Russian “Provocations” Anger Georgia

Relations between Tbilisi and Moscow have taken another turn for the worse, following the NATO summit in Bucharest in which Georgia took another step towards alliance membership, albeit not as big a one as it had anticipated.



Over the last few days, Moscow has made a number of overtures towards the breakaway Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia which Tbilisi says are acts of retaliation for its bid to join NATO.



On April 8, Moscow’s ambassador to Tbilisi, Vyacheslav Kovalenko, was handed a note of protest following a letter from his government to the de facto authorities in Abkhazia offering to transfer Russian citizens being held in jail there to prisons in Russia.



Earlier, during the April 2-4 Bucharest summit, Russian president Vladimir Putin, who has loudly voiced his opposition to Georgia’s ambitions to join NATO, had enraged the Georgians by sending a letter of support to the leaders of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.



"Any attempts to put political, economic or even military pressure on Abkhazia and South Ossetia will not achieve their goals and are counter-productive," Putin wrote in the letter, which was released by the Russian foreign ministry.



"The Russian side intends to further widen and deepen its all-embracing practical cooperation with Abkhazia and South Ossetia for the good of their peoples, in the interests of safeguarding peace, security and stability in the region."



The final declaration from the summit gave Georgia and its fellow NATO-aspirant Ukraine mixed messages. It stated that the two countries would eventually become members, but failed to offer them a Membership Action Plan (or MAP), which guarantees a route into the alliance.



“Today we make clear that we support these countries’ applications for MAP. Therefore we will now begin a period of intensive engagement with both at a high political level to address the questions still outstanding pertaining to their MAP applications,” said the declaration.



The statement concluded that NATO foreign ministers would have the authority to give a verdict on Georgia’s and Ukraine’s MAP applications, when they meet in December this year.



Georgia’s minister for reintegration Temur Yakobashvili said he now expected Russia to try and disrupt Georgia’s progress towards membership.



“We have expected and are still expecting that after the NATO summit and before December 2008 there will be a lot of provocations against us,” said Yakobashvili. “And we see a blatant attempt by Russia to carry out annexation in some form – in this case more in Abkhazia than in Tskhinvali region (South Ossetia).”



The issue of NATO membership has touched almost every Georgian citizen over the last year. In January 77 per cent of Georgian voters supported the country’s alliance aspirations in a referendum.



A video clip has been aired on Georgian television for the last few months, showing an old wine-grower failing to save his vines from hail. Then a group of young men cover his vines with a canvas canopy bearing the NATO emblem and a voice says, “NATO – 26 true friends.”



President Mikheil Saakashvili and his government had raised high expectations about progress on alliance membership at the Bucharest summit and what becoming a part of NATO would mean for Georgia.



“If we join NATO Russia will back off from Abkhazia and South Ossetia and we can return to our homes,” said Guli Misabishvili, a refugee from Abkhazia.



“I think [joining NATO] is very important for Georgia,” said Tbilisi resident Givi Sartania. “In the first place because it is a big responsibility for the country and its leaders. Our leaders will have to behave responsibly.”



On April 4, everyone was watching the news from Bucharest with keen anticipation.



The promise of eventual membership and the failure to be granted a MAP triggered very different reactions from government and opposition.



Saakashvili said the Bucharest final document was “historic” for Georgia.



“This summit gave us a political and legal guarantee that we will become NATO members,” Saakashvili said in an interview on Rustavi-2 television. “Not a single country in past 15 years – since the launch of new wave of NATO expansion – has received this kind of guarantee.”



He said he had “no illusions” that Russia was responsible for blocking Georgia’s MAP.



This was disputed strongly by Georgian opposition leaders who said the fault lay with the president for failing to honour promises he had made to make democratic reforms.



Member of parliament and leader of the Conservative Party Kakha Kukava called the MAP decision a “reaction to the situation in the country” and in particular to the brutal suppression of opposition demonstrators in Tbilisi on November 7.



“There were demands from the Georgian authorities in the first instance for democratic and judicial reforms and fair elections,” Kukava told IWPR. “Not a single one of these demands was met.”



David Berdzenishvili, one of the leaders of the opposition Republican Party, said the authorities were making a mistake by blaming everything on the “Russia factor”.



“The MAP issue was decided by European states which were founders of NATO, it’s not serious to call them agents of Gazprom and Putin,” he said.



Tornike Sharashenidze, an expert on international relations, said that the summit should have a sobering effect on the Georgian government.



“Today the authorities are repeating several times a day that this is not a tragedy,” he said. “It is in actual fact not a tragedy but if the authorities had not fed the people with false hopes they would not have to make excuses. Surely they must have realised that Georgia would not get MAP in Bucharest?”



Another Tbilisi expert, Archil Gegeshidze, said that the first immediate test for Georgia would be how the parliamentary elections due in May will be judged by the international community and by European countries in particular.



“Another important detail is judicial reform,” said Gegeshidze. “In the West there is a belief that Georgia has failed in this regard. The process of collaboration between Georgia and NATO did not begin with a MAP and will not end with it. At this point we have been refused but we will receive a MAP in December.”



Following the Bucharest summit, Georgia and NATO have set up working groups to advance Tbilisi’s progress towards a MAP. Foreign minister David Bakradze said that an action plan was being drawn up of “what Georgia ought to do before December so that the application for a MAP is real and so that we are totally prepared in December.”



Nana Kurashvili is a journalist with Imedi television in Tbilisi.