by Fiona Thompson

Created on: August 10, 2008

The events of the last few days have seen a little known dispute over a small area in one of Europe's forgotten countries played out as a war on our television screens. Were it not for the intervention of Russia, the incident might have remained pretty much out of the public eye but is Russia right to intervene and can Georgia expect the help of the international community?

I visited the former Soviet Republic of Georgia in 2006. It's a beautiful little country with the Black sea on its western side and the Caucasus mountains forming a natural barrier with Russia to the east. It's a country trying to drag itself up from decades of being run down by the Soviet Union, one that has become an open and enthusiastic ally of the west and has ambitions of joining NATO. However, it also has two major problems that threaten to destabilize it and throw into jeopardy its chances of becoming more than just a little country of the periphery of Europe.

Georgia's problems are Abkhazia and South Ossetia; they were both problems for us as we travelled around the Black Sea because they lie in border areas, which of course, is why the Russian population in both regions is large enough to provoke demands for independence from Georgia. The problems re-surfacing in August 2008 are essentially related to South Ossetia but it is inevitable that the issues in Abkhazia will start to become more prominent.
South Ossetia was created as an autonomous region when the Soviet Union took over Georgia in the 1920s. North Ossetia was created on the Russian side of the border and the people of the region, who had also been pro-Russian, were rewarded' for their loyalty and for not resisting Russia's incursions in order to expand her empire as other peoples of the Caucasus had done.

However in the late 1980s when the first rumblings of independence began, South Ossetians began to get themselves ready to resist because they feared they would lose their autonomy in an independent Georgia. In 1989 and 1990 bloody clashes took place between opposing factions in the South Ossetian capital Tskhinvali. Georgia became independent in 1991 and for the next couple of years the violence continued albeit more sporadically, until 1992 when they Russians, Georgians and South Ossetians managed to reach an uneasy agreement about deploying peace-keeping forces in the region. Under the pro-Russian Edvard Schevardnadze things became fairly quiet but when the Georgian people staged the Pink Revolution' and installed what

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