The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has invested 1.2 billion dollars in Afghanistan for roads, railways, and airport projects. Credit: Giuliano Battiston/IPS

By Kanya D'Almeida
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 27 2015 (IPS)

First the centre of the silk route, then the epicenter of bloody conflicts, Afghanistan’s history can be charted through many diverse chapters, the most recent of which opened with the election of President Ashraf Ghani in September 2014.

Having inherited a country pockmarked with the scars of over a decade of occupation by U.S. troops – including one million unemployed youth and a flourishing opium trade – the former finance minister has entered the ring at a low point for his country.

“Our goal is to become a transit country for transport, power transmissions, gas pipelines and fiber optics.” -- Ashraf Ghani, president of Afghanistan
Afghanistan ranks near the bottom of Transparency International’s most recent Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), tailed only by North Korea, Somalia and Sudan.

A full 36 percent of its population of 30.5 million people lives in poverty, while spillover pressures from war-torn neighbours like Pakistan threaten to plunge this land-locked nation back into the throes of religious extremism.

But under this sheen of distress, the seeds of Afghanistan’s future are slumbering: vast metal and mineral deposits, ample water resources and huge tracts of farmland have investors casting keen eyes from all directions.

Citing an internal Pentagon memo in 2010, the New York Times referred to Afghanistan as the “Saudi Arabia of Lithium”, an essential ingredient in the production of batteries and related goods.

The country is poised to become the world’s largest producer of copper and iron in the next decade. According to some estimates, untapped mineral reserves could amount to about a trillion dollars.

Perhaps more importantly Afghanistan’s landmass represents prime geopolitical real estate, acting as the gateway between Asia and Europe. As the government begins the slow process of re-building a nation from the scraps of war, it is looking first and foremost to its immediate neighbours, for the hand of friendship and mutual economic benefit.

Regional integration 

Speaking of his development plans at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) Thursday, Ghani emphasised the role that the Caucasus, as well as Pakistan and China, can play in the country’s transformation.

“In the next 25 years, Asia is going to become the world’s largest continental economy,” Ghani stressed. “What happened in the U.S. in 1869 when the continental railroad was integrated is very likely to happen in Asia in the next 25 years. Without Afghanistan, Central Asia, South Asia, East Asia and West Asia will not be connected.

“Our goal is to become a transit country,” he said, “for transport, power transmissions, gas pipelines and fiber optics.”

Ghani added that the bulk of what Afghanistan hopes to produce in the coming decade would be heavy stuff, requiring a robust rail network in order to create economies of scale.

“In three years, we hope to be reaching Europe within five days. So the Caspian is really becoming central to our economy […] In three years, we could have 70 percent of our imports and exports via the Caspian,” he claimed.

Roads, too, will be vital to the country’s revival, and here the Asian Development Bank (ADB) has already begun laying the groundwork. Just last month the financial institution and the Afghan government signed grant agreements worth 130 million dollars, “[To] finance a new road link that will open up an east-west trade corridor with Tajikistan and beyond.”

Thomas Panella, ADB’s country director for Afghanistan, told IPS, “ADB-funded projects in transport and energy infrastructure promote regional economic cooperation through increased connectivity. To date under the Central Asia Regional Economic Cooperation (CAREC) programme, 2.6 billion dollars have been invested in transport, trade, and energy projects, of which 15 are ongoing and 10 have been completed.

“In the transport sector,” he added, “six projects are ongoing and eight projects have been completed, including the 75-km railway project connecting Hairatan bordering Uzbekistan and Mazar-e-Sharif of Afghanistan.”

Afghanistan’s transport sector accounted for 22 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) during the U.S. occupation, a contribution driven primarily by the presence of foreign troops.

Now the sector has slumped, but financial assistance from the likes of the ADB is likely to set it back on track. At last count, on Dec. 31, 2013, the development bank had sunk 1.9 billion dollars into efforts to construct or upgrade some 1,500 km of regional and national roads, and a further 31 million to revamp four regional airports in Afghanistan, which have since seen a two-fold increase in usage.

In total, the ADB has approved 3.9 billion dollars in loans, grants, and technical assistance for Afghanistan since 2002. Panella also said the bank allocated 335.18 million dollars in Asian Development Fund (ADF) resources to Afghanistan for 2014, and 167.59 million dollars annually for 2015 and 2016.

China too has stepped up to the plate – having already acquired a stake in one of the country’s most critical copper mines and invested in the oil sector – promising 330 million dollars in aid and grants, which Ghani said he intends to use exclusively to beef up infrastructure and “improve feasibility.”

Both India and China, the former through private companies and the latter through state-owned corporations, have made “significant” contributions to the fledgling economy, Ghani said, adding that the Gulf states and Azerbaijan also form part of the ‘consortium approach’ that he has adopted as Afghanistan’s roadmap out of the doldrums.

‘A very neoliberal idea’

But in an environment that until very recently could only be described as a war economy, with a poor track record of sharing wealth equally – be it aid, or private contracts – the road through the forest of extractive initiatives and mega-infrastructure projects promises to be a bumpy one.

According to Anand Gopal, an expert on Afghan politics and award-winning author of ‘No Good Men Among the Living’, “There is a widespread notion that only a very powerful fraction of the local elite and international community benefitted from the [flow] of foreign aid.”

“If you go to look at schools,” he told IPS, “or into clinics that were funded by the international community, you can see these institutions are in a state of disrepair, you can see that local warlords have taken a cut, have even been empowered by this aid, which helped them build a base of support.”

Although the aid flow has now dried up, the system that allowed it to be siphoned off to line the pockets of strongmen and political elites will not be easily dismantled.

“The mindset here is not oriented towards communities, it’s oriented towards development of private industries and private contractors,” Gopal stated.

“When you have a state that is unable to raise its own revenue and is utterly reliant on foreign aid to make these projects viable […] the straightforward thing to do would be to nationalise natural resources and use them as a base of revenue to develop the economy, the expertise of local communities and the endogenous ability of the Afghan state to survive.”

Instead what happens is that this tremendous potential falls off into hands of contracts to the Chinese and others. “It’s a very neoliberal idea,” he added, “to privatise everything and hope that the benefits will trickle down.

“But as we’ve seen all over the world, it doesn’t trickle down. In fact, the people who are supposed to be helped aren’t the ones to get help and a lot of other people get enriched in the process.”

Indeed, attempts to stimulate growth and close the wealth gap by pouring money into the extractives sector or large-scale development – particularly in formerly conflict-ridden countries – has had disastrous consequences worldwide, from Papua New Guinea, to Colombia, to Chad.

Rather than reducing poverty and empowering local communities, mining and infrastructure projects have impoverished indigenous people, fueled gender-based violence, and paved the way for the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands.

A far more meaningful approach, Gopal suggested, would be to directly fund local communities in ways that don’t immediately give rise to an army of middlemen.

It remains to be seen how the country’s plans to shake off the cloak of foreign occupation and decades of instability will unfold. But it is clear that Afghanistan is fast becoming the new playground – and possibly the next battleground – of emerging players in the global economy.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

With the Kremlin’s attention fixated on Ukraine, the Caucasus Emirate, a terrorist group fighting to establish an independent Islamic state in the North Caucasus, threatens to undermine Russian domestic security in new ways.

The death of the emirate’s veteran leader, Doku Umarov, sparked an internal power struggle last fall that resulted in a significant shift in the group’s organisational structure and strategy.There is no shortage of new recruits for the Caucasus Emirate, due to the Russian government’s general disregard for basic rights.

Although not initially well-received by certain influential cells in the organisation, Umarov’s successor is now consolidating his authority and seems poised to abandon outdated ideology and broaden the movement’s scope of operational capabilities. Most significantly, the Chechen influence over the organisation appears to have diminished.

The major question at this point is how rapidly can Russian security officials adapt to the Caucasus Emirate’s changes? A Kremlin that is distracted by events in Ukraine could easily lose ground in its efforts to contain the morphing insurgency in the North Caucasus.

On Mar. 18, Kavkaz Centre, the primary news portal of the Caucasus Emirate, officially announced the “martyrdom” of the movement’s seasoned chief, Doku Umarov. Widely recognised as a major military figure in the First and Second Chechen Wars, he rose to prominence in 2007, assuming command of the insurgency and proclaiming himself first emir of a newly formed Caucasus Emirate.

Initially driven by national separatist aspirations, the group shifted toward the global jihadi movement and became an affiliate of Al Qaeda.

Umarov was closely linked to a spate of terrorist attacks in Russia over the past several years including the 2011 Moscow airport bombing, the 2010 suicide bombings on the city’s metro, and the 2009 bombing of a train from Moscow to St. Petersburg; each killed dozens of people and injured hundreds more. His last propaganda video called on Islamic militants to target the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.

Although instrumental in publicising the Caucasus Emirate’s mission and in motivating its members, Umarov played a reduced role in recent years in operational planning. His departure from the scene, then, will not be a source of much disruption for the terrorist organisation, some experts suggest.

“The damage done to [the Caucasus Emirate] by the death of the leader is tangible, but will not be lasting,” Simon Saradzhyan, a research fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Centre for Science and International Affairs, wrote in an analysis published in March by the Moscow Times.

The circumstances surrounding Umarov’s death remain shrouded in mystery: speculation abounds, ranging from sickness to drone strike to even a coup.

A lengthy delay in the confirmation of his death suggests his loss triggered an internal power struggle, likely among Dagestani and Kabardino-Balkarian jamaats (units) vying to claim the top spot from the long-in-charge Chechen leadership. After months of tense deliberation, a six-man council of provincial emirs selected Avar theologian Aliaskhab Kebekov, aka Ali Abu-Muhammad.

Umarov’s successor lacks the military pedigree of past commanders, but notably possesses theological training to push the Caucasus Emirate in a different strategic and operational direction. Based out of Dagestan, Kebekov is a former qadi (supreme religious authority) and the first non-Chechen to lead the North Caucasus insurgency. He ordered the killing of Sufi Sheikh Said-Afandi Chirkeisky by a female suicide bomber in 2012, according to Russian security officials.

In a January audio clip, Kebekov condemned the “nationalism” and “nationalist spirit” of the Chechens in the ranks of the Caucasus Emirate. Such rhetoric aims to further distance the group from the original Chechen nationalist movement of the 1990s and reinforce its global jihadi orientation and battle for an autonomous Sunni Islamic State in Russia governed by a strict interpretation of Sharia law.

In a continuing push away from Chechnya, he will likely strengthen operations in Dagestan, possibly pursuing a less aggressive form of jihad. Despite some opposition, the latest pledges of allegiance indicate some jamaats, including certain influential Chechens who manage key funding channels and media outlets for the Caucasus Emirate, are now accepting of Kebekov’s ascendancy to leadership.

The choice of Kebekov as successor also indicates that the Caucasus Emirate may extend its mission beyond the North Caucasus region. Recent operations provide sound evidence of this possible shift outward. Since 2011, hundreds of militants from Russia have ventured abroad to fight alongside the Al Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front in the Syrian civil war.

The organisation also sought to undertake operations in the Volga-Ural region of Russia. In 2012, the Mujahedeen of Tatarstan, an extremist group with strong ties to the Caucasus Emirate, perpetrated a series of terrorist attacks against Muslim religious leaders in the Russian city of Kazan.

More recently, suicide bombers from Dagestan killed dozens of people in separate strikes on a bus and a train station in Volgograd.

For now, Russian leaders seem intent on continuing a heavy-handed approach to counterinsurgency operations. On Mar. 19, Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev convened a government meeting in Chechnya to discuss ways to disrupt militant financing channels, as well as the threat of terrorist attacks outside of the North Caucasus. Meeting participants reportedly did not mull the implications of the emirate’s leadership shift.

Russian security forces have succeeded in killing key extremist leaders and hundreds of militants in the North Caucasus over the last few years, dealing serious blows to the organisation. Even so, there is no shortage of new recruits for the Caucasus Emirate, due to the Russian government’s general disregard for basic rights, including religious freedom, socio-economic disparity and large-scale corruption.

Some observers suggest that under the present circumstances, the security threat posed by the Caucasus Emirate stands to rise.

“The growing importance of the organisation inside the Caucasus Emirate decisional structure represents an increased risk for terrorist attacks against touristic sites and transportation networks inside Russia,” wrote Jean-Francois Ratelle, a postdoctoral fellow at George Washington University, in a recent commentary.

Editor’s note:  Peter J. Marzalik is an independent analyst of Islamic affairs in the Russian Federation. This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.

Irina Grigoryan, director of a kindergarten in Stepanakert, capital of the Nagorno-Karabakh Region (NKR), does not want to lose another generation to war. Credit: Enzo Mangini/IPS

By Enzo Mangini
STEPANAKERT (Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, Caucasus), Apr 12 2013 (IPS)

Sixty-year-old Irina Grigoryan’s voice is drowned out by the merry noise of 230 children waiting for their lunch. Director of kindergarten N3, located in Stepanakert, capital of the self-proclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh Region (NKR) deep in the Caucasus, Grigoryan smiles tolerantly at the din.

But the poster hanging on the wall behind her desk – picturing a single dove flying above the words “Give peace a chance” – suggests that all is not well in this misty, mountainous city of 50,000 people, 2,400 kilometres south of Moscow.

In fact, NKR, nestled between Azerbaijan and Armenia, is in the middle of a long-forgotten war.

Two communities, Armenians and Azeris, who lived side by side for many years, are now wrenched apart.
When the USSR was still alive, Nagorno-Karabakh was an autonomous region, but in 1936 the Russian dictator Joseph Stalin handed it over to Azerbaijan, sparking calls for autonomy by the primarily Armenian population.

At the end of the 1980s, amidst the rubble of the crumbling Soviet Union, opposition to Azeri rule grew more vocal, and Stepanakert saw mass demonstrations of citizens demanding that they be allowed to join the Soviet republic of Armenia.

At the end of 1991, the population of 191,000, 75 percent of which was Armenian, proclaimed an independent Nagorno-Karabakh Region (NKR) – a month later, in January 1992, Baku sent in its troops to quell the secessionist movement.

Today, the two countries remain officially at war, with 150,000 NKR citizens living in a political limbo.

For those who survived the conflict, the precarious situation is a source of daily stress and anxiety, and though nearly 20 years have passed since the declaration of a ceasefire, citizens continue to live under the shadow of war.

“During the war I was teaching at a local gymnasium, and I saw 80 percent of my male students die in the fighting,” Grigoryan tells IPS.

“I do not want this to happen again –that’s why here, in our kindergarten, we do not speak about the war and we do not teach hatred to our pupils,” she says.

But though she does not speak of her memories, they are still fresh in her mind.

With vivid clarity she recalls the 1992 siege of Stepanakert, when Azeri Grad rocket launchers positioned in the hills in the nearby town of Shushi rained missiles down on NKR’s capital every day.

Civilians, quick to learn the rhythms of war, soon discovered that it took soldiers 18 minutes to reload a Grad battery and would use those intervals to move around the city, or steal brief moments of normalcy.

“I remember the mothers and fathers of the children you hear in the next room playing 18-minute-long football matches (during the siege),” Grigoryan says.

She is also active with the Public Diplomacy Institute, a local organisation that works to build bridges between Armenian NGOs and former Azeri inhabitants of NKR who were forced to flee to Azerbaijan in their tens of thousands during the war.

Lamenting that “two communities, Armenians and Azeris, who lived side by side for many years” are now wrenched apart, she hopes to build ties between them, through direct dialogue among people and peace activists on both sides.

Part of Grigoryan’s work entails “explaining” to her fellow countrymen that if they want peace, they must be prepared to make sacrifices, including territorial and political concessions to Azeris, like giving up the buffer zone beyond the NKR border and allowing Azeri refugees to return.

“We do not want to lose another generation to war,” she added, referring to the skirmishes that constantly erupt along the ceasefire line, and threats issued periodically from the government in Baku, which suggest that conflict is not far off.

Until 2009, Grigoryan’s cross-border diplomacy between NGOs and peace activists received some support form the international community, including a series of meetings in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, and in Moscow, facilitated by the UK-based NGO International Alert.

But then everything slowed down, and the negotiations taking place under the auspices of the Minsk Group, a diplomatic initiative co-chaired by the U.S., Russia and France to mediate between the governments on either side of the Line of Contact, or ceasefire line, reached a stalemate.

Geopolitics hinder chances for peace

Though it boasts everything from a parliament to a ministry of foreign affairs, located just a few paces away from Grigoryan’s kindergarten, NKR has not been recognised at the international level.

Soldiers in the trenches of the 1994 ceasefire line after the Armenian-Azeri war over Nagorno-Kharabakh. Credit: Enzo Mangini/IPS

Azerbaijan does not have any direct contact with NKR, leaving all negotiations to Armenia, which it has labeled the “occupying force” in the region.

NKR Foreign Minister Karen Mirzoyan says he is “ready to sit at the table with my Azeri colleagues, but the problem is that they are not ready to sit with a member of the NKR government.”

Mirzoyan was appointed several months ago, when the July 2012 elections gave the incumbent president Bako Saghosyan a second term, with 64 percent of the vote.

“We received a clear mandate from our citizens,” Mirzoyan tells IPS: “They want to be free and independent and I am ready to make any concession that is consequent with this goal.”

But what this means on a practical level is far from clear.

NKR authorities blame the Azeri government, led by President Ilham Aliyev, of running an anti-Armenian campaign at the international level and of silencing dissenting voices in its own country.

Experts point to numerous incidents that support this claim, including the case of journalist Eynulla Fatullayev, sentenced to eight and a half years in prison in Azerbaijan for his investigations on the Khojaly massacre, which cast doubt on the official Azeri version of the events. Faullayev was eventually pardoned in May 2011.

Experts like Richard Giragosian, head of the Regional Studies Centre, an independent think-tank for the southern Caucasus, believe there is a “desperate need for bold and creative political confidence building measures”, such as a universal withdrawal of Armenian troops from some stretches of the buffer zone.

“Armenia and Azerbaijan are stuck in a political stalemate that is hurting both countries,” he told IPS. “This could fuel instability in a region that is essential for the energy security of other countries, like Turkey, but also of Western Europe.”

Two major pipelines, the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyahn and the Baku-Tiblisi-Supsa, plus the Baku-Tiblisi-Erzurum gas line, pass a few miles away from the NKR border.

Experts fear there could be severe ripple effects if the international community allows the issue to rot.

“Over the years, NKR’s independence has become an issue of national pride and national identity for Armenians and Azeris, thus making it all the more difficult to make concessions to the other side,” Giragosian says.

He believes strong players like Russia – which has sturdy relations with, and military bases in, both countries – ought to play a more prominent mediator role.

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic
BELGRADE, Jun 15 2011 (IPS)

For most of the world the issue of Kosovo is long over. The nation declared independence from Serbia in 2008 and has gained recognition from 76 out of 192 U.N. member states.

In the Balkans, however, the issues of Kosovo continue. Pristina and Belgrade began a series of successful direct talks, under the auspices of the European Union (EU) in Brussels, in March. They deal with remaining unsolved issues, including: recognition of documents, return of archives from Serbia to Kosovo, free flow of goods, and movement of people from Kosovo through Serbia, and rights of the remaining 120,000 Serbs among two million ethnic Albanians in the country.

But Belgrade has opened a new, apparently confusing chapter on Kosovo, with top officials such as Interior Minister Ivica Dacic suggesting the partition of Kosovo into an ethnic Albanian and a Serb part. A demarcation line should divide Serbs, who mostly live in the north, close to Serbia, and Albanians in remaining areas, he said.

In an interview with the Pristina daily ‘Zeri’, Dacic said that such a move could help “peacefully resolve tensions” and “political deadlock” that still exists. He also said that if former Yugoslavia was peacefully partitioned in the 1990s, “there would have been no wars” that killed more than 130,000 people and left millions homeless.

“If everyone is against [the partition], I would like to hear what the solution is,” Dacic said. “My job is not to recount fairy tales to the people, but to see how Serbia could progress.”

Belgrade has vowed never to recognise the independence of Kosovo, which is regarded as the model Serbian medieval state though history has changed its ethnic composition – now ethnic Albanians make up its majority. Despite living in Kosovo, many local Serbs continue to recognise Belgrade as their capital, and disregard all connections with Pristina.

“Maybe it’s too late to talk about partition now, after the entity proclaimed independence,” former Foreign Minister Goran Svilanovic told IPS. “The EU, the U.S. and others strongly stand against it. But any mutually agreed solution without violence is good,” he added.

Dacic’s interview provoked harsh reactions both at home and abroad that are continuing. Serbian nationalists sharply criticised him, as they consider the former Serbian province as an integral part of the country. Serbian President Boris Tadić said the idea was not bad at all, while Kosovo politicians rejected it completely.

According to Tadić, who met journalists last week in Belgrade, “it’s our job to change reality in the field… and to respect [ethnic] Albanians.” He added that “the model of two Germanys” could be appropriate. Until the unification of Germany in 1990, the two states – the Democratic Republic (Eastern) and the Federal Republic (Western) did not recognise each other, but they held meetings at high levels in the 80s.

An EU source in Belgrade, who insisted on anonymity, told IPS that such a model “is something between two opposites” – Kosovo’s independence and Serbia’s unwillingness to recognise it. “In practice, that means Belgrade would not have to recognise Kosovo – five EU states do not – but would not block Kosovo’s participation at international meetings or boycott them,” the source added. “Kosovo would have to give maximum rights, like a kind of autonomy to Serbs, in return.” Kosovo still does not have sufficient international recognition to become a member of the United Nations, the source reminded.

A delegation of European parliamentarians that recently visited Belgrade stressed that “partition [of Kosovo] is something the EU would not like to see, particularly if Serbia begins the access talks some time next year”. The EU had a problem with this in the case of Cyprus, an MP from the group told IPS on condition of anonymity.

The head of the Belgrade team negotiating with Kosovo, Borko Stefanovic, refused to comment on the idea, saying, “for the time being this looks like a lunch with entrée, main course and desert, and we’re jumping right to desert.” Meanwhile, Kosovo team head Edita Tahiri told Pristina reporters that “Belgrade should find its Charles de Gaulle… a statesman that would bravely recognise reality – an independent and sovereign state of Kosovo – like de Gaulle recognised Algiers’ status long time ago.”

