02 June 2004 09:37
Russia says Georgia troop moves cause concern
Russia accused Georgia's U.S.-trained special forces on Tuesday of endangering a fragile peace by entering the Black Sea state's breakaway South Ossetia region, which has backers in Moscow. Georgia briefly sent troops to its de facto border with South Ossetia on Monday, saying they would defend anti-smuggling checkpoints that Russians working as peacekeepers in the region had threatened to remove. It later said it had pulled them back.
Russia said the Georgian reinforcements were special forces deployed in breach of international legal agreements and included troops trained under U.S. cooperation programmes meant to tackle terrorism. The U.S. training has incensed Russia.
"Russia is convinced that attempts to use these units in Georgia's regions of ethnic conflict run counter to efforts to resolve them by political means and understandably stir up concern," the statement said.
South Ossetia has been effectively independent from Tbilisi since a war in the early 1990s and recently rebuffed overtures from President Mikhail Saakashvili, who wants to return all Georgia's breakaway regions to the central fold.
Analysts and diplomats are watching his progress for signs of competing U.S. and Russian influence in the oil-rich but ethnically diverse Caucasus region, where both have an interest.
Georgia was under Moscow's control until the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, but U.S.-educated Saakashvili is backed by Western countries keen to see stability in a region that is becoming a major oil transit route.
He has already successfully – and peacefully – tamed the restive province of Adzhara, but faces stiffer opposition in South Ossetia, a tiny mountainous region of 70,000 people, and larger Abkhazia, which both seceded in bloody 1990s conflicts.
The media-savvy and multilingual Saakashvili began his campaign to reassert power over Adzhara with a high-profile stand-off at the frontier, where he demanded to be allowed in.
In a similar development on Tuesday, the South Ossetian authorities refused entry to Saakashvili's Dutch-born wife, Sandra Roelofs, a charity worker who wanted to travel to the region to mark Children's Day by giving out presents.
After several attempts, she made it to the village of Tamarasheni in South Ossetia, where Rustavi-2 television showed her talking to locals in Georgian and Ossetian.
Last week 36-year-old lawyer Saakashvili offered Abkhazia and South Ossetia – where people rely on smuggling goods between Russia and Georgia for much of their income – talks on rejoining Georgia, but the offer was quickly rejected.
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