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POLITICAL AND GEOGRAPHIC RECTANGULAR “TBILISI-TSKHINVALI-VLADIKAVKAZ-MOSCOW”: PROSPECTS FOR A GEORGIAN-SOUTH OSSETIAN SETTLEMENT
Vladimir PRIAKHIN
Vladimir Priakhin, D.Sc. (Political Science), member, the Russian National Club of Rome Support Committee and the Russian International Research Association (Moscow, Russian Federation)
Where Do We Stand Today?
South Ossetia paid a high price for the bloodshed that happened in its blossoming valleys early in the 1990s; privations and sufferings that were the result of the conflict between Georgia and South Ossetia drove tens of thousands away from their homes and deprived them of their possessions. The local migration services have already registered 12,742 refugees and forced migrants mainly from Georgia’s internal areas. By February 1997 the number dropped to 5,018 (driven by the appalling social and economic conditions in the republic, people moved to North Ossetia of the Russian Federation and other regions of Russia). There is an opinion that over 30 thou have already left South Ossetia (one-third of its initial population).
The moral harm done by this confrontation, the strife and enmity between the peoples that have been living side by side like good neighbors for many centuries is greater still. It is ambitious politicians and predatory criminals following in their footsteps that are obviously responsible for the conflict and its results—it is common people duped by chauvinistic and nationalist propaganda that made them mere vehicles of evil intentions that are paying the high price.
There is no shortage of political, ethnographic, demographic, toponymic and historical arguments designed to explain the conflict’s causes and motives. None of them can be accepted without reservations, yet historical arguments look the least adequate of all.
I shall not go into all historical details here; my aim is to present the key arguments so that to expose the myths about the conflict’s historical roots, about “ages of national-liberation struggle” and “biological enmity” between the Georgians and Ossets. It seems that it would be methodologically correct to first discuss the relations between Russia and Georgia on which my further exposition of the historical and theoretical material will rest.
Russia and Georgia
Historical ties between them, the unique place the Georgian ethnos has been occupying in Russian society are the starting point for……………
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