Bernard-Henri Lévy

Back to August, 2008.  As the Great of this world celebrated the opening of the Olympic Games in Beijing, the Caucasus burst into flames.  On the 7th, dozens of tanks and hundreds of Russian troops illegally entered Georgian territory by the Roki tunnel.  On the 8^th, fighting broke out in Tskhinvali (South Ossetia, Georgia).  The 9th and the 10th, the invasion of Georgia by its Russian neighbour seemed about to succeed.

Just back in Paris from Baku, having seen the first images of the conflict as I passed, in transit, through the Moscow airport (where the invasion was presented as planned, even announced months ago by Putin, as, obviously, a “Georgian aggression”), I looked at my vibrating cell phone:  “BHL cell”.  “Raphaël, it’s Bernard.  Do you have any news of Georgia ?  We have to do something—“

-          I talked to Tbilisi ten minutes ago.  People are dismayed, they feel isolated, abandoned.  ..
-          Obviously.  We have to go there.  I feel we should.  Are you coming with me?”

I didn’t know then—and I haven’t said so since out of modesty, for, though our relations are friendly and respectful, we are not close—but this phone call would indirectly change my life.

I was familiar with Georgia and its young leaders since the revolutions of colour, these joyous, anti-authoritarian uprisings that had hoped to blow the wind of liberty ever further East in 1989.  I had visited Tbilisi several times during the early years of the Sakashvili government.  I had seen the paramilitaries, the KGB, and other corrupt and repressive organizations inherited from the Soviets dissolve into nothing from one day to the next, leaders of student unions and NGOs become ministers and representatives by the handful, a young woman of thirty lead the struggle against the mafias and the clans at the head of a new police force.  I had loved—why deny it?—the revolutionary atmosphere that burned in discussions, necessarily about politics, in the many bars and restaurants of the magnificent Georgian capital.  I understood then, partially, what was at stake in the fighting in Tskhinvali or in Gori.

But around me, in France, everything seemed so grey and confused.  Who had shot first?  Wasn’t it a local conflict, between peoples who, in any case, despised each other?  “Ethnic rivalries »:  the concept of non-interventionists of all persuasions was launched.  Hadn’t the Caucasus been at war since the dawn of time?  Hadn’t the impetuous President Mikhail Sakashvili provoked the Russian bear just one time too many?  Weren’t the Moscow media talking of «genocide» at Tskhinvali (a « genocide that ultimately left less than 40 dead according to the Russian authorities themselves)?  What, exactly, was the role of the United States in the outbreak of hostilities?  All these more or less legitimate questions, fed by Russian propaganda, well-oiled by a decade of massacres of Chechen civilians presented as police operations against Al Qaeda, clouded the issues.  They proned inaction at the moment when, before our very eyes, Vladimir Putin put an end to the most promising democratic experiment of the post-Soviet era.

Bernard had heard these questions, like all of us.  But he also remembered, more than anyone else, the Bosnian, Rwandan, and Chechen precedents.  He recalled the same pens raising the same questions, the same diplomats explaining to the same journalists that the reality was so “complicated” and the responsibilities “shared” to such a degree that it was impossible to “take sides”.  He knew, also, that an executioner always accuses his victim of provoking him and that, in 1940, Nazi Germany had proclaimed its march on Warsaw as a “response” to shots by the Polish border guards, just as Stalin’s USSR had merely “replied” to General Mannerheim’s “pranks” when the Red Army invaded Finland.

He remembered all this and he had the courage—and, as we would discover, the lucidity—to doubt our doubts, to question our questions.  To go there at the heart of the conflict and observe, in order to form an opinion.  Yes, to form an opinion—by watching, by listening, and looking—and then to defend it.  For, what has always pleased me about Bernard, like my father, as a matter of fact, is this ingrained refusal to confuse objectivity and neutrality.  I like precisely that which others reproach him for, that rare faculty of taking sides when it is necessary.  It’s always a risk, an invitation to danger, and it’s much easier to place oneself complacently at an equidistance.  Yet the reality, this crass reality of the political conflicts Bernard has explored so many times, reality is rarely “neutral”.

