Russia rejects UN Georgia draft

Russia has, unsurprisingly, rejected a UN resolution which essentially ignores the terms of the ceasefire which France negotiated between the two sides only last week.

After a meeting of Nato, dominated by the US, Condoleezza Rice accused Moscow of "bombing civilians and wanton destruction", which moved the blame for the conflict squarely on to the shoulders of the people who didn't start it. Nato may have acquiesced in this nonsense but it was utterly unsurprising when the Russians later rejected a UN resolution outright.

The draft text called on Russia to pull back its forces to the positions held before the current conflict.

But Russia says the truce allows its troops to stay in a buffer zone on the Georgia side of South Ossetia's border.

Moscow earlier dismissed a Nato warning that normal relations were impossible while its troops remained in Georgia.

The conflict broke out on 7 August when Georgia launched an assault to wrest back control of the Moscow-backed breakaway region of South Ossetia, triggering a counter-offensive by Russian troops who advanced beyond South Ossetia into Georgia's heartland.

Russia's UN ambassador said the French-drafted UN resolution went against the terms of the ceasefire brokered by France's President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Vitaly Churkin said the resolution should incorporate all elements of the six-point peace plan agreed last week.

It's typical of the arrogance of the Bush administration that it should seek to renegotiate the terms of the ceasefire after both sides have already signed it, and that they live in such a blinkered world that they think they can state that Russia were the aggressors here and that people will accept this black-is-actually-white view of the world.

At the heart of all of this is Bush's insistence on Georgia's "territorial integrity", and his demand that the people of South Ossetia and Abkhazia should remain part of Georgia whether they want to or not. It's a bizarre stance from the man who claims to be democracy's greatest exporter, but it actually fits perfectly with the Cold war mindset which permeates his entire administration. You can almost hear Dick Cheney insisting on this one. The problem is that the Russians simply are not buying it.

He (Churkin) also objected to language in the draft reaffirming Georgia's territorial integrity, saying South Ossetia and Abkhazia did not want to be part of Georgia. Russia can veto UN resolutions and the ambassador told the BBC that putting the text to a vote would be pointless.

This is where Rice is banging her head off a brick wall, demanding that the Russians accept a US version of events which is simply devoid of reality, and almost wilfully ignoring the fact that the Russians have a veto and that she is going to get nowhere by simply issuing threats:

Following a rebuke from Nato's 26 foreign ministers in Brussels, Moscow accused Nato of bias in favour of the "criminal regime" in the Georgian capital Tbilisi.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Russia risked becoming the "outlaw" of the conflict, in an interview with CBS news on the sidelines of the Nato emergency summit.

It's simply a sick joke for Rice to threaten that Russia is risking becoming "the outlaw" in this situation when everyone knows that this is the position the US have been seeking to place them in ever since Saakashvili sent Georgian troops into South Ossetia and Russia responded.

And the argument, which the right puts forward, that South Ossetia and Abkhazia are both actually part of Georgia ignores the fact that both regions have made it perfectly clear that they don't want to be part of Georgia.

We saw the US play this game after the Israel-Lebanon war when they attempted to draft resolutions which hid the fact that the Israelis had actually lost the conflict. Now they are attempting to draft a resolution which ignores the fact that Saakashvili started this and that there are two semi-autonomous regions who are seeking, as Kosovo did, to separate themselves from a country to which they do not want to belong.

And they are doing so because, in pure Cold war terms, Georgia is on our side and allowing the South Ossetians and the Abkhazians to state their wishes risks conceding territory to Russia.

It's an almost scandalously outdated way to view the world and yet that remains the US position.

The right of people to democratically state their wishes must be suspended if their aspirations affect the "territorial integrity" of a possible future Nato member.

The US are going to get nowhere playing this game the way they are, but that is possibly the point. Maybe it suits them to highlight what they can sell in the US as Russian intransigence. The rest of the planet can see what is happening but the US media tends to only report what politicians say, so perhaps they can sell this as the US defending "plucky little Georgia" back home and put Obama in a difficult position.

It's the only thing I can think of. And, with the obvious exception of Britain, most of Europe don't appear to be buying this US version of events either:

With the US, Britain, and the former Soviet satellites of central Europe adopting a robust position on the Kremlin's conduct, the more pro-Russian governments in the European Union such as Germany, Italy, and France were muted yesterday.

And, in this case, silence does not mean consent. Which I am sure the Russians are perfectly aware of.

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