Hope is not a plan

Not so little, of course, if you are involved in it.

The BBC reports in this article that there are preparations to move children out of South Ossetia and into Russia (most likely, into North Ossetia within Russia). The government of Georgia takes this as a sign that the leaders of the breakaway province are planning on further military action, whereas the authorities within South Ossetia claim that it is a response to sniper attacks and shelling against their people by the Georgian military. Without third-party reporters on the ground, it's very hard to say what's going on.

Tensions have apparently risen following the Russian government's declaration that it will continue it's fairly blatant destabilization plan directed at Georgia by establishing ties with the separatist provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the latter proxy war having even made it so far as to result in Russian deaths.

I continue to be confused about how this does not bode ill for Russia in the long term, as it continues to try and balance between promoting separatism externally and maintaining unity internally.

If you want the official views from both primary parties to this conflict, you can go to the web sites of the State Committee of Information and Press of the Republic of South Ossetia and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Georgia. From the Ministry, we get this declaration about terrorism in the Ossetian region, and from the Committee we get this rather more blatantly suspect announcement about how the Georgians have packed eight cars with explosives and plan to sell them to random South Ossetian citizens.

Lacking outside confirmation, I can't say whether the Georgian story is true or not, but prima facie the Ossetian press release looks like Snopes-worthy BS.

As the Olympics approach, Uighur separatists in Xinjiang province have ramped up their activities. Yesterday, they drove a truck into a group of exercising police officers, then hit them with grenades and finally waded in with knives, eventually killing sixteen and wounding another sixteen. The two attackers have been captured.

Notably, the Chinese press did report this as a separatist attack, while still officially denying that the two prior bus explosions were terrorist acts. Perhaps it's harder to pretend that a grenade and knife attack was an accidental fuel explosion.

It appears, at least looking from the outside and as filtered through largely PRC-controlled reporting, that the Chinese government was not adequately prepared for just how much separatist groups would pile on the violence as the Olympics approach and more non-PRC media outlets fill into the country.

BBC article
al Jazeera article

The government of Rwanda has once again accused France of complicity in the Rwandana genocide of 1994, this time in a report from the Rwandan Ministry of Justice.

The report says France backed Rwanda's Hutu government with political, military, diplomatic and logistical support.

"They clearly requested that the Interahamwes contine to man those checkpoints and kill Tutsis attempting to flee," it said.

The Rwandan report calls for the extradition and prosecution of thirty-three French nationals, including notables such as former president Mitterand and Dominique de Villepin. The French government has used the ever-popular past exonerative to indicate that "mistakes were made," but has generally claimed that French forces helped protect civilians as part of a UN-mandated mission during 1994.

BBC article

Following up on the report that children were being shipped out of South Ossetia into Russia ahead of possible violence, the BBC reports some new developments.

Most notably, the Russian government has indicated that it will intervene if there is a conflict in South Ossetia, with the public motivation of protecting Russian nationals living in the area:

"If events develop according to the worst-case violence scenario, Russia will not allow itself to remain indifferent, considering that Russian citizens live in South Ossetia, particularly in the conflict zone," Interfax quotes [special ambassador] Yuri Popov as saying.

Meanwhile, as the de facto government of South Ossetia claims that the Georgian government is attempting to spark violence, the Georgian government is pinning the blame for recent exchanges and deaths on the Ossetians as well as claiming that Ossetian children are not being sent away in fear of violence, but instead are doing their normal yearly trips to summer camp.

It would be helpful, if possibly very dangerous, to have some non-Caucasian (in the geographical sense) reporters on the scene.

Following on the heels of news of rising tensions between Georgian authorities and the de facto government of South Ossetia, and a Russian declaration of support should things go large, officials on both sides have announced that they will be talking tomorrow.

"There is an agreement to hold a meeting in Tskhinvali on August 7," Marina Salukvadze, the reintegration minister's spokeswoman said, referring to the capital of unrecognised South Ossetia.

In a separate development, Georgia's foreign ministry said the Georgian deputy foreign minister will meet his Russian counterpart in Moscow later this week to discuss the situation in South Ossetia.

