We first meet Han in a wretched bar on a backwater planet. He’s sitting at a table when the bounty hunter Greedo confronts him. Greedo threatens Han, who looks almost bored by the encounter. Of course what we in the audience are privy to is Han slowly drawing his gun and pointing it at Greedo under the table. Without warning Han shoots, sending Greedo’s corpse skidding across the room. Han nonchalantly gets up, tosses the bartender a coin “for the mess” and leaves.
That’s the way the scene originally played out until George Lucas released the movie on DVD. George decided to take the opportunity to redo the Han Solo scene, by using computer animation to have Greedo shoot at Han first. In doing this though Lucas robbed the Han Solo storyline within the movie of its impact – the character who is an amoral killer at the start of the tale acting selflessly to help the rebels defeat Darth Vader and the Death Star by the end.
And if by this point you’re asking what any of this has to do with the current conflict in Georgia it’s this: that it matters to the story who shoots first.
The narrative in the Western (US/UK) press about the conflict so far has largely been one of naked Russian aggression towards their poor freedom-loving neighbor. It’s easy with that set-up to paint the Russians as the villains. The problem is that the current conflict was sparked by Georgia’s shelling of the South Ossetian capital Tskhinvali, an attack that caused widespread damage in the city of 40,000 (for a view of the conflict from the “other” side, check out this Russian reporter’s blog). Like the Star Wars movie, it’s a realization that changes the tone of the story.
As do the reports that Western diplomats, including staff from the US State Department, cautioned Georgia’s president Mikhail Saakashvili to cool down his rhetoric regarding South Ossetia and Abkhazia these past few months, and under no circumstances to engage in any military action – something the Russian press has been warning about for some time now. But portraying Saakashvili as a hothead doesn’t fit with the narrative being crafted about the Georgian situation, nor does reporting about Saakashvili’s own problems with democratic rule. It was less than a year ago that Saakashvili used riot police to break up peaceful protests against his government in the capital Tbilisi. The protestors accused Saakashvili’s government of corruption and becoming authoritarian. Saakashvili’s response was to send in the troops, then to call an early election that he likely lacked the authority to call, and finally to engage (as reported by European observers) in the same kinds of vote tampering that were called the “death of democracy” in Russia. The problem is that none of this fits into the image created of Saakashvili as the George Washington of the Caucasus.
Tensions have been building with Russia and the West for the past few years, part of Saakashvili’s brilliance has been to put Georgia squarely on the front line of that struggle – a move that has brought his country, tucked away there in the far southeast corner of Europe, a measure of prestige in the international community, not to mention foreign support, larger than one would naturally expect for such a place. But that only works if Georgia is the little democracy threatened by its bigger, aggressive neighbor. Saakashvili sending his troops against Tskhinvali ruins that carefully crafted image.
The politics of post-Soviet Europe are vastly complicated, as are relations in the Caucasus region, put them together and well…It’s a situation with a lot of moving parts – US/Russian relations, the fate of two separatists regions, the founding of new democracies, energy supplies, military alliances – all of which act and interact with each other in an intricate dance. It is a situation that takes a lot of time, patience and understanding to sort out. It’s also a case where there are no clear good guys and bad guys; it’s a painting in shades of gray.
Or you could just paint once side the aggressor and the other the victim, which is fine, so long as you don’t particularly care who fired the first shot.
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