, and Ossetian forces. The agreement did not resolve the question of South Ossetia’s final status, and it remained formally part of Georgia but enjoyed de facto autonomy.

Prior to the renewed outbreak of armed conflict in August, ethnic Georgians made up just less than one-third of the population of South Ossetia. The region was a checkerboard-like patchwork of Georgian and Ossetian villages that coexisted side-by-side in an uneasy peace.

But that uneasy peace abruptly ended in the beginning of August, when Georgian and separatist-controlled villages in South Ossetia began exchanging gun, mortar, and grenade fire, with each side blaming the other for initiating hostilities.

“The most extensive shelling began on August 7, although our village had been attacked in previous days too,” Gocha Petriashvili, a resident of the ethnic-Georgian village of Nuli, told RFE/RL’s Georgian Service.

He added that the attacks began on August 2 when his neighbor’s home was hit with mortar fire and burned down. “It was a miracle that nobody was killed there. The parents somehow managed to get their 4-month-old baby down from the second floor to the yard,” he said, adding that he also witnessed a minivan carrying women and children come under machine-gun fire.

Petriashvili fled Nuli on August 10, and later learned that his home burned to the ground after being hit with mortar fire.

Another Nuli resident, Bela Chavchavadze, concurs with Petriashvili’s account that the shelling started on August 2 — when the home of a local police officer was bombed, causing it to burn to the ground — and intensified on August 6-7.

“On August 6, in the evening they were shooting and shelling. Around midnight it all stopped but resumed again in the early morning,” Chavchavadze says. “We were lucky to have left the village before the roads were blocked.”

And in the ethnic-Georgian village of Ergneti, which is in the Gori region outside of South Ossetia’s administrative borders in Georgia proper, residents also reported heavy shelling starting in the beginning of August. “Ergneti was bombed before the military confrontation started. In the first days of August there was extensive shelling of the village, many houses have been damaged. A man I know was wounded,” says local resident Temur Tatunashvili.

Fresh Allegations

The tripartite monitoring group also found evidence suggesting that Nuli, Eredvi, Zemo Nikozi, and Zemo Prisi — all ethnic-Georgian villages — had come under attack by separatist forces prior to the full-fledged outbreak of armed conflict on August 7-8.

“Trace of various calibration shells were found on local residential houses in Zemo Nikozi. Bullet holes were found in the roofs of private houses and other buildings of Zemo Nikozi in the vicinity of residential areas,” the report said.

“In the settlements of Nuli, Eredvi, and Zemo Prisi, observers found 82-millimeter fractions on private houses as a result of grenade-launcher attacks. Military observers from the Joint Control Commission witnessed shootings towards Sarabuki, a Georgian peacekeeping post, with 120-millimeter grenade launcher and one 100-millimeter mortar.”

In an article published on November 7, “The New York Times,” however, wrote that “newly available accounts” from military observers from the OSCE “question the long-standing Georgian assertion that it was acting defensively” when Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili ordered troops into South Ossetia just before midnight on August 7-8.

The monitors, including a Finnish major, a Belarusian airborne captain, and a Polish civilian, told diplomats at two confidential briefings that Georgia attacked the South Ossetian capital Tskhinvali on August 7 “with indiscriminate artillery and rocket fire.” The article also said the monitors “were unable to verify that ethnic-Georgian villages were under heavy bombardment that evening, calling into question one of Mr. Saakashvili’s main justifications for the attack.”

Georgian officials have challenged the account. Moscow, meanwhile, has embraced it and asked the OSCE to conduct a broader inquiry into the allegations.

Georgia has long called for an international investigation into the events leading up to the start of the war. EU foreign ministers have sanctioned such an investigation and chose Swiss diplomat Heidi Tagliavini, the former head of the UN Mission in Georgia, to head it.

Speaking at a press conference in Moscow on November 12 after meeting Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Finnish Foreign Minister Alexander Stubb, the current OSCE chairman in office, said he would comply with Russia’s request, but also appeared to cast doubt on some of the monitors’ allegations.

Stubb said the small contingent of monitors in Tskhinvali was not in a position to determine how the war started. “It’s not my job to make the judgment on who started the war, or how it actually started,” Stubb said. “The OSCE isn’t an intelligence service. Our instruments are, unfortunately, very limited.”

Unarmed Military Officers In A Couple Of Cars

“The New York Times” cited mostly anonymous OSCE officials in its November 7 story. One official it did quote by name, however, was Ryan Grist, a former British Army captain who was deputy head of the OSCE mission in Tbilisi when the war broke out. Grist has also been cited in numerous other media reports critical of Georgia.

