Former senior OSCE officials say Georgia started bloody war in South Ossetia

PanARMENIAN.Net - Two former British military officers are expected to give crucial evidence against Georgia when an international inquiry is convened to establish who started the country's bloody five-day war with Russia in August, The Sunday Times reports.



Ryan Grist, a former British Army captain, and Stephen Young, a former RAF wing commander, are said to have concluded that, before the Russian bombardment began, Georgian rockets and artillery were hitting civilian areas in the breakaway region of South Ossetia every 15 or 20 seconds.



Their accounts seem likely to undermine the American-backed claims of President Mikhail Saakashvili of Georgia that his little country was the innocent victim of Russian aggression and acted solely in self-defense.



During the war both Grist and Young were senior figures in the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). The organization had deployed teams of unarmed monitors to try to reduce tension over South Ossetia, which had split from Georgia in the early 1990s.



On the night war broke out, Grist was the senior OSCE official in Georgia. He was in charge of unarmed monitors who became trapped by the fighting. Based on their observations, Grist briefed European Union diplomats in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, with his assessment of the conflict.



Grist, who resigned from the OSCE shortly afterwards, has told The New York Times it was Georgia that launched the first military strikes against Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital.



"It was clear to me that the [Georgian] attack was completely indiscriminate and disproportionate to any, if indeed there had been any, provocation," he said. "The attack was clearly, in my mind, an indiscriminate attack on the town, as a town."



He said he had made it "very clear" at a briefing to ambassadors there was a "severe escalation".



"It would give the Russian Federation any excuse it needed in terms of trying to support its own troops," Grist said.



Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister who helped broker the ceasefire that ended the war and has been a fierce critic of the Russian invasion of Georgia, is tomorrow due to announce a commission of inquiry into the conflict at a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels.



The inquiry will be chaired by a Swiss expert as a mark of independence and will try to establish who was to blame for the conflict. European and OSCE sources say it is likely to seek evidence from the two former British officers.



The inquiry comes as the EU softens its hardline position towards Russia amid mounting European skepticism about Saakashvili's judgment.