The Telegraph reports:
Most of the Ossetians, as well as the Chechen irregulars who joined them, were more interested in pillaging, . . . but many, according to witnesses whose accounts have yet to be verified, also went house-to-house in Georgian villages, both in South Ossetia and outside the breakaway province, on raping and murdering sprees.
Last week, until orders came from Moscow to rein them in, the Russian troops occupying Georgian territory either did little to stop the irregulars from looting or committing atrocities or actively encouraged them.
Manning a checkpoint outside the Georgian town of Kaspi, 25 miles southeast of Gori, four young Chechen soldiers admitted that their South Ossetian allies had carried out reprisals against Georgian civilians – but insisted they were justified.
“Do you know what the Georgians did in Tskhinvali,” demanded one fighter, who identified himself as Sulim. “They killed 2,000 people. Georgians were crushing small children with their tanks.”
From the beginning of hostilities, officials in Moscow were quick to declare that “genocide” was taking place and that up to 2,000 people had been killed in attacks deliberately aimed at Tskhinvali’s civilian population.
Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, went on television to claim that Georgian tanks were crushing children and Georgian soldiers were beheading civilians.
Yet the first independent human rights activists attempting to calculate the civilian death toll have so far only been able to confirm the deaths of 44 people according to records from Tskhinvali’s only hospital.
According to Human Rights Watch, the respected New York-based body, the Kremlin’s deliberate exaggeration of the civilian death toll was inevitably contributing to the scale of reprisals against Georgians.
Asked whether he had personally seen any children crushed by Georgian tanks, Sulim replied: “No, but I heard Putin say it so it must be true.”
Russian propaganda has been so convincing that not even the few independent media outlets that normally criticise the Kremlin in Russia have spoken out against the Georgia war.
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