South Ossetia: war and politics

Thomas de Waal, 10 August 2008

Subjects:

Georgia's blitzkrieg against one of its two breakaway territories, South Ossetia, is provoking a ferocious Russian response. This is a political as well as a military disaster, says Thomas de Waal - and the primary responsibility lies with Georgia's president, Mikheil Saakashvili.

About the author

Thomas de Waal is a senior associate for the Caucasus at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) in Washington. He is the author of The Caucasus: An Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2010). His earlier books include Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus (NYU Press, 1999) - with Carlotta Gall; and Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War (NYU Press, 2003)

The Caucasus is the kind of place where, when the guns start firing,
it's hard to stop them. That is the brutal reality of South Ossetia,
where a small conflict is beginning to spread exponentially.

Leave aside the geopolitics for the moment and have pity for the people who
will suffer most from this, the citizens - mostly ethnic Ossetians but
also Georgians - who have already died in their hundreds. It is a tiny
and vulnerable place, with no more than 75,000 inhabitants of both
nationalities mixed up in a patchwork of villages and one sleepy
provincial town in the foothills of the Caucasus.

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