Prof. George Hewitt

Georgia's Trilogy of Tragedies (1. Zviad Gamsakhurdia, 2. Eduard Shevardnadze, 3. Mikheil Saak'ashvili Or A Reply to David L. Phillips (pt.2)

 25 August 2008

‘In [19]92, the Russian invasion bombed Sukhumi and other cities.’ Thus the Georgian president, Mikheil Saak’ashvili, in his attempt on 19th March 2008 to provide ‘information’ (recte misinformation) to The Atlantic Council of the UnitedStates about the Georgian-Abkhazian war (14th August 1992 to 30th September 1993), which began with Eduard Shevardnadze’s GEORGIAN troops killing those manning the border-post at the R. Ingur crossing and pouring into Abkhazia from the province of Mingrelia in Georgia proper. There are grounds for believing that Russian president Boris Yeltsin had actually given Shevardnadze the green light to take this step in the (mis)calculation that it would be a ‘short, victorious war’ (therebyuncannily anticipating his own parallel miscalculation in starting the first Chechen war in 1994). In fact, the Abkhazians along with their allies from their Near Eastern diaspora and North Caucasian volunteers organised by the Confederation of Mountain Peoples’ of the Caucasus under Yuri Shanibov fought determinedly to defend their ancestral homeland, and, despite losing 4% of their entire population resident in Abkhazia, ejected in ignominy those who had inflicted so much unnecessary suffering on their small republic.

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