This is the first time the Georgian government has sat for talks with the South Ossetian authorities. Notably, the announcement was made by someone from the Office of the State Minister for Reintegration, an office whose stated purpose is:

Contribution to the restoration of territorial integrity of Georgia; Reintegration of local inhabitants of Abkhazia and Tskhinvali Region/South Ossetia into unified state of Georgia; Contribution to the return of all refugees and IDPs and their descendants to these regions.

The Minister for Reintegration is Temuri Yakobashvili. According to Mr. Yakobashvili's bio, he's a career diplomat with a degree in Physics, who commendably speaks Russian, English, and Hebrew in addition to his native Georgian. We'll see what he can manage tomorrow.

Previously, I lamented the lack of outside journalists in the region. As it happens, al Jazeera has a correspondent in Russian North Ossetia, one Jonah Hull, who has this to say about the disputed evacuation of children from South Ossetia:

Jonah Hull, Al Jazeera's correspondent in North Ossetia, said many of the women and children seeking shelter and safety are situated around the city of Vladikavkaz.

"They're getting pretty basic care, and simply don't know how long they'll be here," he said.

That does tend to give the impression that this is not simply routine summer vacations for these folks.

al Jazeera article

Word of the first meeting between Ossetian and Georgian authorities in a decade may, or may not, have been premature. According to South Ossetian president Eduard Kokoity, there will be no talks tomorrow, as the Georgian government refuses to accept the four-party arrangement the South Ossetians want.

For the record, the four parties there would be Georgia, South Ossetia, North Ossetia, and Russia. The Georgian government complains that this is unnecessarily tilted against them. That seems at once both reasonable and possibly irrelevant. Although it seems redundant to have both North Ossetian and Russian participants, as North Ossetia is part of Russia (for now, anyway), this is not a voting assembly, so the idea of being outnumbered should not matter so much to the Georgian participants.

That said, Georgian Minister for Reintegration Temuri Yakobashvili insists that the talks absolutely will be happening tomorrow.

As we wait to see whether or not anyone sits down at a table in Tskhinvali with the Minister, both Georgian and Ossetian authorities report exchanges of fire. Again. As always for the area, we have no reliable third-party reporting, and one side's stories are comprehensively denied by the other, and vice versa.

We have many hours yet until daylight in Georgia, so it will be a little longer before we know if an actual meeting occurred or not.

al Jazeera article
CNN article

We closed out Wednesday with a pending meeting between the Georgian and South Ossetian authorities counterbalanced by reports of continued gunfire and a disagreement of whether any meeting was going to take place.

Today, Georgia has called a complete ceasefire, and Interfax has annouced that talks will take place on Friday, brokered by the Russian government.

Reports of the talks came just hours after Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia's president, offered an immediate halt to the heavy fighting and said he had ordered his forces not to return fire if attacked.

Saakashvili also repeated an offer of "full autonomy" for the breakaway region and said Russia could be the guarantor of any deal.

Interesting. Notably, the support of America and Russia come down firmly on partisan lines on this one. Whereas Russian deputy foreign minister Grigory Karasin has urged "the Georgian leadership to show common sense and stop irresponsible military activities in South Ossetia", American assistant secretary of state Dan Fried had this to say:

"It appears that the South Ossetians have instigated this uptick in violence," he said. "We have urged the Russians to urge their South Ossetian friends to pull back and show greater restraint."

We'll see, once again, what tomorrow brings.

al Jazeera article

Just a few hours after the announcement of a ceasefire to be followed by emergency peace talks, fighting has resumed in the South Ossetian region.

"The government of Georgia has decided to restore constitutional order in the conflict zone," General Mamuka Kurashvili, the head of Georgian peacekeepers in the region, said in comments broadcast on Georgia's Rustavi-2 television network.

"Despite our call for peace and a unilateral ceasefire separatists continued the shelling of Georgian villages," he said.

Also...

An AFP news agency reporter said that two columns of Georgian forces were seen approaching South Ossetia from near the Georgian town of Gori.

One column contained 40 trucks of armed interior ministry troops, some towing heavy artillery pieces, while the other column consisted of about 15 armoured personnel carriers.

