EU Steps Up Engagement in Georgia
September 15, 2008
The European Union stepped up its engagement in Georgia on Monday, launching an observer mission to oversee the withdrawal of Russian troops, appointing a special envoy to coordinate diplomatic efforts and preparing a major increase in economic aid.
EU foreign ministers formally approved the deployment of a 200-strong civilian observer mission to Georgia, meant to verify the pullback of Russian troops to positions in the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia held before the outbreak of fighting on August 7.
They appointed Pierre Morel, a French diplomat with long experience in the region, as a special envoy to oversee the EU’s diplomatic drive and coordinate the bloc’s position ahead of peace talks due to start next month in Geneva.
Ministers gave broad approval to a proposed three-year EU aid package of €500 million ($700 million) to help Georgia recover from the conflict and agreed the EU should host an international donors’ conference to raise still more money for the battered Caucasus nation.
“The European Union must undertake a very significant financial effort,” said EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner. “We have to go beyond the ongoing assistance.”
She said the “stability and growth package” designed to run from 2008-2010 will assist people displaced by the conflict, help to rebuild, support Georgia’s economic stability and finance the construction of new infrastructure. Ferrero-Waldner told reporters she hoped the money from the EU’s central budget would be matched by contributions from individual EU nations, bringing the bloc’s total aid to at least €1 billion ($1.4 billion).
The EU said a donors’ conference will be held in Brussels, probably in mid-October.
Ferrero-Waldner said the European Commission hoped to spend €100 million on Georgia by the end of this year, compared to the pre-conflict average of €30 million a year.
The EU observer mission is expected to last at least one year, and cost €31 million. France was to provide the biggest contingent of the unarmed observers — around 70.
Russia says the mission should be limited to parts of Georgia outside South Ossetia and Abkhazia. However Javier Solana, the EU’s foreign policy chief, said the mission should eventually be deployed throughout the country including the separatist run provinces.
Morel, 64, is currently the EU’s special envoy to Central Asia. He served as French ambassador to Russia and Georgia in the 1990s.
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It was not clear how much of the EU aid money would be spent in South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
The EU faces a dilemma in dealing with those regions. Excluding them from the package would reinforce their separation from the rest of Georgia. However, Russia insists that any aid be coordinated with the separatist regimes, which are not recognized by EU nations.
Source: CNN, September 2008
edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/09/15/georgia.eu.aid.ap/index.html
NATO Chief, Envoys Visit Georgia to Show Support
September 15, 2008
Georgia’s president said Monday he hopes a visit from NATO’s chief will accelerate his nation’s drive to join the Western alliance, pressing for sustained international support following its defeat by Russia in a brief and bitter war.
Mikhail Saakashvili said Georgia and NATO should work hard to show that Georgia is on track to join what he called the “Euro-Atlantic family.”
That is Georgia’s proper and rightful place, he said.
NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, also speaking in Georgia’s capital, criticized Russia but spoke cautiously in remarks before a NATO-Georgia meeting.
De Hoop Scheffer and ambassadors from every NATO member converged on Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital, in a show of support for the former Soviet republic. The U.S. strongly supports NATO membership for Georgia, but Germany and others dependent on Russian energy supplies have balked at taking an action sure to infuriate the Kremlin.
The NATO chief said the alliance will assess “how to further enhance” the partnership between NATO and Georgia.
The trip to Georgia, scheduled before the war, comes as Russia is strengthening its grip on South Ossetia and Abkhazia, another separatist region of Georgia, in a challenge to Georgia’s NATO hopes.
Russia, which borders Georgia to the north, objects strenuously to having Georgia join the Western military alliance — an opposition underscored last month when Russia crushed Georgia in a war over Georgia’s separatist, Russian-oriented province of South Ossetia.
As the ambassadors arrived in Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev warned the West that any sanctions imposed on Russia over the war would backfire.
“It’s senseless to pressure Russia with sanctions,” Medvedev said at a meeting with Russian business leaders. “They can shut a couple of sources of (revenue) to a banana republic and make its situation dramatic. It won’t work like that here.”
