McCain's Friend The War Criminal

By Cernig

Both John McCain and his senior foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann are long-time friends of Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili. McCain's decade-long friendship with the Georgian leader is among the closest McCain has with any foreign leader and began in 1995, when McCain directed a search for potential leaders in the former Soviet republics after communism's collapse. He has gone on holiday and jetskiied with him, spoke to him daily on the phone during Georgia's recent conflict with Russia and even sent his wife to Saakashvili's side to offer his support during that conflict. Scheunemann has worked closely with the Georgian leader, accepting his money to lobby on Georgia's behalf on the Hill even while working for the McCain campaign.

But the firebrand, neck-tie chewing, U.S.-educated lawyer has had his problems in the past, at odds with McCain's depictation of him as - in McCain's legendary judgement - a freedom-loving promoter of democracy. In 2007, Saakashvili's government crushed an opposition protest by beating unarmed protestors, shooting them with rubber bullets and fire hoses. They also shut down a TV station critical of the government.

Now though, there's an entirely different category of problem for Mccain's judgement - Saakashvilli has been accused by a BBC investigative reporting team of ordering war crimes and atrocities during Georgia's surprise attack on its breakaway province of South Ossetia, causing the UK government to re-evaluate its support for Saakashvili himself, if not for Georgia.

Eyewitnesses have described how its tanks fired directly into an apartment block, and how civilians were shot at as they tried to escape the fighting.

Research by the international investigative organisation Human Rights Watch also points to indiscriminate use of force by the Georgian military, and the possible deliberate targeting of civilians.

Indiscriminate use of force is a violation of the Geneva Conventions, and serious violations are considered to be war crimes.

The allegations are now raising concerns among Georgia's supporters in the West.

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband has told the BBC the attack on South Ossetia was "reckless".

He said he had raised the issue of possible Georgian war crimes with the government in Tbilisi.

It seems to be the case that the Georgian actions were mirrored by tit-for-tat Russian crimes, true. But this is the second time in a few short years that Saakashvili has revealed himself as more of a despot than a democratic leader. The details are horrific.

Human Rights Watch believes the figure of 300-400 civilians is a "useful starting point".

That would represent more than 1% of the population of Tskhinvali - the equivalent of 70,000 deaths in London.

Allison Gill, director of the Moscow office of Human Rights Watch, said: "We're very concerned at the use of indiscriminate force by the Georgian military in Tskhinvali.

"Tskhinvali is a densely populated city and as such military action needs to be very careful that it doesn't endanger civilians."

"We know that in the early stages there were tank attacks and Grad rockets used by Georgian forces," she added.

"Grad rockets cannot be used in densely populated areas because they cannot be precisely targeted, and as such they are inherently indiscriminate.

"Our researchers were on the ground in Tskhinvali as early as 12 August.

"And we gained evidence and witness testimony of Grad rocket attacks and tank attacks on apartment buildings, including tank attacks that shot at the basement level.

"And basements are typically areas where civilians will hide for their own protection.

Worse, the BBC team uncovered evidence that civilians had been deliberately targeted.

Marina Kochieva, a doctor at Tskhinvali's main hospital, says she herself was targeted by a Georgian tank as she and three relatives were trying to escape by car from the town on the night of 9 August.

She says the tank fired on her car and two other vehicles, forcing them to crash into a ditch.

The firing continued as she and her companions lay on the ground.

She showed the BBC the burnt-out wreckage of the car on the town's ring-road, riddled with bullet holes and with a much larger hole, apparently from a tank round, in the front passenger door.

Ms Kochieva says a nurse from her hospital was killed while fleeing Tskhinvali in similar circumstances.

She says she counted 18 burnt-out cars on the ring-road on 13 August, at the end of the war, suggesting there may have been more casualties.

..."The Georgians knew this was the 'Road of Life' for Ossetians. They were sitting here waiting to kill us," she said.

Saakashvili has, of course, denied the accusations. But the UK government is taking them seriously and is not at all happy, perhaps feeling it has been taken for a ride by Saakashvili's protestations of being the oppressed lover of freedom and justice.

David Miliband, who visited Georgia immediately after the war to show solidarity with its government, said he took the allegations of war crimes "extremely seriously" and had raised them "at the highest level" in Tbilisi.

Apparently hardening his language towards Georgia, he called its actions "reckless".

But he added: "The Russian response was reckless and wrong".

"It's important that the Russian narrative cannot start with Georgian actions; it has to start with the attacks on the Georgians from the South Ossetians and that is the tit-for-tat that got out of control," he said.

Even the democratic Georgian opposition says that Saakashvili deliberately provoked Russia's military intervention, possibly believing McCain and Scheunemann's friendship meant America would rush to his aid militarily. (They've asked that billions of dollars in aid be carefully monitored so that the Georgian leader and his associates don't use it to simply prop up their rule. In turn, Saakashvili accuses them of being Russian agents.)

That's not the way McCain sees it - in his debates with Obama he repeatedly claimed Russia was the aggressor. But while the Mccain campaign is hyping up any and all associations between Obama and Bill Ayers, there has been little said in America about McCain's extraordinary lapse of judgement in his far closer association with the Georgian leader - an association which is doubtless driven by McCain's long-term ties to rabidly anti-communist rightwing groups which have sponsored fascist despots, death squads, anti-semites and atrocities aplenty.

Comments

[Batocchio]

Well, this explains McCain's comment that "We are all Georgian war criminals."

[Ossetia Truth]

The eyewitness accounts from the BBC are just the tip of the iceberg. Read this collection of personal accounts from residents of Tskhinvali and smaller towns. They corroborate the accounts of indiscriminate shelling, attacks on fleeing civilians, targeting of private homes and civilian public shelters, and more.

[Susan]

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Susan

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