The Russian invasion of Georgia has been presented to the press as a story of Georgia invading the breakaway territory of South Ossetia. This is a lie. Michael Totten has the true story.
“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.
The Russians have been stirring up trouble among ethnic minorities since the USSR collapsed. In fact, this was the technique the USSR used to keep its ethnic groups in line.
Who are the Ossetians and where do they live? This is the question that has been lost in all of the static from this story. This autonomy [South Ossetia] is an autonomous district, as opposed to an autonomous republic, with about 60,000 people max. So, where are the rest of the Ossetians? Guess where they live? Tbilisi. Here. There. Everywhere. There are more Ossetians – take a look around this lobby. You will find Ossetians here. Of those Ossetians who are theoretically citizens of the Republic of Georgia, 60,000 live there and around 40,000 live here.”
“What do they think about all this?” I said.
“They’re scared as shit,” Goltz said.
“Are they on the side of those who live in South Ossetia?” I said.
“No,” he said. “One of them is Georgia’s Minister of Defense. Georgia is a multi-ethnic republic. And the whole point of the Ossetian ethnic question is this: South Ossetia is part of Georgia.”
“Are reporters receptive to what you’re saying?” I said to Worms.
“Everyone is receptive,” he said. “Everyone, regardless of nationality, even those who love Georgia, genuinely thought Saakashvili started it.”
“That’s what I thought,” I said. “That’s what everyone has been writing.”
Read the whole thing. The site was overloaded yesterday because Instapundit linked to it. Lots of people are learning for the first time what happened.