Without mentioning any specific nation, Medvedev warned that attempts to punish Russia would also hurt the West. “Sanctions is a weapon that will backfire,” he said.
And he dismissed calls by some Western diplomats to bar Russia from joining the World Trade Organization. Russia would like to join but will not be pressured into concessions, Medvedev said.
“WTO isn’t a carrot; it entails a lot of difficult obligations,” he said. “And if we do it, let us do it in a normal way without them trying to scare us.”
The two-day NATO visit is expected to include the first meeting of a new NATO-Georgia Commission set up to oversee future ties.
De Hoop Scheffer said last week that NATO wants to show support for Georgia after Russia’s use of “disproportionate force” against its much smaller neighbor. He has stressed NATO’s condemnation of Russia’s recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states.
Following the war, NATO said it was making closer ties with Russia dependent on the withdrawal of Russian forces to the positions they held before the conflict, as required by a cease-fire agreement.
Russia has promised to withdraw from positions in Georgia proper next month. But it has said it will keep nearly 8,000 troops in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, although the U.S. and European Union that would violate the cease-fire.
Saakashvili, a U.S. ally, has angered Russia by seeking NATO membership. In April, NATO declined to grant Georgia a road map — a detailed plan for achieving membership — but said Georgia would eventually join.
A review of Georgia’s request for a road map is scheduled for December.
The war has deepened NATO’s dilemma over Georgia — how to handle the membership aspirations of a country with large chunks of territory controlled by Russia and its separatist allies.
NATO members have been united in their criticism of Russia, but less so on Georgia’s future.
The United States has pushed for NATO to take a key step toward granting Georgia membership in April.
Russia seems confident that Georgia is not close to joining NATO.
“Georgia is much farther away from membership in NATO than it used to be,” Sergei Karaganov, a political analyst with close Kremlin connections, said in Moscow.
Anatol Lieven, a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, said European countries and the United States would be unlikely to fight Russia on Georgia’s behalf, even if joined NATO.
“Georgia would be crushingly defeated and NATO would be humiliated,” he said.
The war began Aug. 7, when Georgian forces launched an attack to regain control of South Ossetia. Russian forces repelled the offensive and pushed deep into Georgia.
After a partial withdrawal last month, Russia pulled out of the Black Sea port of Poti and other positions in western Georgia over the weekend as part of an additional agreement reached by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who brokered the original EU peace plan.
Moscow has pledged to withdraw all other forces now on Georgian territory outside South Ossetia and Abkhazia within 10 days of the deployment of EU monitors who are supposed to be in place by Oct. 1. But it is pushing to keep Western observers away from South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
At a tent camp housing more than 2,000 displaced people in Gori, a central Georgian city near South Ossetia, families wondered Sunday whether they would ever return home for good.
Nanuli Okroperidze, 45, who lives in Tent 85 with her mother, four children, two grandchildren and two other relatives, said her home is one of many in her mostly ethnic Georgian village in South Ossetia that were torched.
“It’s gone, burned to ashes,” she said.
Source: The Associated Press, September 2008
news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080915/ap_on_re_eu/georgia_nato
In Wake of Georgian War, Russian Media Feel Heat
September 15, 2008
At the height of the crisis over Russia’s invasion of Georgia last month, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin summoned the top executives of his nation’s most influential newspapers and broadcasters to a private meeting in the Black Sea resort of Sochi.
The Kremlin controls much of the Russian media, and Putin occasionally meets with friendly groups of senior journalists to answer questions and guide news coverage. On Aug. 29, though, for the first time in five years, he also invited the editor in chief of Echo Moskvy, the only national radio station that routinely broadcasts opposition voices.
For several minutes, according to people who attended the session or were briefed about it, Putin berated the editor in front of his peers, criticizing Echo’s coverage of the war with Georgia and reading from a dossier of transcripts to point out what he considered errors.
“I’m not interested in who said these things,” one participant quoted Putin telling the editor, Alexei Venediktov. “You are responsible for everything that goes on at the radio station. I don’t know who they are, but I know who you are.”
The message to the 30 or so media executives at the gathering was clear: With Russia occupying parts of Georgia and locked in perhaps its most serious conflict with the West since the Cold War, they should be especially vigilant against reporting anything that the government might find objectionable.
