Translated material
After the trenches
Georgia returns to peaceful life
Normal life is returning to Georgia. Yesterday, President Mikheil Saakashvili held a government meeting not in Tbilisi, but 70 kilometers to the west - in the city of Gori, which suffered during the conflict. By this time, branches of the largest Georgian banks and shops had already resumed work in Stalin’s homeland.Civilians who left the city for a while are returning to Gori. The Georgian Ministry of Education promises to start the new school year in mid-September. Railway traffic, interrupted the day before due to an explosion at artillery depots in the village of Skra near Gori, has resumed. The OSCE has sent 20 observers who will begin monitoring the situation between Gori and Tskhinvali.
There are signs of normalization of the situation in other regions of the country. In Western Georgia, a brigade of Georgian armed forces stationed there before the crisis in South Ossetia has returned to its base in Senaki. This base was under the control of the Russian military for some time. According to the Georgian Ministry of Defense, the infrastructure of the base was seriously damaged.
After a three-week break, oil pumping through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline resumed. True, transportation on this Western-protected route, bypassing Russia, was suspended even before the hostilities in South Ossetia - the cause was an explosion and a large fire on a pipeline in northeastern Turkey in the zone of activity of Kurdish militants. In an interview with Vremya Novostey, Georgian State Minister for Reintegration, Special Presidential Representative for Conflict Resolution Temuri Yakobashvili noted that if oil had continued to be pumped through the pipeline during the days of the conflict, this would have led to even greater problems. According to him, during the days of the conflict, the Russian Air Force allegedly attacked this oil pipeline.
Meanwhile, controversy is flaring up around the assessment of the military side of recent events. Former Georgian Defense Minister Giorgi Karkarashvili (he headed the department during the conflicts in South Ossetia and Abkhazia in the early 1990s) said that the Georgian army was unprepared for Russian air strikes, which was the main reason for the defeat. Another ex-defense minister, Irakli Okruashvili, who is now in political exile in Paris , called Mikheil Saakashvili during the war and asked permission to return to fight as an ordinary soldier, but was refused. Now, in an interview with the Tbilisi newspaper “Kviris Palitra” (“Palette of the Week”), he harshly criticized the president and his team, who launched the operation in South Ossetia without proper preparation and ended up losing people and territories, “pushing back at least 10-- 15 years to the prospect of the return of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.”
Let us recall that Mr. Okruashvili himself was planning to celebrate 2007 in Tskhinvali a couple of years ago, but then he was not allowed to fight. According to Okruashvili, as a result of the current conflict, Georgia “has lost more than a thousand soldiers dead and missing.” Temuri Yakobashvili insists on other figures - 200 soldiers and 100 civilians were killed or missing. Russian channels still do not broadcast in Georgia. The State Minister admitted that he personally initiated their shutdown during the information war.