Human cost of Georgian conflict
 Will the different ethnic groups be able to cohabit peacefully again? |
All ethnic groups have suffered at the hands of the main protagonists - with widespread reports of war crimes - and it is difficult to see how the ethnic Ossetians and Abkhaz will cohabit peacefully once again with ethnic Georgians.
The two ethnic conflicts had been largely dormant and their peace processes frozen. But since the 2003 Rose Revolution, Tbilisi's pro-peace rhetoric was accompanied by an assertive and sometimes militant push to restore Georgia's territorial integrity and counter Russia's meddling in the region.
Security in the zones of conflict had deteriorated and confidence between the divided communities plummeted.
South Ossetia has been ripped apart in the latest fighting.
In this region of 75,000 people, ethnic Georgian and ethnic Ossetian villages exist side by side in a chequerboard-like pattern. After an earlier Georgian military adventure in 2004, and with the peace process stalled, the communities grew so deeply apart that they now have separate gas and electricity networks.
 The UN estimates that almost 100,000 people have been displaced |
The United Nations refugee agency UNHCR estimates that almost 100,000 people have been displaced from South Ossetia and areas around it in the last few days. Moscow says some 25,000 South Ossetians have found refuge in Russia, in North Ossetia.
The number of civilian casualties has yet to be independently established. Moscow claims 2,000 people were killed. US-based Human Rights Watch has said this cannot be independently verified.
Sources on the ground also make as yet unverifiable claims about atrocities and other crimes. Larisa, an Ossetian refugee in North Ossetia, told me that her neighbour, now also in Vladikavkaz, "witnessed burning of people in a village church" before reaching safety. A Georgian source talked of abductions by Ossetians of Georgian males who stayed behind in the conflict zone's villages.
Russia and Georgia are also trading accusations of mass atrocities. But leaving the song and dance of politically motivated justifications aside, ethnic hatreds are once again out in the open, and war traumas from the early 1990s have resurfaced between Georgians and Ossetians.
Credible and impartial investigations of violations and, if appropriate, the prosecution of perpetrators, could advance long-term reconciliation and would help build confidence that Western responses will be even handed.
This is important, as there may well be a need for a bigger EU role in peacekeeping and conflict resolution.
If the new ceasefire holds, security guarantees will be necessary to enable civilians to return.
The pre-conflict peacekeeping force - composed of a battalion from each of Georgia, Russia and South Ossetia - is not adequate to deliver long-term security to the region.
In Abkhazia, where fighting was largely limited to the Kodori Gorge, the main risk now is of a new wave of people being uprooted from their homes.
 Abkhaz troops place the Abkhaz flag on a building in the Kodori Gorge |
The approximately 60,000 returnees have splintered loyalties. Ethnically Georgian, they fall under the de facto Abkhaz administration and they have been subject to human rights abuses by both sides. The Abkhaz question their political loyalties, the Georgians consider them traitors.
There have been no reports as yet of a mass exodus. The Russian troops advancing into Georgia proper passed through the area but there was no widespread fighting.
However, in the poisonous environment generated by the conflict, the Georgians who stayed behind in Abkhazia may now be treated even more harshly - by both sides.
Without decisive international pressure to protect them, they could be displaced. Here, too, the existing peacekeeping mission - a Russian-dominated Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) force observed by the UN - will not now be trusted by all sides, and an international peacekeeping contingent may be needed.
Tbilisi's reckless miscalculation in South Ossetia, and Russia's subsequent aggressive and disproportionate response, have deepened the divide between Georgia and its breakaway regions.
Over the past decade, Tbilisi's strategy of isolation and pressure against the regions had failed to make Georgia attractive to the Abkhaz and Ossetians.
The Georgian operation in South Ossetia may have alienated them irreversibly.
While they had long understood that Russia was more interested in their territory than people, the recent conflict has turned their regions into de facto Russian protectorates.
