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 |  Subject: Rights group assails foes in Georgia war  Sat Jan 24, 2009 8:28 pm | |
| MOSCOW: Human Rights Watch released a comprehensive report Friday on the brief August war in Georgia, accusing both Russia and Georgia of using indiscriminate force on civilians and lambasting Russia for standing by while South Ossetian militias and irregulars carried out "execution-style killings, rape, abductions and countless beatings."
The war began Aug. 7, when Georgia attacked the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali. Russia responded by sending columns of armor into South Ossetia and Abkhazia, a second breakaway enclave, and then driving deep into Georgia.
In the early days of the war, Moscow accused Georgia of "genocide," and said 2,000 people had been killed in the shelling of Tskhinvali. In its report, Human Rights Watch rejects those claims as exaggerated and calls on Russia to acknowledge that more recent assessments put the number of deaths between 162 and 400.
Much of the report is devoted to a meticulous description of Ossetian rampages in ethnic Georgian villages in South Ossetia, in which houses were systematically looted, torched and bulldozed, sometimes as their owners looked on.
Human Rights Watch concludes that the militias' intent was "to ethnically cleanse these villages."
Russian forces "had full knowledge of what was going on," Anna Neistat, the organization's senior emergencies researcher, said at a news conference in Moscow. "I think they just didn't care."
The 200-page report was based on interviews with 460 victims and witnesses. Georgian officials cooperated with the effort. Russian officials, by contrast, did not respond to requests for information sent to the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of Emergency Situations and the Office of the President, the report says.
Criticism of the Georgian side centers on the shelling of Tskhinvali, starting the night of Aug. 7.
The report calls the Georgian shelling "indiscriminate" and a violation of international humanitarian law, in large part because it used Grad multiple rocket launching systems, which are notoriously inaccurate. A man whose mother and aunt were killed when a rocket landed in their yard told a researcher that it left a 10-foot crater.
"When it hit, all the sharp, scorching fragments flew into the house, penetrating the walls as if it was paper," said the man, Alan Sipols. "When such a fragment hits a person, it just shreds you apart, and I cannot describe what they turned the people I loved most into."
Human Rights Watch also found that Georgia used cluster bombs, weapons that eject dozens or hundreds of bomblets and spread them over a large area. Weeks after the war, unexploded bomblets were scattered throughout fields and orchards, so that farmers were too frightened to harvest their crops.
The report characterizes some Russian air and artillery strikes as indiscriminate, saying in some cases strikes fell a kilometers away from military targets and even where no military target could be discerned.
The report says that Russia also used cluster bombs - something the authorities vehemently denied during the war - and were responsible for an attack on the main square in Gori on Aug. 12, which killed six people, including a Dutch journalist.
Most vivid, however, are reports about the violence that was unleashed by South Ossetians after Russia had driven back the Georgian army.
Human Rights Watch documents 159 detentions, two rapes of ethnic Georgian women, the torture and execution of three prisoners of war and the razing of hundreds of houses.
A Georgian soldier, Kakha Zirakishvili, 33, told researchers he and six other prisoners of war were marched through the center of Tskhinvali and beaten by Ossetian civilians and fighters "with gun butts, iron bars, whatever they had: wooden sticks, chairs even."
When they were released, 10 days after the Georgian attack on Tskhinvali, Zirakishvili had a broken rib, two broken fingers, a broken bone in his hand, internal bruising in his chest, a broken eardrum and severe head trauma.
Davit Malachini, 26, who was released at the same time as Zirakishvili, said that "by that time I couldn't really even move my arms."
"My feet dragged," he added. "My legs and arms were so swollen. I was trembling all over. I couldn't control it."
In its report, Human Rights Watch urges all sides to conduct independent investigations and allow the return of 22,000 ethnic Georgian refugees to their homes in South Ossetia.
The report does not attempt to determine which side started the war or whose actions were worse, a task Tanya Lokshina, deputy director of the Moscow office, said was "better left to historians and politicians."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/01/23/europe/georgia.4-414756.php
Statist animals... both of them! |
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