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| Rice to ask Saakashvili to sign Sarkozy brokered cease-fire plan |
| 2008-08-14 |
| Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will ask Georgia to sign a cease-fire plan agreed to this week, with the aim of securing full Russian withdrawal from Georgia, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France said after a two-hour meeting with Rice. In Moscow and Tbilisi on Tuesday and Wednesday, France brokered a tenuous truce to the crisis. Since then, however, Russian troops have continued to move around Georgia, prompting increasingly strong U.S. demands that Moscow halt its military actions and withdraw. The cease-fire plan, said a statement from Sarkozy's office, "should be signed without delay by the parties in order to consolidate the cessation of hostilities and accelerate the retreat of Russian forces." President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia shook hands on the deal early Wednesday, but did not sign it. On Thursday, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov of Russia told his French counterpart, Bernard Kouchner, that Georgia must sign, Reuters reported. "If tomorrow Mr. Saakashvili signs the documents, which we negotiated with Mr. Medvedev, then the withdrawal of Russian forces could begin," Sarkozy said with Rice at his summer residence in southern France. Rice urged Russia again to withdraw all its forces from Georgia. "The provisional cease-fire that was agreed to really must go into place," Rice said. "And that means that military activities have to cease." Since Wednesday morning, when Sarkozy announced that he had persuaded the leaders of Georgia and Russia to agree to a set of principles that would halt the fighting, hopes for a smooth exit from the crisis have receded. Russian tanks have taken up positions around the city of Gori in central Georgia and Georgian officials said Russian soldiers had re-occupied the port of Poti. Rice said reports suggested that Russia had violated the truce. Sarkozy, who brokered the deal as president of the European Union, struck a more cautious tone. "You don't stop things just like that," he said. "On the ground, it is going better. The situation is progressively improving." After a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels on Wednesday, the 27-country bloc backed the French truce plan and agreed in principle to send monitors. Sarkozy's six-point cease-fire plan does appear to have stopped the worst bloodshed and helped stem the flow of refugees fleeing their homes. But it has also allowed Russia to claim that as part of so-called additional security measures under the agreement, its troops could occupy Gori and a zone around the city, effectively controlling the main east-west road through Georgia. The move isolates the capital, Tbilisi, from the Black Sea coast and cuts off important supply routes. Sarkozy, said French and Georgian officials close to the negotiations, also failed to get the Russians to agree to any time limit for military action. Accounts of the negotiations by a French diplomats, who traveled with their leader to Moscow and Tbilisi, and by a senior Georgian official, who sat in on the talks between Sarkozy and Saakashvili, indicate that Russia was negotiating from a position of strength. Sarkozy took a four-point cease-fire plan to Moscow on Tuesday, after Kouchner had won backing from the Georgians a day earlier. The conditions were: the end of hostilities, the opening of humanitarian corridors and the withdrawal by both sides to pre-war positions. There was also a reference to the territorial integrity of Georgia. In a heated four-hour meeting with Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Tuesday, French officials said, Sarkozy and Kouchner prevailed on one important point: The Russians no longer insisted that Saakashvili step aside as a precondition for any deal. But the French failed to persuade the Russians to accept Georgia's territorial integrity, settling instead for the terms "independence" and "sovereignty." The Russians also demanded a provision in the cease-fire plan for their troops to act in what was termed a peacekeeping role, even outside the boundaries of the separatist enclaves where the war began, with an understanding that later an international agreement might obviate this need. The vague language allows Russian peacekeepers to "implement additional security measures" while awaiting an international monitoring mechanism. Sarkozy carried the demands to Saakashvili late Tuesday. The Georgians asked two things: that the final status of the separatist territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia be set aside and that a timeline be included in the language on additional security measures. Sarkozy called Medvedev, who accepted the first point but rejected the second. Russian officials were unavailable to comment on how the talks unfolded. The fifth point in the agreement has become the main justification for Russian troop movements in Georgia. Sarkozy and Saakashvili announced the agreement around 2 a.m., and Russian tanks and troops moved toward Gori soon afterward. The Russians cited the fifth provision, saying they had identified a threat to the local population that justified their troops assuming a peacekeeping role in the city. A spokesman for Medvedev said they took up positions around the town to protect locals from South Ossetians bent on revenge against ethnic Georgians for what Russia says was Georgia's wholesale destruction of Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, and the resulting civilian casualties. It said it was also there to dispose of weapons left unattended by Georgian troops. French diplomats said that Russian agreement on the truce plan was essential to maximize the chances of turning it into a legally binding UN resolution, which Moscow could veto. They have assured the Georgians that such a resolution would restore the mention of Georgia's territorial integrity. But it is not clear Moscow will agree. |
| Posted by:john frum |