Conflict Strains Ties Between Russian and Georgian Jews

Grant Slater
Jewish Telegraphic Agency

IGOETI, Georgia

The Russian soldier took the last drag of his Marlboro Light, scanned the crowd of Georgian police huddling about 20 yards away and threw the butt in their direction.

He slung his rifle over his shoulder and jogged back toward an armored vehicle, with a reporter right beside him.

"We're not going to Tbilisi. I want to go home," said the soldier.

But as Russian troops pushed within 30 minutes of the Georgian capital on Monday, it was unclear whether any of the higher-ups agreed with him.

Over the weekend, Russian forces dug in on either side of the main road leading from the capital Tbilisi to the embattled city of Gori and farther west. They set up sniper positions on hills, hid armored vehicles on the side of the road beneath piles of tree branches and operated with impunity on Georgia's main highway.

A Russian soldier guards the road from Tbilisi to Gori.

The Georgian forces -- outmanned and seeking to avoid confrontation -- could only look on powerlessly.

They stared across the line with one question on their mind: How long will they stay?

A flurry of diplomacy by European Union and American officials has sought a resolution to the situation and to press Russian troops to leave Georgia. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said that Russia would pull its troops out Monday, but gave no timetable for withdrawal.

The normally close relations between Russian-speaking Jews -- manifested in congresses and charities meant to bring them together -- have been strained by nationalism and propaganda wars in the last two weeks.

Rerun of 1968?
Georgians view the Russian troops on their soil as no less than a full-scale occupation of their country, akin to Czechoslovakia in 1968 when Russian tanks rumbled into Prague. A photo exhibition in front of the Parliament building in Tbilisi compares the invasions.

Georgian hopes still lay in diplomatic pressure from the West. European Union flags fly alongside the red-and-white crosses of the Georgian one in front of most storefronts in the capital.

"The Russians understand that what they're doing is a crime," said Temur Yakobshvili, Georgia's reintegration minister and one of several high-ranking Jewish officials in the Georgian government. "They're starting to realize that this crime can not last unpunished."

His responsibility was to reunite Georgia with its breakaway republics, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. When border skirmishes erupted last week and threatened to explode into all-out war, he traveled to the Ossetian capital Tskhinvali, but could not alter the course of the conflict.

Now, with Russian troops at his doorstep, Yakobshvili said that all Georgia could do was to wait and see. Any advance or retaliation against Russian troops could provide the impetus for a broader conflict.

He said that the terms of the current cease-fire make it clear that the Russians need to leave -- and quickly.

"Immediate means now," he said. "Unfortunately, we don't have any indications that the Russians understand what is now."

The Russians may understand, but they have little reason to leave.

Behind their front lines, news reports suggest that they are dismantling key parts of the Georgian military and civilian infrastructure. At the same time, irregular troops from the Caucasus republics and South Ossetia have been looting ethnic Georgian villages.

The ease with which Russia exerted its will has emboldened the country. Many Jewish groups and leaders from Russia have lined up behind the war effort and against Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili.

The boldest statement came from the president of the World Congress of Russian Jews, Boris Shpigel, who called Georgia's attack on South Ossetia, which ignited the Russian response, a genocide.

"We, as a people who have experienced genocide, cannot remain aloof when armed men kill innocent women, children and the elderly. We agree that evil must not go unpunished," Shpigel said in a statement published in full by the Jewish News Agency, a wire service operated by the Chabad-run Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia.

The federation has not commented on the conflict and could not speak about the statement, according to their press service.

The federation has operations throughout the former Soviet Union. Many of the countries where it operates have stood in solidarity with Georgia, creating cross purposes that have strained relationships.

Ze'ev Elkin, a member of the Israeli Knesset and of the World Congress' Parliamentary Club, distanced himself from Shpigel's rhetoric, saying that such congresses should not get involved in "geopolitical conflicts," reported the Israeli daily Ha'aretz.

Moshe Kantor heads the European Jewish Congress and the Russian Jewish Congress, groups that are closely aligned but are straddling both sides of the current conflict.

A spokesman for the Russian Jewish Congress said that the group had prepared a statement, but was awaiting approval by its leadership.