As always, it is unclear who actually fired first, but there is some guessing from outside analysts that the South Ossetian leadership is trying to force a large enough upswing in violence to force Russia to leave its advisory and peacekeeping role and fully engage in the conflict. One wonders what we plan to do if that happens.

al Jazeera article

By way of illustrating the tenuous situation in South Ossetia, this is an unedited screencap from my feed reader (this is the al Jazeera feed):

Back to back.

On Thursday, Georgian forces moved into South Ossetia, derailing a previously announced plan for emergency peace talks today. Now, in lieu of peace talks, we have Russian armored columns, as Georgian forces close on the South Ossetia capital of Tskhinvali and a hundred fifty or so Russian armored units, including tanks and APCs have crossed into the area from Russia.

So far, Russia has claimed that ten of its peacekeeping troops were killed by Georgian forces, and the Georgian authorities have indicated that they have shot down some Russian jets overflying their territory.

The Russian government is currently making the claim that Georgian forces are taking part in ethnic cleansing in the Ossetian towns they've overrun (a claim that continues to surprise me for the extent to which it ignores Russia's own behavior in Chechnya).

We can part, for now, on the words of the Georgian president:

Mikhail Saakasvili, Georgia's president, said: "One hundred and fifty Russian tanks, armoured personnel carriers and other vehicles" had entered South Ossetia.

"I must also tell you that Georgian forces have downed two Russian jet fighters over Georgia's territory."

BBC article
al Jazeera article

Compare and contrast. These were all grabbed within the last five minutes

The BBC's focus is obvious

al Jazeera hits the mark

You can find it on the Fox front page, at any rate

But God damn it, CNN, what's wrong with you? I had to highlight the headline to make it visible.

The latest report from Georgia is that Russian units have moved out of South Ossetia and deeper into the heart of Georgia, ostensibly to prevent further Georgian strikes into South Ossetia. Mikheil Saakashvili has alternated between saying that his forces have knocked down a whole bunch of Russian planes and saying that Russia is committing premeditated murder of a small country, and that the world is obligated to come in to help.

These are not necessarily mutually exclusive claims, of course. When one compares the size of the Georgian and Russian military and sees that the Russians have very little else to take care of right now, one has to wonder what the long-term plan was on the Georgian military side. It may have been "start some violence, and hope NATO or at least the US has our back." The Russian government, on the other hand, may have made the probably more reasonable assessment that very few people over on the NATO side relish the idea of going to war against Russia -- especially over an issue that is as unclear as that of regaining a separatist province.

CNN article
BBC article
al Jazeera article

I was so taken by this AP headline that I went ahead and quoted it.

It brings up an interesting question that I continue to wonder about, vis-a-vis the Russian government's continued attempts to destabilize some neighbors via ethnic tensions while hoping to hold down its own autonomy-seeking ethnic minorities. Where will the PRC place its support? Obviously, it wants to support another major power that similarly seeks to maintain its own internal integrity, but as China is dealing with its own ethnic separatists, it's a little painful for their government to have to decide to back the Russian effort to lever off South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

I'd still put money on the PRC government just hanging out, hiding behind the Olympics, and saying things like this:

China's Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang issued a statement during the weekend saying the conflict should be resolved peacefully through dialogue.

Indeed. How likely is that to happen?

In response to a request for some background on the current Georgia-Russia conflict, I recently posted a link to this BBC primer and the following, very-high-level explanation to Greg Rucka's blog. The explanation seemed decently concise and clear, so here it is again:

South Ossetia's majority Ossetian population do not want to be part of Georgia, and took the first opportunity to try and separate in 1991 in the nascent days of the most recent incarnation of Georgia as a nation.*

The Russian government, seeing opportunity, supported the Ossetian separatists, including sending in "peacekeeping" troops who make it tricky for Georgian forces to do anything about continued violence coming out of the region.

Last week, increasing yet still low-level exchanges of fire between Georgian and Ossetian forces led to a call for peace talks, a four-hour ceasefire, and then a full military incursion by the Georgian military into S. Ossetia. The official Georgian line is that they took this action in response to a new outbreak of attacks by Ossetian forces. This may well be true, as many analysts believe the S. Ossetian authorities have been trying to provoke a violent enough incident to get the Russians involved in a big way.

