In an age when media coverage is such a significant dimension of armed conflict, the question of who’s cast as the goodie and who’s the baddie is not a small one. So who’s winning the narrative high ground over South Ossetia?
Until the fighting began, the answer – in western Europe and the US, at least – would clearly have been Georgia. Look at the regular stories over the past few months of Russian sabre-rattling towards Georgia, including YouTube footage that seems to show Russian fighters downing a Georgian UAV.
Those stories dovetailed perfectly with a growing mood of suspicion towards Russia on many fronts; as Jules’s post on Friday observed, the image of Russian tanks rolling in to South Ossetia immediately prompted “dark memories of Afghanistan, Prague, Berlin”.
But a couple of pieces of commentary over the weekend suggest a growing backlash against Mikheil Saakashvili among the centre left European commentariat. In Saturday’s Guardian, Mark Almond tersely dismisses the idea of “plucky little Georgia” standing up to the Russian leviathan: “the cold war reading won’t wash”, he says. Instead, he argues, the conflict in South Ossetia
…has more in common with the Falklands war of 1982 than it does with a cold war crisis. When the Argentine junta was basking in public approval for its bloodless recovery of Las Malvinas, Henry Kissinger anticipated Britain’s widely unexpected military response with the comment: “No great power retreats for ever.” Maybe today Russia has stopped the long retreat to Moscow which started under Gorbachev …
Anyone familiar with the Caucasus knows that the state bleating about its victim status at the hands of a bigger neighbour can be just as nasty to its smaller subjects. Small nationalisms are rarely sweet-natured …
Thomas de Waal, writing in today’s Observer, agrees. While Russia is behaving badly, he says, the same’s true of Georgia too:
Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili seems to care less about [South Ossetians] than about asserting that they live in Georgian territory. Otherwise he would not on the night of 7-8 August have launched a massive artillery assault on the town of Tskhinvali, which has no purely military targets and whose residents, the Georgians say, lest we forget, are their own citizens. This is a blatant breach of international humanitarian law …
Saakashvili is a famously volatile risk-taker, veering between warmonger and peacemaker, democrat and autocrat. On several occasions international officials have pulled him back from the brink. On a visit to Washington in 2004, he received a tongue-lashing from then Secretary of State Colin Powell who told him to act with restraint. Two months ago, he could have triggered a war with his other breakaway province of Abkhazia by calling for the expulsion of Russian peacekeepers from there, but European diplomats persuaded him to step back. This time he has yielded to provocation and stepped over the precipice.
The provocation is real, but the Georgian President is rash to believe this is a war he can win or that the West wants it. Both George Bush and John McCain have visited Georgia, made glowing speeches praising Saakashvili and were rewarded with the Order of St George. But Bush, at least in public, is now bound to be cautious, calling for a ceasefire.
The reaction in much of Europe will be much less forgiving. Even before this crisis, a number of governments, notably France and Germany, were reporting ‘Georgia fatigue’. Though they broadly wished the Saakashvili government well, they did not buy the line that he was a model democrat – the sight last November of his riot police tear-gassing protesters in Tbilisi and smashing up an opposition TV station dispelled that illusion. And they have a long agenda of issues with Russia, which they regard as more important than the post-Soviet quarrel between Moscow and Tbilisi. Paris and Berlin will now say they were right to urge caution on Georgia’s Nato ambitions at the Bucharest Nato summit.
