Kuwait Times

Published Date: July 23, 2008
By Irakli Metreveli

Western diplomatic efforts to defuse tensions between Georgia and Russia may not yield immediate results, but they have already changed matters by depriving Russia of exclusive control of the situation, analysts said. Europe and the United States initiated their attempts to end the dangerous dispute over Georgia's breakaway region of Abkhazia "as tensions reached an extremely high temperature," Archil Gegeshidze, a political analyst at the Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies, told A
FP.

The EU and the United States seek a stable and democratic Georgia" with its oil and gas pipelines connecting the Caspian Sea to Turkey and its strategic location in the eastern edge of the European continent, he added. As for Russia, which has grown more assertive in recent years, restoring influence in the South Caucasus is largely seen by its political elite as an "existential issue," Gegeshidze said.

The row over Abkhazia and another separatist Georgian region, South Ossetia, is at the heart of increasingly bitter relations between Moscow and Tbilisi, amid Russia's broader offensive against Western influence in its former Soviet backyard. The increase in tensions has helped Moscow impede its neighbour's bid for membership in the NATO military alliance. But now the region has seen a flurry of Western diplomatic activity, including visits by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and German Foreign Minis
ter Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

The Western factor has irreversibly changed the status quo around Georgia's conflict regions. With the West entering the Caucasus game, Russia is not the first violin there anymore," Alexei Malashenko, a political analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Centre, told AFP. Although the self-proclaimed governments of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which broke away from Tbilisi in the early 1990s, are not formally recognised by any state, Russia tacitly supports the separatists and maintains peacekeeping troops in the tw
o regions.

Tensions mounted further this month with a series of bombings in Abkhazia, which the Abkhaz leadership blamed on Georgia, and Moscow's admission that it had sent military jets on flights over South Ossetia. The incidents raised memories of the two regions' separatist wars in the early 1990s, which killed several thousand people and forced hundreds of thousands to flee their homes.

In light of the escalation in the last weeks and months, we all have a common duty to help defuse the situation," German Foreign Minister Steinmeier said on Friday after meeting Abkhaz leader Sergei Bagapsh during a two-day visit to the region. "The West is giving Georgia a chance to resolve the crisis through a sophisticated diplomatic game," Tornike Sharashenidze, an analyst at the Georgian Institute of Public Affairs, told AFP. "Georgia now has to demonstrate its ability to follow this process with pat
ience. Otherwise it risks losing Western support," he said.

The first Western bid to end the crisis received a cool response Thursday as Georgia rejected key elements of a three-stage conflict resolution plan proposed by Germany. Abkhazia rejected the plan on Friday. The German plan includes the signing of a legally binding document committing both sides to refrain from the use of force and allow around 250,000 displaced Georgians to return to Abkhazia.

Those steps would be followed by economic aid to the region, with Berlin organizing a donors' conference, and finally a political solution. Steinmeier's plan "was just a first attempt at finding a way out of crisis. Only long-term efforts with the participation of all parties involved may lead to mutual concessions," Sergei Mikheyev, the vice president of the Moscow-based Centre for Political Technologies, told AFP.

Russia needs guarantees for its interests in the region. In the case such guarantees are provided, it may agree" to cooperate with the West on conflict resolution in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, he added. Malashenko said that "it's extremely difficult, but still possible to find a formula for conflict resolution that would be convenient for all parties," adding that it would take "very careful diplomatic work". "Any harsh moves may lead to fatal consequences," he added. - AFP