Russian President Dmitry Medvedev himself took the lead, declaring on August 11: “The ferocity with which the actions of the Georgian side were carried out cannot be called anything else but genocide, because they acquired a mass character and were directed against individuals, the civilian population, peacekeepers who carried out their functions of maintaining peace.”[1] The Russian ambassador in Tskhinvali mentioned that “at least 2,000 people were killed in Tskhinvali.”[2] In a fact sheet by the news agency RIA Novosti, issued one month later, this number had shrunk to 1,500 civilians. It was announced that “Russian prosecutors, on orders from President Dmitry Medvedev, are currently gathering evidence to support allegations of genocide committed by Georgia against South Ossetians.”[3] By August 21, this commission had already made a first estimate of 133 civilians killed by the Georgian forces.[4] When, on December 23, 2008, the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor’s Office of the Russian Federation at last published the final results of its inquiry, instead of 2,000 victims in Tskhinvali alone, the Committee found a total of 162 civilian victims for the whole of South Ossetia.[5] However, the false, Soviet-style accusations directed at the Georgian government were never officially revoked, and until today the accusations of genocide find a prominent place in official and unofficial Russian publications on the war with Georgia.
Apparently, these accusations were prepared in advance by the Russian leadership to
construct a semblance of similarity between NATO’s humanitarian intervention in Kosovo
and Russia’s intervention in Georgia.[6] The accusations against Georgia were extremely cynical, taking into account the
abuses committed by the Russian military in Chechnya, where in two wars at least 10
percent of the population had been killed. Yekaterina Sokiryanskaya of the human rights
group Memorial commented: “Talking about the right for independence, about genocide
and the war crimes of Mr Saakashvili, Russia’s leaders are perhaps forgetting about
the tens of thousands of civilians who were killed by Russia’s bombardment of Grozny
and who were executed, cleansed, and tortured by the Russian military in Chechnya.”[7] The Kremlin’s accusations were a clear case of what Robert Amsterdam in a striking
comparison has called “the Doppelgänger Theory”: “the Kremlin’s habit of charging
their critics with the very activities in which they themselves engage.”[8] It was, by the way, not the first time Georgia was accused of genocide. Already
in 1993 Vladimir Zhirinovsky wrote: “Today Georgia is killing Abkhazians, Ossetians,
and Europe keeps silent. . . . There are not many Abkhazians, but they are a people,
they want to live on their land and in freedom. But they [the Georgians] are taking
this right away. This is a genocide, this is racism and it is happening today. Who
is going to stop this?”[9] Especially the accusation of “racism” was particularly unexpected, coming from
a politician, who, in the same book, only some pages earlier, compared immigrants
from the South with
The Kremlin has made a habit of accusing others of crimes of which it has been accused of itself. Yekaterina Sokiryanskaya mentioned already the massive, indiscriminate bombardments of Grozny in the winter of 1999–2000 with thousands of victims amongst the civil population of Chechnya. These bombardments and other atrocities committed in Chechnya made another prominent Russian human rights activist, Sergey Kovalyov, write: “What is new this time around is that Russian society as a whole is prepared to carry out genocide. Cruelty and violence are no longer rejected.”[10]
Ethnic Cleansing and Cluster Bombs
