Warnings of possible bloodshed are coming from the politically discombobulated territory of South Ossetia as opposition leader Alla Jioyeva gets ready to inaugurate herself on February 10 as the region’s de-facto president and ignore plans to hold a repeat (de-facto) presidential election.
Describing Caucasians as "a hot-headed people," ex de-facto Defense Minister Anatoly Barankevich, a Jioyeva ally, warned that the inauguration “could lead to a civil war," an event "that will affect the entire Caucasus and even Russia," Kavkazsky Uzel reports.
But, so far, Jioyeva, who has the ice-cold determination to become South Ossetia's de-facto leader, in keeping with the apparent results of a 2011 run-off (de-facto) election, is not to be swayed. She says that the inauguration will take place with or without the interim de-facto government’s support. The de-facto government , for its part, wants to hold a third run-off presidential election on March 25.
The only international effort to defuse the tensions has come from Moscow, which recognizes the territory as a state independent from Georgia, but, with two competing centers of power now in South Ossetia, it's hard to argue that Russia's self-promoted skills as a crisis manager have amounted to much.
Still, the Russia factor remains a variable. The Kremlin-blessed candidate Anatoly Bibilov, who flopped twice in the de-facto presidential election series, has now bowed out of the race. Some wonder whether South Ossetia's de-facto envoy to Russia, Dmitry Medoyev, might pick up the torch; Medoyev himself says he's waiting for a group of voters to give him the nod, Kommersant reports. (The paper also reports that one such group is meeting in the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, on February 7.)
But such a move is unlikely to help patch things over with Jioyeva and her team. Kommersant wrote on February 7 that the face-off in March "promises to be no less interesting than last year's" de-facto presidential elections. Indeed, that's certainly one way of putting it.
Giorgi Lomsadze is a journalist based in Tbilisi, and author of Tamada Tales.
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