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Georgia seeks Western help as Russia breaks ceasefire (2nd Roundup)
Aug 13, 2008, 17:25 GMT
Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili (C) speaks during a joint news conference in Tbilisi, Georgia, 13 August 2008. Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves (L), Polish President Lech Kaczynski (2-L), Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus (2-R) and Latvian Prime Minster Ivars Godmanis (R) also took part in the news conference. EPA/ZURAB KURTSIKIDZE
Moscow/Tbilisi - A ceasefire ending the Ossetia war was in tatters on Wednesday with Russian armoured and naval forces violating terms supposedly agreed upon the day before.
A Russian armoured unit drove into the border town Gori, entered a Georgian tank base, and was destroying the installation and carrying off loot, witnesses told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
The Russian regular motor rifle unit rode on BMP and BTR armoured personnel carriers and, according to soldiers interviewed, had spent four days driving from Chechnya to the Ossetia sector. There were at least 21 Russian combat vehicles and more than 100 soldiers visible to witnesses.
Smoke was rising from the Gori tank base by mid-afternoon.
Georgian media reported murders of ethnic Georgians in villages near the border between Georgia and Ossetia, but there was no independent confirmation.
Colonel General Anatoly Nogovytsyn, Russia's army chief of staff, speaking at a Moscow press conference flatly denied Russian troops had entered Gori. Witnesses including Gori residents interviewed by dpa accused the Russian government of lying.
Nogovytsyn confirmed earlier Georgian reports Russian forces had taken control of the Georgian port of Poti and had captured and sunk all but two Georgian naval vessels stationed there. The vessels were sunk offshore so as not to interfere with the port's operation, he said.
The twin Russian moves, apparently aimed at demolishing Georgian military infrastructure, ruined a ceasefire agreement seemingly brokered by French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Monday, and approved by Russian President Dmitriy Medvedev on Tuesday.
The de facto ceasefire held for some 12 hours, from afternoon on Tuesday until early Wednesday morning. A key term of the ceasefire was the return of Georgian combat units away from the front home to their bases - a transfer in progress as Russian forces moved on Gori and Poti.
Fighting in the six-day conflict ended shortly after midday Tuesday. Aside from Georgian reports of a pair of Russian airstrikes after that time, combat had appeared halted throughout the region.
Officials in Tbilisi on Tuesday morning announced details of the formal ceasefire agreement suggested by Sarkozy and approved by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili.
Terms included in the document included a total ceasefire, non- interference with humanitarian aid, return of Georgian combat units to their bases, removal of Russian combat forces from the war zone and installation of an international peacekeeper force in South Ossetia.
In Washington, President George W Bush's administration was contemplating ways to punish Russia for the military assault on the pro-Western Georgian government led by Saakashvili, and was focusing on ways to get humanitarian aid to the Georgian population.
'The Russians need to stop their military operations, as they have apparently said that they will, but those military operations really do now need to stop, because calm needs to be restored,' US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters at the White House.
US retaliation measures will include cancellation of a US-Russia joint naval exercise, Bush's boycott of a NATO meeting with Russia and longer-term US diplomacy aimed at reducing contact between Russia and the G7 group of industrialized nations, US media reported.
The Georgian government formally requested NATO assistance shortly before the ceasefire came into effect, although the Caucasus nation is not a member of the alliance.
Georgia filed a suit in The Hague Court of International Justice alleging Russian 'ethnic cleansing' after 58th Army forces moved into South Ossetia and adjacent Georgian territories, government spokesman Aleksander Lomaia said.
Russia also has alleged Georgia carried out ethnic cleansing in its attack on South Ossetia. Russian interrogators were 'interviewing' Georgian prisoners of war for evidence, said Vladimir Markin, a Russian Justice Ministry spokesman.
NATO held an emergency meeting Tuesday at its Brussels headquarters, where Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said the alliance would not back off its eventual plans to invite Georgia into the organization.
'That situation has not changed,' he said.
