Global News Journal

Georgia’s day of prayer: who can save country now?

At the security checkpoint on the way in to Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s chancellery building, two small posters are displayed.    

“Stop Russia,” says the first. The second is a quotation from British World War Two leader Winston Churchill: “Never, never, never give up.”

Together, they sum up a national mood of grim defiance in Georgia after a short, disastrous war with Russia, followed by the loss of two provinces that have been outside Tbilisi’s control since the early 1990s but have now cemented their split by getting Moscow to recognise them as independent states under its protection.

Sitting in front of a row of Georgian and European Union  flags,  Saakashvili projects remarkable energy for a man under intense strain, three weeks into a national crisis. ”The first couple of days he didn’t sleep, we were all worried about him,” says a staffer in the presidential building. 

For several nights this week he held late-night sessions with Western reporters, sometimes finishing as late as 3 a.m., as he sought to gain the upper hand in the media war that has run parallel to the conflict on the ground with Russia.

“Russia clearly intended this as a blatant challenge to world order. It’s now up to all of us to roll Russian aggression back,” he told Reuters in an interview that started at 20 minutes after midnight.

Saakashvili has lost weight, says a Western observer who knows him well, but his face shows barely a trace of the sleepless nights.  

Is the American dream over for Georgia and Ukraine?

When thousands in the streets of the Ukrainian capital Kiev and the Georgian capital Tbilisi overthrew Soviet-style rulers, many felt warm in the embrace of the West.

Western support for the opposition — open and behind the scenes –  helped many people overcome fear of Soviet-style reprisals to stand for days outside Georgia’s parliament in 2003 or to pitch orange tents on Kiev’s main thoroughfare in late 2004, providing a lasting image of “people power” overthrowing a stale leadership.

Washington, or at least organisations with close political ties with the Bush administration, had courted opposition parties in both countries, coaching in the methods of democracy or securing “regime-change” as they sought to end the rules of President Leonid Kuchma and Georgian leader Eduard Shevardnadze. 

But the new leaders, and their teams, soon found that the attentions of an adoring West didn’t last for long. Ukraine’s team of President Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko soon fell apart.                                                                                                                                                                             The West grew tired of the constant bickering of the Ukrainian leaders, unable to agree on almost any policy, while a resurgent pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovich, who lost a rerun of the presidential election, encouraged unity in his own party and rose in popularity.

In Georgia, Saakashvili cracked down on post-election protests last year and now some blame him for taking Tbilisi into a war it could never win.  

The war in South Ossetia has frightened Ukraine. Yushchenko was quick to turn to the United States, saying he considered “U.S. support for Ukraine to be very important”.

But has the West given up? Ukraine and Georgia have been promised membership of NATO one day but the alliance decided at a summit in April not to give them a road map to membership.

Berlin angst about Georgia’s U.S.-backed leader

There was an awkward moment on Sunday, when Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili stood next to German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Tbilisi and thanked her for having “initiated” plans to bring his country into NATO.

Anyone who followed NATO’s last summit in Bucharest back in April knows that it was Merkel who broke with Washington and spearheaded opposition to such a move.

Shifting uncomfortably, Merkel couldn’t help but interject: “Give credit where credit is due,” she said curtly, taken aback by Saakashvili’s strange distortion of her stance.

The moment was instructive, underlining one of the main reasons why Berlin remains opposed to giving Georgia a seat in the military alliance anytime soon.

Merkel continues to view Saakashvili and his U.S.-backed bid to join NATO with a good dose of scepticism — a view reinforced by the Georgian president’s actions and rhetorical eruptions since his violent showdown with Moscow began earlier this month.

Last week, the Georgian president drew parallels between Europe’s reaction to the conflict and its appeasement of Hitler in the run-up to World War Two — not the best way to win friends.

Merkel did offer Saakashvili some of her most encouraging language to date on his NATO aspirations, saying Georgia was on a “clear path” to membership. But it would be wrong to read too much into that.

Georgia: How close did Europe come to a wider war?

