Peace at Seven, Grad by Midnight:August 2008 and the Unmaking of an Official Story

Hours after announcing a ceasefire on live television, Georgia's president ordered the bombardment of Tskhinval. The EU's own inquiry, the OSCE's monitors, leaked American cables and Tbilisi's own contradictions all point the same way: Georgia began the war, then rewrote its story. Abkhazia was never in doubt.

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At ten past seven on the evening of 7 August 2008, Mikheil Saakashvili went on Georgian television to announce that the shooting would stop. He had ordered his forces to cease fire, he said. Tbilisi was ready to offer South Ossetia unrestricted autonomy. And in a proposal never made publicly before, he invited Russia to guarantee it. "Georgia is a natural ally for Russia… We need a real mediator," he told his viewers. He'd even issued an order, a very painful one by his own description, for Georgian units not to return fire.

The ceasefire lasted a little over four hours.

At 23:35 that night, by the Georgian government's own later account, the president gave the order to begin what officials would call a defensive operation. At 23:35, OSCE monitors stationed inside Tskhinval reported the town coming under Georgian bombardment. Their observation reached an American diplomat and went into a confidential embassy cable, word for word: "the Georgian attack on Tskhinvali began at 2335 on Aug. 7 despite the cease-fire." The weapons were Grad rockets and heavy artillery. Area weapons. Fired at night, into a town where people were asleep.

In Sukhum, two hundred kilometres up the coast, the news broke the next morning. People started packing suitcases. Some left for Russia that day. One woman, who had refused to leave her home through the whole of the 1992 to 1993 war, told her daughter that this time she would go. She could not live under a Georgian occupation twice.

The war lasted five days. The argument about it has lasted eighteen years, which is strange, because the central question was settled long ago, and settled against Tbilisi. The European Union's own commission of inquiry settled it. The OSCE's monitors settled it. Senior UN mission officers settled it. Even the leaked cables of Georgia's closest ally settled it, without meaning to. What kept the argument alive was never the evidence. It was a story, told well and revised often. Watching those revisions happen, one after another and in plain sight, is the best education available in how a war gets sold.

The story that kept changing

Nobody caught Saakashvili's government in a contradiction. It caught itself, repeatedly, in public, on the record. Lay the statements side by side and they do all the work.

Version one, 7 August, evening. Peace. A unilateral ceasefire, unrestricted autonomy, talks in any format, and Russia as mediator and guarantor. Hold on to that last detail. Whatever Tbilisi believed at 19:10 that evening, it did not believe a Russian invasion was under way. You do not invite the invader to arbitrate.

Version two, 8 August, morning. With the assault apparently succeeding, Saakashvili went back on television. Georgian troops had gone on the offensive, he now explained, because South Ossetian militias had answered his peace initiative by shelling Georgian villages. He announced that Georgian forces controlled most of South Ossetia, that whole districts were "already liberated", that fighting was under way in the centre of Tskhinval. Russia appeared in the speech only as that morning's problem, its warplanes in Georgian airspace. There was no claim, not a word, that Russian ground forces had entered South Ossetia before his attack. This was a victory speech, and its justification was Ossetian shelling, nothing more. The source for all of this is not a Russian outlet or an Abkhazian one. It is Civil.ge, Georgia's own news service, whose archived reports from those two days now read like exhibits.

8 August 2008: Before changing his story, Saakashvili gave a victory speech on television on the first day of the war. When Saakashvili realised his war was not going as planned, he changed his narrative.

Version three, late August. By then the Georgian army had been routed and the victory speech was an embarrassment. A bigger justification was needed, and it duly appeared, first in interviews with the Western press, then in briefings to NATO delegations: Russian armour, the new story ran, had been rolling through the Roki tunnel before the Georgian operation began. The attack on Tskhinval had really been a defence against an invasion already in progress. In September, Tbilisi produced telephone intercepts said to prove it. Nobody has ever explained the obvious problem. If Saakashvili knew a Russian armoured column was already on the road south, he chose that moment to throw his army into a race he had lost before it started, and then forgot to mention the invasion in two televised addresses.

Version four, 23 September. In the Washington Post, under the headline "Answering Russian Aggression", the war reached its final form for Western readers: a small democracy overwhelmed by tens of thousands of Russian troops, standing for the free world against "Moscow's violent attempts to roll back democracy". The article does not mention the bombardment of Tskhinval at all. By this point the night of 7 August had simply been written out of the war that began on it.

