BOTH TO BLAME!

THE report of the inquiry into the causes of the outbreak of the five-day war between Georgia and Russia in August last year was delivered yesterday to the European Union which commissioned it. The detailed report is more than 500 pages long but on the central question it was asked to answer it is commendably brief: “The war was started by a Georgian attack on South Ossetia that was not justified by international law.” However (there's always a however) it continued, “The attack followed months of Russian provocation. Although Russia was entitled to respond to the attack its subsequent military push into Georgia was in violation of international law.”

The inquiry was led by Heidi Tagliavani, a Swiss diplomat with a knowledge of the area, who had a team of 30 international experts on all the various aspects of the conflict. Last August most neutral opinion reached a similar conclusion to that of the inquiry about who was responsible for the first shots. The Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili did not help his case at the time by advancing three differing explanations of what had happened. Yesterday he may have been right when he said, “Russia was preparing for war all along”. But if that was so, why was he so foolish as to fall into Russia's carefully prepared trap? Moscow's response to the report yesterday was brief: “It gives an unequivocal answer to the question of who was to blame. It was Georgia.”