Moscow prosecutors say that Georgia refused to cooperate with the Russian investigation into alleged war crimes committed during the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia. Now, who saw that coming?
The investigators' miffed spokesperson, one Vladimir Markin, said that Tbilisi, for some bizarre reason, would not help provide Moscow with proof of Georgia's alleged crimes during the two countries' 2008 war. “Despite repeated requests … the Georgian Ministry of Justice refused to cooperate with Russian law enforcement agencies on this criminal case,” said Markin on August 8, the conflict's third anniversary.
This is after Russian investigators, in Markin's telling, have done all the due diligence. They even found no proof of “any illegal actions on the territory of Georgia or South Ossetia” by the Russian military. Surprise, surprise.
But how closely Moscow's meticulous sleuths examined the wartime situation on the ground in South Ossetia remains unclear. Without assigning specific blame, a European Union-funded international investigation, which blamed Tbilisi for lighting the match that led to full-scale hostilities, concluded that ethnic cleansing of Georgians, rather than South Ossetians, was “practiced both during and after the August 2008 conflict.”
Georgia, for its part, took Russia to the International Court of Justice over Moscow's ethnic- cleansing charges, but the court ruled that the two sides have not exhausted the means among themselves for smoothing things over.
Long story short, everyone violated the law, some more than others, and need to “make good for it,” as the EU-financed report suggests. Somebody tell Markin.
Giorgi Lomsadze is a journalist based in Tbilisi, and author of Tamada Tales.
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