This is also bad news for Abkhaz and South Ossetians, most of whom welcome Russia's security umbrella, but do not want to take orders from Moscow.
Magdalena Frichova has worked on conflict issues in the South Caucasus since 1999, most recently as Project Director for International Crisis Group.
Spanish inflation at 15-year high
 Food prices rose significantly in July |
Prices in Spain rose at their fastest annual rate for 15 years in July, driven by rising food and fuel costs.
The annual inflation rate climbed to 5.3% in July, up from 5% in June.
Transport costs were 10.6% higher than a year earlier, the National Institute of Statistics said, with food prices up 7% compared with July 2007.
Spanish inflation is above the eurozone average of 4.1%, but recent falls in the price of crude oil could bring the rate down.
Spain's Economy Minister Pedro Solbes said the rate of inflation could drop to about 4% by the end of the year as crude prices have declined.
Later on Wednesday Spain set out a number of economic reforms aimed at tackling the cooling economy, following an emergency meeting.
Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero had interrupted his holidays to attend the meeting with Mr Solbes and other cabinet members.
The plan, yet to be finalised, included a 20m-euro package ($30m; £15.9m) to help families access finance for mortgages and to help smaller firms among others.
US whites 'to be minority sooner'
 The projection could be offset by factors such as immigration |
White people are projected to no longer be in the majority in the United States by the year 2042 - eight years sooner than previous projections.
The US Census Bureau's latest figures - based on birth, death and immigration rates - suggest that minorities will soon make up 55% of the population.
Hispanics who now make up about 15% will, it says, account for 30% by 2050.
It is projected that black people will make up 15%, a small increase, while Asians will grow from 4% to 9%.
White non-Hispanics currently make up about two-thirds of the population, but only 55% of those younger than five.
'Aging baby boomers'
It has long been said that the US is a nation of immigrants but in the past the influx has mainly come from white Europeans, the BBC's Jonathan Beale reports from Washington.
By the middle of this century, that group will be in the minority for the first time, he notes.
It is likely that the demographic changes will be experienced right across the country - and no longer confined to urban areas as in the past.
Overall, the US population is expected to rise from 305 million people to 439 million by the year 2050.
The white population will also be ageing. The number of people over 85 years old will triple in the next 40 years.
"The white population is older and very much centred around the aging baby boomers who are well past their high fertility years," William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution think tank, told the Associated Press.
"The future of America is epitomised by the young people today. They are basically the melting pot we are going to see in the future."
The Census Bureau points out that its projections are subject to big revisions, depending on immigration policy, cultural changes and natural or manmade disasters.Rice says Russia faces isolation
 The first US relief plane was unloaded in Tbilisi overnight |
The US secretary of state has warned Russia that it risks isolation abroad if does not observe a ceasefire with Georgia and withdraw its troops.
"We expect Russia to meet its commitment to cease all military activities in Georgia," she said.
Condoleezza Rice is to visit France for talks with President Nicolas Sarkozy, who currently chairs the EU, before visiting Georgia itself on Friday.
The US has begun delivering aid by air to the ex-Soviet republic.
Washington is showing unwavering support for Georgia in its conflict with Russia, a BBC correspondent notes.
Russian forces briefly moved out of the breakaway Georgian province of South Ossetia on Wednesday to destroy military hardware at an abandoned Georgian military base in the nearby town of Gori.
Thousands of Russian troops remain in South Ossetia since they drove out a Georgian force which tried to regain control of the de facto independent province in a surprise attack one week ago.
They are also deployed in force in Abkhazia, Georgia's other breakaway province, where separatists ejected Georgia's remaining troops this week.
'Isolation' for Russia
Dispatching Ms Rice to Europe, President George W Bush called on Moscow to withdraw its forces from Georgian territory.