Four months after Putin handed the presidency to his protégé Dmitry Medvedev, mildly raising expectations that the Kremlin might relax its grip on political life here, the continuing standoff with the West over Georgia has largely ended that talk and brought fears that a turn toward increased repression might be underway instead.
Prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation into whether Echo Moskvy has broadcast “extremist” speech. A leading opposition figure in the troubled Ingushetia region has been shot dead by police.
And a campaign to undermine the reputations of nongovernmental organizations seems to be picking up. In remarks to a group of foreign academics last week, Putin said Russia needed to act in Georgia because “certain nongovernmental organizations in certain republics” were using the crisis to justify separatism in the Russian part of the Northern Caucasus region.
The domestic fallout of the Georgian war can also be seen in the caution and anxiety of journalists, civic activists and others who work near the boundaries of what the Kremlin tolerates — and who little more than a month ago were optimistic those limits might be expanding.
“When Medvedev took office, we hoped for a new thaw,” said Mariana Maximovskaya, deputy editor of Ren-TV, a station that often broadcasts voices critical of the government. “But after the Georgian war, people are now very concerned about a new tightening inside the country.”
Yuri Samodurov, former curator of the Andrei Sakharov Museum, an institution devoted to honoring the late Soviet dissident, said a prominent filmmaker recently backed out of a plan to produce a documentary for the museum about the Soviet era. “Before the war, she agreed to do it, but she told me she is afraid now,” he said. “The situation is changing, and she felt it changing.”
The museum is also being more cautious, he said. For years, a banner protesting Russia’s long war in Chechnya hung outside the building. After the invasion of Georgia, Samodurov wanted to put up another tough message, but the museum decided to take down the old banner and not replace it. “It’s just a bad time to do it,” said Igor Veritiny, the museum’s acting director. “We’re trying to be careful.”
During eight years in office, Putin consolidated control of the government, media and big business. Many analysts say he remains Russia’s paramount leader despite stepping down as president to make way for Medvedev, the low-profile bureaucrat and former law professor he chose as successor.
After winning an election carefully scripted by the Kremlin, Medvedev immediately appointed Putin prime minister.
But even as Medvedev positioned himself as a Putin loyalist, he raised hopes in some quarters with promises to fight corruption, help small businesses and champion human rights and the rule of law. In an early move, Medvedev established a think tank, the Institute of Contemporary Development, to help him develop domestic policy and gathered a group of liberal-minded scholars who favored a program of economic and democratic reforms.
“We had hopes in the spring that we were entering a new stage,” said Evgeny Gontmakher, an economist whom Medvedev invited to serve on the board of the institute. “We hoped for some kind of democratic transition.”
Gontmakher said he and others thought that Medvedev was trying to build a base of political support for such action, and that Putin had stayed on as prime minister to help him. But the Georgian crisis has altered the political calculus, he said, making it more likely the leadership will put off reforms and strengthening influential officials and state corporations resisting change.
“It’s a dangerous situation,” Gontmakher said, warning that with economic problems on the horizon — industrial growth has slowed, and inflation is climbing fast — Medvedev and Putin might be tempted to use the crisis in Georgia to divert public anger over the economy.
Some analysts still think a thaw is possible under Medvedev, arguing that he has gained political capital during the Georgian crisis by positioning himself as a tough, decisive leader. Although Putin remains far more popular, Medvedev’s approval ratings have jumped, and he has received more time on national television than Putin.
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But others say the crisis has highlighted Medvedev’s lack of clout, especially after he signed a cease-fire agreement with Georgia and then appeared unable or unwilling to get his military to comply. Gontmakher said officials have told him that Putin has been the driving force behind the key decisions during the crisis.
Yevgenia Albats, a prominent journalist who hosts a show on Echo Moskvy, said that although Medvedev has been getting media attention, he has looked like Putin’s press secretary. Democratic reforms, she added, will be difficult to adopt because the Kremlin has portrayed the West as the enemy in the Georgian crisis, and reforms are associated with the West.
