Russia Unveiled: Georgia under Attack

Brothers and Sisters,

August 8 2008 when the whole world was following the spectacular opening of the Olympic Games in Beijing rejoicing with global peace and unity of nations, Georgian people had to observe scenes very much different from the gorgeous show staged on the Beijing Olympic Stadium.

What we saw was alien military aircrafts flying over and throwing bombs on our peaceful villages nestled up in high mountains, historical towns in the heart of our country and the capital city of Tbilisi.

For millennia, we, Georgians, have lived here in the Caucasus and fought to defend ourselves. One can easily say our history has been the history of defense and constant fear for extinction. Only Tbilisi that has been our capital for the last 15 hundred years has been burned down dozens of times. This small Caucasian country and nation of only 5 million inhabitants have witnessed all the invaders that existed on Eurasian continent at any particular point of history that attacked us from all the sides of the world.

And yet, during all this time we also built and laid foundation to a beautiful country and original culture that embraced and welcomed all the civilizations at this crossroads of the Orient and Occident. Our cities gave shelter to merchants, travelers, and just ordinary people of most diverse origins, races, languages and faiths.

Official religion being Orthodox Christianity, our kings visited Muslim mosques on Fridays and Christian inhabitants of Tbilisi would not keep pigs in their yards not to offend their Muslim and Jewish neighbors. Our cities still bustle with voices speaking Georgian as much as Armenian, Russian, Azeri, Kurdish, Greek and many others.

Our children have grown in multicultural neighborhoods embracing and accepting descendants of all these peoples as their compatriots and brothers. We do not like making distinction in race and pointing to a person’s nationality is regarded in Georgia as expression of nasty taste and bad form. Travelers are sincerely impressed and surprised to find an area of about one square kilometer in the center of Tbilisi with a synagogue, mosque, and orthodox, Gregorian and catholic churches standing side by side and visited every Friday, Saturday and Sunday by believers who live likewise side-by-side and in completely peaceful and sweet neighborly atmosphere in the city.

After the final blow to the sovereignty of Georgia by the Russian Empire in 1801 and all the atrocities committed by the Communist regime against our physical existence, love of our country and personal dignity the country managed to get on its feet in the beginning of the 21^st century. We have once again set a firm direction for the development of our society – towards democracy, rule of law and European values; after all, so far the first human remains in Europe have been found in Georgia and our art and culture as well as governance forms were one of the first to enjoy the revitalizing touch of Renascent human thought back in the 13^th century.

It was our choice to build a free nation that respects human rights and fundamental values underlying a modern civilized society.

We want to head west without rejecting our close brotherly ties with the east and the whole Caucasus region. Slowly, like a child that is only starting to walk we are rebuilding our society, making roads, arranging infrastructure, trying to make people’s lives better

and happier. For the last several years Georgia has enjoyed an incredibly boosting inflow of foreign investments and foreign tourists that wish to see with their own eyes the place where the wine was born, where the ancient Georgian tribes mentioned even in the Bible have been one of the first in the world to mine and process precious metals and steel; where Argonauts met Medea – a Georgian princess of the people that guarded Golden Fleece as a symbol of wealth, wisdom and technology.

Centuries ago invaders were attracted to Georgia because of its strategic location at the crossroads of East and West and North and South; because of its beautiful nature, strong, honest, clever men and beautiful women – in Iran people still talk of legends of their charm, while in India a pretty girl is called a “Georgian Fairy”. Conquerors came for our abundant natural resources of water, forest, rich agriculture. Today people visiting Georgia want to see and share the beauty and charm of the civilization we, all the peoples living in this country have built over centuries.

