1.

World

MOSCOW AND TBILISI AGREE OUTLINE FOR PEACE PLAN
By Catherine Belton (Moscow), Roman Olearchyk (Tbilisi), and Harvey Morris (United Nations)

Financial Times (London)
August 12, 2008 (updated Aug. 13, 8:00 a.m. BST [12:00 midnight PDT; 11:00 a.m. Moscow and Tbilisi time]

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5eec7de6-689a-11dd-a4e5-0000779fd18c.html

Russia and Georgia on Tuesday agreed an outline peace plan brokered by French President Nicolas Sarkozy after Moscow ordered a ceasefire in the six-day battle over the Georgian breakaway enclave of South Ossetia.

But there were reports of sporadic fighting between Georgian and Russian troops. Tbilisi accused Moscow of continued bombing even after Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s president, had ordered and end to military operations. Russia denied the claim.

Late on Tuesday night in Tbilisi, Mr. Sarkozy secured agreement from Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s president, after hammering out a tentative peace plan in Moscow with Mr. Medvedev. He said significant progress had been made, including a “provisional cessation of hostilities.” But he warned: “There are still many discussions that we need to have. There are still many areas where there is a lack of understanding.”

The plan includes six conditions for peace, including the withdrawal of Georgian and Russian troops to positions held before the conflict and an end to the use of force. But the two sides remained split over the future status of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, another separatist enclave, and on the introduction of international peacekeepers.

The peace outline made no reference to the status of the enclaves and sidestepped a decision on an international force, saying only that Russian peacekeeping troops would remain until an international “mechanism” had been found.

Mr. Saakashvili insisted on international involvement in the security arrangements. He added: “The territorial integrity and belonging of South Ossetia and Abkhazia to Georgia can never be put under doubt.” Moscow has talked of the two enclaves having the right of self-determination. Mr. Medvedev said Russian “peacekeepers” would remain in South Ossetia. “Our peacekeepers are continuing to perform their duties and will continue to [do so] because they are [a] key factor for upholding security in the Caucasus,” he said.

Writing in Wednesday’s Financial Times, Sergei Lavrov, Russian foreign minister, says claims that Moscow had been trying to overthrow Mr. Saakashvili’s government were “palpable nonsense” and that Russia’s actions had been “targeted, proportionate, and legitimate.” Mr. Medvedev also lashed out at Mr. Saakashvili, calling him a “lunatic.”

In Tbilisi, a defiant Mr. Saakashvili told 150,000 supporters that Russia could not turn the country “into another Grozny,” a reference to Russia’s crushing of a revolt in Chechnya.

In its first concrete action of protest, the U.S. on Tuesday cancelled a Pacific Ocean naval exercise set for next week involving Russia, Britain, and France.

”There is no way in good conscience that we could proceed with a joint naval exercise given the state of this crisis,” a senior U.S. defense official said on the condition of anonymity.

A senior U.S. official on Tuesday floated the possibility of expelling Russia from the Group of Eight industrialized nations and revoking an invitation for it to join the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. “The idea is to show the Russians that it is no longer business as usual,” one official said.

2.

OBAMA, McCAIN SPLIT ON GEORGIA CRISIS

Associated Press
August 13, 2008

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/08/13/america/NA-POL-US-Elections.php

WASHINGTON -- Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain issued dueling statements about Russia's invasion of American-allied Georgia, a complex conflict that has opened a window on the differing diplomatic mindsets of the men vying to become the next U.S. president.

McCain touts what he calls his overwhelming edge in experience in foreign affairs and security issues. He has been hitting the Kremlin hard for sending troops, armor, and attack aircraft against the tiny Caucasus country, which gained independence after nearly two centuries of Russian dominance with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Obama, too, has been full-throated in condemning the Russian attack but has called for restraint on both sides. He did not entirely absolve Georgia of a role in provoking Moscow by trying late last week to forcibly impose central government authority on the breakaway South Ossetia region.

Ossetians, who speak a version of the Persian language, live on either side of the spine of the Caucasus Mountains that form the border between Russian and Georgia. The South Ossetians, whose land lies in Georgia, have gained Kremlin protection as they have sought fitfully since the early 1990s to join with North Ossetia, on the other side of the Russian border.

At a campaign stop in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, McCain told a cheering crowd that he had just spoken with Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili, offering moral support and telling him: "Today, we are all Georgians."

The four-term Arizona senator had taken a tough stand against Moscow even before the invasion, calling for the Kremlin to be expelled from the Group of Eight, the organization of the world's richest nations known as the G-8. He says Russia has no place in the group given the increasingly authoritarian tendencies that have taken root under former President Vladimir Putin, who now has installed himself as prime minister.

