TBILISI, Georgia — Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. gave a rousing speech at Georgia’s Parliament building on Tuesday, raising his voice to a shout in denunciation of Russia’s “19th-century notion of spheres of influence,” and urging the world not to formally recognize the separatist territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. He received standing ovations, one after another.
His speech had a hard kernel of advice, though: do not try to fight Russia. Georgia’s best hope of reclaiming the territories, he said, was building a country so appealing that the separatists would eventually return voluntarily. Meeting with ethnic Georgian children displaced during the war, Mr. Biden couched that process in terms of years, or maybe decades.
“When all the people of Abkhazia and South Ossetia see prosperity and opportunity in the rest of Georgia, and when they look north into Russia — unless it radically changes — and don’t see the same opportunity, they’re going to say to one another, ‘Regardless of ethnic background, I want to be in Georgia,’ ” he said. “That’s ultimately why the Berlin Wall came down.”
Georgia has looked to the United States for support and advocacy since last August, when Russian troops routed its army and took control of the territories. President Mikheil Saakashvili has pinned hopes on Mr. Biden, and during Mr. Biden’s visit, repeatedly emphasized the threat from Russian forces in South Ossetia, whose boundary is just 25 miles from Tbilisi, the capital.
In interviews published this week by The Washington Post and The Daily Telegraph, Mr. Saakashvili said Georgia was hoping to replenish its battered military with antiaircraft and anti-tank weapons, which he said could serve to deter a Russian attack. He told both newspapers that he was having early-stage discussions with Washington about providing weapons, and that he hoped to press Mr. Biden to speed up the time frame.
No such request was made at Thursday’s meetings, said Georgian and United States government officials. Eka Tkeshelashvili, secretary of Georgia’s National Security Council, said she believed that it was not the right time for Georgia to focus on acquiring weapons. Current bilateral military agreements focus on training, modernization, and command and control functions.
At a Washington news conference on Thursday, a spokesman for the State Department, Philip Crowley, said the United States had not ruled out rearming Georgia at some point.
A senior American official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with reporters, said: “As Mr. Saakashvili made clear, it’s something they are still very interested in. We feel like a key for Georgia now is modernization of the military, building capacity. It’s not so much a matter of military hardware.”
The decision was being followed closely in Moscow. On Thursday, the Russian deputy foreign minister, Grigory Karasin, told the Itar-Tass news agency that Russia would take “concrete measures” to prevent Georgia from rearming.
As he did in his speech in Kiev on Wednesday, Mr. Biden interspersed praise for Georgia’s young democracy with criticism. He called on the government to restore debate to Parliament, create a balance of power between Parliament and the president, build an independent news media, insulate courts from outside influence, and allow for the transfer of power through “democratic processes, not on the street.”
At the gathering with displaced Georgian children from South Ossetia, Mr. Biden saved his harshest words for Russia.
He said he believed that Moscow “used a pretext to invade your country,” weighing in confidently on the question of whether Mr. Saakashvili should be blamed for ordering the Aug. 7 shelling of Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital. He said Russia had paid dearly for invading Georgia, arguing that “all the countries that surround them are now saying very harsh things to Russia.” He promised the children that the United States would press Russia to comply with the French-brokered cease-fire agreement, and that if they continued to defy it, “it is a problem for them.”
He noted the largess of Americans — “they said, ‘It’s O.K., take my money, raise my taxes’ ” — in pledging $1 billion in aid to Georgia after the war. Only five million people live in Georgia, making it one of the highest per capita recipients of American aid in the world.
“You should understand, America cares about you, cares about you personally,” Mr. Biden said. “We care about all of you, and we’re not going to leave you. It’s a hard journey, but we’re not going away.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/world/europe/24georgia.html?ref=todayspaper&pagewanted=print
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
