Goin' Broke The Cost of War
 Events
The Battle for Whiteclay
Jan 30 to Feb 5 at the Ross Nebraska 2009 Legislative Session
January 7, 2009 Martin Luther King Jr. Birthday Observed
January 19 Inauguration of President Obama
January 20 Volunteer Speaking Our Peace Yes, Mr. Bush, This War / Recession Is Hard
By Paul Olson, NFP President Global Warming Building a Sustainable Future Is Not a Luxury
By Professor Bruce E. Johansen Nebraska Peace Stratcom
The Most Dangerous Place on the Face of the Earth Whiteclay
Updates on Nebraska's tiny reservation border town. Dick Cheney
Impeachment is on the table. Peace Matters
Omaha NFP Newsletter Alexandra Svoboda
One Year Later StratCom Conference Space Conference
 Visions for Peace Visions for Peace
 Checks On Power Use these online tools as resources for holding Obama to his campaign promises:

STATE OF CHANGE
CONGRESS MATTERS
FOCUS THE NATION
350
CHANGE.GOV

Georgia On My Mind

Paul Olson
UNL Professor Emeritus

Moldova, adjacent to the Ukraine and near Russia, is the poorest county in Europe, the first part of the old Soviet Union to break off. In 1996, I was asked to lecture there for several weeks on sustainable agriculture, rural education and community development. The country had been cut off from fossil fuels, including gasoline for tractors and chemical fertilizers. It was not an easy ride.

The country had no tradition of community development. Stalinist top-down schemes still operated, though some freedoms appeared and some hopefulness. The people were wonderful.

Before my wife Betty and I went, we wrote our wills. Threats of civil war supported by the Russians existed. We were afraid. The partly Russian-in-population Moldova across the Dneister River still housed the old 14th Soviet army, the Transdniester Operative Group that had warred with Moldova proper in the early '90s and could again. Travel agencies warned (and still warn) tourists against the Transdneister. We thought that we might not live through the visit.

When we got there, we saw a recently independent Moldova where Russians and Soviets had thrown their weight around for a long time. For example, the 1920 Soviet Army took Odessa, the wonderful Black Sea port that Moldovans felt to be part of their province, Bessarabia, and made it Ukrainian. In the '30s and '50s, Stalin further shrunk Moldova-Bessarabia around Odessa. America did not condemn him for doing so.

Stalin did the same kind of things on the Georgian-Russian border in the old USSR. He was Georgian and proud of it, so in 1922 he divided an Ossetia that had its own ethnic identity, language and history, and gave South Ossetia to Georgia. After the Soviet Union fell, South Ossetia — part Georgian and part Russian — tried to achieve an independence a little like Moldova's, but the new Republic of Georgia crushed their insurgency in 1991, even though Russia supported the South Ossetians. After that rebellion, South Ossetia persisted in maintaining its uniqueness. In the 1992 and 2006 elections (the latter monitored by 34 international observers), 99 percent of the voters voted for independence, officially becoming a semi-autonomous area within the Republic of Georgia in 2007. This was the situation when Georgia attacked South Ossetia on August 8.

The Georgian forces involved in the attack, according to the BBC, had been trained by three battalions of U.S. military instructors since 2002 and armed by arms from many countries, particularly the United States. The U.S.' decision to include Georgia in its "area of national interest" and to actively promote Georgia's membership in NATO upped the diplomatic ante.

Russia, faced with a hostile Georgia on the one hand, and by Ossetian requests for help on the other, retaliated by entering South Ossetia. Its retaliation involved the deaths of many civilizans and the burning of Ossaetian villages. Soon after hostilities broke out, the NFP board issued the following news release, which read in part:

Nebraskans for Peace condemns the outbreak of hostilities between the Georgian Republic and Russia. We hope that both sides will observe the ceasefire that President Sarkozy of France had apparently negotiated frequently violated since its negotiation. We call on the United Nations to send in peacekeeper forces to patrol the borders in disputed areas until such time as a resolution can be negotiated... The U.S. would not be pleased if Russia asserted — with much more plausibility than we can muster in the case of Georgia — Canada to be part of its national interest sphere, invited it into a Russian military alliance and armed it. Russia (or the old Soviet Union) lost 20 million citizens fighting with us in World War II and, historically, it has reason to be suspicious of European military coalitions close to its borders. This suspicion extends to the our placing of Star Wars missile installations in Poland and the Czech Republic, capable of assisting military action in Georgia and Central Asia — installations that are part of StratCom's international network centered in Omaha.

On the other hand, we call for Russia, which has killed many civilians in the war, to observe the ceasefire it has ratified and to heed former Soviet president and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Mikhail Gorbachev, in his call for a "subregional system of security and cooperation that would make any provocation impossible." That would give Russia and the central Asian countries the security that NATO now provides the United States.

Georgia, Russia and the West have an interest in protecting the oil pipeline across Georgia, through which oil flows to the West. Joint UN or regional peacekeeping forces charged with protecting this pipeline would be in the interest of all parties. We ask that the United States refrain from selling further weapons to Georgia and pull out its battalions of soldiers to avoid their being compromised in an international incident.

Since the situation is very volatile, we also call on the American presidential candidates to avoid making inflammatory remarks that will prevent a peaceful settlement of the dispute. We regret that candidate McCain has continued to use as his chief foreign policy expert a man who recently received $300,000 from the Georgian Republic for lobbying activities in behalf of support for it in Washington. We call on both candidates to support United Nations peacekeeping efforts, perhaps along the lines of President Gorbachev's proposal.

Two nuclear superpowers now face off against each other in Eastern Europe and along the Russian border near the oil-rich Middle East from the Black Sea through the Caspian. Both superpowers now arm to play a geopolitical game. Each can threaten sanctions: the West, economic sanctions; Russia, the withdrawal of oil from Europe.

As Joan Rivers would say, "Can we talk?" We had better. The world is quickly becoming an ever more dangerous place.