Obama's most recent words on the crisis, a two sentence statement issued Tuesday from his Hawaiian vacation retreat, declared, "It is past time for the Russian government to immediately sign and implement a cease-fire. Russia must halt its violation of Georgian airspace and withdraw its ground forces from Georgia, with international monitors to verify that these obligations are met."

On Monday, Obama told the Russians "There is no possible justification for these attacks." At the same time, however, he said "Georgia should refrain from using force in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and a political settlement must be reached that addresses the status of these disputed regions." That was a clear acknowledgment that Georgia, too, needed to change course.

Abkhazia is a second region in northern Georgia that has broken away, also under Russian protection. The Kremlin has based what it calls "peacekeepers" in both regions as a deterrent to Georgian desires to bring them back under central government control.

On Tuesday, after expressions of outrage in Washington and European capitals, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev ordered a halt to military action and said on national television that his military had inflicted sufficient punishment on Georgia.

Hours later, Saakashvili told reporters that he generally accepted the cease-fire plan negotiated by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, which calls for both sides to move back to their positions before fighting erupted.

Domestically, a leading Republican moderate with a foreign policy background endorsed Obama, who was trying to demonstrate his appeal to members of both political parties.

Former Rep. Jim Leach of Iowa was among a group of Republicans who said they were crossing party lines to support Obama, although the campaign did not release names or the size of the group.

"I'm convinced that the national interest demands a new approach to our interaction with the world," Leach, a foreign service officer before being elected to Congress, said in a conference call with reporters.

Leach predicted that many Republicans and independents would be attracted by Obama's campaign but said his decision to endorse a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time was not easy.

Leach was elected to Congress in 1976 and served 30 years before losing his seat in 2006. As a moderate, he was often at odds with the conservative Republican leadership.

"For me, the national interest comes before party concerns, particularly internationally," said Leach, an Iraq war opponent.

"We do need a new direction in American policy, and Obama has a sense of that," he said. "He recognizes that a long-term occupation of Iraq is not only expensive, it's extremely dangerous to the American interests."

Leach said he was attracted to Obama's call for a dialogue with nations such as Iran that have long been seen as U.S. adversaries.

"He also recognizes that it's preferable to speak with potential adversaries rather than simply shun them," Leach said.

McCain has been highly critical of Obama's stated willingness to negotiate with world leaders whose policies are seen as threatening to U.S. interests and security.

While the crisis in the Caucasus played out, light was shined on the dark underside of American politics.

The Atlantic magazine reported that Hillary Rodham Clinton's top campaign strategist had advised her to cast Obama during their battle for the nomination as having questionable "roots to basic American values and culture" and use the theme to counter the image that his background is diverse and multicultural.

Obama, the son of a black man from Kenya and white woman from Kansas, was born in Hawaii, the 50th U.S. state of Pacific Ocean islands that has a diverse culture. The first-term senator spent part of his childhood in Indonesia.

"I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values," top adviser Mark Penn wrote in a March 2007 memo to Clinton, who did not act on the advice.

3.

IN RUSSIA, NATIONALIST PRIDE PREVAILS
By Frederick Kunkle

** Support for Armed Response Outweighs Skepticism, Concern **

Washington Post
August 13, 2008
Page A09

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/12/AR2008081202881.html

MOSCOW -- Along Moscow's famously colorful Arbat Street on Tuesday, there was a striking unanimity of views about Russia's brief, one-sided war with Georgia. While many people said they regretted the loss of life, the conflict appeared mainly to have stoked nationalist pride and anger that Russia's show of force over the breakaway region of South Ossetia had been condemned as disproportionate.

Some expressed outrage that the country had been blamed for starting the crisis. Others, echoing Russian officials and analysts, suggested there was little difference between the massive military response to Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili's shelling of the separatist capital last week and the NATO-led bombing of Serbia or the West's recognition of Kosovo's right to independence.

"It is not every day that 1,600 of your fellow compatriots are killed in cold blood," said Alexander Pikayev, a departmental director at the Institute for World Economy and International Relations, referring to the alleged death toll in South Ossetia after the Georgian assault.

Pikayev said Russian forces needed to go after targets in and around the city of Gori, which is on undisputed Georgian territory, because it was an important staging area for Georgia's offensive. "I think that it's too early to make any final judgments, because we are talking about a complicated situation," he said.