Apparently, that happened, as the Russians rolled into S. Ossetia in force, and then continued their assault with air attacks across all of Georgia. They appear to have also bisected the country with their land forces now.

There is also the possibility that Georgia's president (Saakashvili) thought he could draw the US into events if things went awry. If so, that was a miscalculation on his part.

So Russia has certainly been promoting this situation for years, most likely hoping for something exactly like this, but the current Georgian regime did itself no favors by how it has acted toward these breakaway regions.

*Clarification -- This conflict does go back significantly farther than 1991, but 1991 is when things boiled up this time around. This does seem to be the way of things in Europe, and Eastern Europe in particular.

Over on his blog, Greg Rucka pointed out a John Markoff article that showed Russian DoS attacks against Georgia starting as soon as July 20th. This is likely to get the spin of "evil" premeditation over here, but well, duh. Of course, it was premeditated. Russia has been actively supporting two separatist movements within Georgia. Instead, we might want to ask "Why start on the 20th, and not earlier or later?"

The proximate chain of events leading up to the DoS attacks includes:

Alleged Georgian attacks in South Ossetia in early July
Alleged Georgian attacks in Abkhazia, leading to a cessation of any Abkhzian contacts with Georgia, also in early July
Russian admission of overflights of nominally Georgian territory

The last event was an admission of breaking of a prior ceasefire agreement concerning the region, and as such was an out-and-out provocation. When we combine that with the general paucity of poor quality of news coming out of the actual region, it's not hard to imagine that, from the Moscow perspective, there was a clear chain of events that seemed to be heading toward conflict starting in late July.

With the cessation of full-on military action in Georgia, we now wait on the departure of Russian forces from within clearly Georgian territory (and presumably back to South Ossetia and Abkhazia, if not to within Russia itself). At the moment, the Russian government says its military is in the town of Gori, from which the recent Georgian attack on Ossetia was launched, with the sole purpose of removing weaponry and restoring law and order. As reported in this BBC article, the official line is that Russian forces are already leaving.

As highlighted in this al Jazeera article and on BBC radio yesterday, however, eyewitnesses -- including an al Jazeera reporter -- relay different stories. Although Russian troops are basically hanging around, their South Ossetian allies have been going house to house, looting and burning Georgian residences. Several primarily ethnically Georgian villages have been more or less razed. A Russian commentator interviewed on the BBC said (paraphrased), 'theft is horrible, but at least they're not killing people' - his point being that many Ossetian civilians died during the initial Georgian attack, so looting and burning are relatively restrained responses.

However, bringing along the Ossetians may already be causing even bigger problems than displacement and mass property damage:

Talks between Russian and Georgian military commanders ended when Russian-backed South Ossetian forces demanded that they be allowed to police the town, sources told Al Jazeera.

A few minutes later the explosions, possibly from artillery fire, could be heard on the edge of Gori.

A request by the Ossetians to police Gori seems suspiciously like an attempt to expand Ossetian control over areas that are within Georgia's boundaries, without the support of the area in question being traditionally Ossetian. Even with the Russian hammer hanging over their heads, the Georgian military commanders could not be reasonably expected to accept that condition.

In the meantime, even as negotiations and possibly fighting are occurring to resolve a Russian pullout from Gori, Russian armor has moved into the coastal city of Poti, and the claim is being made there that the Russians are wrecking the port. It's unclear what the nominal justification for that would be, as Poti is not particularly near the Ossetia conflict region (in fact, one imagines the Russian armor that made it to Poti came from Abkhazia).

With no legitimate pressure being brought to bear from the rest of the world, Moscow is likely to continue to take their time here as peacekeepers, and to use the opportunity to wreck Georgia as much as they can, while they can, without doing anything immediately obvious like burning down farms en masse.

Coming fairly under the radar in this week of war and Olympics, the United States has signed an agreement with Libya in which diplomatic relations between the two countries will be renewed following financial compensation for deaths on both sides. Specifically, Libya agrees to pay compensation to victims (or rather, families of victims) of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing and the 1986 Berlin disco bombing, and the United States will compensate victims of our 1986 air raid against Tripoli.

