LAKBE from ARCHANDA

THE TRUTH ABOUT RUSSIA IN GEORGIA
By
Michael J. Totten

August 26, 2008



TBILISI, GEORGIA – Virtually everyone believes Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili foolishly provoked a Russian invasion on August 7, 2008, when he sent troops into the breakaway district of South Ossetia. “The warfare began Aug. 7 when Georgia launched a barrage targeting South Ossetia,” the Associated Press reported over the weekend in typical fashion.

Virtually everyone is wrong. Georgia didn't start it on August 7, nor on any other date. 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.

(To read continuation)

Three miniatures
By Mikho Mosulishvili

1. An Old Fisher

Once Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Zhuangzi. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuangzi. But he didn't know if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi.

Zhuangzi - "The Transformation of Things".


Recently I have had a strange feeling: as if in my own city and even in the country I were an immigrant who has learned the language very well but can not understand the people and their behavior.

I miss the 80s Tbilisi – absolutely different…

I remember Omar Durmishidze’s splendid exhibition in the city in those times.

I especially remember a picture “an old fisher”.

An old fisher is sitting on a pavement of a dark street; there is a box in front of him. He has put a fish on this box and looks absolutely hopeless and lonely. He is sitting so strangely that the pleats of his shirt and the wrinkles of his face have the same shape.

When you get closer you start discovering small pieces of hope in his eyes – may be you will buy his fish?

If you get back and look at him again you won’t see white pieces any more – you did not buy fish either.

When you get closer – you see the pieces of hope and when you get back – they disappear.

One may think that it is just an illusion but the more times you do it, the more times you will get the same result.

I was twenty then and I went to see that painting every day.

So I remember it so very well that I can see it, or I can imagine it or I can recall it.

Not only see but also feel that I am that fisherman looking at you from the picture with the pieces of hope in my eyes – may be someone will buy my fish?



2. A good hand at writing
(A sudden portrait)

In the memory of Revaz Inanishvili


“He is great, too great. He’s strong character can make the world go round he told me thoughtfully and after several minutes of silence he added: “But an ordinary man is not so great.”

“And what about you?” I asked.

“I am small, too small, tired and can not walk without my stick. As see I am sitting down here under the shade of this old oak and can not look high up to the sky. I am staring at the ground, watching the ants carrying twice as big things as their bodies.” He answered.

“I don’t want to be that he; I just think that I am that little ant.” I said laughing.

He smiled the way only he could – pleading, but still sadly and put his wrinkled, hand on my head.

Then he got up very slowly; he went away and vanished. He was a great man – a real Christian. Once he said:

“I write only when my soul needs to pray.”

Don’t think of him as you do about some village writers.

His village I see the whole Georgia, is it necessary for you to see Europe proclaims him like Niko Pirosmanashvili to proclaims him yourself and cry one’s eyes out?



3. Lady with Poppies

A twenty-year-old girl with an excited appearance is walking in the room which is lit in a very low light of the lamp light.

The nervous paintings on the walls and the sound of rain coming in from the street create a specific feeling of comfort.

The girl is a painter. She is trying to take her eyes off the guest – a writer, and thinks that taking too many drugs overdosing is the best way of suicide.

“One will leave this world without pain,” she says.

“Why aren’t you painting any more?” The man asks with interest.

“There is nothing left to be seen or painted for me. Take a look, here I find the only relief.”

She turned up her slaves and our romantic writer saw the pricked veins.

He can clearly see the poppies coming out from the wounds, as red as blood.

They grow taller, and then they cut out owls fly out of the flowers. The owls are carrying Hypnosis – the god of long sleep. Little by little he grows and becomes stronger.

Now poor lady with poppies is all in his arms. But one can not call her a lady; she is a girl, just a young girl…


Translated from Georgian into English by Ann Mosulishvili

'I the supporter of custom to kiss to the woman a hand. In fact it is necessary to begin with something', - spoke Sacha Guitry (21 February 1885 – 24 July 1957), a French film actor, director, screenwriter and playwright.

And I supporter of Sasha Guitry...

Nato to hold emergency meeting amid doubts over Kremlin promise.


Russia warned: withdraw from Georgia, or else



# Ian Traynor in Brussels and Luke Harding in Tbilisi
# The Guardian,
# Monday August 18 2008

European leaders warned Russia yesterday to withdraw its forces rapidly from Georgia or face unspecified consequences, as Moscow stalled on its pledges to honour a ceasefire and pull back the thousands of troops from the Caucasus republic.