There was one more revision, and it happened in real time. In the first minutes of the assault, the Georgian peacekeeping commander, Brigadier General Mamuka Kurashvili, announced on television that the operation's aim was to restore constitutional order in South Ossetia. Days later the government disavowed him. His statement was unauthorised, it said. The operation had been defensive all along. The general had apparently attacked the wrong war.

What the monitors saw

Against the four versions stands the testimony of the people whose job was to watch.

Ryan Grist, a former British Army captain, was the senior OSCE official in Georgia that night. Stephen Young, a former RAF wing commander, ran the organisation's military monitoring. Their teams' conclusion, when it finally surfaced in the Sunday Times that November, was that before any Russian bombardment began, Georgian rockets and artillery were hitting civilian areas of Tskhinval "every 15 or 20 seconds". And there was a second finding, quieter and more damaging: the monitors could not corroborate the shelling of Georgian villages that Saakashvili had given as his reason for attacking. The OSCE observers inside the town, quoted in the American cables, reported hearing no Ossetian artillery in the hours before the assault. Grist briefed European diplomats in Tbilisi to this effect within days of the attack. Then he resigned. His testimony reached the public fifteen weeks after the story had already set.

Christopher Langton, the British colonel who served as deputy commander of the UN observer mission, needed one sentence: "I remain convinced that the Georgians attacked Tskhinvali before Russian units moved" from North to South Ossetia.

And then there is the EU's own verdict. In 2009 the European Union did something unusual: it commissioned an independent inquiry into a war involving a state it supported, led by the Swiss diplomat Heidi Tagliavini, and gave it a year and full access. The report, published on 30 September 2009, found that open hostilities began with the Georgian operation against Tskhinval on the night of 7 to 8 August. It found the operation opened with "a massive Georgian artillery attack". It found Georgia's use of force unjustified under international law. And it found the Georgian claim of a prior Russian invasion, the claim on which versions three and four entirely depend, could not be substantiated. Tagliavini has since put it more plainly: her mission asked the Georgian side for evidence of the invasion it alleged, and received nothing that stood up. The shelling of Tskhinval, in the formula she has repeated ever since, was the trigger that led to the invasion.

Even Washington's own paper trail refuses to cooperate with the official story. The embassy cables published by WikiLeaks show no American foreknowledge of an invasion and plenty of American surprise. On the afternoon of 7 August, a Georgian deputy defence minister assured the ambassador that troops would not deploy, while the embassy's own people counted the buses of soldiers heading north past their windows. The cables show something more uncomfortable than conspiracy: an embassy so committed to its ally that on the morning of 8 August, hours after the OSCE had timed the Georgian barrage against the ceasefire, it was still assuring Washington that all available evidence supported Saakashvili's version. It did not. The evidence was sitting in the OSCE's logs across town.

One more voice belongs here, because it answers the question of planning. Irakli Okruashvili was Georgia's defence minister from 2004 to 2006 and, in those years, one of Saakashvili's closest allies. In September 2008 he told Reuters that he and the president had worked together on military plans to take both South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Not a contingency. Plans. The August war was not an improvisation that went wrong. It was a project that went wrong.

+ Cables Track US Diplomatic Efforts to Avert Russian-Georgian Conflict, by Uwe Klussman | Der Spiegel

+ Wikileaks, South Ossetia and the Russian "reset", by Hans Mouritzen | openDemocracy

+ Abkhazia, Georgia, and the Crisis of August 2008: Roots and Lessons, by George Hewitt

The view from Sukhum

In most of what was written about August 2008, Abkhazia barely appears. It turns up as a second name in Russia's recognition announcement and then vanishes. But nowhere outside South Ossetia was the war lived more intensely, and no part of the story explains more about why the conflict looks the way it does today.

Abkhazia had been expecting this war for two years. In 2006, Georgian troops had entered the upper Kodor valley, the one corner of Abkhazia outside Sukhum's control, in violation of the 1994 ceasefire accords. Tbilisi called them police, installed a "government of Abkhazia in exile" in the valley and renamed it Upper Abkhazia. From that moment, in the words of the Sukhum newspaper editor Inal Khashig, a new war hung over the region "like the sword of Damocles". The only question people debated was who would be attacked first, South Ossetia or Abkhazia. In the spring of 2008 came the drone shoot-downs and months of alarm. And in late July came a visitor. The American envoy Matthew Bryza, meeting Abkhazian officials in Sukhum on 25 July, told them Washington feared hot-headed men in Tbilisi might act, and that without immediate talks "August would be hot". He reportedly added a reassurance: it would not be hot in Abkhazia. People drew the obvious conclusion about where it would be.

