War of Words over South Ossetia

Both sides in the recent conflict between Russia and Georgia are engaged in a propaganda struggle in the media and in cyberspace

By Dumitru Minzarari

The war between Russia and Georgia exploded onto the media and cyberspace theater almost as soon as the conventional forces clashed, with both belligerents firing volleys of disinformation and propaganda campaigns aimed at demonizing the other.

Russia's initial major priority was to justify its military incursion into Georgian territory. Declaring the goal of helping the "brotherly Ossetian people," the Russian leadership also borrowed from the vocabulary of its perceived main world competitor, the United States. Addressing mainly the domestic audience, Moscow claimed it must defend its peacekeepers and citizens in South Ossetia from "treacherous Georgian military aggression."

The Kremlin, facing little opposition in the domestic media, has nearly complete liberty to mold any desired public opinion. The main basis for the legitimacy of the Russian invasion of South Ossetia was the accusation that the Georgian shelled the region's capital, Tskhinvali, killing close to 2,000 civilians. The reports of many deaths in South Ossetia generated massive outrage in Russia. However, as the wave of feeling rose, notably lacking was anyone asking whether this information provided by the Russian Defense Ministry was accurate and what its sources were.

On 11 August Tatyana Lokshina of Human Rights Watch, after visiting the combat area, gave her view that the figures on refugees and casualties given by the Russian authorities were inflated. Against Moscow's official estimate of 34,000 refugees from South Ossetia in Russia, Lokshina insisted that Russian Federal Migration Service documents showed 24,000 refugees, and that 11,000 of those had been recorded as returning into South Ossetia. The Russian authorities noted that "the overall number [of the displaced] was decreasing because of the people who return to join to volunteer militias of South Ossetia," HRW reported.

Speaking about the casualty figures, Lokshina charged in an interview with the Russian service of Radio Free Europe that South Ossetia's self-styled authorities were counting their dead paramilitaries as civilian casualties, raising serious doubts over the true number of civilians killed. It is telling that the deputy chief of the Russian General Staff, General Anatoly Nogovitsyn, admitted to the Russian media on 12 August that the data on casualties were being provided to them by the South Ossetian authorities. This clearly looked like an attempt to distance the Russian military from a biased and unreliable source after Lokshina's organization questioned the accuracy of the figures.

HRW later said that Tskhinvali hospitals gave figures of 44 dead and 273 wounded.

Russia is also accusing Georgia of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes, which Tbilisi denies. There is clear no evidence on any of these, and instead the inhabitants of Georgian villages in South Ossetia were forced to leave their homes, according to reports available to everyday Russians, for instance in the Kommersant newspaper. Nevertheless, these words generated a powerful resonance in the Russian society.

In return Georgia accused Russia of military aggression, and claimed its own military campaign was aimed at "reestablishing the constitutional order" over the breakaway region. Vitaly Portnikov, a columnist for Grani.ru, suggested that if Russia's leaders would listen carefully to their Georgian counterparts, they could recognize themselves using exactly the same phrase while shelling and leveling Chechen Grozny. London's Telegraph newspaper made a similar comparison, describing what happened when Russian warplanes attempted to hit a military barracks in Gori. Instead, at least two bombs struck an apartment complex, turning five buildings into blackened shells. A secondary school caught another bomb and became a pile of rubble.

When Russia received the clear signal that European countries were hesitant to accuse and put pressure on her, and seemed ready to tacitly accept any Russian option, Moscow launched a massive anti-American campaign.