GEORGIA AT WAR: WHAT I SAW
By Bernard-Henri Levy
Georgiandaily
Aug 20 2008
NY
The first thing that strikes me as soon as we are out of Tbilisi is
the strange absence of military force. I had read that the Georgian
army, defeated in Ossetia, then routed in Gori, had withdrawn to the
capital to defend it.
I reach the outskirts of the city, moving forty kilometers on the
highway that slices through the country from east to west. But I
see almost no trace of the army which has supposedly regrouped in
order to fiercely resist the Russian invasion. Here we see a police
station. A little farther on, a handful of soldiers, their uniforms
still too new. But no combat units. No anti-aircraft weaponry. Not
even the trenches and zigzagging fortifications which, in all the
besieged cities of the world, are set up to at least slightly impede
the enemy’s advance.
A dispatch received while we are driving announces that Russian tanks
are now approaching the capital. The information is relayed by various
radio stations and then finally denied, creating unspeakable chaos
and making the few cars which had ventured outside the city turn back
immediately. But the authorities, the powers that be, seem strangely
to have given up.
Is the Georgian army there, but hiding? Ready to intervene but also
invisible? Are we perhaps in the middle of one of those wars in which
the supreme ruse is to let yourself be seen as little as possible,
the way they did in the forgotten wars of Africa? Or has President
Saakashvili deliberately chosen non-combat as a way to force us,
the Europeans and Americans, to accept our responsibilities ("You
claim to be our friends? You have said a hundred times that with
our democratic institutions, our wish to become part of Europe,
our government composed of — unique in the annals of history – an
Anglo-Georgian Prime Minister, American-Georgian cabinet ministers,
an Israelo-Georgian Minister of Defense – is the first in its Western
class? Well, now is the time to step up and prove it."). I don’t
know. The fact is that the first significant military presence we run
into is a long Russian convoy, at least one hundred vehicles long,
headed in the direction of Tbilisi, casually waiting to get gas. Then,
forty kilometers outside the city, around Okami, we see a battalion,
as usual Russian, attached to a unit of armored vehicles whose role
is to stop journalists from going one direction and refugees from
going the other.
One of them, a peasant, wounded in the forehead, still dazed and
terrified, tells me the story of fleeing his village in Ossetia
on foot, three days ago. The Russians arrived, and in their wake,
Cossack and Ossetian gangs pillaged, raped and murdered. As they did
in Chechnya, they rounded up the young men and drove them away in
trucks, to unknown destinations. Fathers were killed in front of their
sons. Sons were killed in front of their fathers. In the basement of
a house which they blew up with propane cylinders they had collected,
they came upon a family and stripped them of everything they had tried
to hide and then forced the adults to kneel down and executed them with
a single shot to the head. The Russian officer in charge at the check
point listens to the story. But he doesn’t care. In any case he looks
like he has been drinking too much and he just doesn’t care. For him,
the war is over. No scrap of paper, a ceasefire, a five or six-point
agreement- will change his victory. And this pathetic refugee can
say whatever he wants.
II
As we approach Gori, the situation is different, the tension is
suddenly palpable. Georgian jeeps are sprawled in the ditches on the
sides of the road. Farther along is a burnt-out tank. Even farther
along is a more important check point which completely blocks the group
of journalists we have joined. And it is here that we are clearly told
that we are no longer welcome, "You are in Russian territory now,"
barks an officer puffed up with importance. "Only those with Russian
accreditation may go farther."
Fortunately a car with diplomatic flags comes up. It belongs to the
Estonian Ambassador, and is carrying the Ambassador and Alexander
Lomaia, the Secretary of Georgia’s National Security Council, who is
authorized to go behind the Russian lines to look for the wounded. He
agrees to take me with him, as well as the European deputy Marie-Anne
Isler-Beguin and Tara Bahrampour from the Washington Post. "I cannot
guarantee anyone’s safety, is that clear?" Lomaia asks. Yes. It is
clear. And we all pile into the Audi and head toward Gori.
After crossing through six new check points, one of which consists
of a tree trunk hoisted up and down by a winch commanded by a group
of paramilitaries, we arrive in Gori. We are not in the center of the
city. But from where Lomaia has dropped us, before taking off in the
Audi to collect his wounded, from this intersection dominated by an
enormous tank as big as a rolling bunker, we can see fires burning
everywhere. Rockets lighting up the sky at regular intervals, followed
by short detonations. The emptiness.
The slight odor of putrefaction and death. Most of all, the incessant
rumbling of armored vehicles. Almost every other car is an unmarked car
jammed with militia, recognizable because of their white armbands and
their headbands. Gori does not belong to the Ossetia which the Russians
claim they have come to "liberate." It is a Georgian town. And they
have burned it down, pillaged it, reduced it to a ghost town. Emptied.