On August 8 2008 the Kremlin started to purposefully attack these fruits of our ancient and contemporary history. Up to 50 people have already died in these attacks, whole villages are being ruined and our fathers, husbands, sons and brothers are fiercely attacked by forces that originate from thousands of kilometers only because we have finally raised our voice and started to decisively set rule of law in the regions of our country that had been artificially cut off from its mother land by criminals and politicians for whom lives of ordinary people of any nationality are priced at nothing. Russian Empire came to the Caucasus only 300 hundred years ago and is now “trying” to play a guarantor between Georgians and Ossetians – two nations that have lived hand in hand over centuries. Our former kings have frequently married Ossetian princesses and the ancient language of the descendant of Alans is now virtually spoken only here, in the Caucasus whereas the tribes were and are still spread all across Europe and have, unfortunately, assimilated with local populations.

We are proud to nurture and make available to the world the exquisite Ossetian culture and language, and the European Council was first to hear words in this ancient language when the head of South Ossetian Administration addressed Europe in his native language when representing the Georgian region.

Meanwhile, people are dying… The “peacekeeping” thrive of the Russian troops have killed Ossetians, Georgians, Azeris just because they are citizens of Georgia.

However, the most painful of all the danger of smoke, fire and destruction hanging over our hands right now, in this very minute, much more hurting than the sight of pregnant women and children fleeing from their homes to remain refugees in their own country – something 500,000 Georgian men and women have experienced after ethnic cleansing in Abkhazia and South Ossetia for over 15 years –

most painful of all this is the dirt and slander the whole world is hearing these days from Russian information agencies. Shameless liars are accusing Georgian soldiers of killing innocent civilians, shooting wounded Russian “peace keepers” (by some magic trick the overall number of casualties in the Russian troops after such “massacre” still remains up to fifteen, a number Russian sources confirm themselves). As if those Georgian soldiers who are fighting for their own land did not have friends, wives, neighbors of Ossetian ethnicity waiting for them back home.

The regime (MIND YOU, WE STRONGLY DISTINGUISH BETWEEN THE KREMLIN FROM ORDINARY RUSSIANS WHO ARE DECEIVED AND LIED TO) taking its roots in the Soviet KGB and Committees Extraordinary that helped Nazi officers in arranging concentration camps, who fed on innocent peoples' dramas in their own original death lagers, massacred and exiled hundreds of thousands, still killing own citizens all over the world with nuclear poisons, arranged the Beslan tragedy – this regime is trying to throw dirt on the people who have given shelter to thousands of Chechen refugees thrown out of their homes, who have nurtured the hope for peaceful resolution of conflicts in the Caucasus stemming from the policy of Divide et Impera for decades and remained patient when criminals and drug traffickers rooted in the criminal enclaves terrorized its civilians in the many peaceful villages where farmers still grow grapes and send cattle to graze on the fields mined with Russian weapons that bring millions of Russian Rubles to the shameless generals who send the innocent sons of Russian citizens to die in the fight against peoples defending their home.

Finally the World MUST know the truth. Today is the time when the real face of this bloody and shameless regime must be unveiled.

YOU MUST KNOW WHAT IS GOING ON before a Russian bomb may land on the house where these lines are written.

We are a people that loves to dance, sing and toast; whose hospitality is legendary and where the ancient tradition requires the host to respect and protect his guest even at the expense of his own life. Such are we, the people who are slandered of the atrocities in fact committed by forces who are aliens on this land. Today the Caucasus became home to another Finland of the 1940s, Afghanistan of the 1980s and Chechnya under the danger of annihilation.

AND IT IS TODAY WE NEED YOUR VOICES! YOUR SIMPLE, HUMAN SUPPORT AND SYMPATHY! WE DO NOT NEED YOUR ARMS OR MILITARY SUPPORT! WE JUST NEED YOU TO KNOW THE TRUTH: A EUROPEAN COUNTRY IS UNDER ATTACK. UNLESS THE AGGRESSION IS NOT STOPPED NOW, WHEN THE NEXT OLYMPICS – SYMBOL OF PEACE AND INTEGRITY – ARE HELD IN SOCHI, RUSSIA, YOUR COUNTRY MAY BE NEXT TO FOLLOW.