The Kremlin strongly opposes NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine, another former Soviet republic, and has increasingly expressed dismay over the alliance's continued eastward expansion.
Some analysts and US politicians allege that Russia launched the counter-attack to intimidate its neighbours in an attempt to reassert its sphere of influence.
The renewed Russian advances were an embarrassment for Sarkozy, who, as the EU's representative, had acted as the key mediator between Russia and Georgia in the ceasefire talks. The French leader was in Tbilisi on Wednesday, along with the presidents of Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania and Estonia and the prime minister of Latvia.
On the initiative of Poland's President Lech Kaczynski, Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko and Latvian Prime Minister Ivars Godmanis travelled to Tbilisi on Tuesday to offer their support for Georgia's independence and territorial integrity.
'We are here to take up the fight,' Poland's Kaczynski said Tuesday evening at a rally of tens of thousands.
He accused Russia of trying to dominate its neighbours as 'in the times before its empire collapsed' in the early 1990s. 'We say no,' said Kaczynski to great applause.
The Polish president warned that after Georgia Russia could threaten Ukraine, the Baltic states and even Poland.
'Georgia doesn't stand alone. It has the entire civilised world on its side,' Ilves said while Yushchenko said that 'freedom is worth fighting for.'
Georgian media reported Wednesday that the presence of the 'foreign presidents' would lead to the eventual installation of an international peacekeeping force in the Ossetia region - long a political goal of the Saakashvili administration.
EU officials on Wednesday seemed to support the idea, suggesting EU troops could indeed assist in Ossetia.
The streets of Tbilisi were practically back to normal Wednesday, with restaurants open and cafes busy, and a government-organized pro- Saakashvili demonstration jamming the Georgian capital's central Shota Rustaveli Street.
The atmosphere in the city was generally more festive than defiant, with tens of thousands of Tbilisi residents taking the night air for the first time since the onset of war on Thursday.
Georgia's banking system re-opened on Wednesday, one day earlier than was planned for a wartime banking holiday.
Civilian officials within South Ossetia and particularly its unofficial capital Tskhinvali were beginning to repair massive damage caused by intense artillery barrages.
Regional authorities were focusing on identifying and burying corpses, and supplying civilian survivors with food and water, said Anatoliy Barankevich, South Ossetia's security council chief, according to an Interfax report.
A bread factory in the region already was functional and loaf production had already begun.
Martial law was in effect, he said.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin over the weekend promised close to 500 million dollars of Kremlin reconstruction money for the South Ossetia reconstruction effort.
The Russian military said 74 of its soldiers died in the fighting and 191 others were wounded.
Georgia reported 175 dead soldiers and 500 wounded. Russian authorities said they captured an unspecified number of Georgian troops. Reports of civilian casualties ranged from 200 to 2,000 dead.
The United Nations, the European Union and the United States were mobilizing to deliver humanitarian assistance to refugees. About 25,000 people fled from South Ossetia into Russia, while another 2,000 went to Armenia.
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Older Talkback
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TEANECK, N.J. - Former Democratic vice presidential nominee Sen. Joe Lieberman slammed Sen. Barack Obama on Tuesday over the Russian invasion of Georgia and said that the Democrat still wasn’t experienced enough for the White House.
“We’ve got a real clear choice to make. And I say it respectfully to Sen. Obama because he’s a gifted young man. But he’s not ready to be president on Jan. 20th of 2009,” Lieberman, of Connecticut, told a fund raising event for Republican hopeful John McCain.
“As the Russians move into Georgia as aggressors, and if you read the statements from the beginning, from Sen. McCain and Sen. Obama, one had a kind of moral neutrality to it that comes I think from inexperience.
“The other’s — Sen. McCain’s — was strong and clear and principled and put America where America always want to be, on the side of freedom,” he said while introducing McCain.
Lieberman sits in Congress as an Independent after he lost the Connecticut Democratic primary election in 2006 but won actual re-election running as a third party candidate....