Other Kosovo officials stood strongly against the idea as well. “Partition is not something we’ll discuss,” Deputy Prime Minister Hayreddin Kuci told Belgrade media earlier this week. “That would mean a lasting crisis that will be hard to manage,” he said.

For many ordinary Serbs however, the Kosovo issue is not so important anymore. Belgrade teacher Milena Stokic (44) summed up the feelings of many, saying that “it’s hard to listen to that talk about Kosovo any more. We lost it. It’s high time we looked forward.”

This month will mark 20 years since the disintegration of former Yugoslavia and “we still feel effects of belligerency, territorial disputes, war crimes,” Stokic said. “It’s a stalemate 20 years long instead of prosperous life. It’s high time we closed the chapter – with or without Kosovo – people want to live normal lives.”

Excerpt:

By Kester Kenn Klomegah
MOSCOW, May 27 2011 (IPS)

More than half of Georgia’s population still lives in abject poverty due to economic stagnation, worsening living standards, rising unemployment and low pay nearly nine years after the 2003 bloodless ‘Rose Revolution’ that promised post-Soviet economic revival, a new political course and better living conditions.

Following a military parade Thursday marking Georgia’s independence from Russia, two people were reported killed and many more injured when police used water cannons, tear gas and rubber bullets to break up an opposition rally against President Mikheil Saakashvili’s government.

The Georgian opposition has taken to the streets to press for the resignation of the current government that have failed to live up to people’s expectations. They also claim that after the ‘Rose Revolution’ there were many opportunities and resources for normalising Georgian-Russian relations, which would have made it possible to solve vital domestic economic problems.

“I think one of the key mistakes of [President Mikheil] Saakashvili’s government is that it considers rule of law not as the major priority and there is no judicial independence,” Eka Gigauri, executive director of Transparency International Georgia, told IPS. “Good legislation remains theoretically only as paperwork and are not duly implemented. Further, media environment is not free and independent, and many influential channels are state controlled.”

Experts say there can only be speedy improvement if radical economic development and political reforms are implemented with strong support and participation of young progressive groups.

In spite of the fact that after the protests in 2009, the government initiated negotiations with opposition parties on the improvement of the electoral environment, no tangible results have been achieved. Negotiations are stopped and the government does not want to compromise and create the possibility for Georgian people to express their will on fair elections, Gigauri said.

After the Rose Revolution, the Georgian government could not manage to improve the social conditions of the population, the unemployment rate is still high, and people are suffering from the high prices and low social conditions, according to Gigauri.

Building of democracy in Georgia started after the Rose Revolution and that still remains the key challenge. It is obvious that any country with weak government institutions faces challenges in implementing democratic values, but in the case of Georgia, there was an initial achievement in fighting petty corruption, Gigauri admitted.

However, she added that “democratic principles have been sacrificed for stability and security of the country. The main challenge of the government remains to strengthen democratic institutions and to elaborate long-term reform strategy. The reforms in civil and public sectors fall below expectations. People talk about corruption among the elite, however this is very difficult to prove even by civil society organisations.”

Some experts have mixed views. Zviad Eradze, president of the Youth Resource Center here, a non- profit institution that works on youth mobilisation for development and political programmes, said the Georgian leaders and the public believe that opposition protests were funded by Moscow – indirectly referring to the Kremlin. Relations between Russia and Georgia have dwindled since Saakashvili’s election in 2004, reaching an ultimate low in 2008, when the two countries fought a short war over two breakaway Georgian republics.

“At the same time, what I observe from here is that they [opposition groups] do not have support from the general public,” Eradze said. “Secondly, all governments have mistakes, among them is Saakashvili’s, but none of the mistakes are critical. As for the corruption level in Georgia, I would say there is no corruption. The situation is much better than before.”

As a former Soviet republic, Georgia is a sovereign state in the Caucasus region of Eurasia and it is located at the crossroads of western Asia and eastern Europe, bounded to the west by the Black Sea, to the north by Russia, to the southwest by Turkey, to the south by Armenia, and to the southeast by Azerbaijan.

Georgia, with a population of almost 4.7 million, has an agricultural economy and little industrial production. Saakashvili, a U.S.-educated lawyer, has ruled the former Soviet republic since the Rose Revolution that catapulted him into power from obscurity. He took over from Edward Shevernadze, who became the president after Soviet collapse in 1991.

Some international organisations have assisted Georgia’s economy. Inga Paichadze, external affairs officer at the World Bank office in Tbilisi, declined to comment on democracy and human rights issues in Georgia, but explained to IPS that the World Bank provides its support to Georgia through the Country Partnership Strategy (CPS), which now spans 2010-2013.

Prepared against the backdrop of the twin crises of the August 2008 conflict and the global economic downturn, the CPS was built around two pillars, according to the World Bank CPS report: (i) meeting post-conflict and vulnerability needs, and (ii) strengthening competitiveness for post-crisis recovery and growth.

Pleased with strong results, the World Bank is providing 235 million dollars in new financing over the next two years to help sustain economic growth and support the needs of the vulnerable. Much of this will go towards local and secondary roads and regional development, the report said.

Early this year, the U.S. ambassador to the South Caucasus also announced that the U.S. was allocating 90 million dollars for democratic reforms in Georgia – a step that led Georgian opposition leader Nino Burdzhanadze to say that the West had finally begun treating Tbilisi “adequately”.

Despite external efforts, Georgians seem dissatisfied and frustrated about the pace of development. They restarted a series of public protests in May that were often brutally dispersed by pro-Saakashvili’s security forces.

Leaders of the Nation-Wide Assembly of Georgia (NWAG), which organised political action, were joined by nearly all the opposition groups in saying “unity of opposition forces and the entire society was necessary for the resignation of Saakashvili and the holding of early elections”.

Some officials argue that Saakashvili enjoys support of the majority of citizens and will not resign until the end of his term of office – Oct. 2013. The opposition is unable to force Saakashvili to step down ahead of time, they say.

“Any political standoff is a natural phenomenon for a democratic society, but the politics ends where armed persons are brought to the battlefield. Unfortunately, the Georgian history has seen examples where such irresponsible actions and a military standoff provoked by politicians caused fateful and deplorable results that we are still reaping today,” said Giorgi Targamadze, leader of the Georgian Christian Democratic Movement (CDM). “People who wear the uniform of a motherland defender do not need additional explanations that this weapon must be used against Georgia’s enemies and not for opposing their own fellow-citizens.”

Georgia’s opposition groups rallied with frustration and disappointment over the results of the Rose Revolution, and have called for reforms or complete regime change. Georgia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Nino Kalandadze told reporters that “the country’s authorities recognise the right to freedom of association. This is the principle signed into law by the country that we respect.”

Excerpt:

By Kester Kenn Klomegah
MOSCOW, May 12 2011 (IPS)

In the wake of anti-government protests by the opposition and youth activists in Baku, Azerbaijan, authorities have arrested and detained scores of demonstrators and journalists in deplorable and inhumane conditions.

Intigam Aliyev. Credit: Courtesy of Legal Education Society, Azerbaijan

Intigam Aliyev, a human rights lawyer and president of the Legal Education Society (LES) in Azerbaijan, has been offering detainees legal services. Aliyev spoke with IPS about the risks and challenges faced by activists in Azerbaijan. Excerpts of the interview follow.

Q: There are reports that some activists were detained after the last parliamentary elections, and also during protests in March and April. What are your views on this? A: Azerbaijani authorities detained at least 40 opposition activists at the Apr. 2 opposition rally in Baku. The arrests were the government’s latest attempt to prevent large-scale protests – similar to those that occurred in North Africa and the Middle East – from spreading to Azerbaijan.

Local authorities are determined to prevent any efforts of opposition to exercise freedom of assembly.

Azerbaijan must follow all its international commitments. Azerbaijan is a member of the Council of Europe and a party to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) as well as a number of other international human rights treaties, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

The crackdown to prevent peaceful protest was a blatant violation of Azerbaijan’s obligations under international law and as a member of the Council of Europe.

Authorities are using the smallest pretexts to silence critics, thus damaging the reputation of Azerbaijan’s justice system. These arrests should stop immediately.

Q: How are political detainees’ cases progressing in court? A: Since the start of this year, all peaceful demonstrations in Baku were systematically dispersed and a large number of participants were arrested and immediately sentenced to administrative detention without proper legal defence.

Many of the detainees, including journalists, were prevented from reporting and filming the demonstrations. Surprisingly, some have been charged with criminal offences for conducting peaceful demonstrations.

Most of the activists were quickly convicted on administrative charges for disobeying police orders… Activists were beaten, tortured and threatened by police while in custody.

The Azerbaijani authorities have initiated criminal proceedings, in absentia, against France-based activist Elnur Majidli; in addition to Hasan Karimov, chairman of the Popular Front Party of Azerbaijan (PFP); Tazakhan Miralamli, chairman of Jalilabad branch of the PFP; and Tural Abbasli, head of the youth organisation of the opposition Musavat Party, who helped to develop the Facebook.com page calling for all the March and April political protests.

Unfortunately, we are unable to provide all the detained activists with required legal aid and services. Azerbaijan Bar Association (ABA) is under control of the government.

Lack of independent lawyers and tight finances of the detained people make their provision with qualitative legal aid almost impossible. In many cases, the court appoints lawyers financed by the government so their participation in the legal process is a formality, or they just act according to the direction of prosecuting bodies or the court.

Q: How would you describe the conditions under which political detainees are being housed? A: Sanitary conditions in these prisons are deplorable and hardly any medical care is offered. People who suffer from tuberculosis are deprived of any medical treatment. According to the reports of several NGOs, deaths from tuberculosis are frequent.

The prison cells are overcrowded with stale air, saturated with carbon dioxide and fumes, especially in hot weather… These conditions cause frequent respiratory illnesses, shortness of breath, drowsiness, dizziness, apathy and emotional instability. Many of the detainees are constantly coughing, wheezing when breathing – every minute they take a sip of water, so as not to suffocate. All abovementioned facts give us grounds to consider these conditions of life in prison inhumane and close to ill treatment and torture.

For example, Hasan Karimov, chairman of the Supreme Mejlis of the Popular Front Party of Azerbaijan (PFPA), suffered a heart attack while in detention at the Sabayil District Police Department in Baku after participating in an opposition rally.

Prisoners also face psychological oppression. Lawyers, friends or relatives are prevented from visiting the detainees. Prisoners are deprived from any access to the information. It is prohibited to bring into the prison any books or newspapers.

Unfortunately, the prisons are closed to the NGO representatives. All requests for access to the prisons were rejected without any legal basis.

Q: What do you suggest should be done in order to stop further political suppression and frequent arrest of young political activists in the country? A: The repressive politics pursued by the government since the collapse of the Soviet era, most often against democratic institutions now leading to the one-party system where all the powers are concentrated in one authority, has to be changed.

Long-term repression and strong-handed power of the Azerbaijani president has to give way for popular modern democracy.

Soon after the meltdown of the Soviet system, we enjoyed stable support of international organisations, but that has dwindled or dried up during the past few years, thus making it harder to promote democracy.

International organisations like the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the U.N., and the Council of Europe must be more persistent in their collective demands for the fulfilment of the Azerbaijani government’s obligations… particularly those calling for the release of all political prisoners and the establishment of an environment in which journalists, human rights activists and all opposition groups can conduct their activists free from interference and inhumane intimidation by the authorities.

Excerpt:

By Kester Kenn Klomegah
MOSCOW, Apr 10 2011 (IPS)

Campaigners are asking the Azerbaijan government to introduce radical reforms early to avoid a popular uprising sweeping the Arab world.

Opposition leaders and rights activists have mobilised large protests in March and early April, and plan more – despite the official restrictions on public rallies. Many demonstrators have been detained.

“The majority of the enlightened population is outraged by the systematically falsified elections, absence of freedom of thought and assembly, opposition activists being held as political prisoners, beating and harassment of journalists, politically dependent and corrupt courts, and absence of rule of law,” Dr. Leila Alieva, who heads the Baku-based think tank Center for National and International Studies told IPS.

Azerbaijan is the largest country in the Caucasus region. Located at the crossroads of eastern Europe and western Asia, it has the Caspian Sea to the east, Russia to the north, Georgia to the northwest, Armenia to the west, and Iran to the south. Azerbaijan is rich in oil and natural gas, which bring it 50 million dollars a day. About 99 percent of its population of eight million is Muslim.

President Ilham Aliyev took over from his father Heidar Aliyev in disputed elections in 2003. The regime is widely seen as corrupt; a U.S. diplomatic cable that surfaced on Wikileaks describes Aliyev as a mafia boss. Election monitoring organisations have pointed to fraud.

Despite its oil wealth, the majority live in abject poverty. Official salaries are unrealistically low, says Alieva, and the education sector and health system are almost collapsing under increasing demands for bribes. But not unlike Libya, the oil and gas resources allow the government to buy political and social support.

Alieva says up to a quarter of the Azerbaijan population works in Russia due to the worsening economic conditions.

“The government severely restricts freedom of assembly,” Giorgi Gogia, Caucasus researcher for the Europe and Central Asia Division of Human Rights Watch (HRW) told IPS. “They have not authorised a single rally in central Baku for a few years, and police quickly and often violently disperse unauthorised protests. The crackdown on peaceful protests intensified this year after the opposition and youth groups announced their intention to hold rallies calling for a change of government.”

Human rights violations documented by HRW include torture and ill- treatment and deaths in police custody, and near complete impunity for the police.

Gogia says “the recent protests in Azerbaijan were inspired by the popular uprising in Middle East and North Africa, but I cannot comment on the level of grievances of Azerbaijani and their readiness for regime change. One thing is clear: the government takes those protests seriously, and they seem determined to crush any attempts at peaceful protests against the regime.”

The Council of Europe (a grouping of 47 nations to promote human rights) has appointed a special rapporteur to study the issue of political prisoners in Azerbaijan. “But Baku refuses to cooperate with the rapporteur and has not given him access to the country,” Gogia said. “This is one of the very rare instances when a CoE member-state flatly refuses to cooperate with the special procedures.”

Sam Patten from Freedom House told IPS that “the parliamentary elections held late last year showed no signs of improvement, and there is now the prospect of increased regulations further restricting the independent activity of civic organisations.”

Further arrests following demonstrations earlier this month do little to suggest that the government may be loosening its grip in the wake of “the Arab spring;” rather, it is tightening it even further, Patten said.

Street protests may be stepped up despite the threatening messages the government has been sending would-be protestors, Patten said. Azerbaijan’s population is strikingly young and the most Internet-savvy in the South Caucasus.

In response the government has been warning Azeris to stay off social networking sites. One government television programme suggested that excessive time spent on Facebook would lead to impotence.

Patten said “another sign to watch out for is the government’s official position with respect to Islam. In the past, Azerbaijan has repressed religion citing fears about extremism. But religiosity in Azerbaijan is on the rise, especially among the young who view the government as insidiously corrupt and unable to respond to public and community needs.

“Further repression of religious groups could lead to even greater instability. Aliyev, however, is reported to have recently met with a large gathering of clerics – unusual for him – in a tacit recognition of the need to allow for greater religious freedom in view of events throughout the Middle East.”

Excerpt:

Kazakhstan’s nine million registered voters went to the polls Apr. 3. Incumbent Nursultan Nazarbayev is not expected to lose.

An activist for President Nursultan Nazarbayev canvasses for the Apr. 3 presidential poll, which critics consider a farce. Credit: Robin Forestier-Walker/Al Jazeera

Observers have already given the country’s election commission poor marks for allowing a questionable selection procedure through which three political lightweights are up against “Papa” – as Nazarbayev is affectionately known.

A fragmented opposition have not put forward any candidates. Unwilling or unable to mount a serious challenge through Egyptian style public protest they have tried to discredit the ageing strongman by encouraging voters to boycott the poll.

But Nazarbayev does not seem concerned. On Jan. 31, the sprightly 70-year-old called the new presidential election with his seated ministers gazing at him from their ornate golden chairs in Astana’s Ak Orda palace – an oversized White House with a dome and mast as high as the building is tall.

“As the first democratically elected president, proceeding exclusively from the highest interests of the country, I have made the decision not to hold a referendum,” he said in a televised address.

“(Taking) into account the will of the people and the faithfulness to democratic principles, I am proposing to hold an early presidential poll, despite the fact that this reduces my term of office by almost two years.”

Censorship and control

It was hard for Kazakh watchers not to ponder whether Kazakhstan’s ‘Leader of the Nation’ (a title for life approved by his rubber-stamp parliament that makes him immune from prosecution) had Cairo on his mind.

A planned referendum on dropping term limits to extend his rule until 2020 had earlier been criticised by the European Union and United States. Certainly the president seemed to be saying this was a more democratic gesture.

The Kazakh president, along with his Central Asian counterparts in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan, has absolute authority. His country suffers from systemic corruption with massive inequalities between rich and poor.

There is no independent judiciary, and the mass media either self-censors or is controlled by the state. Freedom of assembly is curtailed, and genuine opposition movements are suppressed or banned.

Credible international monitors like the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) have never certified an election in the oil-rich nation free or fair.

Kazakhstan’s fragmented opposition believes the country deserves the same wave of change that could precipitate democracy in the Middle East.

Boycott initiative

The opposition recently held a rally in Almaty with the sanction of the authorities. Calls were made for a boycott of Sunday’s vote by a loose coalition of activists and political parties. Leaflets posing the question ”Tunisia, Egypt, who will be next?” were circulated.

Vladimir Kozlov, who heads Alga! (Forward!), an unregistered political party, says the elections – originally scheduled for 2012 – are just another method of extending the president’s power.

“We think it’s an insult. We didn’t think it gave us enough time to participate. So we’re asking people not to vote and this will be our protest. Let Nazarbayev get his 96 percent as his advisers say, but it will be 96 percent of the 15 percent who partake in these elections.”

Yet hidden within Kozlov’s argument is the tacit acknowledgement that president Nazarbayev possesses an enduring popularity, something no opposition politician can match.

Far from the city centre, only a few hundred people turned out in support of the movement, and most of them were pensioners. Plain clothes security agents circulated among those gathered. At the latest count, the movement’s Facebook page had attracted a meagre 435 members.

Standing at the back, Olzhas, an opposition supporter in his early twenties, looked on with contempt.

“They demonstrate a stark lack of talent. Even the place itself: who wants to go to a remote park on the outskirts of the city to protest? No one has enough fervour or courage to illegally go out onto the main square.”

On this, Olzhas and the president’s chief political adviser, Yermukhamet Yertysbayev, can agree. “They are poorly organised, and have no financial support. They don’t have any ideology. They can’t propose anything that could compete with the president’s policies.”

Opposition murders

But Kozlov says that in today’s Kazakhstan, it is almost impossible for genuine opponents of the government to succeed.

“The regime uses many ways to limit us. They start criminal cases. People leave the country because they want to avoid prison. Or they can just shoot people, like they did with Altynbek Sarsenbaev.”

Sarsenbaev is one of a number of opposition figures who were murdered or who died in suspicious circumstances over the previous decade. He was gunned down along with his bodyguard and driver in February 2006.

Those deaths led to jail sentences for state security officers and the resignation of president Nazarbayev’s then head of national security.

Yermukhamet Yertysbayev says the president is aware of what has been happening in the Middle East. But he says Egypt and Kazakhstan share little in common.

“President Nazarbayev has learnt a lot from the revolutions, and he does want changes. In our country, a lot of young people go abroad to study. Here even menial work in the street markets can earn a man 30 to 40 dollars a day. In Cairo, they can earn just a dollar or two a day.”

Economic divide

Compared to Egypt, Kazakhstan’s 16 million strong population fares better on paper. Per capita gross domestic product is more than 9,000 dollars – four times greater than Egypt’s.

And Nazarbayev is credited with steering his country out of near economic ruin in the 1990s to become the region’s most successful economy with major foreign investment and money generated by its vast mineral resources.

If economic hardship is not a powerful enough incentive to bring people onto the streets, political scientist Mia Olsson says that Kazakhstan lacks the kind of politicised class movement that can organise mass protest.

“The big difference is that in Egypt and Tunisia there’s a large middle class unconnected to the elites. In Kazakhstan, the extremely wealthy are linked to the oil industry. They’re the economic elite and often the same people as the political elite. A separate, middle class is lacking.”

In the absence of a developed civil society, the president’s party Nur Otan has a virtual monopoly on political action. In the run-up to the poll, young party activists sporting baseball caps and tops emblazoned with the slogans “Nazarbayev, Our President” and “We are voting for our Leader” could be seen canvassing the public in hospitals, shopping malls and parks.

Three candidates, virtual unknowns, are running against Nazarbayev. Publicly, none have criticised the incumbent. The boycott lobby and other parties that did not field anyone have described them as stooges entered to provide a veneer of respectability to the race.

Mels Yeleusizov is an environmentalist who has stood against Nazarbayev before. At a tree planting ceremony, he says he knows he cannot win but runs in order to raise awareness about ecology, acknowledging Nazarbayev as “an outstanding politician, number one”.

Revolutionary neighbour

If Egypt is a long way from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan is much closer. Its impoverished and chaotic neighbour has experienced its own special run of revolutions – once in 2005, and again in 2010.

On those occasions, public supporters of politicians that had fallen from grace brought down sitting presidents who were perceived to have allowed their families to grow fat on corruption.

Much of the media in Kazakhstan portrayed the Kyrgyz revolutions as negative events that threatened to endanger stability in Kazakhstan. The same media extols the virtues of Nazarbayev on a daily basis.

In its interim report published ahead of Sunday’s poll, the OSCE observer mission described Kazakhstan’s media as restricted. Legal provisions, it said, contributed to self-censorship.

Professor Nargis Kassenova of the European Union Central Asia Advisory Group says most of the media is simply propaganda for the president.

“The information people receive makes them think he’s the only one. Without him they think there will be war or poverty like the rest of Central Asia. The comparison really helps him stay popular.”

Unease in the halls of power

Privately, senior government officials have stated their concerns about the next presidential term, which Nazarbayev is expected to inherit on Sunday. Professor Kassenova says the regime is worried about the future.

“They’re in a stalemate. I think there is a general realisation that the system is stagnating. There’s no fresh blood, fresh brains. It’s all built around one figure – the president. He is 70. He can’t last forever. They don’t know what to do when he goes.”

Behind the scenes, palace politics is said to have intensified of late, with the recent appointment of the Kazakh parliament’s Speaker as the head of the U.N.’s office in Geneva.

