Photograph courtesy of Jonathan Alpeyrie by Creative Commons

What exactly is going on in Georgia? A good place to start would be Michael Totten’s comprehensive overview. We owe today’s mess to a nifty trick by Stalin: gerrymandering provinces so as to maximise ethnic tension and inhibit rebellion (it’s in here somewhere). At the break-up of the USSR, Russia stuck to the same borders. Since 1992, systematic displacement has centrifuged the region: nearly all Georgians formerly in Abkhazia and South Ossetia are long gone.

The current populations of Abkhazia and South Ossetia have voted overwhelmingly for independence from Georgia. What of their “right to self-determination“? And what of the Georgians’ “right to return“? International law prioritises the territorial integrity of Georgia. But (post-Iraq, post-Kosovo) does anyone still defer to international law as a moral authority?

Call me cynical, but I doubt talk of “rights” and “humanitarian” motivations can help here. Such arguments can be fabricated equally plausibly by either side. Maybe the ongoing humanitarian crisis does make one side right and the other wrong. But we’ll only know afterwards, when something like this turns up. For now, this is a land squabble. There’s only one rule in a land squabble: the biggest bully wins, and bullies don’t come much bigger than Medvedev’s newly muscular Russia.

Filed under: foreignpolicy, humanrights on August 29th, 2008