The Dutch government sent a fact-finding commission to Georgia to establish the facts. In its report[17] one could read that the bombardment took place after military and police units of Georgia had already left the town. The bomb clearly targeted the civilian population. At 10:45 a.m. there were twenty explosions in the air, as well as on the ground. Each explosion spread a huge number of small 5mm metal balls. One of these hit and killed Storimans. He was killed by submunitions of a cluster bomb launched with a Russian Iskander SS-26 missile. In a letter to the Dutch Parliament, the Dutch minister of foreign affairs, Maxime Verhagen, wrote that although the use of cluster bombs was not yet forbidden, “parties in a situation of an armed conflict should always make a sharp distinction between military and civilian targets,” and, “taking into account that on August 12 the Georgian military and police had left Gori, the Russian forces should have abstained from using [these weapons]. In light of this I find the conclusion of the investigatory committee very serious and I have explained this to the Russian authorities.”[18] Three days after the attack on Gori, Colonel-General Anatoly Nogovitsyn, deputy chief of Russia’s general staff, categorically denied that such weapons had ever been used in Georgia. “We never use cluster bombs,” he said. “There is no need to do so.”[19] Moreover, the unequivocal findings of the fact-finding commission of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not change the Kremlin’s version of the facts. Commenting on the death of Storimans the spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry not only denied the use of cluster bombs, but he went even further and “asserted that there was not enough evidence to conclude that Storimans had been killed as a result of the use of [any] weapons by the Russian side.”[20] In November 2008, some weeks after the publication of the Dutch report, Human Rights Watch wrote: “Russia has continued to deny using cluster munitions in Georgia, but Human Rights Watch finds the evidence to be overwhelming. Human Rights Watch believes that Russia’s use of cluster munitions in populated areas was indiscriminate, and therefore in violation of international humanitarian law.”[21]
Does a Lie Told Often Enough Become a Truth?
The Victim as Aggressor
There are two opposing conceptions concerning lies. The first is attributed to Vladimir
Ilyich Lenin, who is reputed to have said, “A lie told often enough becomes the truth.”
There is another one, attributed to US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who said:
“Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth.” It is clear that the Russian leadership
has a preference for Lenin’s approach. Even faced with unequivocal evidence it continues
to deny the facts. Apart from unfounded accusations against Georgia of genocide and
the denial of its own use of cluster bombs, the war in Georgia was preceded and accompanied
by open lies, misinformation (for instance, about “uncontrollable” South Ossetian
militias), and active disinformation,[22] all reminiscent of the old Soviet style. In this way Russia almost succeeded in
hiding the most important fact: that this was not a “Russian-Georgian war,” but a
Russian war against Georgia