Senior figures are believed to be wrangling for his job, a prized possession. According to the Kazakh constitution, the Speaker inherits the presidency in the event of Nazarbayev’s death.

That still leaves the question of how political change will eventually come unanswered.

*Published under an agreement with Al-Jazeera.

By Apostolis Fotiadis
SOCHI, Dec 9 2008 (IPS)

The nomination of the Russian city Sochi to host the 2014 Winter Olympics is already affecting the sensitive geopolitical balance in the region.

Sochi and the Adler district are situated on the Black Sea coast, north of the border with the volatile Abkhazia region. The new Sochi-Adler airport and the area where the Olympics village will be located are just a few kilometres from the border checkpoint.

Sochi and Adler, little known to westerners, are popular summer resorts for Russians. Many leaders and celebrities, including President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, visit the area regularly.

“Last summer more than six million visited the area, which depends greatly on tourism,” says Vladimir Gourelian, a flower store owner in downtown Sochi.

Abkhazia was just as popular among Russians for its natural beauty and warm climate, but instability due to the ethnic conflict between Abkhazians and Georgians has reduced tourist flows.

Russia supported Abkhazians against Georgian aggression earlier this summer; its army was already present as a peacekeeping force. Immediately after the conflict, Russia recognised the two breakaway republics as independent countries. Its forces remain in the region to guarantee Abkhazians’ security, and as a shield to protect Russian interests in the Black Sea.

“The plans announced by the Russian government are really ambitious,” says Gourelian. “If implemented, they will result in nothing less than rebuilding Sochi city centre from scratch.”

The initial budget was expected to be more than 12 billion dollars. But Deputy Prime Minister Dmitri Kotzak has said that in view of the international financial crisis “we now have the task of fulfilling our plan while reducing spending.”

Freelance journalist Olga Petrovka is not optimistic. “There is a lot of talk of investment and projects but few real initiatives. Success does not depend only on creating infrastructure, but also whether you create the capacity to host the games. This means a better public transportation system, more people with language skills, an improved services sector.”

Nikolaj Diatchkov, deputy rector of the State University For Tourism and Recreation in Sochi told IPS that “the nearer we approach 2014, the more money will be poured in.” Tourism students, he said, “are planning ahead in order to provide people with skills for careers as specialists in their field during the Olympic games.”

But the region does not have sufficient workforce to carry out infrastructure projects for the Olympics. Workers will have to be imported, says Gourelian. “Under a bilateral government agreement, up to 60,000 Chinese will come to work in Sochi and Adler during the next few years.”

Most guest workers are likely to be asked to stay in Abkhazia, which has a population of 215,472 according to the 2002 census. A region with weak social structures and lack of efficient economic activity might soon face a critical population influx.

“The prospect of such a population movement will offer unprecedented economic boost, but simultaneously will create a migration challenge for us,” Abkhazian deputy foreign minister Maxim Gountzia told IPS. “The truth is that there is no stopping them from coming, but it is better if this happens under a well-organised plan.”

Beyond infrastructural development, regional security remains the major challenge for Russia’s plans for the 2014 event. Two small bomb attacks in Sochi just days after the war were blamed on “Georgian terrorists”. Such attacks could derail investment and restructuring plans.

Violent incidents are reported regularly in villages on the front lines between Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Georgia.

Negotiations between Russia and Georgia collapsed in Brussels last month after Georgia refused to accept delegations from the breakaway regions South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Georgia later agreed to listen to representatives from South Ossetia and Abkhazia at talks in Geneva supervised by the UN, the EU and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation (OSCE) in Europe. But little agreement was forthcoming.

Russia’s plans for organising a great event and Abkhazia’s aspirations for benefiting from the development will have to get past local insecurities.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 25 2008 (IPS)

As the European Union launches a probe into the conflict between Georgian and Russian troops in the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia last August – with much of the blame now being cast on Georgia for firing the first shots – thousands of civilians remain displaced and homeless at the start of winter.

UNHCR distributes aid to displaced families. Credit: UNHCR/Y. Mechitov/August 2008

Most of those who fled the bombing and shelling have returned to the “buffer zone” – the area adjacent to South Ossetia’s administrative border – but their living conditions are inadequate to endure sub-zero temperatures.

“The humanitarian crisis and essential needs remain very grave,” Giorgi Gogia, Caucasus researcher for Human Rights Watch (HRW) in Tbilisi, told IPS.

In a Nov. 18 report, Amnesty International expressed similar concerns about “the speed with which badly damaged houses can be made sufficiently habitable as winter approaches.”

An estimated 35,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) are living in collective centres run by the Georgian government. UNHCR expects more people to seek emergency shelter because “they ran out of resources, they can no longer afford to rent a place,” said Mahecic.

Human rights groups have called the Georgian government to take greater responsibility for the returnees’ well-being – something officials say they are already doing.

“The Georgian government is now putting together a strong package of support, building shelters for the winter, to be prepared. We hope we will have sustained and continuous support,” Irakli Alasania, Georgia’s ambassador to the United Nations, told IPS.

As temperatures plunge, UNHCR has launched a “winterisation programme” that includes distributing firewood and warm bedding. The agency is also working to repair damaged houses before winter, said Mahecic.

Food supplies are another critical issue, as many of the returnees are small farmers who are now unable to support their families.

“Most of the harvest had been lost when the territory was under Russian occupation. People won’t be able to collect their harvest,” Gogia said. “Since they were not able to collect the harvest, whatever kind of crops they collect, it must be enough for the fall -but in winter the need will increase.”

The security situation remains precarious, with HRW reporting recent incidents in territories adjacent to the administrative border. These areas are “pretty much no-man’s lands and people cannot go back,” said Gogia.

“The security situation along the de facto border dividing South Ossetia from the rest of Georgia remains extremely tense. Up to 25,000 ethnic Georgians continue to be unable to return to their homes in South Ossetia,” said Amnesty International.

“Some 10,000 seeking to return to homes in the former ‘buffer zone’ have been prevented from doing so on account of reported lawlessness and pillaging by militias loyal to South Ossetia” said Amnesty.

On Aug. 8, Georgian troops tried to take control of the Georgian breakaway region of South Ossetia, de facto independent since 1992, by engaging in heavy fighting in the regional capital Tskhinvali.

Russia, officially in South Ossetian territory on a peacekeeping mission, responded by launching an extensive military operation in South Ossetia and beyond. The armed clashes, which claimed mainly civilian lives, came to an end on Aug. 12, after peace brokering efforts by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose country currently holds the rotating presidency of the EU.

For the 25,000 ethnic Georgians who fled South Ossetia, “the right to safe and dignified return is still to be recognised and guaranteed”, Gogia stressed.

The majority of ethnic Georgians ran away from their villages in August after being threatened or attacked by South Ossetia militiamen who looted and burnt their houses, rights groups say.

Out of the 35,000 people who fled to North Ossetia, 2,000 remain in the Russian Federation, according to Amnesty International.

Although the Russian Foreign Ministry has said the return of displaced persons is a priority, “it’s not yet clear what is being done to implement this right and to return the displaced,” said Gogia.

“Georgia has made significant efforts to build temporary family houses. However, humanitarian needs still persist because these shelters are not enough,” he said.

Of the estimated 192,000 IDPs registered by the Georgian government in August, 80,000 have returned home, Andrej Mahecic told IPS.

UNHCR has also begun to convert unused public building into housing for the 20,000 long-term displaced.

However, UNHCR is still waiting for donors to meet the pledging request of 44.5 million dollars it made in the aftermath of the war to reach its humanitarian objectives. So far, it has received only about a third of the funds.

“We need urgently the funds for the newly displaced population in order to cover protection needs and other assistance programmes,” said Mahecic.

According to Amnesty and other rights groups, another problem is cluster bombs, which were deployed by both Georgia and Russia, resulting in numerous civilian casualties and the contamination of large areas of land with unexploded ordnance.

“Many of the [displaced farmers], after returning, could not collect their harvest because their fields were contaminated by clusters bombs posed by both Georgian and Russian troops,” Gogia said.

These unexploded ordnances are still causing civilian and official casualties. Two policemen were killed by a mine explosion in Nov. 10, according to the Georgian government.

A Convention on Cluster Munitions was adopted by 107 countries in May 2008. Neither Russia nor Georgia signed it.

Humanitarian groups are calling for a broad clearance of all unexploded munitions in the conflict areas.

Meanwhile, both sides are claiming that the provision of humanitarian relief is being hindered by border authorities.

Gogia said that Georgia recently decreed that any goods crossing from North Ossetia to South Ossetia from the Russian side are illegal. He added that Russia and South Ossetia are preventing aid from going into Georgia proper.

“We expect all the parties to honour their commitment. All people of all ethnic origins should have the possibility to return in safety and dignity,” added Mahecic.

Excerpt:

By Zoltán Dujisin
BUDAPEST, Nov 25 2008 (IPS)

The Georgian-Russian war has detonated a political war in Ukraine. The governing coalition has collapsed, and new elections loom in a country struck by a grave economic crisis and facing accusations of trading illegal arms with Georgia.

The disagreements in the coalition of the nominally pro-Western “democratic forces” of President Viktor Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine and Prime Minister Yuliya Timoshenko’s bloc became irreconcilable in the wake of the conflict that saw Russian troops intervene in Georgian territory last August.

Initial plans to hold early elections are suspended as the country sinks into an economic crisis, but Yushchenko plans to hold them next year with the hope that voters will hold the prime minister responsible for the economic hardship.

Timoshenko and Yushchenko have been waging a year-long battle aimed at curtailing each other’s powers, to the West’s dismay.

Now they’ll need to take a break – Ukraine is one of the countries most affected among emerging economies by the global financial collapse. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has extended an emergency loan.

“All politicians understand that now it is more important to stabilise the economic situation,” Valeriy Chaly, deputy director general of the Razumkov Centre, a political think tank based in Kiev, told IPS.

Almost 80 percent of Ukrainians oppose an early election, which would come as the third legislative vote in three years. Most Ukrainians would like politicians to opt for neutrality and focus on Ukraine’s economy.

Timoshenko’s silence on the Georgian conflict and her opposition to limiting Russian navy movements in the Ukrainian Black Sea prompted Yushchenko’s aides to accuse her of treason in exchange for Russian financial and political support in future elections.

The Crimea is home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet whose presence is regulated by an inter-state agreement. Most of Crimea’s population is Russian and its economy revolves around the activities of the base whose lease Yushchenko wants to terminate in 2017.

The Ukrainian President says Crimea, formerly a part of Russia and handed over to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1954 as a friendly gesture, could be Moscow’s next target, though the Kremlin denies having any territorial claims.

Pro-presidential forces have accused Russia of massively granting passports to the region’s population in order to justify a future military intervention, something also denied by Kremlin officials.

But the overwhelmingly unpopular president was condemned by his opponents for siding too quickly with Georgia after the conflict broke out, and unnecessarily straining ties with Russia.

Yushchenko is the godfather of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s children, and the country’s more ardent proponent of North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) membership for Ukraine.

Russia, Ukraine’s most important economic partner, is furious at Yushchenko’s pro-NATO rhetoric and his support for Saakashvili, and accused Kiev of engaging in illegal arms trade with Georgia.

Russian television has aired images with alleged proof of the presence of Ukrainian mercenaries among Georgian troops and of infantry fighting vehicles modernised in Ukraine being deployed in the Caucasus.

Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) responded by accusing its Russian counterparts of deliberately trying to portray Ukraine as a party in the conflict.

It was also confirmed by Ukraine’s Defence ministry that Ukrainian servicemen underwent training in Georgia ahead of the conflict, signalling a high level of cooperation between the two NATO aspirant countries.

Ukrainian officials admit selling weapons to both Russia and Georgia, but deny violating any international treaties.

“Ukraine traded with Russia and Georgia. And we sold far more volume to Russia,” SBU head Valentyn Nalyvaychenko told the local press.

But a Ukrainian ad-hoc parliamentary commission concluded that Ukraine had sold arms to Georgia ahead of the conflict at unreasonably low prices with the President’s involvement, and claimed there had been instances of arms smuggling.

The SBU swiftly interrogated Valeriy Konovalyuk, head of the ad-hoc commission and an opposition MP, and confiscated the server of a website revealing alleged state secrets connected to arms sales.

The showing of a documentary on the sale of Ukrainian weapons to Georgia, organised by Konovalyuk and arranged with the help of the Russian embassy in Kiev, was also banned by the SBU.

More could happen in the future: President Yushchenko last week asked the SBU to examine “the actions of certain individuals who are continuing insinuations around arms trade between Ukraine and Georgia.”

In the West’s eyes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s NATO ambitions have been undermined by the recent Caucasus war. But the President and his supporters believe it was NATO’s failure to grant Georgia and Ukraine a membership plan in the NATO Bucharest summit last April that encouraged the Russian advance on Georgia.

They see in the recent war an additional reason to speed up Ukraine’s membership of the organisation to protect it from an “imminent Russian threat”, and their alarmism is a way to put pressure on the West to welcome it in its security structures.

But Chaly is skeptical anything will be decided at the upcoming Brussels NATO summit in December, as Yushchenko hopes. “Any decision will be more realistic when Ukraine has an effective government and parliament,” he told IPS. “Realistically thinking experts and politicians in Ukraine are now thinking not about a membership timetable but on how to maintain the level of cooperation with NATO.”

Enthusiasm is waning. Timoshenko herself, formerly seen as pro-Western, has adopted a more neutral stance which could boost her rating with Ukraine’s substantial pro-Russian electorate and help her negotiate a favourable price for Russian gas, on which Ukraine is highly dependent.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
BRUSSELS, Nov 15 2008 (IPS)

Brinkmanship over weapons overshadowed a summit between the European Union and Russia held in the French city Nice Nov. 14.

Although the EU had agreed earlier in the week to resume talks on deepening its relationship with Moscow that had been suspended in protest at Russia’s military incursions into Georgia during August, the summit took place in an atmosphere of tension.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy who hosted the event voiced his unease with a recent threat by his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev to station Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad, a Russian territory that borders the EU countries Poland and Lithuania.

“We really must move forward to remove sources of friction,” Sarkozy said, adding that no deployment of the missiles should take place before discussions on the challenges for European security take place. Such talks – facilitated by the continent-wide Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe – are planned for next year.

Medvedev had announced his intention to deploy the short-range weapons nine days earlier, at a time when the world’s press was focused on the election of Barack Obama as the new U.S. president. Russia claims that the move is being taken in response to recent accords that the U.S. reached with Poland and the Czech Republic on establishing a missile defence shield in central and eastern Europe.

“Russia has never taken unilateral steps,” Medvedev maintained. “All these measures taken by us, including the measures which I announced recently, have been a response to the actions of individual countries in Europe which, without consulting anyone, have agreed on hosting new military systems on their soil.”

Despite the EU’s announcement that it wishes to resume talks aimed at signing a new partnership and cooperation agreement with Russia, no firm date for negotiations was set. Sarkozy also used the occasion to reiterate demands that Russia withdraw its remaining troops from Georgia to positions held before the war in August.

Human Rights Watch has argued that the resumption of dialogue should be conditional to the Russian government reversing the pattern of repression it set under Medvedev’s predecessor and mentor Vladimir Putin.

Among the benchmarks recommended are that Russia lifts the onerous restrictions it has placed on the activities of non-governmental organisations and that it honours judgments of the European Court of Human Rights. The Strasbourg-based court has delivered over 50 judgments in recent years against the conduct of Russian troops in the breakaway republic of Chechnya.

These verdicts found Russia responsible for torture, the ‘disappearance’ of civilians, and extrajudicial executions. While compensation has been paid to many of the victims, the authorities have rejected court orders that the abuses be thoroughly investigated.

Lotte Leicht, Brussels director with Human Rights Watch, said that Russia has declined to address the surrounding issues in top-level discussions with the Union. She suggested that the Union’s reluctance to be more assertive with Russia is at variance with official assurances that the Brussels institutions are wedded to such values as the protection of human rights and democracy.

“For a decade now the EU has said that its relationship with Russia is based on European values, but the EU hasn’t always followed through,” said Leicht. “Setting benchmarks would show the EU is serious about its human rights policy.”

Amnesty International urged the EU to raise the cases of journalists critical of the Kremlin who have died in suspicious circumstances. These include Magomed Evolev, owner of the website ingushetia.org, who died in August in police custody.

“Eagerness to resume the negotiations suspended in September following the Russia-Georgia conflict should not lead to a softening of the EU’s commitment to speak out on the human rights problems that remain unaddressed by Russian authorities,” said Amnesty spokesman Nicolas Beger.

Energy issues are almost certain to figure strongly in the resumed talks.

One-third of gas and one-quarter of oil used in the EU comes from Russia. But a new paper from the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think-tank, noted that Russia’s share of gas consumed in the Union has almost halved since 1980.

Pierre Noël, the paper’s author, said that “the gas relationship with Russia has become an extremely divisive issue among EU member states and is a major reason for the failure to develop an ambitious common foreign policy towards Moscow, at a time when Europe badly needs one.” While a business elite in Germany and Italy has developed a cosy relationship with the Russian energy giant Gazprom, Poland and Lithuania resent how dependent their economies are on Russian supplies.

The only way to reduce this dependence, according to Noël, is for the EU to build a properly integrated gas market of its own. But, he said, there is a marked resistance to ending the fragmentation of the current market from companies in France, Italy and Germany that have done well out of the existing arrangements.

Excerpt:

By Apostolis Fotiadis
SOKHUMI, Abkhazia, Nov 10 2008 (IPS)

The Russian city of Adler, at the southern edge of the country on the Black sea coast, is the only gateway that has kept Abkhazia connected to the rest of the world during 16 years of isolation since the Abkhazian-Georgian war of 1992.

A destroyed house in Gali on the front line between Georgia and Abkhazia. Credit: Dimitris Michalakis

Troubled Abkhazia lies on the eastern coast of the Black Sea, with Russia to the north and Georgia to the east. The 8,432 square kilometre territory looks like a small islet next to its giant rival, Georgia, which spans 69,700 square kilometres. That official figure includes Abkhazia. The official Georgian population figure of 4.5 million also includes Abkhazians.

Back in 1992 Abkhazia demanded independence from the Georgian republic, which was implementing a harsh ethnic policy. Then Georgian president and former Soviet minister for foreign affairs Eduard Shevardnadze responded with a military crackdown. Abkhazians resisted with the support of Russian paramilitaries and fighters of other Caucasian ethnic origin, mostly Ossetians and Chechens.

The majority in the Caucasus region backed Abkhazia's struggle for independence because it reflected similar hopes of their own. And Russia defended Abkhazia against what were seen as enemy political interests in its traditional sphere of influence.

Gross violations of human rights were reported on both sides during the conflict. Georgian forces withdrew in September 1993, followed by a mass exodus of more than 200,000 Georgians.

Abkhazia became a breakaway region but never received international recognition. Post-war poverty and lawlessness caused by isolation and the absence of state structures reduced living standards further. Many left.

The last Soviet census of 1989 estimated Abkhazia's population at 560,000. A 2003 census put the number at 215,972. Capital Sokhumi had about 125,000 inhabitants before the war; today it has about 60,000 officially, but locals say there are no more than 40,000.

The deeper you travel into Abkhazia, the more the scars of isolation become visible everywhere.

Along the 90 kilometres of recently renovated road from the checkpoint to Sokhumi between the Black Sea coast and the Caucasus cliffs, what were once extravagant resorts and glamorous dachas stand deserted, in the midst of amazing natural diversity and beauty. These are remnants of Abkhazia's past as a leisure destination of the Tsars, 19th century nobles, and then of senior party members during the communist era. With such visitors came prosperity and a cosmopolitan plurality of ethnic Russians, Armenians and Greeks-Pontiacs.

"What you are looking at will not help you understand what the place looked like before. Stalin himself maintained 36 dachas around the region," says Giorgi Hachev, one of the few ethnic Greeks left in Abkhazia, driving on the road to Sokhumi.

Hachev believes that the summer war in South Ossetia has brought a new era. Georgia has now lost all influence after its military withdrew completely from the region. Only a small minority of Georgians are left.

The European Union, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE, a pan-European security organisation) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) recognise Abkhazia as only an integral part of the territory of Georgia. But Russia's recognition on Aug. 26 of the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the two breakaway regions from Georgia proper, followed by Nicaragua, has altered the status of the region.

Maxim Gundjia, Abkhazia's deputy foreign minister, says this has not just encouraged the domestic population, but has invited new interest from foreign business interests.

"Developing economic relationships with other partners when you are an unrecognised country is very problematic, but soon we anticipate recognition from more South Asian and Latin American countries, and I am positive that things will gradually improve," he told IPS. "We are also in close contact with Singapore, which is interested in undertaking a huge property development project here."

Gundjia does not downplay the challenges ahead. "We estimate the number of unemployed to be around 40,000 but many of them are involved in the informal market. Tax claim remains low, but it is important that 49 percent of the population lives in rural areas, and to a great extent uses its land and cattle to cover subsistence needs."

One problem that has arisen is restoration of property to returning Russians, Armenians and Greeks who have found their houses taken by Abkhazians. This is emerging as a significant challenge to the frail judicial system, besides causing distress to the minorities.

Gundjia says many believe that Georgia is preparing for another war. But this seems unlikely as long as Russian forces remain deployed in Abkhazia.

That is not necessarily reassuring to all Abkhazians. "Russians did not protect us because they are in love with Abkhazia and Ossetia," Leon Adzhindzhel, member of the local Foundation for Independent Expertise, and an expert on regional issues told IPS. "Their rapid and massive involvement in Southern Caucasus has been very costly; 74 billion dollars of capital flew from Russia during the war last summer, but it was necessary in order to avoid an explosion in the Northern Caucasus."

Northern Caucasus, where many autonomous republics of the Russian Federation such as Northern Ossetia, Ingushetia, Chechnya, Kabardino-Balkaria and Dagestan are situated, remains a highly volatile region. Paused conflicts and quasi-civil wars between pro-Russian elites and separatists loom in many of them.

Adzhindzhel believes Georgia launched the aggression in order to provoke the dormant ethnic conflicts in the Northern Caucasus. "If fighting had carried on too long, the Caucasus would explode. Imagine that the day after Georgia's attack, Ossetian newspapers went out saying that Russia betrayed Ossetia."