When the Russian or Ossetian paramilitaries clear dozens of Georgian villages of all their ethnically «unpure» inhabitants before sending in the bulldozers to demolish their homes, neutrality is not “objective”.  When an old man walks up to you and tells you, holding back his tears, how a some drunken army scum got hold of his only son, it is not “objective” to remain at a comfortable distance from his pain.  It signifies a post-modern ideological construction that is otherwise more dogmatic than taking the side of the victim.  When a country of four million five hundred inhabitants, nearly five hundred thousand of them refugees or displaced persons due to the diverse ethnic cleansing campaigns conducted under Moscow’s authority, is invaded and bombed, the never-ending phrases, in cut-and-paste, articulated around the traditional “on the one side” and “on the other” bear truth only in appearance.

In Georgia, I saw Bernard interrogate the strategists, listen to the refugees, question an elected President whose enemies in Moscow promised to hang him («by the balls», if you please, as Putin shouted at Sarkozy on August 12^th), and advise him as well on what conduct he should adopt.  I saw him pass a Russian roadblock in the south of Gori and stand up to the gesticulating troops.  I saw him observe these “things seen in Georgia” which would constitute the essence of the article published in Le Monde upon his return.

I saw the way he knew when it was better to remain discreet as well as he knew when to be a prominent presence.  And I saw, heard, and also read the polemics this publication inspired.  Polemics we are unfortunately used to, and which Paris adores.  An absolutely ridiculous polemic.  Bernard-Henri Lévy describes a war whose outcome may banish all hope of democracy in the Caucasus and give Putin’s Russia the monopoly of Europe’s energy supply routes.  He tells of the fear of a people and the violence of an army.  And what interests a handful of pseudo-journalists who wouldn’t think of setting foot in Gori or Kaspi, is what plane he took to go there, how much it cost him, what restaurants or cantines he had lunch or dinner at, what was the label of the shirt he was wearing when he embraced some refugees.  I know these questions all the better because I was asked them, directly.  Today I’m sorry I replied.  When the wise man points to the moon (a pool of blood, in this case), the fool looks at his finger, so the proverb goes.  And the bloody stupidity, when it is so obvious, deserves only the coldest contempt.

Well, this journey to the heart of the Georgian night, as well as the polemic surrounding our return, dear Bernard, was what made me decide to move to Tbilisi.  This is what convinced me to commit myself to being with those people we met together at the most difficult moment of their existence, so that Georgia might survive as the promise of a European destiny for an entire region.  This is what pushed me into an entirely voluntary exile some did not understand.  Your phone call was thus the catalyst for a radical turn in the path of my existence.  The fact of participating in one of the rare political adventures of contemporary Europe has delighted me so much every day for the last two years, I can never thank you enough.  You understood that what was playing out at Tskhinvali or Gori was much more than a territorial war, that two ways of perceiving the world were at loggerheads.  Between these two visions, you chose, and I with you.  The game is far from being won.  Russian tanks still occupy 20% of Georgia’s territory, in perfect illegality.  500,000 refugees and displaced persons are still prevented from going home by the 600 “border guards” of the FSB, posted on the front lines.  Vladimir Putin has not renounced his «Tbilisian» plans and maintains over 10,000 troops in Georgia.  And, elsewhere, reforms are still necessary in order to definitively secure this country-symbol to the European Union.  But the game isn’t lost either.  And all of us here know that we can count on you.

Raphaël Glucksmann

French filmmaker, Raphaël Glucksman was born in October the 15^th, 1979. Co-creator of the association “Etudes sans Frontières” , he took care of the Rwanda and Tchetchenia related missions. He settled in Georgia, where he works for the creation of the “Centre culturel français” in Tbilisi and the Caucasian University.

Translation by Janet Lizop

Photo 1 : Bernard-Henri Levy with two Georgian soldiers, 5 miles south Gori (c) Alexis Duclos.
Photo 2 : With a group of Georgian refugees in Tbilisi (c) Alexis Duclos.
Photo 3 : With Raphaäl Glucksmann and Omar Ouhamane. (c) Alexis Duclos.