Latest on Poti incursion by Russian forces

“OTI, Georgia (AP) — Russian soldiers took about 20 Georgians in military uniform prisoner at a key Black Sea port in western Georgia on Tuesday, blindfolding them and holding them at gunpoint, and commandeered American Humvees awaiting shipment back to the United States.

The move came as a small column of Russian tanks and armored vehicles left the strategic city of Gori in the first sign of a Russian pullback of troops from Georgia after a cease-fire intended to end fighting that reignited Cold War tensions.

It was the latest example of Russia still demonstrating its military prowess, leaving Georgians to wonder if Russia planned an extended military occupation or was still inflicting punishment before adhering to a promised troop withdrawal. In Poti, Russian forces blocked access to the city’s naval and commercial ports on Tuesday morning and towed the missile boat Dioskuria, one of the navy’s most sophisticated vessels, out of sight of observers. A loud explosion was heard minutes later. Georgian Interior Ministry spokesman Shote Utiashvili said the Russian military blew up the Dioskuria. Several hours later, an Associated Press photographer saw Russian trucks and armored personnel carriers leaving the port with about 20 blindfolded and handcuffed men riding on them. Poti Mayor Vano Taginadze said the Russians seized 22 military and police troops because the Georgians refused to let Russian armored vehicles enter the port. The Georgians were taken to the nearby Senaki military base, now controlled by Russia. There were conflicting reports from Georgian officials late Tuesday on whether the men were freed, or some were still detained, or all were to be released Wednesday. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said officials were looking into the reported theft of the Humvees.”

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2008-08-19-Russia-pull-out_N.htm

Just Plain Odd

Knights Templar ‘Heirs’ Sue Pope For Billions
All Things Considered, August 17, 2008 · A group of people claiming to be the heirs of the legendary Knights Templar are suing Pope Benedict XVI, seeking more than $150 billion for assets seized by the Catholic Church seven centuries ago.
They also want to restore the order’s good name. Founded in 1119, the Knights Templar was a secretive order of Christian warriors who protected pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem during the Crusades. They fell out of favor years later, and members were accused of denying Christ, worshipping the devil and practicing sodomy. Many Templars were tortured and burned at the stake.
In 1307, Pope Clement V accused the order of heresy and officially dissolved it.
Fiona Govan, who wrote about the lawsuit for London’s Daily Telegraph, tells host Andrea Seabrook the order is believed to have gone underground and continued to practice, but that there is no firm, historical evidence to support it.
Last fall, the Vatican published secret documents about the trial of the Templars in a book called Processus Contra Templarios, Latin for “Trial Against the Templars.” The volume included a parchment apparently showing that, contrary to historic belief, Clement had absolved the order of heresy.
Now, a group called the Association of the Sovereign Order of the Temple of Christ has filed suit in a Spanish court, asking for an apology from the pope and recognition that land and property worth about $150 billion today was seized from the Templars.
The Vatican will never reimburse the group, Govan says, because its members cannot prove that they are descendants of the Knights Templar.
She calls the claim “ludicrous” and says Spanish papers have suggested the issue is something for psychiatrists to decide rather than historians.

"Citizenship no Justification for Military action"

 

“The Russian offensive against and in Georgia is an act of aggression that is incompatible with international law and fundamental principles of security and cooperation in Europe,” says Minister for Foreign Affairs Carl Bildt in a statement on Saturday.

“We – and Russia – will have to live with the consequences of Russia’s use of force for a long time to come.

“The justification given by Russia is that it is protecting Russian nationals, but the obligation to protect people – irrespective of their nationality – lies with the state in which those individuals are located. No state has a right to intervene militarily in the territory of another state simply because there are individuals there with a passport issued by that state or who are nationals of that state.

“Attempts to apply such a doctrine have plunged Europe into war in the past – and that is why it is so important that this doctrine is emphatically dismissed. The same doctrine can be equally dangerous in other situations.