“All hope is gone,” she said. “Basically, most of the liberals are trying to figure out if we are about to go into a repressive period in our history. It means what’s left of the free media may disappear. We don’t know if Echo Moskvy will exist a month from now.”
Venediktov, Echo Moskvy’s editor in chief, confirmed he had been called on the carpet by Putin in Sochi. He said Putin pointed out problems with the station’s coverage of the Georgian war, including a statement by one reporter referring to Russian soldiers as enemy forces and a report about troop movements based only on Georgian accounts.
“It was unpleasant to be publicly reprimanded, and it was even more unpleasant to have to admit mistakes, because there were mistakes, unfortunately,” he said, adding that Putin didn’t single out any journalists or make any demands.
Venediktov said that he disagreed with some of Putin’s complaints and was allowed to explain his positions, and that Putin expressed his displeasure with the radio station even more forcefully in a private session. Venediktov declined to further describe that conversation.
The station continues to operate as usual and broadcast voices critical of the Kremlin. But Venediktov acknowledged that “the situation is complicated” by heightened official scrutiny. “It means we must work even more professionally, even more accurately,” he said.
A day after meeting Putin, Venediktov barred a dissident politician, Valeriya Novodvorskaya, from appearing on Echo Moskvy for the rest of the year after she made on-air remarks that appeared to defend the Chechen separatist responsible for the 2004 Beslan school siege that left 334 people dead. He also announced that Yulia Latynina, a program host and critic of the Kremlin, would be off the air and out of the country on business and vacation for several weeks.
Latynina is the focus of an investigation by prosecutors in the southern province of Dagestan examining whether the radio service violated laws prohibiting “public incitement of extremist activity through the mass media,” the official RIA Novosti news agency reported Aug. 27.
According to two journalists, the pressure on Echo Moskvy intensified after the meeting with Putin. Top government officials reacted angrily to its coverage of the slaying of Magomed Yevloyev, the opposition leader in Ingushetia province who was shot in the head in a police vehicle Aug. 31.
Authorities have maintained that Yevloyev was shot after trying to seize a gun from an officer in the car with him. But opposition leaders say the killing is an example of how the Georgian crisis has emboldened hard-liners in the government apparatus. A colleague of Yevloyev’s, Magomed Hazbiyev, was heard on Echo Moskvy accusing the Russian government of committing genocide in Ingushetia and saying that if it continued, “we need to ask Europe or America to have us disconnected from Russia.”
Opposition activists said they thought that Murat Zyazikov, the former KGB official who is the Kremlin-appointed president of Ingushetia and has been accused of waging a campaign of abductions and killings against his critics, seized on the Georgian crisis as a chance to move against Yevloyev and others with impunity. Hazbiyev, for example, said Zyazikov’s security forces fired machine guns at his home just days after the Georgian war began.
Addressing a news conference on Sept. 5, Zyazikov denied there was any unrest in Ingushetia and accused the United States of trying to “destabilize” the republic just as he said it had done in Georgia.
Hazbiyev and other opposition activists in Ingushetia have gathered tens of thousands of signatures on a petition calling on Medvedev to replace Zyazikov. But Zyazikov is considered a strong ally of Putin’s, and there has been no action on the request.
Source: The Washington Post, September 2008
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/14/AR2008091402249_2.html?hpid=moreheadlines
Russian Forces Withdraw from Key Georgian Checkpoints
September 13, 2008
Russian peacekeepers are withdrawing from five checkpoints in western Georgia where they have been since the conflict between the two countries broke out last month, the Russian Foreign Ministry said Saturday, according to the state-run Interfax news agency.
Russian troops
Russian soldiers pack up their gear at the Georgian checkpoint in Poti on Sept. 11.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Andrei Nesterenko said the peacekeeping forces will be withdrawn over the next seven days from five spots between the port city of Poti and the town of Senaki farther inland, Interfax said.
Nesterenko said the move was in line with Russia’s agreement this week to completely withdraw from Georgia, with the exception of the two disputed territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
The agreement came after French President Nicolas Sarkozy traveled to Moscow and met with his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Medvedev.
The September 8 agreement also called for 200 international monitors to be deployed to South Ossetia.
