I
n the summer of 2008, open war broke out once again in Georgia, a small,
multiethnic country along Russia’s Caucasian border. It was not a new
conflict. In 1990, as the Soviet Union collapsed, the region of South
Ossetia, then part of Soviet Georgia, fought a war of independence with
the Georgian government. Both sides in that conflict signed a cease-fire that
left the political question of Ossetian sovereignty unresolved. The outbreak
of sustained violence in August 2008 marked the conflict’s most significant
renewal since the earlier cease-fire.
South Ossetia, dominated demographically by its titular ethnic group (the
Ossetians), borders the Russian Federation.1 Relatively unencumbered by a
weak Georgian state in the 1990s, the South Ossetian government had for
years acted as an independent country, establishing substantial administration
and the trappings of its own statehood. Accepting a difference between
de facto and de jure circumstances, the Georgian government administered
the large Georgian minority in the region, insisting that the conditions of
functional Ossetian independence were temporary. Despite that claim, these
ambiguous politics dragged on over almost two decades. By the time of
the 2008 conflict, most Ossetians in South Ossetia identified themselves as
citizens of an independent Ossetian state, but also held a kind of Russian
citizenship. The Georgians in the region paid Georgian taxes and voted in
Georgian elections. The international community had dubbed the conflict
“frozen.”