South Ossetia

I was really slow on the uptake this time around because I've been fairly busy these last couple of days, but nevertheless I wanted to clarify this whole Russo-Georgian situation taking place right now, because a lot of people have been asking me what the deal is. To understand what's happening now, you must understand what has happened in the past. I have been extremely lucky recently, because the books I have read in the past year have been auspiciously relevant to current events, and this time it was Eastward to Tartary, by Robert D. Kaplan. In the book, he travels through a couple Balkan countries, the Levant, and spends a significant amount of time in the Caucuses, where he talks about some of the things I will now.

You see, despite Westerners' general view that the fall of the Soviet Union had a positive impact on the world, in the case of many former Soviet countries, this is not true. Under Soviet rule, people in countries like Azerbaijan had steady jobs, standardized laws, and a pension. Now, unemployment is rampant and the law enforcement is unreliable. Russia may not control the countries anymore, but they try their best, through organized crime and funding of opposition militias, to gain a stake in the oil that is being pumped from the Caspian every day. you see, after the fall, democracy was pushed on these countries, who did not have the people or the infrastructure to make that jump yet. As a result, ultra-corrupt governments headed by former Soviet politicians were spawned, or in some cases, nationalistic regimes with cult-like figures at their head who had no clue how to run a country. This was one factor that created great instability in the region. Another was the overwhelming movement towards ethnically pure countries. Prior to the fall, the various races of the Caucuses lived with general indifference regarding where they were located in relation to their ethnicity. In the Armenian city of Yerevan for example you would see Turks, Azeris, Georgians, Russians, Jews. After the fall, the largest and most concentrated ethnic groups had countries, and the smaller ones were consumed into the larger. This caused two things to happen. The first was the mass migration of people. An example of this would be that a large amount of Armenian people living in Georgia would move to Armenia, lest they face possible persecution. Now in Yerevan you will see most everyone living there is an Armenian. The other thing that happened was the the rebellion that other ethnicities waged against the majority, case in point: Abkhazia in the eastern point of territorial Georgia. This is a bit of what is happening in South Ossetia (I pronounce it oh-set-ee-uh, though you may hear it pronounced oh-see-she-uh), which is in the north of Georgia. A mix of Ossetians and Georgians live there, with Ossetians being the majority, and they want to secede from Georgia and join North Ossetia, which is in Russia. The Russians support their cause, but the Georgians wish to keep the land in Georgia. That is where the conflict arises, and that is why Georgia and Russia are fighting. In my personal opinion, the Georgians, by themselves, may last a week and a half at most. With help, who knows.