Putin on their shoes
Did Georgia start a war on 7 August, as the media would have us believe? No, says Michael Totten in "The Truth About Russia in Georgia". Snippet: "The South Ossetian militia started it on August 6 when its fighters fired on Georgian peacekeepers and Georgian villages with weapons banned by the agreement hammered out between the two sides in 1994. At the same time, the Russian military sent its invasion force bearing down on Georgia from the north side of the Caucasus Mountains on the Russian side of the border through the Roki tunnel and into Georgia. This happened before Saakashvili sent additional troops to South Ossetia and allegedly started the war."
Totten spoke to regional expert, German native, and former European Commission official Patrick Worms, now a media advisor to the Georgian government. "You should always be careful with the version of events told by someone on government payroll even when the government is friendly as democratic as Georgia's," says Totten. "I was lucky, though, that another regional expert, author and academic Thomas Goltz, was present during Worms' briefing." A quote from Gotz on Russian strategy in Georgia:
"Don't forget, they sent in a lot of irregulars, Chechens, Cossacks, Ossetians, Ingush — basically thugs. Not normal Chechens or Ingush — thugs. Thugs out for a holiday. Many Western camera crews were robbed at gunpoint ten meters from Russian tanks while Russian commanders just stood there smoking their cigarettes while the irregulars...that happened to a Turkish TV crew. They're lucky to still be alive. Some of the Georgians were picked up by the irregulars. If they happened to be female, they got raped. If they happened to be male, they got shot immediately, sometimes tortured. Injured people we have in hospitals who managed to get out have had arms chopped off, eyes gouged out, and their tongues ripped out."
Michael Totten supplements his reportage with some marvellous photos of Georgain war art.