"It’s logical," explains General Vyachislav Borisov, as we stand in
the stench and the night waiting for Lomaia to return. "We are here
because the Georgians are incompetent, because their administration
collapsed and the town was being looted. Look at this," showing me
on his cell phone photographs of weapons of Israeli origin, which
he emphasizes heavily, "Do you think we could leave all this lying
around without supervision? And let me tell you," he struts around,
striking a match to light a cigarette, startling the little blond
tank gunner who had fallen asleep in his turret, "We summoned the
Israeli Foreign Minister to Moscow.
And he was told that if he continues to supply arms to the
Georgians we would continue to supply Hezbollah and Hamas." We would
continue? What an admission! Two hours go by. Two hours of bragging
and threats. Sometimes a passing car would slow, but it would change
its mind after noticing the tank and speed off. Finally Lomaia came
back, bringing with him an old woman and the pregnant woman he had
pulled from hell, and asked us to take them back to Tbilisi.
III
President Saakashvili, accompanied by his counselor Daniel Kunnin,
listens to my story. We are in the Presidential residence of
Avlabari. It is two AM but the noria of his counselors is working
as it would during business hours. He is young. Very young. With a
youthfulness which can be seen in the impatience of his movements, the
intensity of his gaze, his abrupt laughter, even the way he guzzles
cans of Red Bull as if it were Coca-Cola. All of these people in
fact are very young. All these ministers and counselors were students
sponsored by various Soros-type foundations, whose studies at Yale,
Princeton and Chicago were interrupted by the Rose Revolution. He is
a francophile and speaks French. Keen on philosophy. A democrat. A
European. A liberal in both the American and European senses of the
word. Of all the great resistance fighters I have met in my life,
of all the Massouds and Izetbegovics I have had occasion to defend,
he is the one who is the most unfamiliar with war, its rites, its
emblems, its culture – but he is dealing with it.
"Let me make one thing clear," he interrupts me, with a sudden
gravity. "We cannot let them say that we started this war … It was
early August. My ministers were on vacation, as I was too, in Italy,
at a weight-loss spa, getting ready to go to Beijing. Then in the
Italian press I read, "War preparations are under way in Georgia." You
understand me. Here I was just hanging out in Italy and I read in
the paper that my own country is preparing for a war! Realizing
that something was wrong, I rushed back to Tbilisi. And what did my
intelligence services tell me?" He makes the face of someone who has
posed a difficult riddle and is waiting for you to find the answer,
"That the Russians at the exact moment they are showering the press
corps with this garbage are also emptying Shrinvali of its inhabitants,
they’re massing troops and troop transports, positioning fuel trucks
on Georgian soil, and finally, sending columns of tanks through the
Roky tunnel which separates the two Ossetias. Now, suppose you are the
leader of the country and you hear this, what do you do?" He gets up to
answer two cell phones which are ringing at the same time on his desk,
comes back, stretching out his long legs … "After the hundred and
fiftieth tank lines itself up facing your cities, you are forced to
admit that the war has begun, and despite the disproportion in the
forces opposing us, you no longer have a choice."
"With the agreement of your allies?" I asked. "With the members
of NATO who have more or less slammed the door in your face?" "The
real problem," he says, sidestepping, "is the stakes involved in this
war. Putin and Medvedev were looking for a pretext to invade. Why?" He
begins counting on his fingers, "Number one, we are a democracy and
incarnate an alternative to Putinism as an exit from communism. Two,
the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan [oil] pipeline goes through our country, such
that if we fall, if Moscow replaces me with an employee of Gazprom,
you, the Europeans, would be 100% dependent on the Russians for your
energy supply. "And number three," as he takes a peach from the fruit
basket which is brought to him by his assistant–"She’s Ossentian,
mind you!"–and then resumes, "Number three, look at the map. Russia
is an ally of Iran. Our Armenian neighbors are also not far from
Iran. Now imagine a pro-Russian government installed in Tbilisi. You
would have a geostrategic continuum stretching from Moscow to Tehran
which I seriously doubt would be doing business with the free world. I
hope NATO understands this."
IV
Friday morning. I, along with Raphaël Gluksmann, Gilles Hertzog and
Marie-Anne Isler-Beguin, the European deputy, decided to return to
Gori which, according to the ceasefire agreement written by French
President Nicolas Sarkozy and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, the
Russians would have begun evacuating, and where we are supposed to meet
with the Orthodox Patriarch of Tbilisi who is himself on his way to an
Ossetian village where hundreds of Georgian corpses have reportedly
been left for the dogs and pigs. But the Patriarch is nowhere to be
found. And the Russians have not evacuated Gori. And this time we are
blocked twenty kilometers short of Gori when a car is held up in front
of us by a squadron of irregulars, who, under the placid gaze of a
Russian officer, haul the journalists out of the car and take their
cameras, money, personal objects, and finally even their car. So it
was a false report, part of that habitual ballet of false reports at
which the artisans of Russian propaganda seem to be past masters. So
off we go toward Kaspi, halfway between Gori and Tbilisi, where the
interpreter for the deputy has family, and where the situation is in
theory calmer – but two other surprises await us there.
