Reuters has produced a report in which they follow a man called Hammarberg (who is the Council of Europe Human Rights Commissioner whatever that may be!) around South Ossetia. They visited a village name of Khetagurova which is Ossetian surrounded by Georgian villages.
The report seems largely truthful and sticks to facts. This is not to be sneered at because Reuters has been found out to be creating fake photographs against the Ossetians and Russia. See
http://www.byzantinesacredart.com/blog/2008/08/deceiving_the_world_with_pictu.html
From this it would seem that the attack on South Ossetia by US and British Imperialist puppet Saakashvili was certainly a war crime. There is also an incident in which the Russians release two Georgian militia men who were involved in the attack and in doing so the Russians are in direct conflict with the Ossetians in this village, because the Georgians took 4 of their number prisoner, and they by that date were still prisoner. It must be remembered that over many years Russia had delayed recognizing the independence of Ossetia, until it was too late and the US puppet Saakashvili launched his genocidal attack.
Only one thing in this Reuters report, They refer to the Jewish Quarter as “so-called” Jewish Quarter. Why?
[Start quote here]
By Dmitry Solovyov
KHETAGUROVO, South Ossetia, Aug 24 (Reuters) – Georgian troops arrived Khetagurovo on Aug. 8 in a storm of steel and bullets, killing eight people and badly damaging the village of ethnic South Ossetians.
When they left two days later, harried by the Russian forces that crushed Tbilisi’s bid to restore control over its breakaway region, locals say their took four prisoners with them and forfeited any chance of reconciliation.
Passions were still running high when Thomas Hammarberg, a European human rights official, arrived in the village on Sunday to witness the release of two Georgian tank crew as a goodwill gesture by the Ossetian authorities.
“Why are you releasing these bloody Georgians if they don’t release my husband who is held hostage there?,” village book keeper Rita Bestayeva shouted at Hammarberg, the Council of Europe’s Human Rights Commissioner.
Russian soldiers held angry villagers at bay as the two Georgian servicemen — captured when Russian troops retook the village — were whisked away in a car in the direction of Georgia, a gesture Hammarberg said he would use his influence to push Tbilisi to reciprocate.
“I know that it is very difficult for people in this village to accept that those two prisoners have been released,” he told reporters during a break in the visit, which was closely chaperoned by the Russian military.
“I respect their reactions but I am convinced that this is a way to secure that those people missing from this village come back as soon as possible,” he said.
(The above is an amazing scene. It was the Georgian military of Saakashvili who attacked this tiny people. Then the Council of Europe turns up and the Russians have to hold the locals back because these two killers were released on the basis of this Hammerberg promise. We all know that Europe is totally pro Saakashvili…FQ)
What remains of Khetagurovo, set in the hills of South Ossetia amid orchards and vineyards, bears the marks of war and the buildings still standing are pockmarked with shrapnel and bullets.
WAR WOUNDS
The conflict has left a lasting legacy in the minds of those like pensioner Yuza Khasiyeva, who saw one neighbour lying in his courtyard killed by a shrapnel headwound and another elderly resident lying dead.
The village is surrounded by a ring of ethnic Georgian villages inside South Ossetia, but asked if the two communities could live together after the latest conflict, she snorted:
“Are you mad? It’s better to die than live with them.”
“My grandparents told me that in the 1920s they were already killing us, so what we see now is already a third wave of their terror against the Ossetians.”
Ossetians say they were a target of ethnic cleansing in the years of Georgia’s short-lived independence after the collapse of the Russian empire in 1917. They backed Russia’s Bolshevik rulers when they moved to retake Georgia in the early 1920s.
(The villagers remember well. These facts are passed down through the generations. Leon Trotsky alluded clearly to the genocidal nature of the Georgian ruling class and their links with Imperialism way back in the years following the Russian Revolution of 1917. Trotsky makes clear his reservation about Stalin but on the issue of the Georgian reactionary bourgeoisie there was no question at all in the mind of the great socialist revolutionary fighter.)
https://4international.wordpress.com/2008/08/23/between-red-and-white-by-leon-trotsky/
The region broke from central Georgian control in the early 1990s with the breakup of the Soviet Union, and book-keeper Bestayeva agreed reunification was now out of the question.
(This is not quite accurate. Both Ossetia and Georgia declared their independence at the same time…FQ)
“There can’t even be any talk of it. This is the third wave of genocide. Enough is enough.”
Hammarberg’s convoy drove through destroyed ethnic Georgian villages but did not stop in the largely deserted settlements.
(Yes, deserted because most of these Georgian Ossetians fled towards Georgia. That is surely the responsibility of Saakashvili. Can they ever return? I would say of course they can, but if they are hostile to Ossetian independence I would say never)
“What I can see here now is the result of the madness of war,” Hammarberg told reporters after surveying the damage to the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali earlier.
“What happened here, a couple of weeks ago, shall never be repeated because this is an insult to people’s human rights,” he said after being shown around the so-called Jewish Quarter, a section of the town damaged by Georgian shelling.
(Note above what I referred to earlier, the use of “so-called”…FQ)
In Khetagurovo, housewife Ofelia Dzhanyeva said she had lost her brother during the war in the early 1990s when South Ossetia threw off Georgian control, and after the latest conflict nothing would induce Ossetians to accept Tbilisi’s rule.
(Throwing off Georgian control, again not quite accurate, both were becoming independent at the same time, with the break up of the Soviet Union…FQ)
According to this Reurers report
Ofelia said. “In 1991 our children turned into refugees. Now they have grown up to defend their homeland.”
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/LO451657.htm <!– news ## for search indexer, do not remove –>
4international 