RUSSIA DEMONIZATION

Reactions to Russia’s Victory

By Werner Pirker

[This article published in: Junge Welt, 8/18/2008 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, www.jungewelt.de/2008/08-18/040.php.]

Georgia’s president Mikhail Saakaschwili seems like an obsessed boy who cannot stop playing war games and therefore must swallow adult criticism. German chancellor Angela Merkel does not criticize him for provoking Russians unnecessarily and misjudging their reaction. Outwardly family cohesion is demonstrated. We stand firmly behind Georgia’s democratically elected president. Thus the German chancellor announced the German position in the form of a principled ideological decision.

Merkel clearly adjusts to the aggressive rhetoric of US president George W. Bush who wants the “free world” committed to help a “threatened democracy” and thereby revived the West’s ideological stereotypes from the Cold War era. Hardly anyone thinks the Georgian leader dared the adventure of South Ossetia’s forcible annexation without consultations with Washington. The question here is whether the Bush administration – and not Saakaschwili as Merkel presumes – misjudged the Russian reaction or whether his administration wanted to provoke such a scenario. Washington may have wanted to make a fool of Moscow as a warring power violating Georgian rights of sovereignty and the rights of the civilian population. This appears very symbolically on the anti-Russian propaganda state given the approaching 40th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

This demonization will not succeed. With its resolute response to the Georgian provocation, Russia has gained respect as a central world political actor. After nearly two decades of foreign policy humiliations, Moscow wanted to clearly demarcate its own interests in its “near environment” and show the limits of US ambitions.

The opinion that the Russians should not be annoyed again seems dominant at least in parts of the western public. Even if setting up double standards has been a foregone conclusion for the West, lamenting about Russian violations of international law in trans-Caucasus raises questions about the legitimacy in international law of western intervention policy in the Balkans.

The motor of indignation over the “brutal Russian surprise attack on a small neighboring country” only stutters. Except for US neocons and French “new philosophers, no one apportions blame one-sidedly to Moscow.