and also...

[ajva]

What the fuck is all this South Ossetia business? Why have I been totally blindsided by surprise at this situation? Is there anyone on my friends list who knows about the region and saw this coming? What the hell's going on?

Comments

[alextiefling.livejournal.com]

I can't say I'm too surprised. South Ossetia's acting government has been effectively saying 'Georgia boo, Russia yay' for a while; this was only a matter of time, and during the Olympics opening ceremony is almost a action-movie piece of timing.

[ajva.livejournal.com]

So, in your opinion, how do the ethics lie in this situation? (And why, of course.) Sorry for asking what is probably a really enormous question but my own knowledge of this issue is virtually nil, so I'm just after a reasonably well-informed starting point. I'll be reading up on it over the next couple of days as things develop, of course, but just a quick off-the-cuff opinion would be very welcome.

[reddragdiva]

The ethnolinguistic map should be a sufficient primer on the situation all by itself. Much like the Middle East, they're not so much countries and regions as arguments with borders.

[reddragdiva]

Or, musical chairs: different regions are in different larger administrative areas which are in larger countries. While it's all the USSR, they can keep a bit of a lid on it; when the music stops and they say "Soviet Union over!", which country a given border region is in is all but arbitrary in the context of a few generations.

[alextiefling.livejournal.com]

In my relatively uninformed opinion, there's not much to recommend either side. On the one hand, the people of South Ossetia asserted their independence fairly promptly after Georgia's own independence from the collapsing USSR, and have run themselves for nearly 20 years. Tanks on the doorstep is not a proper response to this kind of self-determination. On the other hand, there's some truth (I understand) in the idea that at least some Ossetian separatists are not so much freedom-fighters as Russian fifth-columnists, and Georgia might look askance at a large and pointy piece of its territory effectively becoming part of its already much, much larger neighbour.

(This is similar to Serbian worries about Kosovo vis-a-vis Albania; the difference is that the Albanian government is not coherent, powerful or talented enough to take ruthless military advantage of the situation and get away with it; whereas the situation in Chechenya shows that the Russians almost certainly are.)