Georgia on Her Mind

When she wrote about Tbilisi as part of a class assignment at Lehman College in the Bronx, N.Y., this spring, Ekaterine Osepashvili didn't know her hometown soon would become the center of world attention.

Her article — published in The Bronx Journal, Lehman's student newspaper — was a very personal account that revealed not only the historic treasures of that beautiful city but also the nostalgia she feels for the place where she was born.

I should know. I was both her professor and her newspaper editor. In class, "Eka" was a quiet student. Even when she spoke about Georgia, her demeanor was reserved, mostly reflecting the love she feels for the place she left eight years ago and still calls home.

But when Eka speaks about Georgia now, after the Russian army has invaded her homeland, she sounds like a different person.

"It's devastating," she says. "My people are being killed and violated by the Russian army, by Russian aggression. Russia doesn't respect anyone, not the Europeans, not NATO, not the U.N., not the United States. It's the 21st century, and Russia doesn't respect any of the rules of the civilized world."

Russia has turned Eka, 28, into an outspoken activist. Her patriotic passion has been rudely reawakened. In the past week, she has participated in demonstrations almost every day. She has sung the Georgian national anthem in front of the U.N. building in Manhattan and outside both the White House and the Russian Embassy in Washington. She carries a protest sign that reads, "Peace in Georgia — Russians Go Home."

When I spoke to her Monday, she no longer wanted to discuss Tbilisi's religious relics, majestic cathedrals or other landmarks. Instead, she wanted to talk about the so-called Russian peacekeepers who invaded Georgia and threaten the very survival of those cultural treasures in her hometown.

"What kinds of peacekeepers kill and violate innocent people?" she asks. "What kind of a country agrees to a cease-fire and then keeps shooting? What kind of a country agrees to withdraw its troops and keeps invading another nation? I want to know. Who will be able to trust the Russians now?"

She's right. Now we know why the former Soviet republics are so eager to join NATO and receive NATO's guarantee of protection from Russian aggression. Now we know why, even in these post-Cold War days, it is still necessary to have a strong military alliance of truly democratic nations.

"Their leaders are former KGB people, and what they are showing us is their communist, totalitarian mentality," Eka says.

"They are not democrats."

Instead of waiting for U.S. news reports, Georgians in the United States keep abreast of the latest war developments through frequent calls to their friends and relatives back home. And the descriptions they hear are often mind-boggling.

"I was just on the phone with a friend in Georgia, and the things she describes are just hard to understand," Eka says. "How can the Russian army do such things to Georgians? We are so close. Many of us live in each other's countries. There are so many Russians and Georgians who are married to each other. It's unbelievable, and it's a shame."

She says that while the Georgian government is trying to abide by the cease-fire agreement, Russian soldiers act as if they have the right to ravage everything in their path.

"They have raped women, robbed homes, taken cars, just because they have power and they have guns," she says. "It's very scary."

She says the Russians are not only destroying Georgian military facilities but also major roads and other infrastructure, which will cripple Georgia's economy for a long time.

"It's very hard," she says, fighting back tears, "because I'm far away from home. But I feel that on behalf of my people, I have to speak out to the rest of the world. I have to tell everyone that a terrible injustice is being committed in my country."

She believes that when the Georgian government tried to regain military control of South Ossetia, it fell into a trap that had been set carefully by Russia — the excuse Russia needed to restart the Cold War and begin to regain the pieces of the former Soviet Union, by force if necessary.

At the demonstrations in New York and Washington, Eka says Georgians are joined mostly by people who lived in the former Soviet Union and fear its return. "Now that the Russians have shown what they are capable of doing to a neighboring country, who is going to trust them?" she asks.

Eka says that while world indignation and condemnation of Russia's aggression has been slow in coming and although Georgians would like to see stronger diplomatic and economic sanctions against Russia, they don't want to see any other foreign military intervention in their country.

"We would like for someone to prevent Russia from doing this to any other nation," she says, "but we don't want the third world war to break out in Georgia. That would not make us happy. What we want is for this conflict to end in a peaceful way because at the end of a war, nobody is a winner; everybody is a loser."

She is no longer my student. Eka graduated in May. But I'm proud to see the activist she has become.

To find out more about Miguel Perez and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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