The road leads back to you, oh Georgia

The rape of Georgia! Russia invades a neighbour! The screaming headlines concerning the war raging in South Ossetia in the Caucasus, all tell the same story: Russia still haunted by dreams of empire has started a war against Georgia with the aim of annexing part of that country's territory.

However, a closer look at the situation, backed by knowledge of history, geography, and culture, might offer a different picture.

To start with, Georgia's President Mikheil Saakashvili launched the current round of fighting by breaking a ceasefire negotiated four years ago. He sent his troops across the ceasefire line with the mission to seize control of Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital and dismantle the rebel secessionist government there.

Russia reacted in accordance with position as the guarantor of the ceasefire and the protector of the breakaway regime.

Why did Saakashvili, an astute politician with a modern and democratic mind, decide to start a war that could do untold harm to his small and weak republic?

One reason may be Saakashvili's desire to heighten his profile as a nationalist hero just a year after he was forced to curtail his first term as president and submit to fresh elections under pressure from massive crowds of demonstrators in his capital Tbilisi.

If patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels anywhere in the world, in Georgia anti-Russian chauvinism represents a constant temptation to even the most level-headed politicians.

In Georgia, profess hatred for Russia and you become poplar. Telling the Georgians that they must unite to wrest away control of part of their "national territory" from the hated Russians is a theme that few politicians could resist.

The trouble is that South Ossetia cannot easily be regarded as "an integral part of Georgia's national territory". Joseph Stalin, a native of Georgia, when working as Commissar for Nationalities in the first Bolshevik regime, added this tiny territory of 3,900 square kilometers to Georgia in 1923.

Stalin's decision cut the Ossetian nation, an Iranian people with their distinct language, culture and history, in two. The northern part, containing two-thirds of all Ossetians, was attached to Russia.

Two centuries of efforts by Russians and Georgians have failed to eliminate the Ossetian identity. In the 1990s, a new surge of Ossetian self-awareness inspired an explosion of cultural, artistic and mediatic creativity.

Such newspapers as Khor-Zarrin (Golden Sun) and Rast-Ziniad (Truth Telling) helped the Ossets discuss issues of interest in their own language. Theatres in the Ossetian language appeared in Tskhinvali, Gori, Poti and, for a while, even in Tbilisi.

Programme

To beat a programme set up by the Georgian government for their forced "Georgianification" the estimated 100,000 population of Southern Ossetia united themselves with some 20,000 Russians living in their midst to seek independence from Tbilisi.

Russia, angered by Georgia's pro-American foreign policy, threw its support behind Osset secessionists. Moscow also issued passport for all the ethnic Russians in South Ossetia plus several thousands ethnic Ossetians who had some blood connections with Russia or had been born in Russia during the Soviet era.

As things stand, nearly half of South Ossetia's population have Russian passports, and thus could be regarded as Russian citizens. It is in the name of protecting them that Moscow has entered the war.

To be sure, Russia's position is prompted by crude big power interest rather than a desire to protect a small nation against a much larger one. Russia denies the right of the Chechens to have a state of their own but is ready to go to war to defend that right for the Ossets. Talk of double standards!

Nevertheless, in this particular case, Georgia deserves little sympathy. Having shaken off the Russian yoke, it is trying to impose its own yoke on a smaller and weaker nation.

The Ossets do not wish to be part of Georgia, which explains while Tbilisi has always rejected a referendum on the future of the territory. However, the Ossets do not wish to be ruled by Russia either. Their dream is a unified Osset Republic bringing together the two halves of their ancestral land now divided between Russia and Georgia.

Saakashvili has appealed to Western democracies to help Georgia regain control of South Ossetia. However, the Western democracies who have rightly defied Serbia to endorse Kosovo's right of self-determination, cannot deny the same right to the Ossets.

The best way out of this crisis is the creation of a United Nations mandate in South Ossetia with a mission to enable its people to decide their future in five or 10 years' time. Kosovo could be a model.

Amir Taheri is an Iranian writer based in Europe.