“We did not accept military intervention by Milosevic’s Serbia in other former Yugoslav states on the grounds of protecting Serbian passport holders. And we have reason to remember how Hitler used this very doctrine little more than half a century ago to undermine and attack substantial parts of central Europe.

“It is important now to demand an immediate end to the bombing raids, immediate withdrawal of the Russian troops that have entered Georgia and the establishment of political contacts to bring about a peaceful solution. As chair of the OSCE, Finland has a particularly important role to play.”

– http://www.egovmonitor.com/node/20541

George Orwell

 

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”

George Orwell
rss@quotationspage.com (Quotes of the Day)
Tue, 19 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT

A good ‘Summary of the war’ – The Economist

 

“In blue jeans and a sports jacket, Mr Putin, cast as the hero of the war, flew to the Russian side of the Caucasus mountain range to hear hair-raising stories from refugees that ranged from burning young girls alive to stabbing babies and running tanks over old women and children. These stories were whipped up into anti-Georgian and anti-Western hysteria. What Russia was doing, it seemed, was no different from what the West had done in its “humanitarian” interventions.

There was one difference, however. Russia was dealing with a crisis that it had deliberately created. Its biggest justification for military intervention was that it was formally protecting its own citizens. Soon after Mr Putin’s arrival in the Kremlin in 2000, Russia started to hand out passports to Abkhaz and South Ossetians, while also claiming the role of a neutral peacekeeper in the region. When the fighting broke out between Georgia and South Ossetia, Russia, which had killed tens of thousands of its own citizens in Chechnya, argued that it had to defend its nationals.

The biggest victims of this war are civilians in South Ossetia and Georgia. Militarily, Mr Putin has won. But all Russia has got from its victory so far is a ruined reputation, broken ties with Georgia, control over separatist enclaves (which it had anyway) and fear from other former Soviet republics.”

http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11921110&fsrc=rss

del.icio.us Tags: ossetia georgia, russia, russian, crisis, abkhazia

Russian’s tiny withdrawal, still causing some problems

 

“POTI, Georgia — Russian forces briefly seized Georgia’s main seaport on Tuesday and carted away about 20 Georgian soldiers in a raid that paralyzed one of Georgia’s key commercial hubs for several hours, port officials said.

About 100 heavily armed Russian soldiers aboard six armored personnel carriers overran the port of Poti at about 8 a.m., according to port officials and witnesses. Five hours later they drove out of Poti past helpless Georgian police officers and dozens of anxious onlookers, some of whom gasped at the sight of several blindfolded Georgian soldiers being carried away as prisoners.

Their destination was unknown. What was clear was that Russia, despite President Dmitry Medvedev’s pledge to withdraw forces starting Monday, continues to operate freely inside Georgia and appears intent on squeezing its tiny neighbor economically as well. ”

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/49196.html

del.icio.us Tags: poti, georgia, ossetia, russia, russian, crisis, abkhazia

TSKHINVALI, Georgia

“TSKHINVALI, Georgia 

del.icio.us Tags: tskhinvali, ossetia, georgia, russia, russian, crisis, abkhazia

As Russian troops pounded through Georgia last week, the Kremlin and its allies repeatedly pointed to one justification above all others: The Georgian military had destroyed the city of Tskhinvali.

Russian politicians and their partners in Tskhinvali, the capital of the breakaway region South Ossetia, said that when Georgian forces tried to seize control of the city and the surrounding area, the physical damage was comparable to Stalingrad and the killings similar to the Holocaust.

But a trip to the city on Sunday, without official escorts, revealed a very different picture. While it was clear there had been heavy fighting — missiles knocked holes in walls, and bombs tore away rooftops — almost all of the buildings seen in an afternoon driving around Tskhinvali were still standing.

Russian-backed leaders in South Ossetia have said that 2,100 people died in fighting in Tskhinvali and nearby villages. But a doctor at the city’s main hospital, the only one open during the battles that began late on Aug. 7, said the facility recorded just 40 deaths.