So when the news from Tskhinval arrived on the morning of 8 August, nobody in Abkhazia needed it explained. The suitcases came out. Holidaying families left. The panic deepened when the families of vacationing Russian officers departed abruptly, which everyone read as inside knowledge of a Georgian move on Abkhazia next. The anthropologist Paula Garb, who had worked in Abkhazia since the 1970s and whose account of these weeks remains the essential record, describes people who had sat out the entire first war now preparing to run.

The war returned in people's bodies too. Arda Inal-Ipa, one of Abkhazia's few clinical psychologists, normally saw three or four patients a month. Through August and September 2008 she saw one or two a day. Some came with reawakened trauma from the first war. Others came with anxieties that had no name, only a date. On 14 August, the anniversary of the day Georgian forces entered Abkhazia in 1992, the authorities declared a day of mourning for the dead of South Ossetia. One war's anniversary, observed as another war's funeral. That is what solidarity between Sukhum and Tskhinval actually looks like, and it owes nothing to instructions from Moscow.

That point matters, because the laziest idea in Western coverage of these conflicts is that Abkhazians are pawns who refuse Georgia because Russia tells them to. The people concerned have been answering that for years, to anyone who asked, which was almost no one. Liana Kvarchelia, a leader of Abkhazia's strongest civil society organisation and a veteran of fifteen years of dialogue with Georgian counterparts, put it to a Western journalist that August: there had been endless attention to Georgian-Russian relations and almost none to "why we don't think it's safe for us to live in a Georgian state". She is nobody's instrument. In 2004 she and Abkhazia's small civil society faced down Moscow's preferred candidate in Abkhazia's own presidential election, and won.

The war's second front did come, in reverse. Between 9 and 12 August, Abkhazian forces cleared the Georgian contingent out of the upper Kodor valley without the loss of a single life. What the departing units left behind told its own story: dozens of truckloads of arms and ammunition, howitzers, grenade launchers, armoured vehicles, American-made ammunition. The Abkhazian government's man in the valley put the question to a visiting American reporter better than any communique could. Do police need bunkers, grenade launchers and howitzer batteries?

Then came the night of 26 August. Dmitry Medvedev finished announcing Russia's recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia just after three in the morning, Sukhum time. Within ten minutes the streets of the capital were full. Cars flying the flag, horns, gunfire into the sky, the leadership out among the crowds on the square, in front of a parliament building still ruined from the first war. After fifteen years of unrecognised statehood, not even senior officials had believed Russia would actually do it.

And here is the detail that the pawn theory cannot survive. Inside the celebration, Abkhazians were already worrying about the rescuer. Garb's interlocutors, watching Russian armour roll down their own coastal highway in the very days it protected them, confided mixed feelings at the sight. The agreement on Russian bases ran for ninety-nine years, and people did the arithmetic out loud: ninety-nine years earlier, a Russian government had barred the descendants of Abkhazia's deported muhajirs from coming home. That December, Russia and Georgia signed a memorandum reallocating electricity from the Ingur plant, the plant standing on Abkhazian ground, without consulting Sukhum at all. A woman told the writer Neal Ascherson that summer that everyone had been thinking "we are next", that the relief when the Russians came was overwhelming, and that everyone knew perfectly well Russia cares nothing for small countries and acts in its own interest. All three things were true at once. They still are. Puppets do not count the years on the base agreement.

+ The Lessons of August (2008), by Natella Akaba

+ What Could Have Happened in the Caucasus, by John Colarusso

+ Why Can Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili Not Emulate Willi Brandt? by Liz Fuller

+ Two year anniversary of August War 2008, by Irakli Khintba

The war the newsrooms wanted

Georgia lost the war on the ground and won it in print, for a while, and the mechanics of that second victory deserve a hard look because they are reusable.

