By Nigel Chamberlain, NATO Watch
With just over a week before parliamentary elections in Georgia on 1 October, a bitter political battle is being fought not just in the country itself, but in Western corridors of power. The BBC reports that two very different stories about Georgia are being promoted, with top international PR and lobby firms hired to push the message which is costing both sides’ huge amounts of money - in a country with high levels of poverty. Georgia’s bid to join NATO is at the heart of the debate.
Concluding his recent visit to the South Caucasus, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen reaffirmed that Georgia will become a member of the Alliance, adding that:
The South Caucasus is a crossroads of civilizations, situated between the Black Sea to the west, the Caspian Sea to the east and bordering Turkey, Russia and Iran. The region has been of considerable geostrategic importance through the ages – and continues to be so today. The region borders the territory of a NATO member state and includes Georgia, a country aspiring to join the Alliance. It also offers useful alternative transit options for the transport of supplies to and from the NATO-led force in Afghanistan.
This next round of NATO enlargement has been opposed in Moscow and is giving some cause for concern in some other European capitals, particularly in those countries who want to retain strong trading links with Russia. The Russian Foreign Ministry said that: "Similar statements prove that NATO has failed to learn more from the tragic events of 2008 and they still keep on sending encouraging signals to Tbilisi.”
Pravda reported that NATO officials are currently in ‘intensive dialogue’ with Georgian officials, a stage in the formal process leading to membership. According to the Georgian authorities, at the end of this stage they will receive the status of ‘candidate for NATO’. The next NATO summit is to be held in 2014, and President Saakashvili is convinced that Georgia, along with the three Balkan states (Macedonia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina), will be admitted to NATO then.
A Caucasus Research Resource Center report in early August of this year indicated that 62% of respondents supported Georgian integration into NATO, while only 9% were against it. The same survey indicated that 48% of the respondents agreed with the notion that the Russian Federation was a threat to Georgia, while only 9% did not see Russia as a threat.
There is strong support for Georgia joining NATO in the country’s diaspora community in the United States which has gained a powerful support in Congress from Senators Lieberman, Graham and McCain, among others.
Pravda reports that “Germany and France are the opponents of this accession. Russia also does not stop worrying about the expansion of NATO to the borders of the South Caucasus”. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said that “the process of remilitarization of Georgia after 2008 goes quickly. We do not want to destabilize the situation in the South Caucasus”. According to the article, Anders Fogh Rasmussen recognises that Georgia remains a "bone of contention" between NATO and Russia and that “NATO countries have to solve a very complex problem - what to do with Georgia and how not to quarrel with Russia. This puzzle is not that easy to solve”.
Russian President Vladimir Putin told reporters in August that he had approved Russia's 2008 invasion of Georgia two years before it took place. He also revealed that Russia had trained and armed secessionist paramilitaries in South Ossetia.
In 2008, the French President Nicolas Sarkozy negotiated a ceasefire agreement on behalf of the EU. The agreement called for a separation of forces: Russia would withdraw to its pre-war positions across the border and Georgian forces would withdraw to their military bases. EU observers would monitor the implementation of the agreement. Russia did not comply, however. More than 10,000 Russian troops remain in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, while Moscow continues to block monitoring missions from the UN and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
Defence Minister Reinsalu of Estonia says that pressure from Russia has only reinforced Georgia's desire to join NATO. Last November, Russia's former President Dmitry Medvedev said that his country will tell NATO aspirants "to behave themselves”. He added that, if Russia "had hesitated in 2008, the geopolitical alignment would be different today, with many states having been artificially dragged into NATO”.
Georgian billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili established Georgian Dream, a coalition of opposition groups which have been accused of fomenting political unrest. Mr. Ivanishvili dismissed the "claim that our new style is part of a Russian plot" to unsettle Georgia, insisting instead that "the pot is already boiling." He says Georgia Dream is determined to regain Georgian territory from Russia, and stressed his belief that "No sustainable future can be built by projecting our own military power against Russia or anywhere else." That's in line with the coalition's promises not to "rush into" NATO.
Writing in Forbes magazine in August, Doug Bandow (former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan) argued that the Russian-Georgian war “offers a dramatic reminder why NATO expansion is bad for America” and that “rhetoric aside, there is little enthusiasm among NATO governments for inducting Tbilisi”. He added that “attempting to establish friendly, democratic regimes along Russia’s borders, and turn them into military outposts as members of the historic American-led, anti-Soviet alliance, is geopolitically aggressive”.
In support of the belief that Georgia initiated the conflict, Bandow quotes former Secretary of State Colin Powell's analogy that President Saakashvili's actions were akin to "lighting a match in a roomful of gas fumes”. He added that the former Georgian Defence Minister, Irakli Okruashvili, admitted that Tbilisi had long planned its attack on South Ossetia and that Spiegel On-line had reported that NATO officers “thought that the Georgians had started the conflict and that their actions were more calculated than pure self-defence or a response to Russian provocation”.
Bandow concludes:
President Saakashvili chose war even though the Bush administration insisted that it had warned Tbilisi not to provoke Russia. The Europeans said they made a similar point. The Georgian leader ignored his friends’ admonitions and assumed they nevertheless would back him up. ... President Putin evidences no design—and possesses no capability—to recreate a global empire. Russia has reverted to a pre-World War I great power, focused on winning respect and protecting its borders. A Russian invasion of Eastern Europe, let alone the core western members of NATO, is but a paranoid fantasy.