Ironed Curtain

After the Russo-Georgian War in August 2008, the European Union found itself in a difficult position. Moscow had not only invaded a neighbor for the first time since the Soviet assault on Afghanistan in 1979. In recognizing Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states, it had also broken the cardinal rule of post-cold war European security: that borders in Europe would never again be changed by force of arms. Yet Georgia, too, had clearly made mistakes, not the least in embroiling itself in a military conflict with Russia that Georgia's own allies had repeatedly warned against. Passions were high as both sides accused each other of aggression, atrocities, and other violations of international law. What to do?

In this bind, the E.U. opted for a classic political answer. It farmed out the task of assessing the war’s origins to an independent commission with an unwieldy name. The Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Conflict in Georgia (IIFFMCG)--headed by the soft-spoken but experienced Swiss diplomat Heidi Tagliavini, who has real-world experience running the U.N. mission in Georgia's breakaway province of Abkhazia--was allotted eight months to investigate. Last week, in Brussels, she and the commission issued their much anticipated report.

Reading the 43-page summary is a little bit like reading the medical file of someone suffering from a serious illness. The prose is dry, the language at times clinical. It might lull a reader to sleep if the topic itself was not so serious and potentially explosive.

The initial media coverage has focused on a single sentence in the report, which says that Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili essentially started the war by shelling Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, on the evening of August 7. At the same time, the sentence emphasizes that the incident was the culmination of a chain of events and provocations going back months, if not years. Russia jumped on the first element of that conclusion, claiming proof that it had been right all along. Georgia countered by emphasizing the second part, which it called proof that it had been provoked into war. And, in presenting her findings, Tagliavini went one step further than the report itself by saying that, in her eyes, the explanations provided by the Georgian side did not provide a sufficient legal foundation for Tbilisi’s actions on that fateful day.

That certainly gave Georgia a black eye. The Kremlin’s spin machine immediately swung into action to exploit the statement. (Actually, it swung into action even before the report was issued, giving rise to rumors that Moscow had an advance copy.) However, Prime Minister Putin and President Medvedev shouldn't be too eager for people to read the report closely, since the more closely one reads it, the worse it looks for Moscow.

That's because, in many ways, the commission’s findings explode Russia’s official narrative of the war as well. The report makes it clear that this was, first and foremost, a war fought between Georgia and Russia, rather than a conflict between Tbilisi and its unruly provinces. Moscow based its official casus belli on three arguments: that Georgian forces had tried to commit “genocide” against South Ossetians; that Georgians had attacked Russian “peacekeepers”; and that Russia had a right and obligation to come to the defense of Russian citizens in these breakaway regions. None of these arguments are confirmed in the report, and all of them are carefully dissected.  

The report dismisses Russian allegations of genocide as “neither founded in law nor substantiated by factual evidence.” It rejects Moscow’s claim to have undertaken a humanitarian intervention. It concludes that the distribution of passports to Abkhaz and South Ossetians in the years prior to the war--thus creating the Russian citizens that Moscow claimed it was defending--was illegal. It does acknowledge Russia's right to defend its so-called "peacekeepers" on the ground, but states that Russia’s military response “cannot be regarded as even remotely commensurate with the threat to Russian peacekeepers in South Ossetia.” And, perhaps most devastatingly for Moscow, the report concludes that neither Abkhazia nor South Ossetia had the right to secede from Georgia and that Moscow’s recognition of their independence ran contrary to international law. So much for the idea that it proved Moscow right.