Brussels briefing - South Ossetia accord eludes Georgia and Russia

FT.com / Europe / Brussels briefing - South Ossetia accord eludes Georgia and Russia

South Ossetia accord eludes Georgia and Russia
>By Neil Buckley
>Published: March 10 2006 10:29 | Last updated: March 10 2006 10:29
>>

In the outer office of Mikheil Saakashvili, the Georgian president, framed newspaper front pages celebrate last May’s visit by US President George W. Bush to the country he hailed as a “beacon of democracy”. Yet barely an hour’s drive from the capital, Tbilisi, tensions threaten to explode into conflict between Georgian and Russian troops and to undermine Mr Saakashvili’s two-year drive for reform and integration with the west.

The flashpoint is South Ossetia, a slab of land stretching south from the Russian-Georgian border. The region declared independence from Georgia in the Soviet Union’s dying days, sparking fighting in 1991-92 ended by a Russian-brokered ceasefire.

Tempers have been fraying since Georgia’s parliament last month adopted a resolution accusing Russian peacekeepers of trying to “annex” the region, and calling for their replacement by an international force. Moscow’s response was fury, prompting an exchange of threats and insults that has caused concern in both the US and the European Union.

Russia’s 58th Army has been conducting exercises just north of the Georgian border. Tbilisi says Russian combat aircraft have several times violated its airspace, which Moscow denies.

Moscow has stopped issuing visas to Georgians in response to Tbilisi’s alleged footdragging in issuing visas to Russian peacekeepers.

Gleb Pavlovsky, a political analyst and television pundit connected to the Kremlin, accused Mr Saakashvili of stirring up war in South Ossetia, suggesting darkly this could be averted with “a single bullet”.

All this comes weeks after Mr Saakashvili indirectly accused Moscow of being responsible for pipeline explosions that left Georgia shivering without Russian gas during a record cold spell.

In a recent late-night interview in his office, the Georgian president said he held firmly to his suspicions on the pipeline incident, and had passed intelligence to his international partners.

“Serious people know what we know, and I think it is quite substantial – intelligence that substantiates some of our strong suspicions,” he said.

Russian president Vladimir Putin has blamed the explosions on terrorists, accusing Mr Saakashvili of being hysterical.

The pipeline dispute and South Ossetian tensions add up to the most serious Russo-Georgian rift since the “Rose” revolution of November 2003 installed Mr Saakashvili and inspired revolutions in Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan. They also underline the trials Mr Saakashvili faces in rebuilding Georgia’s economy and moving towards Nato and EU membership, with a powerful northern neighbour reluctant to relinquish its grip on a country it dominated for 200 years.

Beyond the bluster from both sides, however – and the danger of fighting breaking out by accident, as it nearly has several times in recent weeks – the mood in Tbilisi is not for war. Mr Saakhashvili says Georgia would never try to retake South Ossetia by force.

“We can’t get into fighting with the Russians. We are not crazy,” he says. He does not believe Russia wants to see violence either.

But the stand-off illustrates how little progress Mr Saakashvili has made towards restoring Georgia’s territorial integrity, a year after Tbilisi presented a South Ossetian peace plan, well received by the international community.

Mr Saakashvili charges that Russia has an interest in keeping tensions simmering in both South Ossetia and Georgia’s larger separatist enclave of Abkhazia, to complicate Tbilisi’s aims of attracting foreign investment and joining Nato.

The Georgian parliament’s claim that Moscow’s peacekeeping mission to Ossetia has been transformed into something with “all the elements of annexation” is well founded, he says. In the past two years, Moscow has issued thousands of Russian passports to South Ossetians, allowing Russia to argue that its peacekeepers are protecting its own citizens.

After years of stalling, Russia had agreed on a timetable to withdraw from two Soviet-era military bases in southern Georgia. European institutions and the US were also engaged more actively than ever before in pursuing a South Ossetian settlement.

But in October the Georgian parliament passed a tough resolution on Russia’s forces in South Ossetia that led directly to last month’s demand for their replacement.