Emotions remained inflamed here Tuesday despite Russian President Dmitry Medvedev's announcement that the operation in Georgia had been completed and that he had called a halt to Russian combat. Saying that the Russian military had had no choice but to strike back at Georgia after it attacked the rebel enclave, Medvedev added that Russia had carried out its aim to protect its peacekeepers.

"The aggressor has been punished and his military forces routed," Medvedev said.

Over the weekend, the Levada Center conducted a poll of 2,100 people in Russia and reported that 71 percent of the respondents sided with South Ossetia and sympathized with its separatist goals. Only 2 percent expressed sympathy for Georgia's stance.

The results were nearly as lopsided on the question of whether South Ossetia should remain part of Georgia, become part of Russia or become independent. Only 4 percent supported the status quo before the fighting, while 46 percent thought Russia should absorb the sparsely populated province and join it to the Russian republic of North Ossetia. Thirty-four percent said South Ossetia should be independent.

In Moscow, the nationalist sentiment was not universal. Some worried that Russia's armed response would only strengthen the hand of the prime minister and former president, Vladimir Putin, and others in his circle in the Kremlin.

"I think Russia is getting more nationalistic, and I think it's been strengthened in this reasserting of sovereignty," said Dmitry Trenin, deputy director of studies at the Carnegie Moscow Center.

Especially in the early hours and days of the conflict, Russian television stations showed Putin directing the military response and visiting with the wounded, and much of the coverage showed only Russian casualties and refugees and quoted only Russian officials. One station used graphics that called Georgia's actions "genocide." Commentators said the coverage helped fan the feeling that Georgia was to blame.

Alexander Golts, deputy editor of the Daily Journal, an independent online newspaper, said that even liberals and some critics of the government felt that Saakashvili's shelling of Tskhinvali, the capital of the breakaway province, had provided the spark for a conflict that had been a long time in the making.

"It's absolutely clear that Saakashvili was the person who began this war," Golts said. "I am even one of these liberal commentators, but it's also clear that when Saakashvili spoke on TV [on Friday], he knew for sure and had ordered the deployment for the attack."

4.

RUSSIAN TROOPS STILL POUR INTO SOUTH OSSETIA
By Andrew Osborn and Marc Champion

** Scarred Area Vents Anger at Georgia; Death Toll Unclear **

Wall Street Journal
August 13, 2008
Page A8

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121857437601134481.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

TSKHINVALI, Georgia -- The Kremlin said Tuesday that it was suspending military action in the separatist enclave of South Ossetia inside Georgia, but huge Russian military convoys still snaked toward the scarred capital, Tskhinvali.

After five days of fighting -- Russia's biggest use of force outside its borders since the 1991 Soviet collapse -- a victorious Russian army offered a small group of foreign journalists a carefully controlled glimpse of the territory it went to war over.

Their goal was to win a more difficult battle: getting the world to believe that Georgia, not Moscow, is to blame for the mayhem. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has accused Georgians of "genocide," and Russia has asserted that Tskhinvali was essentially leveled in a Georgian attack last Thursday.

Parts of the city were in ruins, although it wasn't clear whether the Georgian attack or the Russian response was to blame. The pillars of a culture center had been broken into pieces like children's toys. Apartment blocks and shops were riddled with bullet holes and shell impacts.

"Look at what they [the Georgians] did," said Taimraz Pliev, 62 years old. "It's Stalingrad." Mr. Pliev said he and his family spent five nights in their cellar while a battle raged above ground. "Who will compensate for all this?" he asked, his eyes glassy with emotion.

Neighborhoods farther off the official tour seemed to have sustained much less damage, with most buildings intact. The tour provided little evidence to support Russian claims that over 1,000 civilians in South Ossetia perished from Georgian bombs and bullets. Doctors at the main hospital in Tskhinvali said around 220 people were brought in for treatment, but they gave no clear answer to repeated questions about the death toll.

Georgia denies the genocide claim and accuses Moscow of ethnic cleansing.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said it would be up to the people of South Ossetia and the pro-Russian republic of Abkhazia to the west to decide their future. Both regions lie within Georgia's internationally recognized borders.

Despite Georgian reports of breaches, the cease-fire announced by Mr. Medvedev Tuesday appeared largely to hold. A fierce, apparently punitive bombardment of the Georgian city of Gori, abandoned Monday night by Georgian forces in retreat, ended shortly before Mr. Medvedev announced the cease-fire. Five people including a journalist were killed by shelling in the main Stalin Square, witnesses said. The square's monument to former Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, whose hometown was Gori, went undamaged.

"The whole situation has changed," said Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of Russia in *Global Politics*, a journal that frequently publishes the work of Russian government officials. "Russia is ready to use force outside of its borders. I think [former Soviet countries] will re-evaluate how to most optimally protect their security in the wider sense, not just militarily but also politically and economically."

In Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital, Russian soldiers atop armored personnel carriers and tanks smiled and waved triumphantly as they patrolled the streets, causing traffic jams.

The traffic on South Ossetia's roads Tuesday suggested the Russian army isn't planning to leave anytime soon. The sole two-lane road that snakes from Russia through plunging mountain passes was clogged with military hardware. Heavy battle tanks, armored personnel carriers, supply trucks, and howitzers rumbled toward the capital. Helicopter gunships flew overhead in the same direction.

In the opposite direction, minibuses ferrying refugees motored toward the Russian border. At one hillside cemetery, a funeral was taking place. Men in camouflage and women clad in black looked on as an open coffin was unloaded from a truck.

Tskhinvali is a town with an official population of 30,000 and long dusty roads, low-rise apartment blocks, and many individual detached houses with large yards.

The first stop on the Kremlin tour was a busy road junction on the edge of town. The charred remains of two Georgian T-72 tanks lay beached there.

A handful of civilians left in the area emerged to tell their stories.

Alla Begayeva, a mother of three, was one of many South Ossetians who said she was grateful to Russian forces. "If Russia hadn't come, the Georgians would have slit our throats like pigs," she said. She said she hoped South Ossetia would soon become part of Russia proper.

Russian officials said nearly half the region's roughly 70,000 people have fled across the border into Russia itself.

The pale facade of Tskhinvali's hospital was pocked with bullet holes. Doctors led the way to a dark fetid basement where they said they had been forced to operate on patients as fighting continued outside.

Staff said Georgian forces had struck the hospital with a missile. The point at which the missile entered the hospital wasn't visible. A Russian officer said that was because it had come in through the roof.

Standing on the front porch cradling three shards of shrapnel she said had been removed from patients, a doctor at the hospital, Tina Zakharova, railed against Georgia and its president, Mikheil Saakashvili.

"This is the kind of humanitarian aid Georgia has sent us," she said, her voice rising with anger. "How can you fire a Grad missile at a hospital?"

A short drive away an entire neighborhood had been flattened by a squall of missiles. In many cases only fragments of facades had been left standing.

An elderly man, Nodar Tskhovrebov, stared at what was left of his house. Nothing remained but the walls. "What am I going to do?" he said, poking the remains of the missile with his shoe. In other places, overturned cars blackened by fire still lay in the road. The main government building was wrecked. People said they had no water or electricity.

Russian Col. Igor Konashenko said 500 bodies had been pulled from the area the previous day. The streets had been littered with corpses and some civilians had been shot in the back of the head, he said. As armored personnel carriers whisked the tour's participants back to Russia proper, they passed large houses in flames on both sides of the road.

Georgia's capital of Tbilisi had none of the destruction of South Ossetia, and none of the joy of victory.

At lunchtime, the Swarovski, Boss and other swank stores along the city's main Rustaveli Avenue -- and the 24-hour McDonald's -- were closed . People in Tbilisi had been emptying supermarket shelves and filling gasoline tanks to prepare for what the Georgian government believed was an imminent Russian attack on the capital. Refugees from bombed or occupied Georgian towns such as Gori and Zugdidi milled about on the otherwise empty sidewalks.

Within an hour of Mr. Medvedev's cease-fire announcement, many of the stores were open again, and McDonald's was bustling. Tens of thousands of people poured onto Rustaveli Avenue waving white and red Georgian flags for a subdued show of unity, and relief. "This is no celebration," said Lasha Jugheli, a 28-year-old Georgian who works for a nonprofit organization, as he headed into the crowd.

Disappointment at the West left many bitter. Already, some Georgians have begun to question whether Mr. Saakashvili made a strategic blunder that has cost the country substantial pieces of its territory. "We waited and waited for the U.S. and Europe to help, but it was just words, words," said Lali Chavchanidze, her hands trembling. "I haven't eaten in a week, just smoked," she explained.

Tuesday's six-point peace plan requires both sides not to use force and to provide humanitarian access. Both have to pull their troops out of the conflict zones, but Russia is allowed to keep a larger force of peacekeepers than before the conflict until a new international force is established. Talks are to open on the separatist territories.

Mr. Medvedev drove the Russian military victory home.

"Thugs differ from normal people in that once they scent blood, it's very hard to stop them," the Kremlin leader said at a news conference, referring to Georgian authorities. "Sometimes surgical methods have to be used."

--Mitchell Prothero in Gori, Georgia, contributed to this article.