With the US and European governments due to meet tomorrow to consider their options for the first time since the crisis erupted 10 days ago, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France threatened the Kremlin with an ultimatum for the first time, warning that more delays in a pullout "would have serious consequences on relations between Russia and the European Union".

The French warning echoed similar statements from the Americans in recent days, none of which appears to have rattled the Russians, whose forces remain in firm control of large tracts of Georgia well beyond the two separatist enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

"People are going to begin to wonder if Russia can be trusted," said Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, yesterday of Moscow's failure to keep its promises.

The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, added to the pressure on Moscow by insisting on an "urgent" retreat. She also backed Georgian aspirations to join Nato. Downing Street said it would send the foreign secretary, David Miliband, to the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, later this week.

In Moscow, President Dmitri Medvedev said Russia's troops would start withdrawing today. But there is a yawning gap between what Moscow and the west understand by withdrawal.

Yesterday, Russian forces appeared to be entrenching their positions on the ground barely 30 miles from Tbilisi.

Nato foreign ministers are to hold an emergency meeting in Brussels tomorrow on their response. The Americans could call for a suspension of the Nato-Russia council, a talking shop that goes back more than a decade and symbolises the post-cold war rapprochement that has been shaken by the invasion of Georgia.

The conflict has reopened old rifts among the western allies that recall the "old Europe-new Europe" divisions over the Iraq war in 2003.

France and Germany are keen to maintain smooth relations with Moscow and fear that the EU's mediation role will be jeopardised if they take sides.

The east Europeans in Nato and the EU are strongly on the side of Georgia, looking not to Brussels, Paris or Berlin, but to Washington for leadership. At the weekend, President Lech Kaczynski of Poland slammed France and Germany for being too soft on Moscow, and complained that they were trying to monopolise the EU position.

France was unapologetic. "We have to invent a new language with regard to Russia. That is what the European Union is trying to do," said Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister.

Sarkozy, the current EU president who negotiated a six-point ceasefire agreement with the Russians and Georgians last week, called for the "withdrawal, without delay, of all the Russian military forces that entered Georgia since August 7", when the fighting started.

The Russians, with an estimated 10,000 troops and 150 tanks in Georgia, show no intention of withdrawing the entire invasion force, and plan to leave troops in Georgia proper, beyond the two pro-Russian breakaway provinces. Yesterday, troops set up a series of checkpoints between Tbilisi and Gori. The first checkpoint near the town of Igoeti is less than 30 miles from the Georgian capital. Georgian drivers turned back by the Russians said they were told they needed permission from Russia's ambassador in Georgia to drive down the road - which connects the east and west of the country.

The Russian military continues to occupy around two thirds of the country, including several towns they were supposed to leave under the terms of the ceasefire deal agreed on Saturday by Medvedev.

The Kremlin said from today Russia would "begin the withdrawal of the military contingent moved to reinforce Russian peacekeepers after the Georgian aggression against South Ossetia". But it said the force would not retreat to Russia, only to South Ossetia, and that forces would stay in the "security zone."

The Russians intend to establish buffer zones in previously Georgian-controlled territory beyond South Ossetia and Abkhazia. One of the most contentious points of the Sarkozy's ceasefire plan allows Moscow "to take additional security measures" beyond the two enclaves until "an international mechanism" is established.

The "international mechanism", entailing perhaps UN-mandated international peacekeepers, will take weeks to establish at a minimum. The EU is endeavouring to be the main middleman. But apart from perhaps sending a few dozen unarmed ceasefire monitors in the days ahead, it is unlikely to grapple with the bigger issues of peacekeepers until EU foreign ministers meet in Avignon in France next month.

Georgia's president, Mikheil Saakashvili, said he would not be happy until every Russian soldier had left his country's territory. "Georgia will never give up a square kilometre of its territory," he said.

Georgian summer 2008

After forty years, Russia in Georgia has repeated "the Prague spring" 1968.



The Prague Spring http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_Spring - (Czech: Pražské jaro, Slovak: Pražská jar) was a period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia during the era of its domination by the Soviet Union after World War II. It began on January 5, 1968, when reformist Alexander Dubček came to power, and continued until August 21, when the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies invaded the country to halt the reforms.



Prague spring 1968