Russia said Saturday, however, that its forces would remain in a “security zone” around South Ossetia and Abkhazia — a zone that is actually inside Georgia.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said the goal of remaining in the zone is to prevent Georgia from launching any offensive in the territories, and that Russia expects the international monitors to take over responsibility in the zone once they arrive.
“If that is done, Russia will honor all of its obligations” and withdraw from the security zone, Putin said in an interview in the French newspaper Le Figaro. “But it is necessary that the European Union also fulfills its obligations.”
The conflict began in early August after Georgia’s military moved to secure South Ossetia, sparking the intervention of Russia, which pushed its troops deep into Georgia proper. Some Russian troops have remained in Georgia ever since.
Source: CNN, September 2008
edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/09/13/russia.georgia.withdrawal/index.html
EU Ready for Georgia Monitoring Mission - Solana
September 13, 2008
EU has enough pledges from its member states to form a 200-strong team of monitors and deploy it in Georgia before the beginning of October, the EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana told Reuters on September 13.
“We have plenty of pledges and we will do it,” Solana told Reuters, referring to the monitoring team. “We will do it in time and we will do it properly.”
According to the September 8 agreement between the Russian and French Presidents Russian troops should withdraw from the Georgian territories outside Abkhazia and South Ossetia by October 10 and they should be replaced by EU monitors there.
“By the 10th of October that part [of Georgia] will be without any Russian troops. That is the most important thing,” Solana said. “That is what Georgian President Saakashvili wanted and that is we have been trying to broker with the Russians.”
He also said that there will be “Europeans everywhere” – he did not say EU monitors - in Georgia, whether with the EU team, UN observers or with OSCE.
The September 8 agreement envisages that OSCE observers will continue to monitor inside South Ossetia as with the same mandate they had before the hostilities – that means that eight unarmed OSCE monitors will be able to monitor a 15-km radius around Tskhinvali.
The agreement, however, leaves room for possible change of the mandate, but any change would require Russia’s consent as decision within OSCE are made on the consensus-based system.
OSCE last month decided to send total of 100 additional observers to Georgia. 20 of them have already arrived in Georgia, but they are not able to monitor situation inside breakaway South Ossetia. Talks on modalities of deployment of remaining 80 observers are underway. The Associated Press reported on September 12, quoting unnamed western diplomat in Vienna, where OSCE headquarters is based, that talks with Russia on the matter had collapsed, as Moscow refused to approve sending of extra 80 OSCE monitors.
Meanwhile, UN observers, according to the September 8 agreement, will be able to continue monitoring inside Abkhazia in accordance to the mandate they had before the hostilities.
Source: Civil.Ge, September 2008
www.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id=19496
Medvedev Describes Georgia Attack as Russia’s 9/11
September 13, 2008
· President says US backed assault on South Ossetia
· Nato membership ‘would destabilise region’
Georgia’s attack on the breakaway region of South Ossetia was unnecessary and unprovoked and was encouraged by the United States, Russia’s president, Dmitry Medvedev, said in an interview yesterday.
“For Russia, August 8 was like September 11 for the United States,” he told a group of foreign journalists and academics. “I would like to see major lessons from it for the world.”
He made clear that the lessons, as Russia sees them, are that the post-cold war “illusion” that a world with one super power is a safe and predictable place is now over.
The 42-year-old president said George Bush had phoned him shortly after he had ordered Russian forces to drive the Georgians back. “‘You’re a young president with a liberal background. Why do you need this?’ Medvedev quoted Bush as saying. “I told him we had no choice,” he said.
Suspicious Minds
September 13, 2008
It’s mutual mistrust, rather than a difference in basic outlook, that plagues the relationship between Russia and the west
A decade ago a member of Abkhazia parliament told me that “the conflict between Georgia and Abkhazia would not be resolved until Russia and the west divide their spheres of interests”. We were sitting on the Black Sea coast and I thought that the guy was crazy. Surely, the conflict was between Georgians and Abkhazians, or Georgians and South Ossetians, and it was up to them to resolve their differences. How naive I had been. In his now traditional Valdai encounter with western experts, Prime Minister Putin confirmed what was obvious to separatist politicians 10 years ago.
