A New Indictment of Georgia

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Tim Whewell's Newsnight report on Georgian War Crimes . In a further report Whewell backs up his account of Georgian atrocities in South Ossetia, that provoked the invasion by Russian troops, with evidence from the OSCE observers in Ossetia.

One of the top OSCE officers in South Ossetia, a former British Army officer, told how the OSCE base itself had 40-50 shells land around it, and it was, he said, nowhere near anything that could have been described as a military target. He told how they had been warning the OSCE that something was brewing for several weeks, because the Georgians had been stepping up their military attacks. 

Only a couple of weeks before, the Georgians had fired several mortars into the town, but nothing had been done to put pressure on the Georgians to prevent such an attack. The reason appeared to be, firstly, a feeling that Russia would not respond, and secondly that, if it did, the West could represent it as the bogeyman.

Of course, that is what the West has done. It is difficult not to see this alongside the West's involvement in Kosovo, its promotion of sympathetic regimes in Georgia in the Ukraine, its provocative siting of weapons systems on the Russian border - remember how the US responded to Soviet missiles in Cuba! - its construction of a ring of steel with military bases in Iraq, and throughout Central Asia, where it is in league with all kinds of nasty dictators, as part of a strategic drive for strategic hegemony, and control of the world's most important resources when the time comes.

As I wrote at the time, that doesn't justify the Russian response, and socialists can have no more sympathy, in this, for the Russian Stalinists than the Western imperialists. Only workers - the people who always are the losers in any war - can provide a lasting and progressive solution to such conflicts, which ultimately come down to the need of capitalism to promote inequality and division.

But, the tragedy, in Ossetia, as much as in Kosovo, or in Tibet, or anywhere else where workers are led down the route of nationalism rather than proletarian internationalism, is that the very unity of workers across borders needed to provide such a solution has been terribly set back, as the atrocities committed, after the Georgians were repulsed, by Ossetians against Georgians in their midst demonstrate. Once again the main essential reason for that is the absence of Workers' Parties based on the principles of Proletarian Internationalism that could have been forging the necessary unity between Georgian, Russian and Ossetian workers to have prevented this calamity. The sectarian stance of Marxists over the last 100 years in failing to build such parties due to their obsession with building their own tiny sects bears the responsibility for that failure.