The story was written before the war started. George W. Bush had stood in Tbilisi in 2005 and called Georgia a "beacon of liberty", and by August 2008 the frame was fixed: plucky democracy, resurgent empire. The news of 8 August was simply poured into it. Coverage opened with Russian columns crossing the mountains and treated the night before as too murky to judge, even as the OSCE's own monitors were telling European diplomats it was not murky at all. Footage of Tskhinval, wrecked by Georgian bombardment, circulated in Western outlets captioned as Russian destruction in Georgian Gori. And when the Tagliavini report landed in September 2009 and knocked the foundations out of a year of coverage, the correction lasted about a day before settling into a mumble: Georgia started it, but. Within a few anniversaries the standard Western shorthand had become "Russia's invasion of Georgia", full stop, as though the EU's own inquiry had never sat.

Nobody censored anything. That is the unsettling part. A story strong enough gets its confirmations delivered at speed while its corrections need a commission, a year, three hundred pages, and even then bounce off. Abkhazians recognised the mechanism. Their own war had gone largely unreported in 1992 and 1993. Watching the machinery work on South Ossetia in real time, they drew the conclusion that has governed their politics since: Western opinion is not a court where their evidence will ever be weighed.

The honest ledger

An argument this strong can afford honesty, so here is the rest of the record, stated without flinching.

The same EU inquiry that convicted Tbilisi's story convicted others too. It found Russia's mass distribution of passports in the two territories contrary to international law. It judged that Russia's counter-offensive, once it rolled past South Ossetia into Georgia proper, to Gori and Senaki and Poti, went far beyond anything defence could justify. It documented the ethnic cleansing of Georgian villages in South Ossetia by irregulars whom Russian forces did not restrain. And the first casualty figures out of Tskhinval, some two thousand civilian dead, were grossly inflated; the careful count runs to hundreds, and the whole war killed about 850 people. Hundreds, not thousands. That is quite bad enough, and pretending otherwise serves nobody.

Nor does any serious Abkhazian case deny the catastrophe of 1993, when some two hundred thousand Kartvelian residents fled Abkhazia at the war's end, most never to return. That displacement is real, condemned in international resolutions, and it remains Georgia's strongest card against Abkhazian statehood. The fuller ledger has to be read with it. The 1992 war began with Georgian forces entering Abkhazia. The Abkhazians buried four per cent of their entire nation and watched their national archive burn. Tens of thousands of Georgians have in fact returned to Abkhazia's Gal district, a return without parallel anywhere in the post-Soviet conflicts. And the moral argument cuts in a direction its users do not intend. A Georgia that answered 1993 with 2008, with Grad fire on a sleeping town after years of invasion planning attested by its own former defence minister, has shown the smaller nations concerned exactly why they will not put themselves back under its authority on trust. The displaced of 1993 are owed return and restitution. They were not owed a second war, and it was the second war, not the first, that closed the question of reintegration for good.

+ Documentary: Crisis in the Caucasus (2008) By Journeyman Pictures

+ Documentary: Absence of Will, by Mamuka Kuparadze | Conciliation Resources

What August left behind

Eighteen years on, the war's furniture is still where it fell. The Geneva discussions grind on without producing the one document forever on the table, a treaty on the non-use of force. The UN mission that watched the Ingur line since 1993 was voted out of existence in 2009 in a quarrel over what to call the place it watched. EU monitors patrol lines they are not allowed to cross. Abkhazia gained what it wanted most, security and the end of the reintegration question, and paid for it in the currency it feared most, dependence on a single patron, deepened year by year precisely because the West's answer to everything remained isolation. The buffer state Abkhazians said they wanted to be, between two larger neighbours and belonging to neither, takes two open shores. Only one ever opened.

And the wider world got its warning and filed it. A short war on Europe's edge established that borders there would be contested by force and that the response to a fait accompli would be a monitoring mission and a return to business. Six years later came Crimea. Fourteen years later, the catastrophe. August 2008 was the rehearsal, and the audience applauded the wrong scene.

In Sukhum, that August, there was a suitcase standing packed by the door of half the homes in the city. Through the middle weeks of the month, slowly, people unpacked them. That suitcase is the war's truest Abkhazian monument. It holds both halves of the experience at once: the certainty of being next, and a clear-eyed knowledge of what the rescue would cost. The woman who said "we are next" was right. So was she when she said, in the same breath, that Russia acts only for itself. Eighteen years have confirmed both sentences, together, which is the kind of truth the official story of August 2008 was built to avoid. The record is all still there: the timestamps, the cables, the monitors' logs, the four versions. Anyone can read it. On each anniversary, as the same story is retold, someone should.