A poster at the entrance to the World War One exhibition at London’s Imperial War Museum depicts the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, minutes before they were shot dead as they toured the streets of Sarajevo in an open topped car. The two bullets triggered World War One. Alliances quickly came into play and an argument between Austria and Serbia drew in Russia, Germany, France, Belgium and Britain.

Europe was at war.

On August 8 this year Russia sent its forces into Georgia to repel Tbilisi’s attempt to wrest control of the pro-Russian, breakaway region South Ossetia. Georgia, like Ukraine, has been pressing to join NATO but has only been promised membership of the alliance at an unspecified future date. What would have happened if Georgia had already secured NATO membership, as it wished, at the alliance’s meeting in Bucharest back in April?

Would the conflict have dragged in fellow NATO members including the United States, Britain and Germany? By invoking NATO’s Article V mutual defence clause, the Georgians could have required other nations to come to their assistance.

Could this have led to another European war at a time when the West’s guard was down and the Cold War years seemed consigned to history?

In the days after the conflict began, a senior envoy from a European state opposed to Georgian NATO entry told Reuters: “Thank heavens we didn’t take them in… No one in NATO wants to be dragged into a war in the Caucasus because of (President Mikheil) Saakashvili’s miscalculations.”

What do you think? 

Saakashvili’s media onslaught: Is he losing the war?

Ever since Russia launched a massive counter-offensive in response to Georgia’s attempt to retake the pro-Russian, breakaway region of South Ossetia, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili has been omnipresent in Western media. He has appeared on CBS, CNN, BBC and pretty much every other English-language TV channel to accuse Russia of penetrating Georgia far beyond Ossetia, planning an assault on the capital and plotting his overthrow. 

On Aug 11 he wrote an opinion column in the Wall Street Journal warning Georgia’s fall would mean the fall of the West.

At the start of the conflict the verdict was unequivocal. Saakashvili was winning the media war hands down. While the Kremlin’s press operation was largely silent, Saakashvili, an urbane, U.S.-educated lawyer, was assured in putting Georgia’s case. The world’s media and many political leaders swung behind him (in words if not deeds).

But is the tide turning? Saakashvili’s wall-to-wall media coverage may be starting to work against him and the Russians have become more nimble in dealing with the media and countering Saakashvili’s accusations.

Even close ally the United States has reined him in, knocking down his assertion that U.S. forces would take control of Georgia’s airports and ports. Is Saakashvili’s well-oiled public relations machine starting to work against him? Is he losing sympathy internationally?

Can the Caucasus flames be controlled?

The Caucasus tinderbox is alight again. How far will the flames spread this time and what can the outside world – the United States, the European Union, NATO – do to extinguish them?

The strategic significance of this mountainous region stretches back through history.

To the west lies the Black Sea, to the east the Caspian, to the south the Mediterranean, Iran and Turkey.

In the past Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan and the Russian tsars struggled to control its trade routes. Today Russia and the West are competing for influence over its energy pipelines carrying Caspian oil to world markets.

The Caucasus’ blue mountains and fiercely independent people have caught the imagination of Russian writers, Lermontov and Tolstoy. It has created only headaches for political leaders.

Georgia’s pro-Russian breakaway region South Ossetia is the latest battle ground in a long-running conflict.

Will the fighting, involving Russian and Georgian troops end there, or will another of Georgia’s breakaway regions Abkhazia seize the opportunity to press its claim for autonomy?

Was South Ossetia’s fate sealed in Kosovo?

Is Kosovo to blame for the fighting in South Ossetia?

When the Serbian province seceded from Belgrade in February, South Ossetia was quick to reassert its own claim to international recognition.

As a spokeswoman for separatist leader Eduard Kokoity told Reuters at the time: “The Kosovo precedent has driven us to more actively seek our rights.”

Those remarks will not have gone unheard in Tblisi and could well have added some urgency to Georgia’s desire to impose its rule over breakaway South Ossetia.

With widespread Western backing, Kosovo was able to achieve a fairly clean break with its former ruler, despite Russian objections.

Now Moscow is backing the separatists and it’s far from clear how things will play out this time.