A Separate Pieces

Posted by Fawn

This will never last. We've seen this sort of thing dozens of times before. A hastily constructed peace plan designed to allow politicians to look good (and they do, look at the photograph above) while the root causes of the situation are ignored.

From the Associated Press:

“Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Saturday signed the plan for a cease-fire in Georgia that his Georgian counterpart reluctantly agreed to a day earlier, setting the stage for a Russian troop withdrawal after more than a week of warfare.

The cease-fire plan calls for Russian forces to withdraw to the positions they held before the fighting broke out in Georgia's Russian-backed separatist province of South Ossetia. That appears to mean that hundreds of Russian soldiers who had been in South Ossetia previously as peacekeepers will be allowed to return.

The plan also grants Russian forces limited rights to patrol Georgia proper...”

The root cause of this conflict lies in ethnic and cultural differences with a dollop of Russian (and U.S.) cold waresque, geo-political grandstanding on top. All the reams of paper, hand shakes, false smiles and rhetoric will not solve this problem. For some predictions as to how this will play out take a look at the Albania, Kosovo, Serbian, et. al. Melt down, the Arab-Israeli disaster, Belgium, and soon, the fractioning of the United States along the anglo-Hispanic fault line. No, it may not happen tomorrow or even in our lifetimes but the problem is not solved, the tension remains, and it will reemerge.

In order for this situation to be solved, the Abkhazians and Ossetians either need their own autonomous, independent countries or they need to become Russians or Georgians with an e pluribus unum mindset. Anything short of this will provide the global community a lifetime of re-runs while Abkhazia and Ossetia remain separate pieces.