For now Russia has responded and has tamed its geopolitical opponents. But the challenge of breaking the vicious cycle of poverty and underdevelopment without selling off the beauty of the region and the fortune of locals to big business interests is going to be a difficult one.

Excerpt:

By Zoltán Dujisin
PRAGUE, Sep 15 2008 (IPS)

The Russia-Georgia peace deal indicates that the EU is acting as an independent power and plans to maintain dialogue with Moscow in spite of pressure by some of its own members and the U.S. to switch to sanctions.

Last week French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev met in Moscow to agree on the gradual withdrawal of Russian troops to positions held before the outbreak of the Georgia-Russia war in August.

On Aug. 8 Georgian troops tried to seize control of the Georgian breakaway region of South Ossetia. Russia launched a military offensive, saying it had to protect Russian citizens living there.

Soon after, Sarkozy negotiated with both sides to end hostilities amid escalating cold war type rhetoric between Moscow and Washington. But Russia failed to keep its promises to completely withdraw from Georgian territory outside South Ossetia and Abkhazia, another separatist region, prompting Sarkozy’s return to Moscow.

Now Russia has nodded to the arrival of 200 EU (European Union) observers to the borders of the irredentist regions, recently recognised as independent entities by Russia.

But there are complaints that “EU observers will not be allowed into the region – which is the part of the conflict that should actually be internationalised,” Michal Thim, South Caucasus analyst at the Prague-based Association for International Affairs told IPS.

In a compromise whose ultimate goal was to maintain an impression of European unity, the EU has called the Russian occupation a “reaction” but added it was “disproportionate.” The EU also condemned Moscow’s recognition of the regions’ independence.

This was far from satisfactory for a block of mostly Eastern European countries who, led by Polish President Lech Kaczynski and encouraged by the U.S., called for tough economic sanctions against Russia.

The EU will only maintain a temporary suspension of the Russia-EU partnership agreement, which should be lifted once Moscow abides with the peace plan. The fact that Russia supplies the EU with almost half of its gas and one-third of its oil makes a policy of isolating Russia impractical.

With most EU members striving not to get caught in the crossfire of a new cold war, more idealistic politicians, especially in Eastern Europe, seemed ready to bear the cost of mutual economic sanctions.

“It is a long-term tendency that those who want to keep a pragmatic policy in relations with Russia have the upper hand within the EU’s decision-making. Decisions have to be taken unanimously, and with the lowest common denominator it is unlikely to get a tougher stance towards Russia,” Thim told IPS.

The absence of Washington from the EU-Russian negotiating table has been seen as an encouraging sign for those looking for a more autonomous international role for the EU.

Russian officials had warm words for Europe’s “balanced” position, and there was visible satisfaction among Russian analysts over Moscow’s ability to dictate many terms of the agreement.

“Both the EU and the U.S. realised they have no power to change the status quo or future of these regions,” Thim told IPS.

Russia will maintain its military presence in the separatist regions, prolonging a situation which began in 1992 with a U.N. sanctioned peacekeeping mission.

Russian-Georgian relations significantly worsened after Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili took power in 2004 and began pushing for his country’s membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO).

The U.S. has been the main sponsor of the NATO aspirations of Georgia and Ukraine, and Russian officials are openly blaming the U.S. for having blessed Georgia’s attempt to take the separatist regions by force.

Moreover, Russian officials have accused the U.S. of arming Georgia before and after the conflict. “The rearming of the Georgian regime is continuing, including under the guise of humanitarian assistance,” Medvedev said last week after the U.S. brought Georgia aid on one of its most sophisticated warships, the Mount Whitney.

The U.S says the war was provoked by Russia, and already last week U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney was visiting Ukraine and Georgia, where he called on “the free world to rally to the side of Georgia” and support its NATO membership.

In Ukraine, where Cheney tried to prevent the pro-Western ruling coalition’s collapse due to disagreements on the Georgian conflict, most politicians and media saw the visit by the lame duck vice-president as fruitless and ill-timed.

An international meeting, that will comprise representatives of the separatist regions, will be held in Geneva in mid-October to discuss the conflict and assess progress in the peace plan. Moscow says its recognition of the regions’ independence is non-negotiable, while the EU’s position on their independence is softer than that of the U.S.

Thim says the U.S. was far away when the fate of the South Caucasus was being decided.

“Washington won’t be happy, but it’s too busy with Afghanistan and Iraq. There has been only political support for Georgia but no action, they can simply keep threatening with Georgian NATO membership and try to persuade others about it.”

The U.S. might try additional sanctions such as refusing Russia’s membership of the World Trade Organisation. It has already considerably upset Russia by signing a deal with Poland on a missile defence infrastructure to be built there.

The U.S. has sought to increase its stakes in the oil and gas rich Central Asian and Caucasus region ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. It is promoting the construction of pipelines that will bypass Russia and Iran, Georgia being the only remaining corridor fully independent of Russia.

But the tough rhetoric from the U.S. administration could be a pre-election strategy to create a new “Russian threat” and make Republican candidate John McCain more appealing to the public.

Polls carried out in the U.S. suggest McCain’s ratings have risen following his tough stance on the Russian “aggression”.

Excerpt:

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 8 2008 (IPS)

When the United States and the former Soviet Union were on the verge of a military confrontation over Cuba during the height of the Cold War, the legendary U.S. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson went eyeball-to-eyeball with Soviet envoy Valerian Zorin in the Security Council chamber.

As old U.N. hands would recall, Stevenson aggressively sought a response from Zorin over allegations of Soviet nuclear missiles stationed in Cuba.

“Yes or no?” Stevenson demanded, and added the punch line: “And don’t wait for the translation”, as he pressed for an immediate answer from the Russian-speaking envoy.

Zorin turned to Stevenson and said, through a translator: “I am not in an American court of law, and I do not wish to answer the question put to me in the manner of a prosecuting counsel.”

Stevenson famously responded he will wait for an answer “until hell freezes over”.

Judging by the recent deadlock in the Security Council – over Kosovo, Iran, Myanmar (Burma), Zimbabwe, Sudan and most recently Georgia – one wonders whether the days of the Cold War are back in vogue. Or perhaps its political rhetoric?

In January last year, a Western-backed and U.S.-led move to castigate the Burmese government for human rights violations suffered a rare double veto, both from China and Russia.

And last month, history repeated itself when these two big powers exercised their vetoes again – this time to stall a resolution aimed at imposing sanctions against Zimbabwe.

The U.S.-Russian political confrontation in the Security Council has been intensified in recent weeks with the Russian invasion of Georgia, and Moscow’s subsequent decision to recognise the breakaway Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

When U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad sought a response from Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin on whether or not the Russians were bent on violating the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Georgia, Churkin said he had already provided an answer to the question.

Maybe, he added rather sarcastically, the U.S. representative had not been listening when Churkin had given his response. “Perhaps he had not had his earpiece on,” he added.

And when U.S. Ambassador Alejandro Wolff recently blasted Russia for its perceived violations of international law and the U.N. charter during the invasion of Georgia, Churkin hit back with another dose of sarcasm.

“Did you find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?…And are you still looking for them?” he asked.

Speeches laced with sarcasm and personal insults are rare in the Council chamber. But is the United Nations now back to the days of the Cold War?

“The United Nations is not headed for a new Cold War,” predicts Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalist Project at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies, and author of several studies on the United Nations.

As U.S. economic, political and diplomatic power has diminished around the world, she argued, military power has become ever more dominant as a viable tool of hegemony.

“The threat of U.S. unilateral military power continues to rise not only in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also with increasing U.S. military bases across the globe, as well as possible new interventions in Iran, in Georgia, in Pakistan and perhaps elsewhere,” Bennis told IPS.

Partly as a result of that rising militarism, and partly out of longstanding habit, she pointed out, governments around the world continue to treat the United States as if it were still an unchallengeable dominion.

“And in the United Nations, that means allowing Washington to continue to call the shots,” added Bennis, author of the recently-released ‘Understanding the U.S.-Iran Crisis: A Primer.’

“A return to the Cold War era? Not sure whether we can characterise it as such?” says an Asian envoy, who keeps close track of the state-of-play in the Security Council.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, he said it is a fact that the Security Council has not been functioning effectively for some time now.

“In my view, the last time it operated effectively was probably during the first Gulf War when Iraq invaded Kuwait and the then Bush [Sr.] administration (1990-91) worked hard to put together an international coalition to take on Saddam Hussein,” he told IPS.

It was just after the Cold War and Washington was in less of an “ideological mode”.

Maybe it was because they felt that they had won the Cold War and could now afford to be magnanimous without behaving in an overbearing and unilateral manner, he added. Or maybe they saw it as an opportunity to demonstrate true leadership and to work towards the preservation of a system where they remained at the top of the heap.

But, over time, especially in the last eight years, he argued, “the Americans have become extremely ideological and unilateral in their approach – they are always right and you are either with them or you are seen to be against them. It’s all black and while with no grey issues.”

“This was evident during the run-up to the Second Gulf War – it blinded American planning and strategising, with them thinking that they would hailed as liberators in Baghdad,” he added.

Mouin Rabbani, contributing editor to the Washington-based Middle East Report, said that since 1990 the United Nations, and particularly the Security Council, has under U.S. domination (perhaps “proprietorship” is a more accurate term) increasingly become an instrument for the marginalisation of international law.

The United States, he said, has also been undermining the consensus of the vast majority of its constituent states on a range of issues, as opposed to an institution that works to uphold international law and enforce the will of the international community.

“In this context, the prospect of a new Cold War at the global organisation is to be enthusiastically welcomed,” Rabbani told IPS.

“At the very least there will be some daylight between the U.N. Security Council (UNSC) and the U.S. National Security Council, and hopefully some dimunition of the role of the UNSC itself,” Rabbani said.

The Asian envoy said the ideological zeal of the United States and the West is also seen in the disturbing tendency by the “West” to try to broaden the definition of what is a “threat to international peace and security”.

While the U.N. Charter leaves some room for interpretation, he said, this definition of a “threat” has generally been confined to wars and violence.

“Increasingly, what we are witnessing are attempts by the West to include all manner of transgressions as possible reasons that require Security Council action,” he said.

In the Zimbabwe case, he said, the argument was that democracy, elections, and human rights all fall under possible new definitions of “threats”.

“This is the same sort of reasoning that we have seen the West try to apply to Myanmar over the political process and the humanitarian crisis,” he added.

While Russia and China are becoming more assertive, it is primarily on issues that bear directly on their own national interests, like preventing the UNSC from producing a lopsided resolution on Georgia.

The real issue remains unchanged – whether the United Nations is capable of reforming itself to become an effective international organisation.

“And here the joint interests of the U.S. and Russia are likely to converge to prevent this from happening, as in the past,” Rabbani added.

The Asian envoy said: “I don’t see either side backing off for the time being. The West will continue to push the envelope and many amongst the Rest continuing to resist,” he added.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
BRUSSELS, Sep 8 2008 (IPS)

Few, if any, regions present a greater challenge for the European Union's foreign policy than the former Soviet Union.

Despite a history of differing approaches between the EU's 27 countries towards Moscow, the Union succeeded in projecting a unified image at an 'emergency' summit held to discuss Russia's conflict with Georgia over the past week. All of the bloc's heads of state and government agreed to suspend talks on deepening ties with Russia until its troops are withdrawn from areas they occupied on Georgian territory during August.

As Antonio Missiroli from the European Policy Centre, a Brussels think-tank, noted, the consensus achieved at the summit "was certainly not a foregone conclusion, in the light of the diversity of statements and reactions coming from European capitals in the preceding days." Whereas Italy, Germany and Greece had been wary of appearing antagonistic towards Russia, Britain, the Baltic states and Poland had been intimating that they favoured a tougher line.

Since the summit concluded, however, a less unified position has developed on relations with Russia's neighbour Ukraine.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who leads the EU's rotating presidency, leads the Union's delegation at a formal meeting with his Ukrainian counterpart Viktor Yushchenko in Paris Sep. 9.

There, the EU side is likely to offer to conclude an 'association agreement' with Ukraine that could mark a considerably narrower strengthening of relations than many of Yushchenko's political allies covet. While key figures behind the 'Orange Revolution' that led to Yushchenko eventually winning the presidency in 2005 (following a stand-off with a pro-Moscow rival) have been advocating that Ukraine should be allowed full membership of the EU, it is likely that the Union will keep Ukraine at arm's length for the foreseeable future.

A draft declaration prepared by Brussels-based diplomats ahead of the EU-Ukraine summit says that an association agreement would leave open the possibility of further developments in the relationship between the two sides. A similarly non-committal formula was used back in 1963, when the then European Community was assessing its contractual ties with Turkey. Since then the Turks have joined a customs union with the EU and have opened talks aimed at ensuring Turkey's eventual entry to the Union. Yet, because the prospect of Turkish membership is deeply unpopular in such countries as France and Austria, it continues to appear distant.

In one camp, Poland, the Czech Republic, Sweden, Britain, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia are broadly positive towards embracing Ukraine. In the other, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Austria are reluctant to do so. One particularly sensitive issue is migration. Although Ukraine is seeking new rules that would make it easier for its citizens to obtain visas in order to travel to the EU, the Benelux countries and Spain are fearful that this could lead to them receiving higher numbers of Ukrainian workers.

Both Georgia and Ukraine are seeking to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, a military alliance set up in the aftermath of the Second World War. For most of its existence NATO has been hostile to Russia, and while the two sides have more recently joined together in a so-called Partnership for Peace, their ties have been to a large extent frozen as a result of the current conflict in Georgia.

While many European members of NATO have been supportive of Georgia and Ukraine's attempts to join, France and Germany opposed them at a meeting of the alliance's leaders in Bucharest earlier this year.

Dick Cheney, the U.S. vice-president, spoke in favour of the NATO membership bid when he visited both Georgia and Ukraine in recent days. In response, Russia's foreign ministry accused him of encouraging Georgia's "dangerous ambitions." The conflict in Georgia was sparked by a military onslaught authorised by Georgia's President Mikheil Saakashvili against the breakaway province of South Ossetia Aug. 7.

Elena Prokhorova, an analyst specialising in EU-Russia relations, said that the conflict in Georgia underscores the need for fresh thinking about how the continent's security can be handled. Even though there has been an upsurge in anti-western rhetoric in Moscow, the country's President Dmitry Medvedev has previously implied that he would be willing to explore the potential of his country signing up to a pan-European security structure.

"Europe should wake up to the fact that its relations with the big eastern neighbour are unlikely to be normal unless Russia's security fears, as paranoid as they may seem, are seriously addressed," said Prokhorova. "Ideally, either NATO should cease to exist as a military alliance, or Russia should join it."

Michael Emerson, a former EU ambassador to Moscow who now works for the Centre for European Studies in Brussels, said that while Russia may convey the impression that it would be able to cripple the Union's economy by refusing to supply it with oil and gas, the reality is that Russia could not survive without export earnings from the west.

"In the end, Russia and Russians will have to decide where and what they want to be in Europe and the world," he added. "The present leadership seems satisfied with its macho foreign policy but is on track for branding itself in the eyes of the west as a duplicitous bully and semi-pariah state. There can be no illusions about an easy or early change."

Excerpt:

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Sep 5 2008 (IPS)

As if the outgoing administration of U.S. President George W. Bush didn’t already have enough on its plate, the question of whether and how to re-arm Georgia in the aftermath of its thrashing last month by Russia is moving steadily up its increasingly crowded foreign policy agenda.

Moscow has already signaled any move to provide the government of President Mikheil Saakashvili with advanced weapons that he has long sought – including powerful hand-held anti-tank rockets and Stinger surface-to-air missiles that contributed heavily to Russia’s defeat in Afghanistan nearly 20 years ago – will significantly increase tensions with Washington, which soared to a post-Cold War high in the wake of the Russian intervention.

But, besides pledging to continue its push for Georgia’s admission to NATO – something with which Washington’s European allies would have to go along – the Bush administration has so far declined to make any promises in regard to military aid.

Indeed, even Vice President Dick Cheney, who had reportedly pushed hard within the administration for sending such advanced equipment to Georgia even before last month’s war, refrained from making any promises Thursday during his high-profile visit to Georgia’s capital.

“Over time, I’m sure, people will look at what happened with the military here and what the needs are,” an official who accompanied Cheney on his four-hour stay in Tbilisi told U.S. reporters on the vice president’s plane. “But I think the focus for the moment is on the humanitarian and long-term economic needs.”

The issue is nonetheless likely to loom large in the coming months, particularly if foreign policy plays a key role in the ongoing presidential election campaign, which moved into high gear Friday with the end the Republican National Convention.

In his acceptance of the Republican presidential nomination Thursday night, Sen. John McCain called for “solidarity” with Georgia in a speech that was remarkably light on foreign policy issues. From the moment that hostilities between Georgia and Russia began, McCain, who considers Saakashvili a friend and spoke frequently by phone with him during the crisis – he once gave the Georgian leader a bullet-proof vest – has consistently called for stronger action against Moscow, including expelling it from the Group of Eight (G-8) nations, than the administration has been willing to take.

While McCain has not explicitly endorsed filling Saakashvili’s wish list, some of his key neo-conservative advisers, such as Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), have pressed the administration to take such a course. Their appeal has been supported by two of McCain’s closest Senate colleagues.

“Specifically, the Georgian military should be given the antiaircraft and antiarmor systems necessary to deter any renewed Russian aggression,” wrote independent Democrat Joe Lieberman and Lindsay Graham, in the Wall Street Journal late last month. “We avoided giving the types of security aid that could have been used to blunt Russia’s conventional onslaught. It is time for that to change,” according to the two senators.

Their advice was published just as Russian President Dmitry Medvedev formally recognised the two breakaway Georgian provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states in defiance of a personal appeal for him not to do so by Bush himself.

While Bush and other top administration officials strongly denounced Medvedev’s move – Cheney called it “an illegitimate, unilateral attempt to change (Georgia’s) borders by force” Thursday – they have so far moved relatively cautiously, ignoring the appeals for stepped-up military aid to rebuild Georgia’s battered forces and upgrade its weaponry. The emphasis instead has been on the delivery of humanitarian and economic assistance.

“The first order of business should not be some sort of punishment,” Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Daniel Fried told the Washington Times this week. “Russia has to decide how much it wants to isolate itself from the world. We don’t want to have a bad relationship with Russia. We’ve never wanted that.”

So far, U.S. actions have been largely limited to its pledge to push Georgia’s and Ukraine’s membership in NATO, to effectively shelve the process by which Russia would be admitted to the World Trade Organisation (WTO), and to suspend a bilateral strategic dialogue and review a number of other bilateral military cooperation agreements.

In the immediate aftermath of the five-day war, Washington also quickly sealed a long-pending bilateral accord that would permit it to build missile defence systems in Poland. That move drew particularly harsh criticism from Moscow, which has also re-iterated its vow to strongly oppose any effort to admit Georgia and Ukraine to NATO, a military alliance which it sees as aimed at encircling and containing Russia.

Aside from those moves, however, the administration has focused on supplying humanitarian and economic assistance to Georgia – albeit via military transport aircraft and warships in the Black Sea. In conjunction with the European Union (EU) it has also helped arrange a 750-million-dollar line of credit to help Tbilisi finance the repair of the substantial infrastructural damages it incurred in the war.

In addition, Washington pledged one billion dollars in economic and reconstruction assistance, of which more than half will be sent over the next five months. That amount would make the Caucasian nation the fourth biggest U.S. aid recipient, after Israel, Iraq, and Egypt.

The administration’s relative caution, particularly with respect to military aid, appears motivated by several factors.

Increasing tensions with Moscow further, according to senior officials and independent analysts, could seriously jeopardise other top foreign policy interests, including Washington’s hopes for applying additional pressure, particularly through the U.N. Security Council, on Iran to halt its nuclear programme. It could prompt Russia to suspend an agreement that permits NATO use Russian and Central Asian bases and air space to supply its troops in Afghanistan.

A more-aggressive stance could also harm relations with key European allies, such as Germany, France, and Italy, which are eager to tamp down tensions, in part due to their own heavy investments in Russia’s economy and dependence on gas supplies.

U.S. officials are also reluctant to address the question of additional military aid in light of the Georgian armed forces’ poor performance during the war – the army retreated in chaos at the first contact, while all of its warships were destroyed in port – and what some of them describe as the recklessness of Saakashvili himself in ordering the attack on Tskhinvali that triggered Russia’s offensive.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy, and particularly the neo-conservative influence in the Bush administration, can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.

Excerpt:

By Daniel Luban
WASHINGTON, Sep 3 2008 (IPS)

In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Georgia last month, many commentators have been quick to proclaim that the war signals “the return of history”. But attentive observers could be forgiven for responding to these pronouncements with a sense of déjà vu.

History, after all, was already supposed to have returned once before – seven years ago, following the Sep. 11 attacks. Then, “the return of history” was meant to signal the commencement of an all-out struggle against the forces of radical Islam and secular Arab nationalism.

The appropriation and reinterpretation of the phrase in recent weeks – in many cases by the same commentators who first made use of it in 2001 – may be indicative of a new turn in U.S. foreign policy debates, as hawks move away from a focus on the Islamic world and push for more aggressive confrontation with Russia and China.

It has also touched off a heated media debate about the future of world politics, notably pitting erstwhile neoconservative allies Robert Kagan and Francis Fukuyama against each other.

It has been nearly 20 years since Fukuyama wrote his influential 1989 essay “The End of History?”, later expanded into a 1992 book. Published just months before the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of the Cold War, Fukuyama’s essay argued that no further ideological alternatives existed to market-based liberal democracy, and that the era of large-scale ideologically-driven conflict was over.

Many hawks initially embraced Fukuyama’s thesis, seeing in it the promise of a “unipolar” world in which the United States could exercise “benevolent hegemony”. In the years that followed, with no clear rival in sight, much of U.S. foreign policy was oriented toward peacekeeping operations in far-flung places like Haiti, Somalia, and the Balkans.

But after the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks, many of the same hawks were quick to fault Fukuyama for his optimism. According to an instantly ubiquitous phrase, the 1990s marked a mere “holiday from history”, and radical Islam was destined to replace fascism and communism as the consuming focus of U.S. foreign policy.

Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, a prominent neoconservative, spoke for many in a Weekly Standard article published two months after the attacks, proclaiming that “[o]n September 11, our holiday from history came to an end”. U.S. foreign policy, he wrote, had “acquired a new organising principle: we have an enemy, radical Islam…and its defeat is our supreme national objective”.

Krauthammer explicitly rejected the notion that Russian and Chinese power posed serious threats to the U.S., instead viewing them as potential allies. If cooperation in the war on terror required recognition of Russia’s Great Power status in Central Asia, he argued, then so be it.

“Radical Islam” was defined broadly enough to include Sunnis and Shiites, religious fundamentalists and secular nationalists. And although Afghanistan was the first front, hawks inside and outside the Bush administration immediately looked ahead to Iraq – and beyond that, to Iran and Syria.

Much as they derided Fukuyama’s optimism, what neoconservatives proposed was the armed imposition of the universal liberal democracy that he had predicted. But Fukuyama himself was not coming along for the ride; he was sceptical that liberal democracy could be imposed by force and broke with his former neoconservative allies in opposing the Iraq war.

It would be an understatement to say that the war against radical Islam has not gone as its planners had hoped. Whether or not the U.S. can salvage acceptable political outcomes in Iraq and Afghanistan, the large-scale democratisation of the Middle East appears to be off the table for now.

And as moderates seem to have gained the upper hand over hardliners within the Bush administration, the U.S. has shown a new willingness to use diplomacy in its dealings with the Islamic world.

With the apparent stalling of the war against radical Islam, many felt that hawkish elements in Washington had begun casting about for a new threat to serve as the “organising principle” of U.S. foreign policy.

Russia and China, both longstanding neoconservative fixations, made for something of a natural fit. In the months before 9/11, the Weekly Standard in particular had pushed for more aggressive confrontation with China – a Jun. 18, 2001 editorial accused the U.S. State Department of engaging in “appeasement of Beijing’s Communist rulers”.

If there has been a central figure in reformulating the “return of history” to push for confrontation with Russia and China, it has been Kagan, a neoconservative stalwart based at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace who serves as an advisor to John McCain.

Kagan’s latest book, “The Return of History and the End of Dreams”, published this past April, argues that the 21st century will be dominated by conflict between the forces of democracy (led by the U.S.) and autocracy (led by Russia and China), in a sort of return to 19th century great power politics.

Kagan’s influence was important in leading McCain to call for a “League of Democracies” to counter Russian and Chinese power, and in the weeks since the Russia-Georgia war his predictions have attracted significantly more attention.

But although few would argue that Russia and China have gained increased salience recently, many critics have questioned whether direct confrontation is the only way to deal with their rising power.

Foremost among these critics has been Fukuyama himself. In recent weeks, he and Kagan have penned a series of opinion pieces that were clearly written in response to each other.

In an Aug. 24 Washington Post op-ed, Fukuyama cautioned against “facile historical analogies”, and argued against the view that autocratic governments inherently share the same interests or seek aggressive territorial expansion.

In an earlier debate with Kagan on the website Bloggingheads.tv, Fukuyama also claimed that Kagan’s predictions of conflict with Russia and China could prove to be a “self-fulfilling prophecy”. If Washington simply assumes that conflict with Russia and China is inevitable, he and other analysts caution, then it may end up making such conflict inevitable.

In a Newsweek article bluntly titled “This Isn’t the Return of History”, prominent foreign policy realist Fareed Zakaria argued that Russia’s invasion would be remembered as a blunder rather than a show of strength, and that globalisation and economic integration would continue to promote a convergence of interests between great powers.

Much of the debate has come to revolve around which side can lay claim to the realist mantle. In an Aug. 30 Wall Street Journal op-ed, Kagan fired back at Fukuyama and Zakaria, accusing them of betraying the disillusioned worldview of their realist predecessors by espousing naïve predictions about the end of large-scale geopolitical conflict.

Fukuyama, for his part, remains sceptical that even a return to the 19th century world of great power politics would justify the aggressive policies espoused by Kagan and other neoconservatives.

“You can’t have it both ways,” he said in his Bloggingheads debate with Kagan. If one accepts the notion of a return to a great-power world, “then you take that seriously, and say what do great powers do when we can’t expect to get everything we want?”

“The normal great power understanding of what you do is you come to an accommodation, you give some things up in order to get what’s more important to you.”

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
BEIJING, Sep 1 2008 (IPS)

Moscow’s decision to recognise the two separatist regions of Georgia as independent states has exposed the divergence of geopolitical interests within the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO).

While the Kremlin has sought to build a counterweight to Western alliances by lobbying its diplomatic partners in the SCO, the Georgia conflict has revealed conflicting loyalties among Russia, China and the West.

Faced with the first serious military conflict since its establishment in 2001, the SCO has failed to take a clear-cut stance, hiding its ambiguity behind statements of concern over the tensions in the region and praise for Russia’s role.

Led by China, the group’s other four members – the Central Asian ex-Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan – refrained from condemning Georgia for igniting the conflict. They stopped short of endorsing the birth of the two independent republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, now formally recognised by Moscow.

Beijing has billed its response to the crisis as one corresponding with the country’s long-standing policy of refusing to lend support for any separatist movement. But Chinese analysts here say two other reasons underpinned Beijing’s decision to withhold its unequivocal support to Russia; its desire to avoid any anti-western flourishes, and its fear that Georgia conflict may come to play as a prelude to another long-term stand off between Russia and the west.

"Are we headed for another Cold War?" said Liang Qiang, researcher on Russia and Central Asia with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. "We don’t know yet but it is the first time since the demise of the former Soviet Union that Russia has decided to deploy its military forces so extensively. However brief, the conflict between Russia and Georgia shows that NATO’s intended expansion eastward is not something that Russia is prepared to watch idly."

Fang Yan, a commentator writing in the ‘Beijing News’ speculated that Russia and Georgia’s conflict is merely a "semi-final" in a geopolitical game where Russia’s real opponent is the United States. "We can’t help it but wonder: who is the next South Ossetia?" Fang asked.

Beijing may have shied away from criticising Russia over its support for breakaway South Ossetia and Abkhazia but its anxiety over such precedents is palpable. With restless ethnic minorities in Tibet and the Muslim province of Xinjiang, China is battling separatist claims of its own and had expressed repeatedly its "concern" about the developments between Russia and Georgia.

"We are fully aware of the complicated history and reality of the issues of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and given our consistent position on such issues, we hope the relevant countries properly resolve the issues through dialogue and consultation," foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang told reporters in Beijing.

Russia observers in China argue that Moscow has not been caught unawares of Georgia’s intentions and that the Kremlin had displayed readiness to cope with the consequences of its declaration over South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The underlying argument is that Russia does not necessarily need China’s help in sorting out the current crisis.

"Russia is well aware that it holds its oil resources as a bargaining chip to negotiate its position," says Qiang Xiaoyun, Russia watcher at Shanghai International Relations Institute. "By contrast, the West has limited options to punish Moscow. From Russia’s actions so far – its ban on poultry imports from the U.S., its freeze on cooperation with NATO and change of heart on WTO membership, one can see that Moscow has been more than ready for the conflict."

China cannot afford to be seen as supporting alliances that can damage its diplomatic standing as a responsible global player. Compared to Russia, China is more dependent on the outside world for oil, natural resources and investment. Over the last thirty years Chinese leaders have laboured continuously to ensure that nothing spoils the country’s peaceful development so that it can achieve its dream of national renaissance.

Moreover, China has just scored high marks for its preparation and hosting of the 29th Olympic Games in Beijing – seen from here as a culmination of its efforts to rejoin the international community and be recognised as a major player.

"It would be difficult to imagine that China would have done anything to spoil that impression and undermine its feat by thrusting itself in the middle of Russia’s quarrel with the west," said a commentary in the ‘China Business Journal.’

Lastly, but not less importantly, the Georgia conflict seems to have inadvertently forwarded China’s energy interests in the region. Experts believe that prolonged instability and tension in Georgia may lead to the Central Asian republics abandoning plans to sell their energy resources to Russia and turning instead to China.

Both Russia and the West have been courting the Central Asian republics for their oil and gas riches. But China has moved much faster than its competitors. Beijing has already sealed a deal to buy up to 40 billion cubic metres of gas annually from Turkmenistan and is currently building a pipeline to carry it across Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan into western China.

Excerpt:

By Haider Rizvi
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 28 2008 (IPS)

Russia wants the U.N. Security Council to allow the leadership of South Ossetia and Abkhazia to take part in ongoing international talks over the future of their territories.

The two secessionist states are considered by Moscow as independent nations, but in the eyes of the United States and its Western allies remain an integral part of Georgia.

“This meeting can’t be fully valid without the representation of South Ossetia and Abkhazia,” said the Russian ambassador to the U.N., Vitaly Churkin, while addressing a Security Council meeting Thursday. The public meeting of the Council was called by its president at the request of Georgia.

In his speech, Churkin defended his country’s decision to recognise South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states and reiterated that Moscow was forced to do so as a result of Georgia’s breach of the six-point agreement to put an end to the armed conflict. The ceasefire agreement was brokered by France on Aug. 12.

Diplomats from the United States and the European Union deplored Russia for its move to recognise South Ossetia and Abkhazia and charged that Moscow’s act was in violation of the U.N. Charter and international law. They also reaffirmed their support for Georgia’s claim that both the regions were an integral part of its territory.

However, Russia seemed somewhat successful in having its point of view endorsed by some of the non-permanent members of the Council from the developing world. Indonesia and South Africa, for example, agreed with the Russian position on the failure of Georgia to abide by the Aug. 12 agreement.

“This agreement presented a good basis,” said South African Ambassador Dumisani Kumalo, who thinks the situation has become “complicated” because all the parties involved in the conflict did not accept it fully. Kumalo also supported the Russian demand for the inclusion of the South Ossetia and Abkhazia leadership in the talks.

Indonesia, another major developing country in the Council, expressed its frustration over the deadlock in diplomatic talks over the Georgian conflict and said it still “welcomes” the six-point agreement between the parties.

The six-point agreement signed by the Russians and Georgians calls for the withdrawal of the Georgian forces to their permanent bases and the Russian military to “the line prior to the beginning of hostilities,” meaning South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

In accordance with the agreement, the Russians have pulled out their troops from Georgia – but not from the separatist regions. Russia says it wants the world community to open a discussion of larger security and stability arrangements in the two regions.

But Georgia and its powerful Western allies insist that Russian forces leave all the disputed territories, a condition Moscow seems unwilling to accept.

After the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ossetia and Abkhazia had become part of Georgia, although it was widely reported at the time that people in the two regions aspired to have their own sovereign states. The former Soviet constitution allowed the states to secede.

The Russians created their peacekeeping forces in the two regions in 1992 and 1994, following the Georgian military’s incursions in 1992 under the slogan, “Georgia for Georgians.”

Moscow justifies its decision to recognise the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia by citing the U.N. Charter, the Helsinki Final Act, and other fundamental international instruments that recognise nations’ right to self-determination.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said Tuesday he had tried to preserve Georgian unity for 17 years, but was forced to change course after the Georgian government carried out a massive military crackdown in South Ossetia early this month.

The Aug. 8 army action resulted in hundreds of deaths as well as the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people.

When asked for his response to the Russians’ call to include the South Ossetian and Abkhazian leadership in the U.N.-led talks, the U.S. deputy representative to the U.N., Alejandro Wolff, told IPS: “We see no basis for inviting them and rewarding them.”

According to some unconfirmed reports, the Ossetian and Abkhazian leaders are eager to take part in the Security Council talks, but have failed to obtain visas from the U.S. embassy in Moscow.

Surprisingly, China, a giant power in the developing world that holds veto power in the Council, did not take part in the debate.

When asked to comment by a journalist, the Russian ambassador said: “We have no complaint about our colleagues [from China].”

Churkin told the Security Council that Moscow was fully prepared to start negotiations with the leaders of South Ossetia and Abkhazia to sign a bilateral agreement on friendship and cooperation. The representatives of the two regions have already welcomed Moscow’s move to recognise their territories as independent countries.

Churkin said many members of the Council were supportive of the six-point agreement and that he felt optimistic about the outcome of the ongoing international talks. “There’s discussion about the U.N. observers [in the regions],” he said. “But we will have some more discussions.”

However, conversations with Western diplomats suggested there was no imminent resolution to the dispute over the Georgian situation. “No, there is no hope of any breakthrough soon,” a French diplomat told IPS before stepping into the Security Council chamber to take part in the debate.

Excerpt:

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Aug 27 2008 (IPS)

Iran could emerge as a big winner, at least in the short term, from the rapidly escalating tensions between the United States and Russia over Moscow’s intervention in Georgia, according to analysts here.

Whatever waning chances remained of a U.S. military attack on Iran before President George W. Bush leaves office next January have all but vanished, given the still-uncertain outcome of the Georgia crisis, according to most of these observers.

Similarly, the likelihood that Moscow will cooperate with U.S. and European efforts to impose additional sanctions on Tehran through the U.N. Security Council, where Russia holds a veto, for not complying with the Council’s demands to halt its uranium enrichment programme has been sharply reduced.

Not only has Washington’s confrontation with its old superpower rival displaced Tehran at the top of the administration’s and U.S. media foreign policy agenda, but Tehran’s geo-political leverage – both as a potential partner for the West in containing Russia and as a potential ally of Moscow’s in warding off western pressure – has also risen sharply as an incidental result of the crisis.

“When the U.S. invaded Iraq, it didn’t do so to improve Iran’s power position in the region, but that was the result,” noted Gary Sick, an Iran expert at Columbia University who served on the National Security Council staff of former Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan. “That wasn’t the purpose of the Russian invasion of Georgia either, but it, too, may be the result.”

So far, Tehran’s response to the Georgia crisis has been measured. Despite calls by some right-wing voices to side with Moscow, according to Farideh Farhi, an Iran expert at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars here, the government, including President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has expressed disapproval of the Russian action, particularly its recognition of the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia from Georgia.

“The reason is on grounds of principle – if Iran is going to start supporting the secession of territories that are unhappy with the central government, then Iran itself has some similar issues with ethnic dissatisfaction,” Farhi, who also teaches at the University of Hawaii, told IPS.

In addition, she said, most of Tehran’s foreign policy establishment “don’t view Russia as a reliable partner. They understand that Russia may support Iran on the nuclear file depending on its own security or policy interests, but Russia has also been quite clever in using Iran as a bargaining chip in terms of its relationship with the United States.”

“The Iranians are being very clever here; they’re not likely to rush to Russia’s defence unless Russia comes to them and ask for their help, and then they can ask for something in return,” Farhi added.

The latter may include anything from the accelerated completion of the long-delayed Bushehr nuclear plant, to providing advanced anti-aircraft systems (something that Tehran’s ally Syria has already asked Moscow to provide in the wake of Damascus’ public support for the Russian intervention), to full membership in the Sino-Russian-sponsored Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), a defence group that is coincidentally holding its annual summit in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, this week.

Teheran’s leverage is not just confined to its status, along with Turkey’s, as the most powerful nation in a strategically critical neighbourhood inhabited by relatively weak U.S.-backed buffer states like Georgia. During the Cold War and until the 1979 Revolution, after all, Iran served as Washington’s most important bulwark against Soviet influence in the Gulf.

It also derives from its being a major oil and gas producer that could also play a much more important role as a transshipment point for Central Asian and Caspian energy resources bound for Europe, whose growing dependence on Russia for its energy supplies looks more risky than ever. This is particularly so in the wake of Moscow’s demonstration that it can easily reach – and disrupt, if it wishes – the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, the only pipeline that transports oil from the Caspian to the West without transiting either Russia or Iran.

“Oil and gas companies now must factor in a new level of uncertainty,” according to Jay Stanley at Kent Moors, an expert on energy finance who writes for ‘Caspian Investor’. “…Georgia is now unstable and that increases the risk of transporting hydrocarbons across it.”

“If the BTC and Georgia won’t be a reliable source of energy, then Iran will absolutely step up to the plate,” according to Prof. William Beeman, an Iran expert at the University of Minnesota. “‘You want gas? We’ll sell you gas’ will likely be their position,” he added, noting that Switzerland signed a 25-year, 42-billion-dollar gas supply and pipeline deal with Tehran last March over strong U.S. objections. “I think the Swiss are a very good bellwether for the rest of Europe on this.”

While Iran has alienated some major European energy companies – most recently France’s Total – by demanding tough terms, it might “see the present crisis as an opportunity to go back to European colleagues and say, ‘Let’s take another look at this,”‘ said Sick. “It gives them some more leverage by going to the West and saying ‘You’re shooting yourselves in the foot here. When are you going to come to your senses?”‘

That argument naturally becomes more compelling as tensions between Russia and the West continue to escalate and could affect internal Bush cabinet-level deliberations on whether to act on a State Department recommendation to seek Iranian approval for opening an interests section in Tehran. Such a move, at the present juncture, would likely be seen as a major move on geo-strategic chessboard. Despite reports earlier this month that Bush had approved the recommendation, the issue appears to be unresolved.

Still, some experts say Iran’s advantage could be short-lived. With a Russian veto over new Iran sanctions all but assured, Washington could decide to drop the U.N. route and try to impose a “coalition-of-the-willing” sanctions regime with its allies, according to Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC).

Michael Klare, author of “Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy”, told IPS he believes that Russia’s unilateral resort to military action against Georgia may actually embolden Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, the leader of the administration’s hawks who travels next week to Georgia and Azerbaijan.

“The question is whether Bush and Cheney will feel empowered to behave in a more belligerent fashion or not,” he said.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy, and particularly the neo-conservative influence in the Bush administration, can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.

Excerpt:

By Haider Rizvi
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 26 2008 (IPS)

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned Tuesday that Russia’s recognition of the breakaway Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia “may have wider implications for security and stability in the Caucasus.”

Russian ambassador Vitaly Churkin speaks to the press at U.N. Headquarters on Aug. 26, 2008. Credit: UN Photo/Evan Schneider

“The secretary-general regrets that ongoing efforts to find a common solution on the way forward in the crisis in Georgia within the Security Council may be complicated,” the statement said.

Speaking at a U.N. press conference Tuesday, Russia’s ambassador Vitaly Churkin affirmed that, “We have no question about the sovereign independence of Georgia… [but] both South Ossetia and Abkhazia have the right to self-determination under the Charter of the United Nations and other international instruments.”

Churkin blamed the Georgian government and its Western backers, including United States, for the continuing deadlock in diplomatic talks over the future of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Other members of the Security Council took a different view. “We were making progress, but frankly territorial integrity [of Georgia] was an essential part of that and Russia’s actions today have put a massive block in the way of achieving a common Security Council position,” British Ambassador John Sawers told reporters Tuesday.

The United States and its Western allies are pressing Russia for complete withdrawal of its troops from Georgia, but Moscow has repeatedly asserted that its military presence in South Ossetia and Abkhazia is in compliance with the past in international agreements.

After the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, both South Ossetia and Abkhazia had become part of Georgia, although it was widely reported at the time that people in the two regions wanted them to be recognised as separate political entities.

The Russians created their peacekeeping forces in the two regions in 1992 and 1994, following the Georgian military incursions in South Ossetia and Abkhazia in 1992 under the slogan, “Georgia for Georgians.”

In recognising South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states, Churkin said Moscow’s decision was guided by the U.N. Charter, the Helsinki Final Act, and other international instruments that recognise the right to self-determination.

Russia says it tried to preserve Georgian unity for 17 years, but was forced to change its course after Georgian government carried out a massive military crackdown in South Ossetia. The Aug. 8 army action resulted in hundreds of deaths and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people.

Churkin and other Russian officials said Moscow now felt obliged to recognise South Ossetia and Abkhazia as other countries had done with Kosovo. In a statement, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said the presidents of South Ossetia and Abkhazia appealed to Russia to recognise the sovereignty of their regions and that the Russian parliament voted in favour of such calls.

Georgia has strongly reacted to the Russian declaration, and said Moscow was seeking to “change Europe’s borders by force”. In a statement Monday night, Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili said the Russian move has “no legal basis”.

Saakashivili’s backers in Washington and elsewhere in the West also strongly condemned the Russian recognition of the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. In a statement Tuesday, U.S. President George W. Bush called the Russian decision “irresponsible” and said Moscow must live up to its international commitments.

“This decision is inconsistent with numerous United Nations Security Council resolutions that Russia has voted for in the past,” said Bush. “[It] is also inconsistent with the French-brokered six-point ceasefire agreement which President Medvedev signed.”

“Abkhazia and South Ossetia are within the internationally recognised borders of Georgia, and they must remain so,” he added. “Russia’s action only exacerbates tensions and complicates diplomatic negotiations.”

France, which brokered the six-point agreement between Russia and Georgia on Aug. 12, also deplored Russia’s decision and called for a political solution. The six-point agreement signed by the Russians and Georgians calls for the withdrawal of the Georgian forces to their permanent basis and the Russian forces to “the line of prior to the beginning of hostilities,” meaning South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

In accordance with the agreement, Russia has pulled out from Georgia, but not from the separatist regions. Russia says now it wants the international community to open a discussion of larger security and stability arrangements in the two regions. But Georgia and powerful Western allies insist that Russian forces must also leave all the disputed territories, a condition that appears to be non-negotiable for the Russians.

“The people of South Ossetia and Abkhazia have several times spoken out at referendums in favour of independence,” said Medvedev. “It is our understanding that what has happened in Tskhinval and what has been planned for Abkhazia they have the right to decide their destiny by themselves.”

In addition to Washington’s plan to install missile defence systems in Poland and expansion of NATO forces, the Medvedev government seems increasingly upset about the increased U.S. military support for the Georgian government.

“Does Washington purposefully encourage an irresponsible and unpredictable regime in the misadventure?” asked Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov in a recent article published in the Wall Street Journal. “If the U.S. couldn’t control Tbilisi’s behaviour before, why do some in the U.S. rush to rearm the Georgian army now?”

Stephen Zunes, a professor of politics and international studies at the University of San Francisco, agrees that without Washington’s help Saakashvili might have acted differently.

“With strong encouragement from Washington, Saakashvili’s government reduced domestic spending but dramatically increased military spending, with the armed forces expanding to more than 45,000 personnel over the next four years, 12,000 of whom were trained by the United States,” he said.

“Congress approved hundreds of millions of dollars of military assistance to Georgia, a small country of less than five million people,” he said. “In addition, the United States successfully encouraged Israel to send advisors and trainers to support the rapidly expanding Georgian armed forces.”

