Strokanov on the Georgian conflict

By Steve Cormier
Special to the Critic

LSC history professor claims that American media is portraying the Georgia-South Ossetia war with bias.

Georgia was making trouble
War, with its division of truth and display of human misunderstanding, is what drove Alexandre Strokanov and an audience of students, faculty and community members into the Alexander Twilight Theatre.
With last month’s Georgia-South Ossetia War as his muse, the professor of history at Lyndon State College stood center stage to explain the misconceptions of the conflict that took the world by surprise last month.
“When I asked at the beginning questions about what do you know about this, not so many of them were greatly enlightened about the event,” Strokanov said of his audience.
His presentation, part lecture and part slide show, was Strokanov’s answer to what he perceived as a bias in reporting and opinion in the United States.
With a brief history of military activity in the region Strokanov impressed upon those in attendance that blame for the aggression laid with the Georgian government. Meanwhile he questioned conflicting images that the US government and mass media had been showing since hostilities began.
Images of gutted hospitals, bombed-out libraries and universities reduced to rubble in South Ossetia were featured in the power-point presentation projected onstage. An Internet video, recorded by advancing Georgian soldiers, showed the deliberate targeting of residential buildings with no military resistance.
Addressing questions pertaining to Russian activity, Strokanov said that Russian and Georgian forces were equal in size, despite reports to the contrary, which he stated were Pentagon lies. He also said that Russian forces would withdraw from Georgian territory by October (though not from South Ossetia).
Georgian civilian casualties, Strokanov said, were between 10 and 20, caused mostly by mistakes made by Russian long-range bombers though reports indicate Russian aircraft dropping Cluster bombs over Gori, Georgia, which break apart randomly over large areas of land. Civilian deaths in South Ossetia that have been attributed to Georgian military activity number around 1,500.
Washington and the American mass media have largely portrayed the conflict as an aggressive move on the part of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev whose internal Russian approval ratings have gone up since the beginning of the conflict Strokanov said. The American government believes any dispute in South Ossetia concerning Georgian activities is an internal matter.
Strokanov, seeing a balancing out of reporting occurring in Europe now concerning the events ponders the perceived bias in the United States once again. “I hope it will happen here too and some other points of views will be presented in the American media but I don’t know. Will it happen, when is it going to happen, that’s why I did this now,” Strokanov said.