The Crisis in the Caucasus

Friday, August 15, 2008

Mikhail Gorbachev blames Georgia for the war there and traces the roots of the tragedy to 1991 ["A Path to Peace in the Caucasus," op-ed, Aug. 12]. Actually the roots of the tragedy extend to 1921, when the Abkhaz and South Ossetian autonomous republics were set up by the Bolsheviks to punish the three-year-old democratic and Western-looking Georgian republic and to give Russia a ready excuse to invade whenever it wanted to do so.

Before the foreign media arrived during the present crisis, very little information was available about events in these areas, because the Russian leadership will not allow a sizable neutral force to be present. Georgia does not want to "retake" Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Georgia has consistently said that Russia may be a part of any international force, but Russia consistently says its troops must be the only force present.

The world didn't notice this until Aug. 9, but the shelling of Georgian villages in South Ossetia was all over Georgian news in the week before Russian troops entered. Last week, a Georgian minister went to Gori and Tskhinvali, begging to discuss a ceasefire with Yuri Popov, the head of the Russian peacekeepers. Popov refused even to speak with him.

MARK MULLEN

Chair

Transparency International Georgia

Tbilisi, Georgia

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Regarding Mikhail Gorbachev's Aug. 12 op-ed, "A Path to Peace in the Caucasus":

It is near-laughable to believe that "Russia has continued to recognize Georgia's territorial integrity." In respecting territorial integrity, there is an implicit co-tenet of respecting political integrity. This Russia has not done, especially after Georgia became more open about embracing the West.

The Russian response was a virtual repeat of the Prague Spring of 1968, when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia and stamped out its democracy movement. Although "Russia had to respond," Mr. Gorbachev did not say why. Russia has its own problems with regions clamoring for autonomy or independence. Chechnya comes to mind.

Furthermore, Mr. Gorbachev did not explain why a rocket attack on a regional capital, for whatever reason, merited the response of effectively cutting a country in half. Joseph Stalin would have been pleased. The rest of us are not.

JERRY E. SULLIVAN

Vienna

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While I agreed with most of what was said in the Aug. 12 editorial "The Invasion Continues," I was amazed and disappointed by the use of the word "unfamiliar" in the secondary headline -- "The West confronts an unfamiliar sight: a nation bent on conquest."

Even ignoring events that many would consider acts of conquest (Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, etc.) one need only look back 20 years to when Iraq attempted to take over Kuwait and remember that our recent history is littered with examples of military aggression. The 1950s and '60s were dominated by our invasion of North Korea and North Vietnam's invasion of the South.

And, of course, it has only been 70 years since Germany tried to take over its entire continent.

That we haven't seen any clear attempts at conquest so far this century is wonderful, but to put forth the notion that our collective memory goes back only a decade is extremely dangerous. The conflicts of the past century exist not only in history books but also in the minds and memories of the millions who lived through them. Perhaps it's too much to expect our newspapers to always provide a historical context, but at the very least they should never pretend that the past doesn't exist.

LIAM TOOHEY

Washington