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
BERLIN, Aug 26 2008 (IPS)

A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of a new Cold War in the wake of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signing a decree Tuesday formally recognising the breakaway Georgian provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states.

Though without the ideological tint of the Cold War that appeared to have been consigned to oblivion some two decades ago with the fall of the Berlin Wall, it has explosive potential.

Georgia is a key Western ally in the Caucasus region, a major transit corridor for energy supplies to Europe and a strategic crossroads close to the Middle East, Iran, Afghanistan, Russia and energy-rich Central Asia.

Widespread anxiety about what may eventually come has been confirmed by no less than Russia’s Ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), Dmitry Rogozin.

Comparing the current tension between Russia and the West to that prevailing on the eve of the First World War (1914-1917), he said that a dangerous new freeze in relations appeared unavoidable.

“The current atmosphere reminds me of the situation in Europe in 1914…when because of one terrorist, leading world powers clashed,” Rogozin told the RBK Daily Russian business newspaper, according to the Guardian.

“I hope (Georgian President) Mikheil Saakashvili will not go down in history as a new Gavrilo Princip,” he said.

A Bosnian Serb citizen of Austria-Hungary and member of the Young Bosnia, Princip assassinated the Austro-Hungarian archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne.

The retaliation by Austria-Hungary against the Kingdom of Serbia activated a series of alliances that set off a chain reaction of war declarations. Within a month, much of Europe was entangled in the ‘War to End All Wars’.

In fact, it was a precursor to the Second World War (1939-1945), that was followed by some four decades of Cold War between the ideological blocs led by the United States on the one hand and the then Soviet Union on the other.

When the Cold War ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union, U.S. philosopher Francis Fukuyama published a historical book titled ‘The End of History and the Last Man’.

A crucial point Fukuyama stressed was: “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

Fukuyama has yet to be proven right. The fact is that a new edition of the Cold War is unfolding. But it is not the kind of war, as former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer says in a column for the weekly ‘Die Zeit’, that persisted between the two super powers.

It is a war between the only super power, the United States, and Russia that is strengthening its armed forces with income from its huge oil and gas reserves. It is a war aimed at expanding the Russian sphere of influence to counter the U.S.-led NATO strategy of encircling Russia with radars and missiles in the ‘new Europe’, the countries that were in the orbit of the now defunct Soviet Union.

Fischer speaks of a “strategic blind alley” into which both the U.S. and Russia have manoeuvred themselves.

Eduard Shevardnadze, former Soviet foreign minister and president of Georgia prior to being overthrown by Saakashvili, says that both sides made mistakes in the lead up to the war between Georgia and Russia.

In an interview with the German news magazine Der Spiegel, Shevardnadze says: “Many people blame the Georgian President. They are wrong in part, but there is also an element of truth to it. He can’t be accused of having acted illegally. It was legal to move our forces into (the South Ossetian capital) Tskhinvali. But it would have been better not to.”

But many European leaders believe that Saakashvili acted rashly and brought down much of the destruction on his own head when he sent his troops to take over the autonomous ethnic enclave South Ossetia.

Media reports quoted a senior French official as saying, “On one side you have a bear, and on the other a little ‘roquet’,” using the latter word for a yapping little dog.

Saakashvili may have fallen into a carefully prepared Russian trap, the official said. “But when you’re a chief of state, you have to know about the reality of forces. This was an incredible misjudgment by Saakashvili.”

But there is also wide consensus among Western leaders that Russia reacted with a “disproportionate” and overwhelming military counter-attack pushing deep into Georgia.

Russian President Medvedev’s announcement that he had “signed decrees on the recognition by the Russian Federation of the independence of South Ossetia and the independence of Abkhazia” has swiftly met with sharp Western criticism.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice described the decision as “extremely unfortunate,” and said that Washington continued to regard Abkhazia and South Ossetia as “part of the internationally recognised borders of Georgia.”

She added that the U.S. would use its veto power in the United Nations Security Council to block any Russian attempt to change the status of the two provinces.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Moscow’s decision was “completely unacceptable” and contrary to international law. She said Russia’s actions contravene the principle of territorial integrity, one of the basic principles of international law.

Merkel said it was time to talk to Russia about common values. Things cannot be allowed to continue as they are, she said. At the same time, the Chancellor regretted the lack of a UN resolution on the Caucasus conflict.

Merkel said in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, that she thought “the European Union will respond in a similar way.” The 27-nation European Union’s heads of state and government will travel to Brussels next week to attend a special summit on the Caucasus conflict.

The German Chancellor wants the European Council to signal that Georgia can count on the EU in its restructuring efforts.

“Through our policy of neighbourliness, the European Union must do all we can to support Georgia and Ukraine,” said the Chancellor.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier also regretted Russian President Medvedev’s decision. Speaking in Berlin, he said it encroaches on the territorial integrity of a neighbouring sovereign state. “We find this unacceptable. It only adds to the difficulty of solving the conflict in South Ossetia and Abkhazia.”

The German view is considered critical in view of the eventful history of German-Russian relations. Also, former Soviet allies now members of the EU and NATO are of the view that Germany can play a crucial role.

This was evident from several calls to Merkel particularly since the beginning of tensions between Russia and Georgia on Aug. 8.

Another significant player in Europe is France, which brokered a ceasefire agreement to end the fighting between Russia and Georgia, and holds the six-month presidency of the EU.

French foreign ministry spokesman Eric Chevallier said: “We consider this a regrettable decision, and I recall our attachment to the territorial integrity of Georgia.”

A spokeswoman for the British Foreign Office was reported saying: “We reject this categorically and reaffirm Georgia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

Sweden’s Foreign Minister Carl Bildt said the fact that Russia’s leadership “has now chosen this route means they have chosen a policy of confrontation, not only with the rest of Europe, but also with the international community in general.”

Western reactions reflect the dismay with which Europe and the United States have watched Russia fail to be swayed by any international threats.

But explaining the decision, Medvedev said in a televised speech Tuesday: “This is not an easy choice but this is the only chance to save people’s lives.”

The Russian President said that Saakashvili had chosen “genocide to fulfil his political plans.” He said Georgia had wanted to achieve its goal “to absorb South Ossetia by eliminating a whole nation.”

Medvedev said the two provinces had the right to determine their future particularly after the Georgian assaults, adding that his decision was in compliance with the right to self-determination firmly anchored in the UN Charter, the principles of international law and the Helsinki Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE).

Abkhazia on the eastern coast of the Black Sea and South Ossetia in South Caucasus rebelled against Georgian rule after the collapse of the Soviet Union and have effectively ruled themselves following wars with Georgia since the early 1990s.

Medvedev’s statement came one day after both houses of Russia’s parliament unanimously asked him to give diplomatic recognition to the two provinces that are known for their loyalty to Moscow.

Adding another bone of contention the same day, the Russian President warned Moldova, located between Romania to the west and Ukraine to the north, east and south, against repeating Georgia’s mistake of trying to use force to seize back control of a breakaway region.

Russia sent peacekeepers to Moldova in the early 1990s to end a conflict between Chisinau and its breakaway Transdniestria region, and is trying to mediate a deal between the two sides.

Transdniestria, one of a number of “frozen conflicts” on the territory of the former Soviet Union, mirrored the standoff between Georgia and its rebel regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia until they erupted in war earlier this month.

The Cold War atmosphere became conspicuous when the U.S. said Tuesday it intended to deliver humanitarian aid by ship on Wednesday to the Georgian port city of Poti, which Russian troops still control through checkpoints on the city’s outskirts.

A top Russian general said that using warships to deliver aid was “devilish”. “The heightened activity of NATO ships in the Black Sea perplexes us,” Col. Gen. Anatoly Nogovitsyn said in Moscow, according to media reports.

“Only yesterday I saw there were nine NATO ships in the sea and by evening another frigate of the U.S. navy passed through the Bosphorus Straits. We have also learnt that another eight warships from NATO states are expected shortly,” said Nogovitsyn.

He added: “They talk about planned exercises and you can probably find some legitimacy in that but…it’s very hard to believe that all the visits so far have been bringing only humanitarian aid.”

Excerpt:

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic
BELGRADE, Aug 26 2008 (IPS)

Serbia was remarkably quiet in the days following the conflict in South Ossetia that began Aug. 8. Speculation by international politicians and in media of a parallel with Kosovo simply could not fit into a simple picture.

The cabinet of Prime Minister Mirko Cvetkovic issued a short statement later after Cvetkovic met with Russian Ambassador Aleksandar Konuzin.

“Serbia is concerned about the humanitarian crisis in South Ossetia,” it said. The statement expressed sympathy over the loss of lives, and called for an end to the conflict through diplomatic means.

“The reason for the slow reaction is simple,” foreign policy analyst Seska Stanojlovic told IPS. “It was not sure how to see itself. Is there a comparison with Kosovo? Was Serbia Russia, Georgia or South Ossetia in this case?”

The southern Serbian province Kosovo declared independence in February this year, backed by the United States and some members of the European Union (EU). Belgrade insists that the move was illegal, as it cancelled its sovereignty over 15 percent of Serbian territory. Russia backed Serbia in the United Nations (UN).

South Ossetia was widely described as wanting to secede from Georgia, much like Kosovo sailed away from Serbia. Under former leader Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia tried in 1998 and 1999 to control Kosovo with force, despite ethnic Albanians’ desire for independence.

“This is where the similarity with Georgia could be put,” first post-Milosevic foreign minister Goran Svilanovic told B92 TV. “Its effort to keep South Ossetia with force was as senseless as Milosevic’s effort over Kosovo.”

Russia intervened on behalf of South Ossetia and against Georgia. In 1999, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) intervened on behalf of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo by bombing Serbia for 11 weeks, to prevent a “humanitarian catastrophe.”

Russian leaders spoke of the Georgian action against South Ossetia as “aggression”, “genocide” or “ethnic cleansing” of the local population. “Such expressions only added to the general confusion in Serbia,” Stanojlovic said. “Particularly so when Georgian actions (against South Ossetia) were compared with Srebrenica by Russians.”

Ethnic Serbs in Bosnia are blamed for the massacre of more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995.

Ethnic cleansing is an expression forged in the West for mass expulsion of Bosniak Muslims during the 1992-95 war, and evictions by Serbs of more than 800,000 ethnic Albanians in Kosovo in 1998 and 1999.

Croats have spoken of “aggression” by Serbia since the republic began its secession from former Yugoslavia in 1991. But Serbia sees itself as a victim of NATO aggression. For most people, this was the most traumatic event in the recent past, regardless of the reason for the NATO action, that took 1,500 lives and destroyed industry and infrastructure.

Russia has called for an international war crimes tribunal to be established for Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili, as it was for Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic. Milosevic fell from power in 2000 after a popular uprising when he refused to admit he had lost the election.

He was extradited to the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in 2001 to stand trial for war crimes in the wars of disintegration of the former federation in the 1990s. Milosevic died in 2006, without being sentenced.

“The decision on what to say about Russia, Georgia and South Ossetia was a very complicated one for Belgrade,” the daily Danas wrote. “Ordinary people liked the show of force by Russia. However, that’s tough – if you openly support Russia, you violate the idea of territorial integrity of Georgia.”

Kosovo politicians and analysts see no parallel between South Ossetia and Kosovo.

“Kosovo is a unique case, not to be compared to any other in the world,” Kosovo President Fatmir Sejdiu told Pristina TV. “The status of Kosovo was solved through international mediation.”

“Any parallel between Kosovo and South Ossetia is false,” Ilir Dugolli from the Kosovar Institute for Policy Research and Development told the TV station. “Kosovo had been an international protectorate for eight years, with an open status that was to be resolved; this is not the case with South Ossetia.”

Excerpt:

By Zoltán Dujisin
BUDAPEST, Aug 25 2008 (IPS)

Following tough negotiations, the U.S. and Poland have signed a deal on extension of the U.S. missile defence system to Eastern Europe, weeks after the outbreak of the Georgian-Russian conflict.

The U.S. wants to build a radar in the Czech Republic and a missile base in Poland that will allegedly protect Europe from missile attacks by ‘rogue’ states in the Middle East.

The U.S. signed a treaty on the stationing of the radar on Czech soil earlier this summer.

Statements by Polish officials indicate that Poland prefers to wait for the outcome of the U.S. presidential election in November before ratifying the deal in parliament.

Ratification might prove complicated, especially in the Czech Republic where parliamentary support is everything but ensured.

Moscow claims the base can monitor military operations in much of European Russia, will affect the strategic balance of forces in Europe, and spark an arms race.

“The Russians have a clear plan on how to respond to the missile system, but not yet to the Georgian situation, so the question now is whether they will be tougher on the Polish deal in light of the Georgian situation,” András Deák, Russia expert at the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs in Budapest told IPS.

On Aug. 8 Georgian troops tried to take control of the Georgian breakaway region of South Ossetia, de facto independent since 1992. Russia, officially in South Ossetia on a peacekeeping mission, responded by launching a military offensive in Georgia.

The Georgian-Russian war brought the Polish and U.S. sides closer to a deal that Russian President Dmitry Medvedev says is aimed at Russia.

“In Washington’s eyes, this conflict has proved that Russia is not a stable partner to the United States and that it still perceives its international environment as its exclusive area of influence,” Polish Defence Minister Bogdan Klich said shortly after the deal was reached.

“Most probably, they realised that Poland needed protection not only against long range missiles but also against medium and short range missiles,” Klich said.

For Russia the Polish-U.S. deal, which finally includes deployment of Patriot missiles in Poland, proves its suspicions that the system was aimed against it rather than a hypothetical Middle Eastern threat.

The recent tensions follow a year of discussing confidence-building measures between Russia and the U.S. that would allow Russian monitoring of the future base.

As Washington’s rhetoric increasingly demonstrates that it perceives Moscow as a potential enemy, the feasibility of such confidence-building steps is being called into question.

Russia says it will respond to the deployment with “asymmetrical measures”, though it has not publicly specified how: a strong possibility is the set-up of military infrastructure in either Belarus, a strong ally of Russia, or in Kaliningrad, the Russian enclave neighbouring Poland.

“It’s going to be more than a symbolic, but less than a real response,” Deák says. “There will be a set of harsh rhetoric, but as usual it will be difficult to separate Russian rhetoric from the real action.

“They don’t want to go into an arms race with the U.S., but the Georgian conflict could change things, they might get much tougher,” the analyst told IPS.

Nationalist and pro-U.S sectors in eastern Europe have condemned the Russian-Georgian conflict as a premeditated aggression by Moscow against which the ‘West’ should not capitulate.

On one side stand those that feel the “Russian aggression” must not go unanswered, and the radar is the best way to show that the West is not afraid. This is the stance suddenly supported by the majority of the Polish population, up until now mostly against the base, but which in an Aug. 18 poll was 55 to 41 percent in favour of the U.S. military installation being built on Polish soil.

For others the Russian action served as proof that Moscow is ready to go as far as hitting ‘Western’ military targets if it feels encircled.

Russian officials, who say that in 1999 the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) issued a unilateral declaration announcing it would not deploy military hardware in the new member states, have reportedly started to flirt with the possibility of bringing military infrastructure to the vicinity of Washington, in either Cuba or Venezuela.

“It could be done cheaply but it’s not sure the Cuban government would go along with it, there is no evidence the Latin American regimes would cooperate. But it’s a possibility,” says Deák.

“There is a growing likelihood of an aggravation of relations; we are far from a cold war but we might have very frozen relations,” Deák adds.

The analyst notes that much will depend on how the Georgian situation is solved in terms of a Russian pullout, a new peacekeeping arrangement, and the ability of both the West and Russia to separate their various disagreements and not see them as part of a general conflict.

“The real danger for Russia is that it might face absolute isolation,” Deák told IPS.

Excerpt:

By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON, Aug 23 2008 (IPS)

The U.S. policy of absorbing Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, which was enthusiastically embraced by Barack Obama and his running mate Joseph Biden, has undoubtedly been given a major boost by the Russian military operation in Georgia.

In the new narrative of the Russia-Georgia war emerging from op-eds and cable news commentaries, Georgia is portrayed as the innocent victim of Russian aggression fighting for its independence.

However, the political background to that war raises the troubling question of why the George W. Bush administration failed to heed warning signs that its policy of NATO expansion right up to Russia’s ethnically troubled border with Georgia was both provocative to Russia and encouraging a Georgian regime known to be bent on using force to recapture the secessionist territories.

There were plenty of signals that Russia would not acquiesce in the alignment of a militarily aggressive Georgia with a U.S.-dominated military alliance. Then Russian President Vladimir Putin made no secret of his view that this represented a move by the United States to infringe on Russia’s security in the South Caucasus region. In February 2007 he asked rhetorically, “Against whom is this expansion intended?”

Contrary to the portrayal of Russian policy as aimed at absorbing South Ossetia and Abkhazia into Russia and regime change in Georgia, Moscow had signaled right up to the eve of the NATO summit its readiness to reach a compromise along the lines of Taiwan’s status in U.S.-China relations: formal recognition of the sovereignty over the secessionist territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in return for freedom to develop extensive economic and political relations. But it was conditioned on Georgia staying out of NATO.

That compromise was disdained by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. After a Mar. 19 speech at the Atlantic Council in Washington, Saakashvili was asked whether Russia had offered a “Taiwan model” solution in return for Georgia stay out of NATO. “We have heard many, many suggestions of this sort,” he said, but he insisted, “You cannot compromise on these issues…”

Russia, meanwhile, had made it clear that it would respond to a move toward NATO membership for Georgia by moving toward official relations with the secessionist regions.

U.S. policymakers had decided long before those developments that the NATO expansion policy would include Georgia and Ukraine. They convinced themselves that they weren’t threatening Russia but only contributing to a new European security order that was divorced from the old politics of spheres of interest.

But their view of NATO expansion appears to be marked by self-deception and naiveté. The Bill Clinton administration had abandoned its original notion that Russia would be a “partner” in post-Cold War European security, and the NATO expansion policy had evolved into a de facto containment strategy.

Robert Hunter, former U.S. ambassador to NATO in the Clinton administration and head of a three-year project for the State Department on reform of the Georgian National Security Council, says the U.S. project of Georgia’s membership in NATO “had to be seen by any serious observer as trying to substitute a Western sphere of influence for Russian” in that violence-prone border region of the Caucasus.

Some officials “wanted to shore up democracy”, said Hunter in an interview, imagining that NATO was “a kind of glorified Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe” – a negotiating and conflict prevention body to which the Russian Federation belongs.

But there were also some in the administration who “genuinely wanted to contain the Russians by surrounding them”, he added.

James J. Townsend, director of the International Security Programme at the Atlantic Council and formerly the Pentagon official in charge of European relations, said there was enthusiastic support in both the Defence Department and the State Department soon after Saakashvili took power in 2003 for integration of Georgia into NATO “as quickly as possible”.

Townsend believes the project to integrate Georgia and Ukraine into NATO gained momentum in part because Washington “was underestimating just how sensitive this is to Putin”. U.S. policymakers, he said, had observed that in previous rounds of enlargement, despite “a lot of bluff and bluster by the Russians”, there was no Russian troop movement.

Furthermore, policymakers believed they were proving to the Russians that NATO expansion is not a threat to Russian interests, according to Townsend. They did become aware of Russia’s growing assertiveness on the issue, Townsend concedes, but policymakers thought they were simply “making trouble on everything in order to have some leverage”.

In the end, the bureaucracies pushing for NATO expansion were determined to push it through despite Russian opposition. “I think it was a case of wanting to get Georgia engaged before the window of opportunity closed,” said Townsend.

To do so they had to ignore the risk that the promise of membership in NATO would only encourage Saakashvili, who had already vowed to “liberate” the South Ossetia and Abkhazia regions, to become even more sanguine about the use of force.

In the same Mar. 19 speech in Washington, Saakashvili minimised the problem of Russian military power in the region. He declared that the Russians “are not capable of enforcing the Taiwan model in Georgia. Their army in the Caucasus is not strong enough …to calm down the situation in their own territory. I don’t think they are ready for any kind of an adventure in somebody else’s territory. And hopefully they know it.”

It was a clear hint that Saakashvili, newly encouraged by Bush’s strong support for NATO membership, believed he could face down the Russians.

At the NATO summit, Bush met resistance from Germany and other European allies, who insisted it was “not the right time” to even begin putting Georgia and Ukraine on the road to membership. But in order to spare embarrassment to Bush, they offered a pledge that Georgia and Ukraine “will become NATO members”.

Hunter believes that NATO commitment was an even more provocative signal to Putin and Saakashvili than NATO approval of a “Membership Action Plan” for Georgia would have been.

The Russians responded exactly as they said they would, taking steps toward legal recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. And Saakashvili soon began making moves to prepare for a military assault on one or both regions.

In early July, Rice traveled to Tsibilisi with the explicit intention of trying to rein him in. In her Jul. 10 press conference, she made it clear that Washington was alarmed by his military moves.

“The violence needs to stop,” said Rice. “And whoever is perpetrating it – and I’ve mentioned this to the president – there should not be violence.”

David L. Phillips, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told the Los Angeles Times last week he believes that, despite State Department efforts to restrain the Georgian president, “Saakashvili’s buddies in the White House and the Office of the Vice President kept egging him on”.

But whether more specific encouragement took place or not, the deeper roots of the crisis lay in bureaucratic self-deceit about the objective expanding NATO up to the border of a highly suspicious and proud Russia in the context of an old and volatile ethnic conflict.

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in 2006.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
PRAGUE, Aug 23 2008 (IPS)

The coinciding of military confrontation between Russia and Georgia and the 40th anniversary of the brutal crushing of the 'Prague Spring' in 1968 in what was Czechoslovakia has triggered a debate on whether a comparison between the two events is justified.

As Czech and Slovak leaders held solemn ceremonies in Prague and Bratislava to mark the historic Aug. 21, 1968, the Czech leaders were conspicuously divided in their views on the conflict between the great power Russia and its tiny neighbour Georgia.

Czechoslovakia split peacefully in 1993 into the Czech and Slovak republics, on the heels of the fall of the Berlin Wall that paved the way for parliamentary democracy in the country.

Czech President Vaclav Klaus has strongly criticised Georgia. Klaus, together with eminent writer Vaclav Havel and his Social Democrat counterpart Milos Zeman is recognised as one of the three most important Czech politicians of the 1990s, and the last of them to remain active.