First, there is the destruction. Here too. But this time it is
destruction which has apparently targeted neither houses nor
people. What have they destroyed instead? The bridge. The train
station. The train tracks, which are already being repaired by a team
of logisticians who are being supervised by the head mechanic from
his room because of a severe hip wound. And the electronic command
system of the Heidelberg cement factory, built with German capital,
which was hit by a laser-guided missile. "There were 650 workers here,"
the factory director, Levan Baramatze, tells me. "Only 120 were able to
come in today. Our production machine is broken." In Poti, the Russians
sank the Georgian war ships. They even hit the BTC pipeline at three
different points. Here in Kaspi, they deliberately took out the vital
centers upon which the region and the country both depend. In other
words, targeted terrorism. The will to bring this country to its knees.
Then there is the second surprise, the tanks. I repeat, we are standing
at the outskirts of the capital. Condoleezza Rice is at this exact
moment giving her press conference. Yet out of the blue comes one of
those combats helicopters whose appearance always signals the worst,
flying at low altitude just above the treetops. And suddenly the few
people still in Kaspi find themselves in the street, first in their own
doorways, then jammed ten at a time into old Lada cars, screaming at
everyone and especially at our drivers that the Russians are coming
and we must get out. At first we don’t believe it. We figure it’s
like the false rumor we heard the day before yesterday. But no, the
tanks are there. Five of them. And a field engineering unit digging
trenches. The message is clear. With or without Condoleezza Rice,
the Russians have moved in. They move around Georgian lands as if
it were conquered terrain. This isn’t exactly like Prague in 1968,
it’s the 21st century version of the coup, slow, bit by bit, with
blows of humiliation, intimidation, panic.
V
This time the meeting is at four AM. Saakashvili has spent the end
of the day with Rice, the day before with Sarkozy. He is grateful to
both for their efforts, for the trouble they took and the friendship
they demonstrated, which no one can doubt – didn’t he call "Nicolas"
"tu"? And the Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain, "close
to Ms. Rice," – hasn’t he been calling three times a day since the
beginning of this crisis? But this time, I find he has a melancholy
air unlike that first night. Maybe it’s fatigue, so many sleepless
nights, the continuing setbacks, the grumbling which he can feel
rising in the country and which we, alas, must to confirm: "What
if Misha is incapable of protecting us? And if our ebullient young
President only attracts more of the same? What if in order to survive
we will have to accept the wishes of Putin and his puppet?" All of
that must figure in the melancholy of the President. Plus something
else on top of it, something cloudier and that applies to how to say,
his friends’ strange attitude.
For example, the ceasefire agreement which his friend Sarkozy brought
and which had been written by four hands in Moscow with Medvedev. He
recalls the French President, here in this same office, impatient
for him to sign it, raising his voice, almost yelling, "You have no
other choice, Misha. Be realistic, you don’t have a choice. When the
Russians come to overthrow you, not one of your friends will lift
a finger to save you." And finally what a strange reaction when he,
Misha Saakashvili, got them to call Medvedev but Medvedev sent word
that he was asleep – it was only nine o’clock, but apparently he was
already asleep, and would be unreachable until the following morning
at 9 AM – here the French President got antsy again; his French yet
again didn’t want to wait–in a rush to go home? too sure that signing
was what mattered, regardless of what was being signed? This is not
how you negotiate, thinks Misha. This is also not how you act with
your friends.
I have seen the document. I have seen the written annotations by the
two Presidents, the Georgian and the French. I saw the second document,
again signed by Sarkozy and given to Condoleeza Rice in Bregancon,
for her to give to Saakashvili. And finally I saw the memorandum of
remarks, written during the evening by the Georgians, a vital piece
in their eyes. They managed to cross out – and this is by no means
negligible – all allusions to the future "status" of Ossetia. They
also got it to be specified – again, not a small detail – that the
"reasonable perimeter" in which the Russian troups would be authorized
to patrol to protect the security of the Russian-speaking population of
Georgia be a perimeter of a "few kilometers." The territorial integrity
of Georgia, however, is mentioned nowhere in either document. As for
the argument of legitimate aid for the Russian-speaking people – we
tremble to think what could happen if we consider the Russian-speakers
in the Ukraine, the Baltic countries or in Poland, who may one day
decide that they too have been threatened by a "genocidal" will.
The last word will belong to the American Richard Holbrooke, a ranking
diplomat close to Barack Obama whom I meet in the bar of our hotel
at the tail end of the night: "There is floating in this affair a bad
smell of appeasement." He is right. Either we are capable of raising
our voice and saying STOP to Putin in Georgia. Or the man who went,
in his own words, "down into the toilets" to kill the civilians in
Chechnya will feel he has the right to do the same thing to any one
of his neighbors.
Is this how we will build Europe, peace and the world of tomorrow?
–Boundary_(ID_v/vINvOha0gOBYBmJ8gRBg)- –