Complex historical and ethnic realities. It is impossible to carry out an effective evaluation of the drama in Georgia without taking account of a reality which is so complex that it cannot be said that right and wrong are confined to just one side. Historic events over the centuries and the mix of ethnicities in the territories in question rule out any a priori judgements. The Bureau of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, in which Russian and Georgian members of Parliament sit side-by-side, held a debate in Paris on 5 September on the recent conflict, and Lluis Maria de Puig, the president of the Assembly, summed up the results of this debate as follows: "I am very pleased with how the meeting went. It allowed us to note that the parliamentarians of both countries hold diametrically opposite views on the events of the month of August and the current situation in Georgia". Putting this observation down to nothing more than excessive nationalism on the part of both sides would be unfair and would mean renouncing our ability to understand.
Mikhaïl Gorbatchev, who, thanks to his recent duties, has a good overview of the situation, wrote: "the entire region is a patchwork of ethnic groups living side-by-side. The Ossetians are an Iranian-language population, who are immensely proud of their Scythian roots (...). The new independent states born of the collapse of the Soviet Union wish to consolidate their borders or revise them, against national religious minorities tempted to break away or by allegiance with a neighbouring state. Against this backdrop of fragility, everyone wishes to impose a historical legitimacy of their own sovereignty, demonstrate the ancientness of their roots and the superiority of their culture". I also owe Ms Nino Mikeladze the knowledge that a single Ossetia, extending along the two sides of the Caucasus, has never existed from a political or legal point of view, nor from a cultural and economic point of view. At the beginning, there was only that which is these days known as North Ossetia; its southern counterpart was created in 1921, and they are separated by the Caucasus mountain chain; the tunnel which unites them dates back only to the 1970s. The expansion of the population of Ossetian or Russian origin in South Ossetia is still more recent. In Abkhazia, the Russian-Georgian conflict has been going on for 15 years and had ended in the departure of 250,000 Georgians (even though they still represented the majority of the population in the 1980s).
The problem is that when the changes of population have occurred, it is impossible not to take account of this. Nobody would deny that Kosovo is the cradle of the Serbian civilisation; there are still monasteries and other vestiges there today to prove it. But what about the fact that 80% of the population, today, is of Albanian origin and Islamic faith? The same goes for the Turks in Cyprus, and everywhere else where substantial population displacement has taken place.
The challenge to the facts. In the current case of Georgia, even the way things happened is controversial. According to Jacques Sapir, a university professor, the Georgian army "used heavy artillery on Tskhinvali, a defenceless city with no military objectives, killing between 1000 and 2000 of its 15,000-20,000 inhabitants, and razing the historical centre to the ground within the first few minutes of the attack". According to the above-mentioned Ms Mikeladze, however, the initial Georgian attack killed no more than about 60 civilians in total.
In general, everybody today recognises that numbers of victims and acts of destruction are exaggerated on both sides, in order to increase the atrocities for which the other party is responsible. What, really, is the point of the investigation into who did what, which the EU hopes to carry out? Or the idea of Georgia bringing the Russians before the International Court in The Hague on a charge of ethnic cleansing?
Differences of assessment. The political assessments differ just as much. Here are a few random examples. According to the Belgian Senator Josy Dubié, the Ossetians, having been bombed by the Georgians, can no longer share a joint destiny with the "mother country". One might respond by asking why the same principle was not applicable to Chechnya. On the strategic level, the president of Estonia says that he is "concerned that a pro-Russian coalition is coming to light within the EU, which puts its financial interests above the fundamental values of Europe", to which Professor Sapir responded by pointing out that the EU, the United States and NATO "need Russia to manage three extremely important dossiers: Afghanistan, Iran and the Middle East"- not forgetting the "energy" dossier, so important that it can be considered decisive.
Conclusion: extreme stances and anathema are neither justified nor effective. It is only by taking account of the complex nature of the historical and cultural factors, and the real interests at stake, that it is possible to define, if not solutions, then at least compromises and reasonable attitudes.
(F.R./trans.fl)