In August Ruins – Presentation at Boell Foundation

Salome Achba

In August Ruins - is entitled the joint report of Georgian NGOs reflecting on the outcome of August 2008 conflict. On February 14th the editor of the report Tinatin Khidasheli and a conflict scientist Paata Zakareishvili talked about it in the Boell Foundation.

In August Ruins of differs from other war related reports due to the fact that the work on it started upon the end of the war on August 13 of 2008, on the “hot track.” The report timely and coordinately documents the facts of human rights and humanitarian law violations.

Georgian Young Lawyers Association, Human Rights Center, Article 42 of Constitution, 21st Century, Center for Constitutional Rights - are the Georgian NGOs which prepared the report. The report was published by the support of Open Society Georgia foundation. The researchers selected by the organizations worked in the villages of the conflict zone and the so-called “buffer zones” after the hot phase of the war ended. They met with the victims of the armed conflicts, investigated facts and information.

“Except for the political aspects of this war, there was one more significant aspect - human histories and tragedies that always follow the war. This happened before and happens now. However, the modern world differs from the past as we have the means today to call people responsible for human tragedies to account. Our goal was to collect the information reflecting on the outcome and human tragedies of war on the hot track before the emotions and stories were dead. Ultimately, we collected 4 721 stories and systematized and analyzed it in this report,” – stated the editor Tinatin Khidasheli at the presentation.

The first half of the report describes the preconditions of the August 2008 war. This description is based on the analysis of the literature about the past Georgian-Ossetian conflict. The rest of the report mostly concerns the interviews and personal stories of the IDPs. The victims of the conflict tell their tragedies.

The main conclusion of the report is that in 2008 the Russian and Ossetian armed formations jointly cleansed the former Autonomous Region of South Ossetia from the ethnic Georgians. Ethnic cleansing was preliminarily planned, well organized and had a systematic nature.

“The murder, bombing of the villages and a peaceful population, destruction of property, persecution and banishment on ethnic grounds, captivity and treatment of captives – we did our best to collect as much information as possible to confirm the fact of ethnical cleansing. We have sufficient photo, video and other material that confirms that the above-mentioned facts occurred not only during the war activities, but after the end of the war as well,” – stated Tina Khidasheli.

The representatives of the group working on the report submitted a request to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in Hague to sue on the case of ethnical cleansing. The Russian side has also submitted two requests to the ICC. The first one concerns the genocide allegedly committed by Georgians, another one – the facts of attacks on Russian peacekeepers.

“The first request – suing the case of genocide allegedly carried out by Georgian side is so not serious that Russia does not talk about it anymore. The second more grounded and serious request concerns the suing on the fact of attack on Russian peacekeepers. We did not close our eyes and stated in the report that the attack really took place. However, we could prove that during the August war these soldiers were not peacekeepers anymore and their mandate had already expired. In this aspect, we should say that we had a weak position due to the fact that the mandate of these soldiers was renewed in every six month during this time by the Georgian government. Russian government never had a serious objection from the Georgian side on this matter,” – stated Tinatin Khidasheli.

The presentation of joint report of Georgian NGOs already took place in several countries, including Washington, USA. According to Tina Khidasheli, in this form the group is trying to provide more information for ICC so the case of ethnic cleansing in Georgia is raised. The publication of the second part is planned soon.

Humanright.ge will publish an article on the speech of a conflict scientist Paata Zakareishvili in the nearest future.