With tomorrow marking the first anniversary of the start of Russia and Georgia’s five-day war, the heavyweights in the Western press have been offering one-year-after accountings, mostly variations on what GlobalPost, in an admirably direct headline, terms “Assessing the Russia-Georgia chatter.” A year on, the guns may be largely (if not entirely) silent, but the two countries are marking the anniversary with an escalating  series of verbal skirmishes - some of them depressingly familiar, like the exchange of rhetorical fire in recent weeks over alleged shelling in and around South Ossetia.

In a New York Times guest column today, two American experts who’ve worked with Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili say that Tbilisi’s “democratic backsliding” while enjoying virtually uncritical U.S. backing has had as much influence on U.S. standing in the post-Soviet world as Moscow’s bullying. Citing Tbilisi’s “excessive police action against unarmed protesters, problems with the judiciary and efforts to constrain the media,” Mark Lenzi, Georgia country director for the International Republican Institute, and Lincoln Mitchell, who formerly held the same position with the National Democratic Institute, write:

“Soon after Georgia was labeled a ‘beacon of liberty’ to the world by President Bush in 2005, the country started to regress democratically without so much as a peep from Washington. This was not lost on other, more authoritarian governments in the Caucasus and Central Asia that are still dealing with their own fledgling opposition groups.”

Lenzi and Mitchell’s critical assessment is particuarly noteworthy in light of Saakashvili’s recent offer of cabinet posts to members of the opposition (dismissed by some as a PR move timed for U.S. Vice President Joe Biden’s recent Georgia visit).

But the most interesting of the anniversary crop might be Marc Champion’s The Wall Street Journal account, which views the war of words through the prism of the pending report on the real fighting by an international fact-finding mission headed by Swiss diplomat Heidi Tagliavini, a veteran Caucasus hand and former head of the UN observer mission in Abkhazia.

Originally due 31 July, the report has been delayed until late September as both countries, jockeying to influence the verdict, flooded the mission with 11th-hour documents purporting to prove beyond doubt that Georgia launched hostilities to return South Ossetia to its fold or that Russian troops provoked the fighting by pouring into the disputed region.

The collective upshot of reading all this is the sense that we are going to be marking this anniversary in quite the same fashion for many years to come. The Journal’s Champion quotes Kremlin-friendly Russian political analyst Sergei Markov chillingly name-checking the 35-year Mediterranean stand-off that puts the “frozen” in “frozen conflict.”

Moscow isn’t concerned about the virtually unanimous international rejection of Abkhazia and South Ossetia’s postwar declarataions of “independence,” Markov asserts, because “that’s good for Russia. These countries will be tied to Russia, like northern Cyprus is to Turkey.”

On a day when some 8.500 Russian troops lumbered into the North Caucasus for Russia’s biggest military exercise since the Georgia war, Al Jazeera English has an excellent field piece by Tbilisi-based journalist and blogger Matthew Collin detailing the tensions on the ground as OSCE and UN monitors up stakes in South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

As Daniela Ivanova noted previously in this blog, both missions were vetoed by Russia, essentially on the grounds that the two disputed provinces are now sovereign states (according to Russia, if virtually no one else), and therefore the missions no longer have a mandate.  Collin contrasts this legalistic argument with a snippet of life in the Georgian border village of Ergneti, where locals fear the impact of the international agencies’ departure on an already fragile security situation. “At night it’s terrible,” a farmer who returned after the fighting to his nearly demolished home tells the reporter, “because you can hear all the burnt metal rattling in the wind.”

Meanwhile, AP notes, Russia’s Caucasian war games will run through July 6 - “the day that President Barack Obama arrives in Moscow for a highly anticipated summit with Russia’s Dmitry Medvedev.”

On 15 June the UN Security Council failed to extend the presence of the 16-year-old United Nations Observer Mission in Georgia (UNOMIG) because Russia vetoed its technical roll-over. The observer mission was active in the sensitive region of Abkhazia after a 1993 ceasefire between Georgia and the Abkhaz separatists, serving as one of the few deterrents of ethnic conflict.

Why would Russia want to end an observer mission consisting of 131 military observers and 20 policemen?
The website of the Russian foreign ministry provides an interesting take on the issue:

“There is no doubt that the full responsibility for the withdrawal from the region of the UN mission observers and staff, whose work was on the whole positively perceived in Moscow, Sukhum [Sukhumi] and New York, lies on the Western states which for many months in a row now have demonstrated ideology-driven recalcitrance. It seems they do not need UN observers, who would hinder the leadership in Tbilisi repeatedly using force. It turned out to be much more important to strive by hook or by crook to highlight in the draft UN Security Council resolution the existence of Georgia within the former, pre-August 2008 borders, and at the same time to wipe Abkhazia off the political map of the Transcaucasus, reviving the state of an ‘unsettled conflict’, which has in fact already been resolved.” (June 16)

The argument is essentially legalistic: the UN mission’s mandate in Georgia has ceased to exist because Abkhazia is no longer part of Georgia, according to Russia. Georgia and Russia intervened or rather clashed in South Ossetia last August, but for Russia the outcome was the independence of both breakaway regions.

Aside from the legalistic nature of the issue, and the great-power game, at stake is the future of the region’s ethnic Georgian population, numbering up to 60,000 according to AFP and concentrated in the region’s eastern Gali district. Analysts say the withdrawal of UN monitors from Abkhazia would leave tens of thousands of ethnic Georgians in the region vulnerable and could provoke a mass exodus. A mission of about 225 European Union monitors will continue to operate near Abkhazia and South Ossetia, but the EU has so far been denied access to both rebel regions.

A similar scenario played out on May 13 with Russia vetoing a Greece-brokered deal to save an OSCE mission in Georgia. After five months of talks revolving around the same type of legalistic sovereignty issues, Greece - the current president of the OSCE - floated a revised plan omitting mention of Georgia or South Ossetia, skirting the hot issue of the separatist region’s status, while stipulating free movement for monitors across the August ceasefire line. Moscow had a different version. According to Reuters references to “free and unimpeded contact and movement” across the truce line were crossed out by the Kremlin - a statement on the separate status of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
registan.net quotes an International Crisis Group report on the situation in South Ossetia:

“All sides in the conflict – Georgian, Russian and South Ossetian – committed war-time abuses, but the actions of Ossetian militias, who systematically looted, torched and in some cases bulldozed most ethnic Georgian villages, were particularly egregious. The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) called those abuses “ethnic cleansing” Human Rights Watch cited ample evidence to label them “crimes against humanity” and “war crimes”. The PACE also noted “the failure of Russia and the de facto authorities to bring these practices to a halt and their perpetrators to justice”. Indeed, Russian troops largely stood by, unwilling or unable to perform their security duties…”

Registan.net also adds that on June 22nd Abkhazian forces managed to attack and damage part of Georgia’s electricity infrastructure - a disturbing occurrence reminiscent more of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than of the more or less stable situation before 2004 (the year when Saakashvili’s government proceeded to break down the flourishing black market between South Ossetia and Russia).