Klaus argues that Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili's "fatal" actions against the separatist region of South Ossetia were to blame for the conflict.

Mountainous South Ossetia in Georgia is separated from North Ossetia in Russia by a border running high in the Caucasus. Georgians account for less than a third of the population of South Ossetia.

President Klaus vehemently rejected the parallel between 1968 and 2008, pointing out that Czechoslovakia did not act provocatively by attacking Subcarpathian Ruthenia 40 years ago, and that then Czechoslovak leader Alexander Dubcek's conduct bore no similarity to that of Saakashvili during recent events.

Subcarpathian Ruthenia is a small region of Central Europe, now mostly in western Ukraine's Zakarpattia Oblast, easternmost Slovakia, Poland's Lemkovyna and Romanian Maramures. Since 1945 it has been a part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and the subsequent independent state of Ukraine.

President Klaus is supported by the opposition Social Democratic Party and by Communist Party leaders.

Miloslav Vlcek, chairman of the Chamber of Deputies, told the Czech News Agency CTK: "The same politicians who did not respect the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Serbia are now calling on Russia to respect the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Georgia."

Vojtech Filip, Communist Party chairman, was quoted in the Lidové Noviny newspaper saying: "The (Georgian) attack on South Ossetia was politically an absolutely unwise and amateurish step and by this, Saakashvili has lost the confidence of the democratic thinking world."

President Klaus is at odds with the pro-Georgian opinions expressed by other government leaders. Eminent among them is Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek, who heads the right-wing neo-liberalist Civic Democratic Party founded by Klaus in 1991.

"The Czech Republic supports Georgia's effort to strengthen its sovereignty," Topolanek said in an Aug. 8 statement shortly after Russian military action against Georgia began. "The Russian tanks on the streets of Georgian towns remind those of us who experienced it, of the 1968 invasion," he added in a recent newspaper article.

Lidové Noviny newspaper quoted Alexandr Vondra, deputy prime minister for European affairs, as saying: "Russia might think its massive military operation against a sovereign state would pass unnoticed. It is mainly we Czechs, with our own experience, who should not tolerate something like this."

The newspaper cited Jan Hamacek, Chamber of Deputies foreign committee chairman as saying: "It was an inappropriate reaction from the Georgian government. An inappropriate reaction from the Russian side only followed."

While the Czech leaders debated whether the events in Georgia now are comparable with those in 1968, Sergej Mironow, chairman of the Federation Council, said the invasion of Czechoslovakia was a "mistake".

The invasion had helped trigger the end of the Warsaw Pact, a communist military bloc headed by the Soviet Union after the Second World War (1939-45) until the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union itself.

The bloc, set up to counter the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO, the western military alliance), comprised the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland and Romania.

"The (Warsaw Pact) tanks were not battling an enemy but a political concept – and this is an attribute of weakness," Mironow said last week in Moscow.

In March 2006, Vladimir Putin, now prime minister and then president, said that Moscow "undoubtedly bears moral responsibility" for the invasion.

Also, Hungary offered apologies for joining the invasion. Hungary's President Laszlo Solyom said at a commemoration that he regretted the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia and was sorry for Hungary's role in it. An apology could serve reconciliation, he added.

On the same day, Culture Minister Istvan Hiller said in a political statement at a press conference that the invasion of Czechoslovakia was "an act of aggression."

The crushing of the Prague Spring was clear evidence that a Soviet-type power was unable to reform and unfit for change. Hiller said the invasion was shameful, and an apology was moral obligation. "We apologise," he added.

Czech responses to the military confrontation between Russia and Georgia, and the former Warsaw Pact allies' soul-searching stands in stark contrast to the results of a recent poll. It found that 70 percent of Czechs younger than 20 have "no opinion" on the events of 1968.

"The reason is that there is nothing in Czech textbooks about 1968," says Alena, who is in her early 20s and is engaged in a Youth Forum that helps build a strong civil society.

Several Czech activist groups have condemned Russian actions in Georgia. Pro-Georgia demonstrators rallied in front of the Russian consulate in Brno on Aug. 15 and the Russian Embassy in Prague Aug. 12. Several Czechs have signed a condolence book for Georgian victims at the Georgian embassy.

"This is not an ethno conflict as it's presented by the Russians," said Georgij Alanija, head of the Prague-based Georgia activist group Samsoblo. "This is an occupation of Georgia. And the conflict did not start a couple days ago, but 19 years ago."

He added his own take on differing opinions among Czech officials. "We are happy with the way the Czech government and the foreign affairs minister expressed their feelings about the conflict. On the other hand, we are horrified by Klaus's latest statements, and also by the Czech communists."

According to the Prague Post weekly, Samsoblo is considering filing a suit against Klaus over his comments against Georgia.

Such differences are typical of Czech foreign policy, analysts say.

"The biggest problem is not that top officials have different opinions," said analyst Jiri Pehe of the New York University in Prague. "However, it is highly problematic when they are not able to compare notes and speak with one voice. Czech foreign policy is a real cacophony of voices."

This is a source of great concern particularly as the Czech Republic will take over the six-monthly presidency of the 27-nation European Union next January.

But there is a sense of relief that Czech officials have welcomed the U.S.-Polish agreement to host a U.S. missile base. It is considered a victory for Czech officials who have promoted the expansion of the U.S. missile defence shield in their own country.

"We welcome the great advance that has been made between Poland and the United States. It is clear that the Poles feel Washington can guarantee their safety, and we should not be afraid to follow in their steps and construct the U.S. military base on our soil," Jan Vidim, chairman of the Chamber of Deputies' defence committee told the Czech News Agency Aug. 15 four days before the formal agreement being signed.

"Everyone can now see that (Prime Minister) Topolanek's administration has been right all along in saying that Poland will sign the treaty eventually," Zdenek Zboril, a political scientist at the Institute of International Relations in Prague told the Prague Post. He added that he thinks the new U.S. military bases in Europe will force a swifter European unification.

"Hopefully, signing these agreements will end all the hype that the story has generated, and people will come to realise the new geo-political situation," Zboril said. "It is clear that if Europe wants to become a viable international partner, it needs to have one address and one voice. As long as others have to call 27 people before reaching a decision, they will never take the European Union seriously, and instead deal with individual states."

Excerpt:

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Aug 23 2008 (IPS)

Whatever hopes the George W. Bush administration may have had for using its post-9/11 “war on terror” to impose a new Pax Americana on Eurasia, and particularly in the unruly areas between the Caucasus and the Khyber Pass, appear to have gone up in flames – in some cases, literally – over the past two weeks.

Not only has Russia reasserted its influence in the most emphatic way possible by invading and occupying substantial parts of Georgia after Washington’s favourite Caucasian, President Mikhail Saakashvili, launched an ill-fated offensive against secessionist South Ossetians.

But bloody attacks in Afghanistan, and Pakistan, about 1,000 kms to the east also underlined the seriousness of the Pashtun-dominated Taliban insurgencies in both countries and the threats they pose to their increasingly beleaguered and befuddled U.S.-backed governments.

And while U.S. negotiators appear to have made progress in hammering out details of a bilateral military agreement that will permit U.S. combat forces to remain in Iraq at least for another year and a half, signs that the Shi’a-dominated government of President Nouri al-Maliki may be preparing to move forcefully against the U.S.-backed, predominantly Sunni ”Awakening” movement has raised the spectre of renewed sectarian civil war.

Meanwhile, any hope of concluding a framework for a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority by the time Bush leaves office less than five months from now appears to have vanished, while efforts at mobilising greater international diplomatic and economic pressure on Iran to freeze its uranium enrichment programme – the administration’s top priority before the Georgia crisis – have stalled indefinitely, overwhelmed by the tidal wave of bad news from its neighbourhood.

”The list of foreign policy failures this week is breathtaking,” noted a statement released Friday by the National Security Network (NSN), a mainstream group of former high-ranking officials critical of the Bush administration’s more-aggressive policies. And a prominent New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman, argued that the Russian move on Georgia, in particular, signaled ”the end of the Pax Americana – the era in which the United States more or less maintained a monopoly on the use of military force.”

Indeed, Russia’s intervention in what it used to call its ”near abroad” was clearly the most spectacular of the fortnight’s developments, both because of its unprecedented use of overwhelming military force against a U.S. ally heavily promoted by Washington for membership in NATO and because of the geo-strategic implications of its move for the increasingly-troubled Atlantic alliance and U.S. hopes that Caspian and Central Asian energy resources could be safely transported to the West without transiting either Russia or Iran.

While Russia did not seize control of the Baku-Tbili-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline or approach the area proposed for the Nabucco pipeline further south, its intervention made it abundantly clear that it could have done so if it had wished, a message that is certain to reverberate across gas-hungry Europe. Indeed, investors now may prove considerably less enthusiastic about financing the Nabucco project than before, dealing yet another blow to Washington’s regional ambitions.

Russia’s move also raised new questions about its willingness to tolerate the continued use by the U.S. and other NATO countries of key air bases and other military facilities in the southern part of the former Soviet Union, notably Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, over which Moscow maintains substantial influence.

As with Georgia, where the U.S. significantly escalated its military presence by sending over Russian protests 200 Special Forces troops in early 2002, Washington first acquired access to these bases under the pretext of its post-9/11 ”global war on terrorism”. But, while clearly important to its subsequent operations on Afghanistan, they were also seen as key building blocks – or ”lily pads” – in the construction of a permanent military infrastructure that could both contain a resurgent Russia or an emergent China and help establish U.S. hegemony over the energy resources of Central Asia and the Caspian region in what its architects hoped would be a ”New American Century.”

As suggested by former Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani this week, Washington and, to some extent, NATO behind it, ”has intruded into the geopolitical spaces of other dormant countries. They are no longer dormant…”

Indeed, still badly bogged down in Iraq where, despite the much-reduced level of sectarian violence, political reconciliation remains elusive, to say the least, the U.S. and its overly deferential NATO allies now face unprecedented challenges in Afghanistan not entirely unfamiliar to the Soviets 20 years ago.

”The news out of Afghanistan is truly alarming,” warned Thursday’s lead editorial in the New York Times, which noted the killings of 10 French paratroopers near Kabul in an ambush earlier in the week – the single worst combat death toll for NATO forces in the war there – as well as the coordinated assault by suicide bombers on one of the biggest U.S. military bases there as indications of an increasingly dire situation. In the last three months, more U.S. soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan than in Iraq.

”Afghanistan badly needs reinforcements. Badly,” wrote ret. Col. Pat Lang, a former top Middle East and South Asia expert at the Defence Intelligence Agency on his blog this week. ”Afghanistan badly needs a serious infrastructure and economic development programme. Badly.”

Of course, the Taliban’s resurgence has in no small part been due to the safe haven it has been provided next door in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) where Pakistan’s own Taliban, which also hosts a rejuvenating al Qaeda, has not only tightened its hold on the region in recent months but extended it into the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP).

Last week, it retaliated in spectacular fashion to airborne attacks on its forces by the U.S.-backed military in Bajaur close to the Khyber Pass – the most important supply route for NATO forces in Afghanistan – by carrying out suicide bombings at a heavily guarded munitions factory that killed nearly 70 people near Islamabad.

Analysts here are especially worried that, having achieved the resignation last week of U.S.-backed former President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the new civilian government will likely tear itself apart over the succession and the growing economic crisis and thus prove completely ineffective in dealing with Washington’s top priority – confronting and defeating the Taliban in a major counter-insurgency effort for which the army, long focused on the conventional threat posed by India, has shown no interest at all.

Indeed, the current leadership vacuum in Islamabad has greatly compounded concern here that the army’s intelligence service ISI, which Washington believes played a role in last month’s deadly Taliban attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul, could broaden its anti-Indian efforts. This is especially so now that Indian Kashmir is once again hotting up, ensuring a sharp escalation in the two nuclear-armed countries’ decades-long rivalry and threatening in yet another way the post-Cold War Pax Americana.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy, and particularly the neo-conservative influence in the Bush administration, can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
WASHINGTON, Aug 19 2008 (IPS)

With the conflict between Georgia and Russia lowered to a simmer after the signing of a ceasefire agreement, questions still remain about the U.S. role and positions on the start of the conflict as well as where it stands moving forward towards a resolution.

Ten days ago, a full-scale war broke out when Russian and Georgian forces clashed over the breakaway Georgian region of South Ossetia.

The U.S. role during the beginning of the conflict on Aug. 7 is unclear, but a Washington Post article this weekend revealed that Matthew Bryza, a deputy assistant secretary of State and a U.S. special envoy to the Caucuses, was aware of the Georgian military operations before they started.

At a press conference Tuesday in Washington, and in line with the Georgian position, Bryza said that the Georgian military movements were a response to attacks from Ossetian separatists and initial large-scale Russian movements into South Ossetia.

“Who shot whom first?” said Bryza at the Foreign Press Centre. “I don’t know if we’ll ever know the answer to that question,” he continued, before going on to call the answer “irrelevant” because “Russia has escalated so brutally” that the international community turned against it.

Moscow has denied the Georgian and U.S. timeline, but did not provide the Washington Post with a Russian timeline of the military movements.

Speaking at a forum at the Atlantic Council for the United States, the immediate former secretary of state for political affairs, R. Nicholas Burns, said that he blamed Russia completely for the conflict, and said that the Russian incursions were the “most disappointing” turn Russia has taken since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Burns, toeing a line pushed strongly by the U.S. representative to the U.N. Zalmay Khalizad last week – and strongly denied by the Russian representative – said that the Russian actions were a response to increasing freedom and democracy in Europe since the end of the Cold War.

“Russia has put this at risk,” Burns said.

Responding to criticisms that unflinching U.S. support for Georgia may have emboldened Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili to make the misstep of a military move into South Ossetia, a generally pro-Russian province that has been pushing for independence since the early 1990s, Burns said that the charges were unfounded.

He said that those “pointing the finger” at Georgia and the U.S. were wrong, and that Russia was solely to blame for the conflict.

“I don’t think the U.S. is to blame for what’s happening in Georgia,” Burns reiterated to IPS after the Atlantic Council conference. “I think Russia is to blame.”

But Paul Saunders, the executive director of the Nixon Centre and a specialist on Russia and U.S.-Russia relations, told IPS that he not surprised that the U.S. and Georgia don’t blame themselves.

“Burns is a person who, as undersecretary of state until recently, was part of forming the U.S. policy towards Georgia,” he said, making it unlikely for him to find fault with those very policies.

As for the U.S. siding with Georgia, a democratic, pro-Western ally, over South Ossetia and its Russian backers, Burns said that the U.S. should not take a role in deciding the borders of European countries.

“We must not be part of the redrawing of lines in Europe,” Burns told the wider audience at the Atlantic Council event.

When asked later in the day by IPS if Burns’ comment mirrored the U.S. position, Bryza said that he wasn’t sure exactly what Burns was talking about. But he was willing to confirm Burns’ general message as an appropriate position for the unique case of the Georgian conflict.

“We should not allow this current situation to draw new lines in Europe and prevent a democratically elected government to join NATO if they want,” he told IPS.

Many commentators have noted that Russian ambitions to realise independence for South Ossetia and another pro-Russian breakaway region in Georgia, Abkhazia, were greatly bolstered by U.S. support for the independence of Kosovo, which Serbia still considers part of its territory.

But many U.S. officials and their defenders have strongly denied that U.S. support of Kosovo – which came swiftly after its declaration of independence – created a legitimate precedent for Russia to support the independence of the Georgian breakaway regions.

In questions after the conference, Burns told IPS that the Kosovar independence and South Ossetian and Abkhazian independence are “fundamentally different”.

“We were right to support the right of independence for Kosovo,” Burns told IPS, explaining that the fundamental difference was U.N. control over Serbia since the war there in late the 1990s sparked by what Burns called Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević’s “savage attack” on Kosovo.

But some commentators have said that the U.S. should have understood when Kosovo declared independence six months ago that the issue of forming an international precedent is not as simple as declaring it as such or not.

“[The U.S.] tried very hard and assertively to support Kosovo’s independence, but [not make it] a precedent,” Saunders told IPS. “What the administration doesn’t understand is that what’s a precedent is in the eyes of the beholder.”

“We don’t get to decide how other people react to what we do,” he said. “Other people get to decide.”

Looking forward to a final resolution of the conflict, Bryza said that Russia and Georgia would be the main players because of their democratically elected leadership, which the U.S. views as legitimate.

“We support Georgia’s territorial integrity,” Bryza said. “That means that the leaders of the Abkhaz and South Ossetians are not on the same legal grounds as the democratically elected leaders of Georgia of the leader of Russia.”

South Ossetia and Abkhazia, lacking independence, do not have internationally recognised de jure governments. However, both regions do have de facto independently operating governments with leaders.

Moreover, with the U.S. constantly citing Georgia’s status as a democracy as a strong reason to back it, many are left curious by the absence of talk of a 2006 referendum in South Ossetia where residents unanimously voted for independence. Whether the leaders of the breakaway region were democratically elected by international standards or not, their leaders certainly and legitimately represent this view.

“If you asked the people in those two regions where they want to live [in terms of independence or under the Georgian state], it’s quite clear that the leadership is representative of that,” said Saunders.

But if the U.S continues to ignore that reality, it could further dilute the U.S.’s international standing as an advocate of democracy and self-determination.

“People start to wonder why we are taking these positions,” said Saunders. “It gets a lot harder to say we are standing on principle.”

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
NEW YORK, Aug 16 2008 (IPS)

When the Russian military launched a military invasion of its small neighbour Georgia – operating at will in Georgia’s secessionist provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, as well as Georgia proper – New York’s Georgian-American community responded almost immediately by gathering outside United Nations Headquarters here to protest the invasion of their homeland.

Demonstrators gathered in the rain across the street from U.N. headquarters. Credit: Omid Memarian/IPS

The rallies continued throughout the week. On Thursday a march past the Russian consulate took place and two rallies are scheduled to take place in Washington D.C.

The decision to demonstrate was a diffuse one originating throughout an émigré community that is roughly a decade old, and has not yet developed potent lobbying groups. In New York City the Georgian-American community consists of an estimated 5,000 people.

Facebook.com announcements, emails, phone calls, and Georgian-American news sources spread the news of the rallies outside the U.N., apparently without the direction of any formal leadership. Demonstrators told IPS that they had travelled to New York from Florida, Philadelphia, and Boston to join the rallies.

Russia and Georgia have both agreed to a cease-fire. However, because it is widely believed that Russia is violating the spirit if not the terms of the cease-fire agreement, activists are poised to continue calling for a greater diplomatic effort to put an end to the conflict.

Victoria Goginava, a co-founder of the Progressive Youth Movement for Georgia and an organiser of Saturday’s protest, told IPS that “the reason why we’re still going to rallies and there is still a high turnout is that despite the ceasefire Russians have not been honouring the ceasefire. There is – as we speak – looting, raping of women, killing. Georgian men are being targeted and being disappeared. It is the same tactics that have been used [by Russia] in Chechnya.”

Emotions run high at the protests. The Georgian-American community is a relatively new phenomenon and its members are closely connected with their former home in the Caucuses through relatives that live there as well as their own personal experiences in the country.

One of the demonstrators at Monday’s rally, George Karazahishvili of Brooklyn, worried that his son who is an American citizen currently visiting Georgia would remain trapped amidst the violence because Russia had attacked Tbilisi International Airport. Russia bombed the airport’s radar system as well as areas close to a runway. Georgian officials maintain that the airport continues to operate normally.

Another activist, Maka Saladaze, also related the conflict back to personal solidarities. When asked what she hoped the demonstrations would accomplish she told IPS, “We want the international community to pressure Russia to stop.” Tears welling up in her eyes, she added, “We all have families back there. They can’t move because the infrastructure is being destroyed.”

The need for international diplomatic assistance to halt Russia’s advance was a major theme of the rallies. By sending troops into South Ossetia on Aug. 7, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili provided Russia with a pretext to launch attacks there as well as in Abkhazia and Georgia proper. The Georgian incursion quickly proved to be a strategic error, revealing Georgia’s lack of military capability to challenge Russia over the breakaway provinces and its inability to defend its own major cities against Russian invasion.

To mobilise international support many demonstrators framed the conflict as an ominous choice between halting Moscow’s ambitions now or seeing Ukraine, Poland, and the Czech Republic come under Russian attack in the near future.

For Columbia student Valerian Sikhuaksvili the classical wisdom of international relations summarised the situation. “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must” he quoted from the ancient Greek historian Thucydides. Russia “is not paying attention to diplomacy and is ignoring the international community,” added Sikhuaksvili.

However, Sikhuaksvili admitted that he did not see viable military solutions to the current hostilities and like many of the other demonstrators, he said that he had joined the protest to send a message to the U.S. and the U.N.

In the absence of an official protest organiser activists began to fill the vacuum. When the police arrived to inform the demonstrators that they had far exceeded the area’s 54-person limit and would have to use another location for future demonstrations, about a half dozen people appointed themselves to consult with the officers. “We’re trying to establish an organiser,” explained Officer Meury of the New York City Police Department’s 14th precinct.

One of those people, Ana Kovziridze, helped to found the Georgian Student Association at Baruch College in Manhattan, where she is entering her senior year. According to Kovziridze Georgian society groups “are not that established” but the congruent politics of Washington, Tblisi, and the Georgian-American community are the basis for a strong strategic bond. The students at Baruch and the Georgian community at large “very strongly support President Saakashvili, an American ally who has sent Georgian troops to Iraq, and has supported his country’s inclusion in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization” a position which the Bush Administration shares.

The current fighting has stimulated political involvement and unity within the Georgian-American community and some activists are trying to use the opportunity to forge more centralised organisations.

Goginava told IPS that in the coming days she plans to participate in a roundtable discussion with her counterparts in other Georgian-American groups. Among the issues they will be discussing is the possibility of coordinating demonstrations in different cities and other collective actions to protest Russia’s actions in Georgia. Creating networks between organisations could be the groundwork for more influential appeals, she said.

“Our priority is to stop the murdering of Georgians right now,” Goginava said, referring to the current wave of demonstrations. But, “on the broader scale our goal would be to form networks within the Georgian community and especially Georgian youth all over the world. After we do that it is too early to say what else we will do.”