Assuming this deal continues smoothly, we can expect to see a reopening of a US embassy in Tripoli and the possibility of financial aid for Libya. And, of course, you might actually be able to go there on vacation.

BBC article

This week, the Italian Catholic publication Famiglia Cristiana caused a self-conscious stir among Italian politicos by denouncing efforts by the current Berlusconi administration to blame everything on gypsies. The editorial made comparisons to prior episodes of mistreatment of minorities in Europe and surely fired up some memories of Italy's twentieth century fascist government. The current government's clever replies included the popular teenager debate method of simply accusing the other person of doing the exact same thing:

One junior minister, Carlo Giovanardi, attacked the magazine saying: "You are fascists, with your bludgeoning tone".

Wandering back into the land of facts, we should recall that the government recently proposed fingerprinting all those pesky Roma. When this caused an unsurprising surge of unhappiness throughout Europe, their solution was to simply generalize the plan and fingerprint everyone.

Nothing to worry about.

The Famiglia editorial stands out from other challenges made to the current government by dint of not coming from some weird lefty publication, but rather from the Catholic community.

The Vatican released a statement saying that Famiglia does not speak for them. Father Antonio Sciortino, the magazine's director, politely gave a "Well, of course not" answer to this question as well.

It is, on the whole, a heartwarmingly Christian outlook for a Christian magazine to espouse.

BBC article

Russia announced today its formal recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states, citing the recent conflict as having forced its hand, much in the way that the Kosovo conflict was the proximate cause of Kosovo's recognition by outside nations as an independent state. Other European countries and NATO have denied the legitimacy of this recognition, creating an interesting mirror image to Kosovo and the Russian response to them.

The move followed votes in both houses of parliament on Monday, which called on Moscow to recognise the regions' independence.

In an interview with the BBC at his residency in Sochi, on the border with Abkhazia, Mr Medvedev later said Russia had been obliged to act following a "genocide" started by his Georgian counterpart against separatists in South Ossetia.

This continues the saga of ethnic groups bucking for their own states as well as Russia alternately being for or against this idea, depending on the ethnicity involved in either the former or new government. We're now in "fuzzy recognition" territory, where nascent countries are considered countries by some, but not all, of the people we're dealing with. That said, it's a little hard to make the case that Georgia should include these areas whose majority populations clearly don't want to Georgian citizens -- but that road of fractured countries certainly doesn't stop in Georgia, or even in Europe proper.

BBC article

The BBC is reporting that a plane flying out of Nyala in the Darfur region of Sudan has been hijacked to Libya.

BBC article

Two different AP stories concerning China highlight the continued issue the PRC government has with public perceptions and maintaining control.

First, two police are dead in Xinjiang following another apparent conflict with Uighurs. "Apparent" inasmuch as it's difficult at the moment to get news out of Xinjiang that is not coming through official channels, unlike other parts of China that appear to have greater penetration by hard-to-control communication methods.

As an aside, the AP article refers to the Uighurs as a minority. Although they're a minority in the PRC as a whole, they're the single largest ethnic group within Xinjiang, outnumbering Han Chinese.

More troubling in terms of the stability of government control is a story from Shanghai about a spree killer of police who has elicited a great deal of sympathy from the public, as many people can relate to his backstory of being mistreated by the local police. Make no mistake that he's also still just a guy who snapped, but the fact that people are able to relate to his motivation and are willing to talk about it shows just how shaky internal support for the government really is.

Of course, these kinds of things have been ongoing for a while, but it's possible that in the wake of the Olympics, we'll see more coverage. Notably, the trial for the killer in Shanghai was deferred until after the Olympics, due to its controversial nature and its near-guaranteed ending in a death sentence.

In 2006, I commented on an article series in PLoS: Medicine covering the general practice of disease mongering -- that is, taking a reasonably normal part of the human condition and trying to convert it into a diagnosable disease for the purpose of selling a drug.

In short, if you've developed a drug, you want to maximize its use. In some cases, that involves convincing people they need to treat something that they previously thought of as normal (and which, in all likelihood, often is completely normal).

