The following excerpts are from Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French reporter and author of “Who Killed Daniel Pearl.” You should know, if you don’t know Levy, he’s you’re typical liberal Frenchman. That is to say, critical of American foreign policy until the stuff hits the fan — in this case Putin’s Russia acting as Khrushchev’s. So, his reporting from Georgia isn’t coming from the villified “neo-con” view. Quite the opposite.
In any event, he’s a solid professional, and what he had to say on his visit to Georgia is well worthy of attention.
Then, forty kilometers outside the city, around Okami, we see a battalion, as usual Russian, attached to a unit of armored vehicles whose role is to stop journalists from going one direction and refugees from going the other.
One of them, a peasant, wounded in the forehead, still dazed and terrified, tells me the story of fleeing his village in Ossetia on foot, three days ago. The Russians arrived, and in their wake, Cossack and Ossetian gangs pillaged, raped and murdered. As they did in Chechnya, they rounded up the young men and drove them away in trucks, to unknown destinations. Fathers were killed in front of their sons. Sons were killed in front of their fathers. In the basement of a house which they blew up with propane cylinders they had collected, they came upon a family and stripped them of everything they had tried to hide and then forced the adults to kneel down and executed them with a single shot to the head. The Russian officer in charge at the check point listens to the story. But he doesn’t care. In any case he looks like he has been drinking too much and he just doesn’t care. For him, the war is over. No scrap of paper, a ceasefire, a five or six-point agreement- will change his victory. And this pathetic refugee can say whatever he wants.
…After crossing through six new check points, one of which consists of a tree trunk hoisted up and down by a winch commanded by a group of paramilitaries, we arrive in Gori. We are not in the center of the city. But from where Lomaia has dropped us, before taking off in the Audi to collect his wounded, from this intersection dominated by an enormous tank as big as a rolling bunker, we can see fires burning everywhere. Rockets lighting up the sky at regular intervals, followed by short detonations. The emptiness.
The slight odor of putrefaction and death. Most of all, the incessant rumbling of armored vehicles. Almost every other car is an unmarked car jammed with militia, recognizable because of their white armbands and their headbands. Gori does not belong to the Ossetia which the Russians claim they have come to “liberate.” It is a Georgian town. And they have burned it down, pillaged it, reduced it to a ghost town. Emptied.
“It’s logical,” explains General Vyachislav Borisov, as we stand in the stench and the night waiting for Lomaia to return. “We are here because the Georgians are incompetent, because their administration collapsed and the town was being looted. Look at this,” showing me on his cell phone photographs of weapons of Israeli origin, which he emphasizes heavily, “Do you think we could leave all this lying around without supervision? And let me tell you,” he struts around, striking a match to light a cigarette, startling the little blond tank gunner who had fallen asleep in his turret, “We summoned the Israeli Foreign Minister to Moscow.
And he was told that if he continues to supply arms to the Georgians we would continue to supply Hezbollah and Hamas.” We would continue? What an admission!
…The last word will belong to the American Richard Holbrooke, a ranking diplomat close to Barack Obama whom I meet in the bar of our hotel at the tail end of the night: “There is floating in this affair a bad smell of appeasement.” He is right. Either we are capable of raising our voice and saying STOP to Putin in Georgia. Or the man who went, in his own words, “down into the toilets” to kill the civilians in Chechnya will feel he has the right to do the same thing to any one of his neighbors.
Is this how we will build Europe, peace and the world of tomorrow?