@rune:
The region was created by Stalin (himself Georgian) in a classic divide and rule policy, but it has practically never been under Georgian rule
You are perpetuating disinformation. How many Ossets actually live on the South slopes of the Greater Caucasus is very much in dispute. Ossetians speak a variant of Persian. They arrived in the trans-Caucasus long after Georgia existed as peoples and states. They were forced into the North slope mountains by the Turkic and/or Hun migration/invasion sometime between 1100 and 1300.
A few Ossetians moved to Georgia on the South slopes of the Greater Caucasus as “guest workers” but the only geographic region one could legitimately call “Ossetian” up until the 1870′s was on the North slope of the Greater Caucasus.
How so? The Czars began taking total control of the Caucasus around 1800 in campaigns of genocide and ethnic cleansing against the patchwork of Ottoman-oriented, mostly Muslim, Turkic peoples (for example, the original inhabitants of Abkhzia: all dead or gone to Turkey). The Ossetians were a convenient client force used much like the Cossack tribes were used. The Czars used Ossetian hatred of their Turkic conquerors to control the North Caucasus, making certain that Ossetians controlled the territories of Russia’s three military roads that crossed the center of the Greater Caucasus down into Georgia.
Since there were Ossetian families employed by Georgian landholders, the Czars also declared a Ossetian area on the South slope. This further cemented Czarist control over their military roads and gave them an excuse to get pushy with uppity Georgians.
It was that bloody paranoid, old “Uncle Joe Georgian” Stalin who really put the screws to Georgia by raising South “Ossetia” to “Autonomous” status.
South Ossetia was since then pumped full of ethnic Russians. They are by and large NOT Ossets. We have difficulty fathoming how thoroughly dishonest and vicious the Russian charade called South “Ossetia” has been since 1800 but it is perfectly consistent with the rest of their occupation of Black Sea, Caspian and Central Asian states for over 200 years.
If you think the few Ossets in South “Ossettia” are a nationality yearning for self-expression, I would suggest that you are not alone, but that you are thoroughly duped. South “Ossetia” is an ethnically Russian criminal enterprise and the relatively few Ossets who have been living on the South slopes of the Greater Caucasus are not themselves the militants agitating against the Georgian government. No, the militants are the gangs serving the Russe Generals, the “soloviki”.
The people you have been duped into calling South “Ossetians” are really the same ethnic Russians we refer to as “The Russian Mafia”.
Heartless and cruel, Czarist, Soviet, and now Putinist/Soloviki policies will only continue to create misery and instability in the trans-Caucasus. If you really prefer Peace, you want Russia out of Georgia as much as you want Russia out of her Viking ancestors’ homeland, Denmark.