Saakashvili is a dangerous buffoon. Lieberman is a traitor who puts the interests of other countries ahead of his own. The US has no significant interests in Georgia. What do these buffoons produce? Wine? or Whine. Saakashvili started the fight and is a war criminal. He should have been more careful. He should have looked at what happens to small neighbors of powerful countries like errr Mexico, which is half the country it used to be or Cuba. The US government has no moral authority. plus the US is bankrupt.
'. The US has no significant interests in Georgia.'
We should stand by a democratically elected government that has thrown off Russian oppression before and doesn't want it imposed again. We also do have an internist in Georgia because if gas pipelines go through Russia the Russians can cut off the flow to Europe as they have shown themselves willing to do.
'What do these buffoons produce? '
What do you produce?
'He should have looked at what happens to small neighbors of powerful countries like errr Mexico,'
So mexico isn't a sovereign country?
'The US government has no moral authority.'
Thanks for tossing your talking points up on the internet. To say that Russia has the 'moral authority' to bomb apartment complexes clearly makes you an idiot.
It reinforces the conservative postion that Russia is an authoritarian state, something liberals continuously seem to slip over to, and something Bush has played with to no benefit for the west.
Now, everyone is reminded, at a relatively low cost, that the cold war was, correctly, never really over. If we can accomplish getting that point across, it is almost worth it.
Time to gin up again for what should have never stopped.
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Georgia shows that Obama is not readyAug 13th, 2008 - 19:08:20
STEVE HUNTLEY
..Like Kosovo, Bosnia, Kuwait and other unfamiliar places before, Ossetia reminds us that a small, remote corner of the globe can explode into an international crisis. One who was up to speed on Georgia and the menace it faced from Russia was veteran Sen. John McCain. He had visited the Caucasian nation three times in a dozen years. When fighting erupted, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate got on the phone to gather details and issued a statement Friday summarizing the situation, tagging Russia as the aggressor and demanding it withdraw its forces from the sovereign territory of Georgia.
It took first-term Sen. Barack Obama three tries to get it right. Headed for a vacation in Hawaii, the presumed Democratic candidate for commander in chief issued an even-handed statement, urging restraint by both sides. Later Friday, he again called for mutual restraint but blamed Russia for the fighting. The next day his language finally caught up with toughness of McCain's.
Making matters worse, Obama's staff focused on a McCain aide who had served as a lobbyist for Georgia, charging it showed McCain was 'ensconced in a lobbyist culture.' Obama's campaign came off as injecting petty partisan politics into an international crisis. This was not a serious response on behalf a man who aspires to be the leader of the Free World. After all, what's so bad about representing a small former Soviet republic struggling to remake itself as a Western-style democracy?
The comparison between the two candidates served to emphasize the strength McCain's experience would bring to the White House in a dangerous world.
Obama's favored approach to international issues, diplomatic talks, failed to stop Russia's invasion. Vladimir Putin, a KGB bull in the former Soviet Union, wants to restore Russia as the supreme power of Eurasia and, to that end, bully former vassal states like Georgia out of their democratic ways. The fear is that Ukraine will come in his cross hairs next.
However the world's newest war ends, America's leadership must recognize and respond to the underlying dynamic of Russia's resurgent aggressive instincts -- the power bestowed on Moscow by its oil and gas riches.
While we don't get fossil fuels from Russia, Western Europe does, and the Kremlin's energy might is fueled by the worldwide demand for oil. Developing U.S. domestic energy sources and alternatives to oil will only enhance our national security and, by reducing the world's petroleum demand, undermine the economic, political and military advantage vast oil and gas reserves give to unfriendly powers like Russia, Iran and Venezuela....
McCain has got it right in advocating new offshore drilling and a federal push to add 45 nuclear generators over the next two decades. Given the evidence of Russia's energy-fueled aggression, he should abandon his opposition to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve and to extending subsidies he favors for nuclear energy to include renewables.
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