The logic of the current discord runs as follows: The west assumes that Russia invaded Georgia in August to punish it for its Nato bid. It would have loved to do so to the Baltic states when they were joining Nato, but had no power at a time. Following this line, Ukraine is to be persecuted next, if not militarily, then politically and economically. Western efforts need to be geared to building a bastion around Ukraine to protect it from being the next victim.
Russian Military Leaves Georgian Port
September 13, 2008
Russian troops have begun leaving some parts of Georgia.
Russian forces evacuated five posts in western Georgia today, which Moscow had promised to dismantle. Among the closures were military camps in Nabada and Patara Poti, outside the strategic Georgian port of Poti, as well as in Teklati and Pirveli Maisi, near the town of Senaki.
Georgian Security Council chief Alexander Lomaia has confirmed the withdrawal.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Andrei Nesterenko said today’s withdrawal from the Poti-Senaki line was taking place in accordance with a September 8 agreement between Russia and the European Union.
Russians Troops Pack Up, Leave Western Georgia
September 13, 2008
Hundreds of Russian forces packed up and withdrew from positions Saturday in western Georgia, and a Georgian official said Russia met a deadline for a partial pullout a month after the war between the two former Soviet republics.
Russian soldiers and armored vehicles rolled out of six checkpoints and temporary bases in the Black Sea port of Poti and other areas nearby, Georgian Security Council chief Alexander Lomaia said.
“They have fulfilled the commitment” to withdraw from the area by Sept. 15 under an agreement European Union leaders reached with Russia last week, Lomaia told The Associated Press. But he stressed that Georgia — like the West — demands a full withdrawal to pre-conflict positions.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Andrei Nesterenko confirmed the withdrawal.
“Right now the withdrawal of our peacekeeping forces is happening from these posts,” Nesterenko said in televised comments.
However, Lomaia said some 1,200 Russian servicemen still remain at 19 checkpoints and other positions, 12 outside South Ossetia and seven outside Abkhazia.
Russia said it would pull them out by Oct. 11 as long as a 200-strong delegation of European Union observers was in place by Oct. 1. However, OSCE documents seen by The Associated Press have raised questions over Russia’s true willingness to accept the monitors.
The presence of Russian troops dug in deep in undisputed Georgian territory more than a month after the fighting ended has deeply angered Georgians and been an enormous sore point between Russia and the West.
Russia’s military campaign in Georgia and its subsequent recognition of Georgia’s separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent nations has plunged its relations with the United States and Europe into their worst crisis since the Cold War.
An Associated Press television crew saw Russian soldiers pack military trucks before dawn Saturday with blankets and other supplies at a post by a road leading to Abkhazia province. Among the items taken down — the Russian tricolor flag.
Four trucks stood packed and ready to leave the post in the village of Pirveli Maisi, along with an armored personnel carrier. A Russian column about the same size rolled past on a road leading to Abkhazia.
Russian forces left the two posts they had maintained for weeks on the outskirts of Poti, one by a bridge on a main road leading into the city and one a few miles from Georgia’s main port and devastated naval base, Interior Ministry official Shota Utiashvili said.
“Russian forces have withdrawn completely from Poti,” he said.
A third Russian post established more recently by the port of Poti had also been vacated, Lomaia said. He said some 250 soldiers and 20 armored vehicles pulled out of their positions and headed toward Abkhazia.
Near the de facto border with Abkhazia, an Associated Press photographer saw several small columns of Russian armor crossing a bridge leading toward the breakaway region and military trucks heading across another bridge at a separate location.
The brazen presence in Poti had been particularly galling for Georgia because it is hundreds of miles from South Ossetia, where the war broke out and where most of the fighting occurred.
Under an additional agreement forged last week, the Kremlin promised to withdraw from Poti and other posts in western Georgia by Monday and from all its positions on Georgian territory outside Abkhazia and South Ossetia within 10 days of the deployment of EU observers.
But in Vienna, confidential OSCE documents revealed that Russian forces and their separatist militia allies were deliberately keeping international monitors out of South Ossetia, where large numbers of Georgian homes have been looted and burned down.
