Originally Posted by asaris

And voting oneself independent isn't sufficient to be independent. Just ask South Carolina, or Scotland, or Ireland, or the Basques, or Belgium, or Hungary, or any other group which has desired independence, but hasn't gained it just by wanting it. This makes sense. I can' secede from the United States by voting myself out, right? And if my family decided we wanted to form our own country, we couldn't, right? Mere numbers of people can't be why the South Ossetians would have the right to secede.

When should a country be able to divorce itself from another country? I don't know; I've heard it suggested that there has to be some bad behavior on the part of the bigger country (eg, Serbia ethic cleansing Kosovo). This probably isn't the worse suggestion out there. And that's not the case here; Georgia certainly wants to cut down on the massive amount of criminal activity based in South Ossetia, but that's not ethnic cleansing.

Besides, they haven't been their own country for 18 years. As I pointed out above, everyone except for Russia views them as part of Georgia. The only reason they've been more or less autonomous is that there have been Russian troops occupying the region for most of that time, under the fictitious pretense that the South Ossetians are Russian citizens. Certainly the options are not a Georgian South Ossetia or an independant South Ossetia, but a Georgian (that is, free and democratic) or a Russian (that is, authoritarian) South Ossetia.