The companion to this need to expand your potential market by convincing people that they're patients is the need to expand your market reach by convincing doctors to prescribe your drug.

Over on the Science-Based Medicine blog, David Gorski brings up a recent article in the Annals of Internal Medicine about internal Merck documents that prove that Merck was engaging in a "seeding trial."

This is the first confirmation of a practice many doctors have believed pharmaceutical companies were engaging in, in which a compeletely unnecessary pharmaceutical "trial" is started at the level of individual medical practices, with the sole intent of increasing the exposure of doctors to a new medication ahead of its official approval by the FDA and commercial release. In this way, the pharmaceutical company accelerates uptake of its new drug and reduces a non-money-making "cold period" following the official commercial release. Here's the conclusion from the Annals paper:

Documentary evidence shows that ADVANTAGE is an example of marketing framed as science. The documents indicate that ADVANTAGE was a seeding trial developed by Merck's marketing division to promote prescription of Vioxx (rofecoxib) when it became available on the market in 1999.

The documentation supporting this came out as part of the multiple ongoing lawsuits against Merck in the wake of the discovery that Vioxx was responsible for an estimated 28,000 heart attacks and deaths over a four-year period.

Here's a key quote, as also quoted in the Science-Based Medicine blog:

The ADVANTAGE (Assessment of Differences between Vioxx and Naproxen To Ascertain Gastrointestinal Tolerability and Effectiveness) trial is the largest ever initiated prior to the launch of a Merck product. The objectives were to provide a product trial among a key physician group to accelerate uptake of VIOXX as the second entrant in a highly competitive new class and gather data important to this customer group. The trial was designed and executed in the spirit of the Merck marketing principles, as described below.

First, the trial was targeted to a select group of critical customers. The clinical trial program for VIOXX focused primarily on specialists. While they would be critical to early uptake and advocacy for VIOXX, the large majority of prescriptions in the A&A market (~60%) come from primary care physicians. The ADVANTAGE trial utilized this important group of prescribers as investigators. In addition to gaining experience with VIOXX, many of these physicians gained a highly coveted introduction to clinical research.

So, in other words, the marketing department at Merck devised a fundamentally unnecessary medical trial (the "largest ever" for a to-be-released Merck product) with the sole intent of accelerating uptake of their drug.

Medical trial as market research.

Magomed Yevloyev, owner of the frequently critical ingushetiya.ru site, was shot and killed while in Russian police custody. The official report is that Mr. Yevloyev attempted to seize a police officer's gun, and was shot in the head in the process.

One might be forgiven for having a degree of suspicion about the claim.

The Ingushetia region, sandwiched between Chechnya and North Ossetia, is the mirror image to Russia's official position of support for the Ossetian minority -- largely because of its historical direct opposition to Ossetia, up to and including a full-scale armed conflict in late 1992, in the early days of post-Communist Russia.

There are a number of factors that go into the unfortunate modern position of Ingushetia, as the even more tumultuous cousin of Chechnya. Perhaps first and most pertinent is that Ingushetia, like Chechnya, but unlike Ossetia, is full of Muslims. The preferential treatment of the Ossetians, most likely on that basis, goes back quite a bit, back even to Imperial Russia. Based on this treatment, the Ingushetians supported the Bolsheviks, but were ill-treated in turn decades later by Stalin, who deported them and the Chechens to the East. This particular deportation was redressed to some degree by the return of the Ingushetians under Khrushchev, but a particular portion of their territory was not returned. This sparked the 1992 conflict.

That brief 1992 conflict ended when Russian troops moved in along the Soviet-established border between the two regions, effectively finalizing the status of the Soviet border, and sticking to the pattern of Russian support for the Ossetians over their neighboring ethnic enclaves.

You can read the full version as reported on by the Rand Institute here.

Yevloyev's death in custody is reminiscent of the shooting death of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, a death that was entirely believably blamed on a Chechen. In this case, Yevloyev's seizure from the airport in Nazran presumably made it undeniable that he was in custody when he died, so blaming his murder on a rogue Ingushetian would have been impossible.

BBC article