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Georgia and South Ossetia mark war one year on
The war killed at least 390 civilians and at its height displaced more than 100,000. A year on, an unfulfilled cease-fire pact, sporadic gunfire and the withdrawal of monitors from pro-Western Georgia's two rebel regions keep alive the risk of renewed war.
Midnight bonfires in the Georgian capital and other towns marked the first in a series of competing ceremonies on Friday in the South Caucasus country and rebel South Ossetia.
A photo exhibition in Tbilisi complete with dummies dressed as Soviet soldiers portrayed the war as the continuation of a Russian occupation stretching back to the Russian empire. Television spots declared "Stop Russia" and "The Fight Goes On."
South Ossetia plans a march and a candlelight ceremony in the scarred rebel capital Tskhinvali. Russia has put its troops there on alert, and accused the United States of re-arming the Georgian "war machine."
Conflicting narratives of the war persist.
Russia blames the "aggression" of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and his US-trained army, and says it fought to defend Russian peacekeepers and civilians holding Russian passports.
Georgia says Russia had already invaded when it launched the assault on South Ossetia, a charge Moscow dismissed as absurd. The invasion, Georgia says, was years in the making by its old Soviet master, punishment for seeking membership of NATO. "Separatism was just a weapon in Russian hands against Georgian statehood," Georgian State Minister for Re-Integration Temur Iakobashvili said.
Recognition
The war rattled Western confidence in oil and gas routes running through Georgia and skirting South Ossetia, which like the rebel Black Sea region of Abkhazia threw off Georgian rule in the early 1990s with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
"I am confident the world will someday understand that the greatest promise for stability and peace in our region is acceptance of South Ossetia's independence," the region's self-styled president Eduard Kokoity said in a statement.
Diplomats say the Aug. 7 assault, which Georgia says it launched to halt separatist shelling, was a huge error of judgment. Concentrated in the North Caucasus following annual military exercises, Russian tanks rolled over the border and advanced into Georgia proper, routing the Georgian military. Jets bombed from clear summer skies.
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