"The [US] stands with the democratically elected government of Georgia, insists that the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Georgia be respected," he said at the White House on Wednesday, flanked by the secretary of state and Defence Secretary Robert Gates.
 |  [There is a] very strong, growing sense that Russia is not behaving like the kind of international partner that it has said that it wants to be  Condoleezza Rice US secretary of state  |
Ms Rice said Russia faced international "isolation" if it refused to respect the truce.
"We expect all Russian forces that entered Georgia in recent days to withdraw from that country," she said.
There was, she said, a "very strong, growing sense that Russia is not behaving like the kind of international partner that it has said that it wants to be".
Ms Rice is to discuss with Mr Sarkozy the five-point peace plan he personally brokered with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili on lightning visits to Russia and Georgia on Tuesday.
| FIVE-POINT PEACE PLAN No more use of force Stop all military actions for good Free access to humanitarian aid Georgian troops return to their places of permanent deployment Russian troops return to pre-conflict positions |
A US military transport plane landed in Tbilisi airport on Wednesday evening, delivering what the US said was medical supplies, bedding and other items for internally displaced people.
The US special envoy to the region, Matthew Bryza, said the consignment was the first of many that would be arriving by sea and air.
The provision of US aid to Georgia follows a promise by President Bush that the US military would play a role in delivering emergency supplies to Georgia.
Kim Ghattas, the BBC's correspondent at the US state department, says that while Washington has been warning Russia of the consequences of its military action in Georgia, so far little has happened apart from the cancellation of a joint military exercise.
But the view from Washington is that Russia has more to lose from a deterioration in ties with the West.
US officials insist that Moscow does care if concrete moves are taken to isolate it on the international scene, our correspondent says.
'Civilised country'
The Georgian government says that 175 people, mainly civilians, were killed during the conflict with Russia and South Ossetian separatist forces.
 This Russian officer was recording a body found in Tskhinvali |
Russia, which says that 74 of its troops were killed, reports that more than 2,000 people died in South Ossetia, the vast majority civilians allegedly killed in the Georgian attack.
While none of the casualty figures have been verified independently, the UN refugee agency estimates that some 100,000 people have been displaced by the fighting, both from South Ossetia and Georgia proper.
Russia says its forces dismantled and destroyed military hardware and ammunition at an undefended Georgian base near the town of Gori on Wednesday.
Russia's First Deputy Prime Minister, Sergei Ivanov, said attacks by Russian forces on Georgian military targets outside South Ossetia were legal and necessary.
He said Russia had to destroy Georgian artillery, and bomb military airfields, in order to protect its peacekeepers in South Ossetia.
Speaking to the BBC, he also said he was surprised at the international condemnation of Russia's response to the crisis:
"Any civilised country would act same way. I may remind you [that on] September 11 [2001], the reaction was similar. American citizens were killed. You know the reaction."
Meanwhile, Georgians fleeing Gori reported widespread shooting and looting by South Ossetian separatists.
Thomas J. DiLorenzo
When Bill Clinton and Al Gore stopped off at Monticello en route to Washington for their inauguration, Gore pointed to two portraits hanging in Mr. Jefferson's home and asked the guide, "who are those two guys?" "Jefferson and Madison," the stunned historian answered.
The president's description of talk radio hosts who advocate constitutional government as "purveyors of hatred and division, the promoters of paranoia" suggests that Clinton is as unaware of the political philosophies of Jefferson and Madison as his running mate was of their likenesses.
"You ought to see...some things that are regularly said over the airwaves in America today," the indignant president announced. "There is nothing patriotic," Clinton preached, about "pretending that you can love your country but despise your government."
Huh? This country was founded by people who loved country and nation, but despised their governmental rulers. In fact, they saw a centralized government like Mr. Clinton's as the enemy of nation, community, family, property, and civil order.
Consider Clinton's middle namesake, Thomas Jefferson, who believed that "on the tree of liberty must spill the blood of patriots and tyrants." And: "a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing," a "medicine necessary for the sound health of government." It was Jefferson who wrote that "whenever any form of government becomes destructive" of citizens procuring for themselves "inalienable rights" to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," then "it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it."