The documents obtained Friday by The Associated Press say Russian troops stopped some observers from entering South Ossetia as recently as two days ago.
Western governments also say Moscow’s plans to maintain 7,600 troops in Abkhazia and South Ossetia for the long term violates a provision in the cease-fire calling for both sides to return to positions held before the conflict erupted.
Georgian troops tried to retake South Ossetia by force on Aug. 7, but were quickly repelled by Russian tanks, troops and warplanes. The Russian military then drove deep into Georgia, occupying large swaths of territory before an initial withdrawal in late August.
The five-day war killed hundreds of people and drove over 150,000 people from their homes.
Source: The Associated Press, September 2008
news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080913/ap_on_re_eu/georgia_russia
Georgia’s Saakashvili warns NATO on Russia
September 12, 2008
Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili urged NATO on Thursday not to push his country away in the wake of Moscow’s military campaign, warning that showing weakness would cause a “never-ending story” of Russian aggression.
In an interview with The Associated Press before a visit by NATO leaders next week, Saakashvili said Russia invaded Georgia to keep the ex-Soviet republic out of the Western alliance.
“If NATO sends a sign of weakness — and clearly this invasion was intended to deter, to scare NATO away — if NATO gets scared away, then this will be a never-ending story,” Saakashvili said.
Saakashvili has angered Russia by seeking NATO membership for Georgia. The alliance has promised Georgia will eventually join, and a review of its request for a road map to membership is scheduled for December.
He suggested that keeping Georgia out of NATO because of increasing Russian control over South Ossetia and another separatist region, Abkhazia, would be precisely the result the Kremlin intended — and a recipe for forceful intervention elsewhere.
“People are saying, ‘Georgia has conflicts, so maybe Georgia cannot be accepted, but maybe we can accept Ukraine.’ But if you put it this way, you automatically are going to get conflict in Ukraine.”
Saakashvili said NATO nations must stand together and expressed confidence that Russia’s use of what Western governments condemned as disproportionate force had strengthened support from some alliance members for Georgian membership.
He said Russia’s actions were aimed at “shaking the foundations of the alliance and their decision-making process.”
The Kremlin has accused the United States of encouraging Saakashvili to wage war against separatist South Ossetia and of moving to rebuild Georgia’s military following the fighting. Saakashvili said he is committed to peaceful solutions to Georgia’s territorial disputes and is not seeking robust military aid from the United States.
“We don’t expect to get anything from the U.S., we haven’t got anything recently from the U.S. and we will not be getting any large-scale hardware or military material assistance from the U.S.,” he said. “All this talk about Americans rearming Georgia, or others coming in and rearming Georgia has been just part of the propaganda.”
The U.S. Defense Department said Tuesday that it would send an assessment team to Georgia this week to help determine its needs as a way of showing U.S. support for its security.
Saakashvili denied Russian claims that U.S. military aid, which included training Georgian forces, was instrumental in emboldening Georgia to try to retake South Ossetia by force on Aug. 7.
“No matter what kind of theoretical assistance we could have got from anybody, there is no way Georgia can fight wars with Russia,” he said.
In Moscow on Thursday, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin aggressively defended the invasion, saying Russia had to act when Georgia attacked South Ossetia. Russian forces repelled the offensive and drove deep into Georgia before withdrawing most of the troops and tanks late last month following a cease-fire deal.
Russia has pledged to withdraw its remaining forces still positioned outside Abkhazia and South Ossetia within a month, but says it will keep thousands of troops in the separatist regions themselves for the foreseeable future. It has also recognized them as independent nations, deepening the confrontation with Georgia and the West.
Saakashvili contends that Georgia was acting in self-defense amid increasing Russian support for the separatists and indications of imminent aggression.
“At a certain moment it was clear that the country was facing an existential threat,” he said.
He reiterated his promise that Georgia will gain control of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, but said it would rely on legal mechanisms and pressure from the international community to do so.
Source: The Associated Press, September 2008
ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5geomtOYYynWwMbsvM1iu7rMBHruwD934QP7O0