{"id":194838,"date":"2008-08-14T23:02:00","date_gmt":"2008-08-15T04:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/08\/14\/south-ossetia-abkhazia-and-kosovo\/"},"modified":"2008-08-14T23:02:00","modified_gmt":"2008-08-15T04:02:00","slug":"south-ossetia-abkhazia-and-kosovo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/08\/14\/south-ossetia-abkhazia-and-kosovo\/","title":{"rendered":"South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and Kosovo"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>First, it appears that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2008\/08\/15\/world\/europe\/15ethnic.html?ref=world\">there is evidence of looting and burning by South Ossetian militias<\/a>.   It&#8217;s unclear how much of this is ethnic violence, and how much is simple opportunism.<\/p>\n<p>The Russians are not doing a whole bunch about this right now, they are busy destroying the Georgian security infrastructure under their control, but it does appear that they have arrested some militia men.<\/p>\n<p>This does parallel what happened in Kosovo following the expulsion of the Serbian army, though with the Russians in control, it&#8217;s likely to get worse than it was in Kosovo with NATO troops who were somewhat less tolerant of the activities of the KLA post liberation.<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, <a href=\"http:\/\/iht.com\/articles\/2008\/08\/14\/europe\/serbia.php\">Serbia is lobbying the UN to refer the matter of Serbian independence to the International Court of Justice<\/a>, which is awkward for the US, who has to argue that Kosovo can and should be independent, but that South Ossetia and Abkhazia should not be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>First, it appears that there is evidence of looting and burning by South Ossetian militias. It&#8217;s unclear how much of this is ethnic violence, and how much is simple opportunism. The Russians are not doing a whole bunch about this right now, they are busy destroying the Georgian security infrastructure under their control, but it &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[984,964,1033,1098],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-194838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-foreign-relations","category-russia","category-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194838"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=194838"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194838\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=194838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=194838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=194838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}