OSCE officials in Tbilisi said Grist traveled to Tskhinvali days after Georgia sent troops into South Ossetia and began giving unauthorized interviews to Russian media that were critical of Georgia. Upon returning to Tbilisi, according to the officials, he was reprimanded, had a heated conversation with his superiors, and subsequently resigned from the organization.

Grist could not be reached for comment and the OSCE says it will not comment on personnel matters.

In an interview with RFE/RL’s Georgian Service, OSCE Deputy Spokeswoman Virginie Coulloudon said the organization’s monitors make “patrol reports” from the ground “on a daily basis.” The organization’s reports were distributed to all 56 member states.

“Another level of information is what some of our monitors…experienced during the night of the 7th to the 8th [of August],” Coulloudon said “They were in Tskhinvali. Three OSCE staff members were in the basement of the Tskhinvali office, and they did witness the shelling of Tskhinvali. However, the OSCE is not in a capacity to say who started the war and what happened before the night of [August] 7-8.”

Coulloudon added that the OSCE in South Ossetia consists of just “unarmed military officers in a couple of cars.”

Tbilisi has fed the confusion about the war’s origins. Shortly after Georgian troops entered South Ossetia, Georgian officials cited “restoring constitutional order” in the separatist region as the reason for using force.

Later, Georgia said Russian forces moved into South Ossetia first on August 7, and that Georgia had no choice but to send troops and try to head off the invasion.

Radio Free Europe

They left behind a nearly deserted village, whose remaining residents are afraid to come out onto the streets for fear of attracting the attention of Ossetian soldiers patrolling the area. Russian troops continued to withdraw from the main checkpoint at the western edge of Perevi, leaving Ossetians in charge of a tense population.

Darejan Bakradze, 50, removed most of her valuables from Perevi on Monday morning, but returned in the afternoon to look after her mother-in-law. Passing the checkpoint, she grew pale and shaky at the sight of Ossetian soldiers.

“I want the Russians to come back,” Bakradadze said. “They were perfect people.”

European monitors urged both sides to remain calm on a day marked by tension along the boundary with South Ossetia. Two Georgian policemen were killed outside the village of Dvani when a remote-controlled mine exploded near their car, according to Shota Utiashvili, a spokesman for the Georgian Interior Ministry. When a patrol arrived to investigate, a second mine exploded, wounding three more policemen, he said.

Ambassador Hansjörg Haber, head of the EU monitoring mission, called the attack “an unacceptable breach of the Sarkozy-Medvedev agreement.” He was referring to the peace deal brokered by the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and endorsed Sept. 8 by the Russian president, Dmitri Medvedev, after the brief war between Georgia and Russia over the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

“Today’s attack risks escalating the still-tense situation along the administrative boundary lines,” Haber said Monday. “We repeat our call on all sides to prevent further provocations.”

The South Ossetian interior minister, Valeri Valiyev, said his forces were not involved. “It is Georgian territory,” he said. “What happens there has nothing to do with us.”

Though no violence has occurred in Perevi, home to about 1,000 ethnic Georgians, it was the focus of angry rhetoric Monday from Tbilisi and Tskhinvali, the separatist capital. Both sides claim it is on their territory. The European Union said in a statement Saturday that it is “clearly” on the Georgian side of the line.

Ibragim Gaseyev, the South Ossetian deputy minister of defense, said the village has belonged to South Ossetia “for countless centuries,” and promised to “give an adequate answer to any provocative act by the Georgian side on the territory of our republic.”

President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia said his country would protect the village.

“We will do everything not to yield to the occupants’ provocations,” Saakashvili said Monday. “We must understand that Georgia began a hard and long fight for the liberation of its lands. And in this fight we must act together with our partners.”

Irina Gagloyeva, a spokesman for the South Ossetian government, said that Perevi was not controlled by Tskhinvali before the war, but that it had become necessary to protect it because Georgians “are trying to create tension here.” She said its residents were friendly to South Ossetia, and “have more than once applied for citizenship” in the enclave.

But Georgians in Perevi said they were frightened. The school has shut down, and most of the women and children have left. Alik Dzhokhadze, 24, said he and his friends were toasting the withdrawal of Russians when Ossetian soldiers entered the village, shooting in the air. Dzhokhadze said he had been hiding in his house for two days.

Lomauridze Zina, 48, had watched many of her neighbors leave the village and gathered for comfort with several families who remain. She said she did not want to leave for fear that her house would be robbed.

Violence has been reported from both sides in recent days. Last Thursday, the South Ossetian authorities reported that a villager, Oleg Gigolayev, was fatally shot by a sniper from the Georgian side of the line. The Georgian authorities denied any involvement.

International Herald Tribune

Ryan Grist, a former British Army captain, and Stephen Young, a former RAF wing commander, are said to have concluded that, before the Russian bombardment began, Georgian rockets and artillery were hitting civilian areas in the breakaway region of South Ossetia every 15 or 20 seconds.