The discrepancy between the numbers at Tskhinvali’s main hospital and the rhetoric of Russian and South Ossetian leaders raises serious questions about the veracity of the Kremlin’s version of events. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and other senior officials in Moscow have said the Georgians were guilty of “genocide,” prompting their forces to push Georgia’s military out of South Ossetia — in a barrage of bombing runs and tanks blasts — and march southeast toward the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, stopping only 25 miles away.

That explanation, that Russians were saving South Ossetians from total annihilation, undergirded Moscow’s rationale for the invasion.”

The doctor at the Tskhinvali hospital, Tina Zakharova, said she wanted to clarify that she wasn’t disagreeing with the South Ossetian officials’ numbers, adding that many bodies had been buried in gardens and cemeteries in outlying villages. She could not, however, explain how more than 2,000 dead — the difference between her hospital’s count and the Kremlin-backed officials’ tally — were buried in a relatively small area without any evidence such as stacks of coffins or mass funerals.

Researchers for Human Rights Watch, an international advocacy group, had similar findings as McClatchy about casualty numbers in Tskhinvali. A doctor at the city’s hospital told the group’s researchers that 44 bodies were brought by and was “adamant” that they represented the majority of deaths there because the city’s morgue was not functioning at the time.

“Obviously there’s a discrepancy there, a big discrepancy,” Rachel Denber, deputy director for Europe and Central Asia at Human Rights Watch, said about the apparently inflated casualty figures. “It’s not clear to us at all where those numbers are coming from.”

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/48860.html

Russia’s next target? – Ukraine

del.icio.us Tags: ukraine, russia, crisis, georgia

Russia ‘distributing passports in the Crimea’
Ukraine is investigating claims that Russia has been distributing passports in the port of Sevastopol, raising fears that the Kremlin could be stoking separatist sentiment in the Crimea as a prelude to possible military intervention.
The allegation has prompted accusations that Russia is using the same tactics employed in the Georgian breakaway regions of Abhkazia and South Ossetia in order to create a pretext for a war.
Russia handed out passports to the residents of the two provinces, which have long looked to Moscow for support, five years ago. The Kremlin has justified its invasion of Georgia in terms of defending its citizens in Abkhazia and South Ossetia from Georgian “aggression”.
Mykola Stretovych, an MP with Ukraine’s ruling orange coalition, claimed that Russia was engaged in a massive operation to hand out passports in Sevastopol, home to 400,000 people, many of whom have historic ties with Russia.
Anatoly Gritsenko, chairman of the Ukrainian parliament’s national security committee, launched a probe into the claims which, if true, would represent “a threat to national security”, he said.
Tensions between Moscow and Kiev have grown in recent days after Viktor Yushchenko, Ukraine’s pro-western president, imposed restrictions on Russian ships entering the Black Sea Fleet’s base in Sevastopol.
The decision to place limitations on movement to and from the base, which Russia rents from Ukraine, was taken after ships from the Black Sea Fleet were used in military operations in Georgia.
Ukraine further infuriated the Kremlin last week by offering Europe and the United States access to its missile warning systems.
Mr Yushchenko’s alliance with Georgia has caused further resentment among the Crimea’s overwhelmingly Russian-speaking population. The territory was historically part of Russia but was awarded to Soviet Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev in 1954.
The head of Ukraine’s security service, however, said that despite nationalist tensions in the territory, a rebellion in the Crimea with or without Russian support was inconceivable.
“Prosperity, peace and calm in the Crimea is the very foundation on which the interests of Ukraine and neighbouring Russia coincide,” Valentin Nalivaichenko said.
Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, warned Russia that its actions in Georgia would further increase the alienation of Ukraine towards Moscow. Mr Yushchenko has applied for Ukraine’s membership of Nato, a move bitterly opposed by the Kremlin.
“If the Russians intended this as intimidation, they have done nothing but harden the attitudes of the small states around them,” she said. “I think the Russians have made a significant mistake here.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl…he-Crimea.html