Excerpt:

By Daniel Luban
WASHINGTON, Aug 14 2008 (IPS)

Just days after the outbreak of war between Russia and Georgia, the debate in Washington over how to view the crisis historically has become nearly as contentious as the debate over how to respond politically.

Prominent neoconservatives and other foreign policy hawks have portrayed Russia’s offensive into Georgia as an echo of 1930s Nazi expansionism – an interpretation that has been hotly contested by a number of liberals and conservative realists.

But the question of what sort of concrete action the U.S. should take in the Caucasus has proved far messier, as both camps remain split about the proper response to the Russian offensive.

Since Friday, when Russia sent troops into the restive Georgian region of South Ossetia, neoconservatives in the U.S. have analogised Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler, and the Russian incursion to Germany’s 1938 annexation of the Sudetenland.

"The details of who did what to precipitate Russia’s war against Georgia are not very important," began a Monday column in the Washington Post by prominent neoconservative Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the Project for a New American Century. "Do you recall the precise details of the Sudeten Crisis that led to Nazi Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia?"

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s famously unsuccessful attempt to appease Hitler by ceding the Sudetenland in the 1938 Munich Agreement has become a central reference of neoconservative foreign policy doctrine. "Appeasement", "Munich", and Chamberlain’s name itself are often taken as code words signifying the ineffectiveness of compromise and diplomacy – and the necessity of military force – in dealing with the U.S.’s enemies.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain also seemed to be alluding to the lessons of Munich in a Tuesday speech. McCain claimed that the U.S. had "learned at great cost the price of allowing aggression against free nations to go unchecked".

McCain is advised by Kagan and has joined him in proposing a ‘League of Democracies’ to counter powers such as Russia and China.

At a panel held Wednesday at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington, Munich analogies were plentiful.

Frederick Kagan, brother of Robert Kagan, and a military scholar who helped formulate the Bush administration’s "surge" plan in Iraq, complained that Western governments and media viewed Georgia as "a far off place of which we know little". Kagan’s comment was a reference to Chamberlain’s description of the Sudeten crisis as "a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing".

Ralph Peters, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and prominent foreign policy hawk, mocked the Tuesday peace agreement between Russia and Georgia brokered by French President Nicholas Sarkozy.

"President Sarkozy has landed in Paris holding in his hand a piece of paper guaranteeing peace in our time," Peters said to widespread laughter from the audience. Once again, the reference was to a statement of Chamberlain’s following the Munich conference.

Peters ended his remarks by making the Putin-Hitler analogy all but explicit.

"We are faced with a resurgent major power with imperialist megalomaniacal ambitions, led by the most effective leader in the world today," Peters said. "Ladies and gentlemen, I find this terribly reminiscent of the 1930s."

Hitler and Chamberlain analogies have long been staples of neoconservative rhetoric, but their application to the situation in Georgia has been met with a growing backlash.

Joe Klein, a prominent centrist political pundit who has become involved in a series of rancorous disputes with neoconservatives in recent months, mocked Robert Kagan’s use of the Sudetenland analogy. "When a column begins like this… the author has got to be a neoconservative pushing for the next war," he wrote in a Monday blog post entitled ‘It’s Raining Nazis’.

Dimitri Simes, president of the Nixon Centre, advocated U.S. assistance to the Georgian regime in the National Interest, a journal which is today known as a bastion of foreign policy realism. But Simes urged policymakers to "disregard the hysterical diatribes of [Georgian President Mikheil] Saakashvili’s American champions, who protest too much – perhaps because their irresponsible encouragement of the Georgian president was a contributing factor on the road to the war".

Despite the intensity of the debate surrounding the Nazi analogy, there has been little agreement on either side about what would constitute an appropriate response to Russian aggression.

At the AEI panel, Peters was blistering in his criticism of the U.S. response to the war, but stopped short of calling for direct military action. He recommended measures such as expelling Russia from the G8 and World Trade Organisation and revoking Russia’s right to host the 2014 Winter Olympic Games.

Many – both inside and outside the neoconservative camp – have argued for Georgia to be granted immediate membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as a bulwark against Russian power.

But NATO membership has its sceptics – even among those typically identified with neoconservative foreign policy. Writing in National Review, classicist and military scholar Victor Davis Hanson claimed that "NATO was given a gift in not having made Georgia a member", since the organisation would have been unable to respond, "effectively destroy[ing] the Potemkin alliance".

Max Boot, a Council on Foreign Relations scholar and advisor to John McCain, has been one of the few advocates of direct U.S. military assistance to Georgia. In a Tuesday Los Angeles Times column, Boot conceded that the "Nazi analogy may appear overwrought", but saw echoes in Putin’s statements of "the excuses that Hitler used to swallow Czechoslovakia and Poland".

Boot pushed for the U.S. to send Stinger and Javelin missiles to the Georgian military for use against Russian tanks and planes.

For now, the debate may have been put on hold by President Bush’s announcement Wednesday that the U.S. will send humanitarian assistance to Georgia and that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will travel to Paris and Tbilisi to help resolve the conflict.

The Bush administration has received a great deal of criticism from hawks for its perceived inaction up to this point. At the AEI panel, Peters went so far as to venture a different historical analogy.

"Bush," he said, "looks strikingly like Jimmy Carter when the Russians invaded Afghanistan."

Excerpt:

By Kester Kenn Klomegah
MOSCOW, Aug 13 2008 (IPS)

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvilli has become an uncertain sort of leader. At first, he won praise after successfully leading the popular ‘Rose Revolution’ in 2003 that catapulted him into power. Now he has received global condemnation for the military attack that he ordered in the breakaway republic of South Ossetia.

The military clashes that left many civilians dead and thousands homeless will now make it difficult to integrate South Ossetia with Georgia. But Saakashvilli could have been drawn by Russia into the present crisis.

Giorgi Kakulia, president of the Academy for Peace and Development, a non-governmental research institution in Tbilisi, capital of Georgia, believes the main cause of the conflict in South Ossetia is that Russia wanted to provoke and destabilise Georgia.

“The reason for the escalation of the conflict was ceaseless shooting into the Georgian villages by Ossetian forces. The Georgian side requested from Russian peacekeepers several times during the last two weeks to stop shooting, but they did nothing, and it was not possible to stop Ossetians without attacking them. That’s why the Georgian army went into the conflict zone, in order to stop the aggression and re-establish constitutional order in the region,” Kakulia told IPS.

Russia used these tactics to stop Georgian attempts to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) because that would bring the military alliance close to Russia’s border.

“As for the U.S., they want to have access to Georgian territory for different reasons; one is oil and gas transit, and secondly, establishing a military base for the U.S. army in the event of an attack on Iran, and for placing radars or anti-rockets systems.”

Georgia lies at the heart of the Caucasus – which hosts a major pipeline pumping oil from Asia to Europe – and is at the centre of a battle for regional influence between the United States and Russia.

Georgia is locked in an increasingly tense row with Russia over the two rebel regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia that broke away from Tbilisi after the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union.

Russia’s parliament unanimously approved a resolution early this year urging the Kremlin to consider recognising Georgia’s breakaway regions Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The parliamentarians said Russia should consider speeding up recognition of the rebel regions as independent if pro-western Georgia is put on the track to join NATO.

The State Duma’s non-binding resolution was widely seen in Russia as a signal by the lower house of parliament that Moscow could use Kosovo’s independence – which it fiercely opposed – as a precedent to recognise separatists closer to home.

Irina Bolgova, lecturer in Soviet politics at the Moscow State Institute for International Relations, says Georgian military engagement in South Ossetia is legal because the region is a part of the Georgian state, but the way the operation was conducted, with bombings of civilians, would be seen as a violation of peace. The Russian military moves were a response to the killing of Russian peacekeepers deployed in South Ossetia.

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said Russian action was in conformity with Article 51 of the UN Charter, under which such defensive actions do not require UN permission to be legal within international law.

Tiko Tkeshelashvili from the Caucasus Institute for Peace, Democracy and Development in Tbilisi told IPS that Georgia has been openly invaded by Russian military forces.

“We are punished for our aspiration to become part of a democratic world; today our choice towards the West is threatened. Russian aggression is a challenge to the international community, and every minute is critical for the lives of innocent civilians,” Tkeshlashvili told IPS.

At a meeting in the Kremlin with French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Tuesday, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said the operations in South Ossetia have ended because they had achieved their main goal: to protect Russian peacekeepers and the civilian population.

Medvedev said the Georgian side had taken aggressive action against civilians and Russian peacekeepers. He spoke of more than a thousand casualties, tens of thousands of refugees, and mass destruction.

The Russian leader said the only way out of the crisis was withdrawal of Georgian armed forces from the conflict zone, return to the process of peace agreements, and the signing of a legally binding agreement against use of force.

Excerpt:

By Omid Memarian
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 12 2008 (IPS)

A few hours after the 15 member U.N. Security Council discussed a draft resolution aimed to ask Russia to stop using massive force in Georgia Monday evening behind closed doors, Russia said it would stop military action. This came Tuesday, after five days of bombing and destruction of cities and military bases in Georgia and the deaths of more than 2,000 people.

U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Zelmay Khalilzad (left), and Vitaly Churkin his Russian counterpart. Credit: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe

The violence prompted the Security Council to meet five times over the course of the past four days to discuss the violence, which was feared to be spreading beyond the South Ossetia region.

"If there are any emerging hotbeds of resistance or any aggressive actions, you should take steps to destroy them," Medvedev instructed his military Tuesday.

Just before the Council meeting Monday, U.S. President George W. Bush harshly criticised the government in Moscow in a short statement from the White House. "I am deeply concerned by reports that Russian troops have moved beyond the zone of conflict, attacked the Georgian town of Gori, and are threatening the Georgia’s capital of Tbilisi," he said. "There's evidence that Russian forces may soon begin bombing the civilian airport in the capital city."

On Aug. 9, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, expressed alarm over the escalation of hostilities in Georgia which have resulted in large numbers of casualties and massive destruction in South Ossetia and other regions of Georgia.

In a statement released late Monday, the government of Georgia appealed to the world community to stop the Russian aggression and assume responsibility for developments in the region. "Russian occupation forces have already gone beyond the conflict zone. Until recently Russia limited itself to aerial assaults outside of the boundaries of the conflict zone, however, now the Russian forces are attempting to seize the control of entire Georgia," the Georgian statement read. "Today the statehood of Georgia is in great danger, and, thereby, leaving existing world order in uncertainty."

"The Georgian government has accepted the elements of a peace agreement that the Russian government previously said it would be willing to accept: an immediate cease-fire, the withdrawal of forces from the zone of conflict, a return to the military status quo as of Aug. 6, and a commitment to refrain from using force," said Bush addressing a possible option to end the conflict.

Bush then criticised Russia’s "objective" behind the attack, saying Russians actions "have raised serious questions about its intentions in Georgia and the region."

Questioning Russia's 'objective' embittered the U.S.-Russia interaction in the Security Council. On Aug. 10, Zelmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., and Vitaly Churkin his Russian counterpart barely avoided a heated exchange when Khalilzad referred to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s phone conversations with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that morning as raising serious questions about Russia’s objectives in the conflict.

Khalilzad mentioned that Lavrov had said that President Mikheil Saakashvili, the democratically elected President of Georgia, "must go". He said that it’s "completely unacceptable" and "crossed the line".

Khalilzad asked Churkin, "Was Russia’s objective regime change in Georgia, the overthrow of the democratically elected Government of that country?" adding that, "The Russian Federation was threatening Georgia’s territorial integrity, and the Council must act decisively to reaffirm it."

In response Churkin described Khalilzad’s statement as polemical in nature. "Regarding the ceasefire, the Russian Federation’s statement had explained the formula that would lead to an end of bloodshed – Georgia’s withdrawal from South Ossetia and agreement on the non-use of force in South Ossetia and Abkhazia," said Churkin.

"Regime change" was an American expression that Russia did not use, Churkin stressed.

While the U.S. and Russia were using tough words in the Security Council, the Secretary-General urged all parties to immediately end hostilities and to engage, without delay, in negotiations to achieve a peaceful settlement. "For the success of this endeavour, all armed contingents which are not authorised by respective agreements on South Ossetia should leave the zone of conflict."

The Secretary-General also urged all parties to respect the principle of territorial integrity of states enshrined in the U.N. Charter and to refrain from actions that could undermine efforts to settle the longstanding conflicts in Georgia. Ban also called for immediate steps to be undertaken in order to address the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Georgia.

In the meantime – despite bouts of driving rain – hundreds of people were gathered in a peaceful protest outside U.N. headquarters to show their sympathy with the Georgians under fire and push for a Security Council decision.

Security Council members have not been able to agree on a draft resolution that Russia – a veto holding member – can agree to.

Meanwhile the deadly conflict in Georgia seems to be spreading outside the South Ossetia region and into Abkhazia, Edmond Mulet, Assistant Secretary- General for Peacekeeping Operations, told the Security Council, warning that the number of casualties from the fighting is already substantial.

Four days after the start of the conflict, there were reports of a massive number of civilians killed. While thousands of people have fled into neighbouring cities in Georgia or North Ossetia.

To prevent a human tragedy in the conflict zone, the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) has begun providing critical humanitarian aid to more than 2,000 displaced people.

In response to a request from the Georgian Government, WFP distributed a 10-day food ration to internally displaced persons (IDPs) living in shelters in the capital, Tbilisi.

"The number of people in need of our help is rising by the hour," said WFP Georgia Country Director Lola Castro, adding that so far, 2,750 IDPs had been registered in Tbilisi alone. Many more people were living with relatives or in unofficial shelters.

Heavy fighting first erupted on Thursday night between Georgian and South Ossetian forces, leading to a large number of casualties and uprooting thousands from their homes.

WFP already has an existing food assistance operation in the country, targeting some 212,000 – poor rural communities, primary school children, tuberculosis patients and people living with HIV/AIDS.

A joint assessment carried out Sunday by WFP and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Gori – which has also been affected by the conflict – found the Georgian town, with a reported population of about 40,000, to be almost deserted.

The number of IDPs is expected to rise to as many as 20,000, according to UNHCR, while about 5,000 South Ossetians have already fled to the neighbouring North Ossetia-Alania region of Russia.

Lavrov reiterated Tuesday that Russia has ruled out negotiations with Saakashvili, insisting instead that he must step down and that Georgia must no longer have a peacekeeping presence in breakaway South Ossetia.

Excerpt:

By Zoltán Dujisin
PRAGUE, Aug 12 2008 (IPS)

Georgia’s step towards military confrontation comes after an increase in authoritarian and militaristic tendencies in a country that dealt catastrophically with Russia’s pressure.

On Aug. 8 Georgian troops tried to take control of the Georgian breakaway region of South Ossetia, de facto independent since 1992, by engaging in heavy fighting in the regional capital Tskhinvali, 100 km north-west of the Georgian capital Tbilisi.

Russia, officially in South Ossetian territory on a peacekeeping mission, responded by launching an extensive military operation in South Ossetia and beyond.

Abkhazia, another breakaway region in Western Georgia that proclaimed independence in the same year, has taken Russia’s side.

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili accuses the northern neighbour of attempting to overthrow him in a premeditated action.

Pressured by Russian economic sanctions and Moscow’s support for the separatist regions, Saakashvili has opted for a confrontational and nationalistic stance counting on Western support.

Georgia, a nation of 4.6 million, claims that Russia uses the regions to obstruct Tbilisi’s path towards North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) membership, a move harshly contested in Moscow but that many Georgians see as affirming their commitment to ‘democracy’ and ‘Western civilisation’.

In recent months hawks have gained the upper hand in Georgia, making the military option more realistic, in spite of Western warnings to abstain from aggressive rhetoric and military action.

Last May Archil Gegeshidze from the Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies wrote in the Russian Analytical Digest that Georgia lacked “political discussion and open public debate on how to solve the problem by peaceful means.”

This month Georgian Minister for Reintegration Temur Iakobashvili warned it would be “foolish to engage in a confrontation in the Tskhinvali region (i.e. South Ossetia) because it is bound to affect civilians immediately.”

Yet fighting took place in Tskhinvali, and if the unconfirmed Russian reports of a humanitarian catastrophe are true, Georgia may have definitely lost any hopes of ever reintegrating the separatist regions.

Allowing the forcible reunification of Georgia could have brought a delicate price for Russia to pay in terms of an even greater flood of refugees, and accusations of failing to protect its own citizens.

Moscow has issued Russian passports to 80 percent of South Ossetia’s citizens in recognition of the strong links the otherwise isolated and blocked population had with the Soviet Union and its successor state.

Over the years the two mutually suspicious sides have had few negotiating breakthroughs, and while Georgia says Moscow’s involvement is the only impediment, it has done little to improve its image in the separatist areas.

Ossetians and Abkhazians are generally supportive of their leadership and overwhelmingly against reintegration in Georgia, a state they don’t see as capable of guaranteeing their security, as was shown by recent referenda.

Although there are no official numbers, it is estimated that 70 percent of South Ossetia’s 62,000 strong population is Ossetian, the remainder 30 percent being of Georgian ethnicity.

The leadership and populations of the secessionist regions also fear the return of hundreds of thousands of Georgian refugees that could re-inflame ethnic tension. Instead, they are increasing their dependence on Russia while rejecting European projects for economic rehabilitation and ethnic reconciliation.

Citizens in the separatist regions have been living off remittances, international and Russian aid, and smuggling to the extent that local leadership has come to profit from non-resolution of the conflict.

South Ossetia rejected an extensive autonomy offer by Georgia in 2005, but this offer came amid Georgian measures against the Ossetian economy and the set-up of competing power structures along with the presence of Georgian security services and paramilitaries.

Saakashvili’s promises of a successful liberal economy and a western-type democracy did not make Georgia a more attractive state to Abkhazians and Ossetians either, as many Georgians themselves have become disillusioned with the President.

Saakashvili’s recent claims that Russia’s intervention is only aimed at overthrowing him bear resemblance to his justifications for violently repressing massive peaceful protests last November.

Charging opposition activists and leaders with conspiracy to overthrow him, and linking opponents to Russian espionage, Saakashvili began to curtail civil liberties, control the press and use state resources in his favour.

His victory in the January presidential elections led to accusations of vote rigging, but the results had the approval of the West.

More than ever, South Ossetians and Abkhazians suspect that Saakashvili’s promises of ethnic harmony are pretty much in line with his rhetorical tools for a ‘naive’ Western audience.

South Ossetians are striving for annexation by Russia so that they could join the relatively wealthy North Ossetian republic in the Russian federation. But the region would be an economic burden for the northern ethnic kin, as well as for Russia, which moreover fears the international and regional consequences of such a move.

The Georgian military intervention sought to thwart Russia’s peacekeeping role by internationalising the conflict and changing the nature of the peacekeeping mission.

The mission, established after the 1992 war, comprises representatives of Russia, North and South Ossetia, and Georgia, but Georgia now says the balance of forces is unfair.

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By IPS Correspondents
JERUSALEM, Aug 12 2008 (IPS)

With the eruption of fighting between Russia and Georgia, Israel has found itself in an awkward position as a result of its arms sales to Georgia, caught between its friendly relations with Georgia and its fear that the continued sale of weaponry will spark Russian retribution in the form of increased arms sales to Iran and Syria.

After fighting broke out late last week between Georgia and Russia over the breakaway provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Israel's foreign ministry over the weekend recommended suspending the sale of all weapons and defence-related equipment to Georgia, the daily Haaretz newspaper reported.

The paper quoted an unnamed senior official saying that Israel needed "to be very careful and sensitive these days. The Russians are selling many arms to Iran and Syria and there is no need to offer them an excuse to sell even more advanced weapons."

Israel's immediate concern is that Russia will proceed with the sale of the S-300 anti-aircraft missile system to Iran, which would help it defend its nuclear installations from aerial attack. Israel, like the U.S., believes that Iran's nuclear programme is aimed at developing a bomb, and Israeli leaders have refused to rule out the possibility of a pre-emptive strike aimed at derailing Iran's nuclear aspirations.

Israel recently conducted a major aerial exercise over the eastern Mediterranean and Greece that was widely viewed as a rehearsal for a possible strike against Iran's nuclear installations. But with the U.S. and Europe resorting to diplomatic pressure in the form of sanctions to deter Iran, Israel is loathe to anger Russia, which until now has opposed harsher sanctions on Tehran.

Israel's relations with Georgia have been close, partly because there is a large Georgian Jewish community in Israel. In recent years, ties have also taken on a military dimension, with military industries in Israel supplying Georgia with some 200 million dollars worth of equipment since 2000. This has included remotely piloted planes, rockets, night-vision equipment, other electronic systems and training by former senior Israeli officers.

"Israel should be proud of its military, which trained Georgian soldiers," Georgian Minister Temur Yakobashvili, who is Jewish, told Israel's Army Radio in Hebrew shortly after the fighting erupted.

Israel is not a major supplier of arms to Georgia, with the U.S. and France supplying Tbilisi with most of its weaponry. But the arms transfers have attracted media attention partly because of the role played by some high-profile Israeli figures, including former Tel Aviv mayor Roni Milo, who conducted business in Georgia on behalf of Israel Military Industries.

According to media reports, Brig. Gen Gal Hirsch, a senior commander in the 2006 Lebanon war who resigned after the release of a highly critical report on the way the war was conducted, served as an adviser to Georgian security forces.

Further attention was drawn to the Israel-Georgia arms trade earlier this year when a Russian jet shot down an Israeli-made drone being operated by the Georgians.

Even though weapons transfers were modest in scope, Russian diplomats began increasingly relaying to Israel their annoyance over its military aid to Georgia, including the special forces training provided by security experts. Israel decided about a year ago to limit military exports to defensive equipment and training.

New contracts weren't approved as the arms sales were scaled back. Georgia's request for 200 advanced Israeli-made Merkava tanks, for example, was turned down.

There were reports in Israel that the sale of the tanks didn't go through because of a disagreement over the commission that was to be paid as part of the deal. But Amos Yaron, the former director-general of the defence ministry, insisted it had to do with "security-diplomatic considerations" – a clear reference to the sensitivity of the arms sales to Georgia. Israel, Yaron added, didn't want "to harm Russian interests too much."

Asked about the motivation to initially engage in the sale of weaponry to Georgia despite concerns it might anger Russia, Yaron replied: "We did see that there was potential for a conflagration in the region but Georgia is a friendly state, it's supported by the U.S., and so it was difficult to refuse."

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