The next time Clinton contemplates raising taxes, hiring bureaucrats, socializing medicine, assaulting religious "fanatics" with tanks and poison gas, or confiscating private property under the guise of environmentalism, he ought to consider one of Jefferson's biggest complaints against the tyrannical King George III. "He has erected a multitude of New Offices," wrote Jefferson, "and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our People, and eat out their substance." To Jefferson, such behavior justified the American Revolution.
It was Jefferson who authored the Kentucky Resolution of 1798, a response to the Sedition Act. As the nation's first "hate speech" law, passed at the urging of the statist Hamiltonians, the Sedition Act outlawed "writing or publishing of any scandalous, malicious, or false statement against the president, or either house of Congress," and forbade any speech that would bring the government "into contempt or disrepute; or excite against them...the hatred of the good people of the United States."
Seeing this as a death blow to free speech, Jefferson in the Kentucky Resolution declared: "Resolved, that the United States of America are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government," and that the Sedition Act "does abridge the freedom of the press, is not law, but is altogether void, and of no force."
Where the powers are not specifically delegated by the Constitution, Jefferson wrote, "nullification of the act is the rightful remedy" which every state has a right to undertake. Since "the natural tendency of things is for government to gain ground and for liberty to yield," let "no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."
Jefferson was unabashedly "for freedom of the press" and any attempt to silence "the complaints or criticism, just or unjust, of our citizens against the conduct of their agents."
It was Patrick Henry, one of the great American patriots, who spoke the famous words, "give me liberty or give me death" as he implored his fellow Virginians to take up arms "in the holy cause of liberty" against a despotic government whose purpose was "to force us to submission."
After the American Revolution, Henry remained a crusader against centralized governmental power, which he presciently warned "will destroy the state government, and swallow the liberties of the people."
George Washington too had a healthy disrespect for politics and politicians, viewing them as necessary evils whose powers must always be minimized. Special-interest politics, which is to say all politics, "are likely, in the course of time...to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the Power of the People, and to usurp for themselves the reins of Government."
To Washington, party politics meant "the alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which...has perpetrated the most horrid enormities...and leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism." "The common and continual mischief of the spirit of Party," the father of his country wrote, "are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it."
The other "guy" who Gore failed to recognize at Monticello was our third president, James Madison. He sounded equally "divisive" when he described democracy as consisting of measures that "are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority." "It is in vain," moreover, to hope that politicians will ever render these "clashing interests...subservient to the public good." Because of such beliefs, Madison and the other founders hoped to construct a constitution that would minimize the role of government in society, not maximize it, as has been the theme of the Clinton administration.
If talk radio were around in 1776, the G. Gordon Liddy of that era would have been Thomas Paine, whose anti-government pamphlet Common Sense sold an incredible 500,000 copies in 1776 alone. "Government even in its best state is but a necessary evil," Paine wrote, and "in its worst state an intolerable one." Like many Americans today, Paine believed that government added insult to injury by using tax dollars in ways that were actually harmful to the public.
"When we suffer," wrote Paine, "or are exposed to the same miseries by a government which we might expect in a country without government, our calamities are heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer." To Paine, "securing freedom and property to all men, and, above all things, freedom of religion," were the only legitimate functions of government. Americans generally agreed, and went to war to achieve this vision.
A healthy disrespect for politicians in particular and government in general is quintessentially American. President Clinton's remark that one cannot "love your country but despise your government" is itself un-American, and epitomizes the kind of despotic mindset the founding fathers were so aware of, and sought to shackle with "the chains of the Constitution."
In fact, the president's appalling attack on free speech is the kind of behavior George Washington must have had in mind when he spoke of "cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men" who will do anything to "subvert the Power of the People, and to usurp for themselves the reins of government."
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