Their accounts seem likely to undermine the American-backed claims of President Mikhail Saakashvili of Georgia that his little country was the innocent victim of Russian aggression and acted solely in self-defence.

During the war both Grist and Young were senior figures in the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). The organisation had deployed teams of unarmed monitors to try to reduce tension over South Ossetia, which had split from Georgia in a separatist struggle in the early 1990s with Russia’s support.

On the night war broke out, Grist was the senior OSCE official in Georgia. He was in charge of unarmed monitors who became trapped by the fighting. Based on their observations, Grist briefed European Union diplomats in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, with his assessment of the conflict.

Grist, who resigned from the OSCE shortly afterwards, has told The New York Times it was Georgia that launched the first military strikes against Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital.

“It was clear to me that the [Georgian] attack was completely indiscriminate and disproportionate to any, if indeed there had been any, provocation,” he said. “The attack was clearly, in my mind, an indiscriminate attack on the town, as a town.”

Last month Young gave a similar briefing to visiting military attachés, in which he reportedly supported the monitors’ assessment that there had been little or no shelling of Georgian villages on the night Saakashvili’s troops mounted an onslaught on Tskhinvali in which scores of civilians and Russian peacekeepers died.

“If there had been heavy shelling in areas that Georgia claimed were shelled, then our people would have heard it, and they didn’t,” Young reportedly said. “They heard only occasional small-arms fire.”

Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister who helped broker the ceasefire that ended the war and has been a fierce critic of the Russian invasion of Georgia, is tomorrow due to announce a commission of inquiry into the conflict at a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels.

The inquiry will be chaired by a Swiss expert as a mark of independence and will try to establish who was to blame for the conflict. European and OSCE sources say it is likely to seek evidence from the two former British officers.

The inquiry comes as the EU softens its hardline position towards Russia amid mounting European scepticism about Saakashvili’s judgment.

Europe is preparing to resume negotiations with Moscow this month on a new partnership and cooperation agreement, which it froze when Russia invaded Georgia, routed its army and recognised the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, another breakaway region.

Although Grist and Young know only part of the picture, their evidence appears to support Russia’s claim that the Georgian attack was well underway by the time their troops and armour crossed the border in a huge counter-strike.

Georgia attacked South Ossetia on the night of August 7-8. In the afternoon an OSCE patrol had seen Georgian artillery and Grad rocket launchers massing just outside the enclave. At 6pm the monitors were told of suspected Georgian shelling of a village.

Georgia declared a unilateral ceasefire. But at 11pm it announced that Georgian villages were being shelled and began a military operation to “restore constitutional order” in South Ossetia.

Soon afterwards the Georgian bombardment of Tskhinvali began. By 12.35am the OSCE monitors had recorded more than 100 rockets or shells exploding in Tskhinvali.

Russia sent in troops and armour, saying they were there to protect its peacekeepers and the civilian population. The invasion attracted worldwide condemnation and led to a deterioration in relations between Moscow and the West.

Many western leaders depicted Russia as an expansionist giant determined to crush its tiny neighbour. They rallied to Georgia’s defence amid calls for it to be rapidly admitted to Nato, Saakashvili’s most fervent wish.

The president argued that Russia had attacked Georgia because “we want to be free” and that his country was fighting a defensive war.

Critical to his argument was his claim that he had ordered the Georgian army to attack South Ossetia in self-defence after mobile telephone intercepts from the Russian border revealed that Russian army vehicles were entering Georgian territory through the Roki tunnel.

“We wanted to stop the Russian troops before they could reach Georgian villages,” Saakashvili said. “When our tanks moved toward Tskhinvali, the Russians bombed the city. They were the ones – not us – who reduced it to rubble.”

Russia counters that the war began at 11.30pm, when Saakashvili ordered an attack, well before any Russian combat troops and armour crossed the border through the tunnel.

HOW FIGHTING BROKE OUT

August 7, 3pm: OSCE monitors see build-up of Georgian artillery on roads to South Ossetia.

6.10pm: Russian peacekeepers inform OSCE of suspected Georgian artillery fire on Khetagurovo, a South Ossetian village.

7pm: Georgia declares a unilateral ceasefire.

11pm: Georgia announces that its villages are being shelled and launches attack in South Ossetia.

11.30pm: Georgian forces bombard Tskhinvali.

11.45pm: OSCE monitors report shells falling on Tskhinvali every 15-20 seconds.

August 8, 12.15am: Commander of Russian peacekeepers reports that his unit has taken casualties. Russia later announces that it has invaded Georgia to protect civilians and Russian peacekeepers.

Times Online