by Jimmy Nightingale

Created on: October 23, 2008

The headlines blazed - "Russia invades Georgia" (Washington Post, August 12, 2008) or words to that effect suggesting that Russia was flexing its military might and reclaiming its place as a world super-power. The sub-text in the US media was that we were on the brink of a new Cold War.

Was this fair and accurate reporting?

No. It failed to convey the complex geo-political make-up of this part of the world. Georgia has been a buffer zone between Asian and European interests for centuries and variously invaded and occupied by each. In the late 18th century, Georgia signed the Treaty of Georgievsk and fell under Russian protection, cemented when Russian troops defeated the Persian army near Zagam in 1805. Over the succeeding decades, Georgia managed to do a bit of colonial expansion with a bit of help from Russia, assimilating parts of what are now known as Turkey and Iran as large parts of its territory, meaning that the country was a melting pot of different cultures and religions.

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Georgia took advantage of the shift in power to declare its independence from Russia. This show of defiance was short-lived, with the Red Army invading four years later and then formally falling under Soviet rule in 1924, with the violent suppression of Georgian separatists in the August Uprising. Despite one of their own in Josef Stalin rising to the highest ranks of Soviet power, the Georgia-Soviet relationship was an uneasy one. Dissident groups commenced moves for Georgian independence from the 1960s and were brutally suppressed.

Georgia held the first multi-party polls in the USSR in 1990 and declared independence shortly before the fall of the Iron Curtain the following year. Instead of that act kick-starting a period of peace for the fledgling country, all it did was commence an internal power struggle characterised by a coup and inter-ethnic violence and bloody disputes, culminating in the quasi-independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia from Georgia, with more than a little help from neighbouring Russia. These two states were recognised as independent nations by both Russia and Nicaragua, but not by the rest of the world. It should also be noted that South Ossetia is ethnically similar to neighbouring North Ossetia, which is part of Russia, and hoped to eventually be part of a single Ossetian territory. Both South Ossetia and Abkhazia consider themselves to have more in common with Russia than Georgia and, given their choice of masters,

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