Putin's Wars полностью

Martin Malek, “Understanding Chechen Culture,” in Chechens in the European Union, eds. Alexander Janda, Norbert Leitner, and Mathias Vogl (Vienna: Austrian Integration Fund: Austrian Federal Ministry of the Interior, 2008), 32.

59.

Russian sources give other figures for the civilian war dead. Sergey Maksudov, for instance, gives a total number of Chechens killed in both wars of twenty-eight thousand (!). He contrasts this number with twenty thousand Chechen Russophones (in the next sentence called “Russians”) killed by the Chechens (and not by the Russian bombardments). (Maksudov et al., “Chechentsy i russkie: pobedy, porazheniya, poteri.”) It is surprising to read these figures with no critical comment on the website of the Moscow Center of the prestigious Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

60.

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Worse than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity (New York: Public Affairs, 2009), 36.

61.

Goldhagen, Worse than War, 29. A similar argument is made by Susan Neiman who, rightly, emphasized that not intentions, but the results are decisive. “What counts,” she wrote, “is not what your road is paved with, but whether it leads to hell. Precisely the belief that evil actions require evil intentions allowed totalitarian regimes to convince people to override moral objections that might otherwise have functioned.” (Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), 275.)

62.

Kovalev, “Putin’s War.”

63.

Goldhagen, Worse than War, 250–251.

64.

Koroteev, “Les violations des droits humains en Tchétchénie devant la Cour Européenne des Droits de l’Homme,” 119.

65.

Cf. Miriam Kosmehl, “Tschetschenien und das internationale Recht,” in Der Krieg im Schatten: Rußland und Tschetschenien, ed. Florian Hassel, 121–122.

66.

Michael Ignatieff, “Human Rights as Politics,” in Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, edited and introduced by Amy Gutmann (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 41–42.

Chapter 13

The War with Georgia, Part I

A Premeditated Russian Aggression

After the War in Georgia, Vaclav Havel and other prominent personalities, wrote an op-ed in which they argued that “a great power always finds pretexts to invade a neighbor whose independence it does not accept. Let us remember: Hitler accused the Poles of being the first to have opened fire in 1939 and Stalin held the Finns responsible for the war he started against them in 1940. The fundamental question is to know which is the occupied country and which is the occupying country, who has invaded whom, rather than who has fired the first bullet.”^[1] We should keep these words in mind when analyzing the events which took place in Georgia in August 2008.

A Five-Day War?

The Russian version of the war in Georgia is as follows: on the night of August 7, 2008, Georgian troops entered the breakaway province of South Ossetia and launched a surprise attack on its capital, Tskhinvali. During the attack the Georgian troops killed two thousand civilians: a clear case of genocide. Many of the victims were Russian citizens. In addition, Russian peacekeepers, stationed in South Ossetia, were killed. To stop this genocide Russian troops started a “humanitarian intervention.” They entered South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the other breakaway province, to drive the Georgian aggressors back. This version of the facts was not only broadcast nationwide by the Russian media and disseminated by Russian diplomats abroad, it was personally explained by Vladimir Putin to US President George W. Bush, who were both attending the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Beijing on August 8.