EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - A transparency campaign group has written to seven European commissioners to pressure them to make good on a promise to reveal the names of the people who sit on the expert groups that influence EU legislation in key areas.

ALTER-EU, made up of 160 organisations, on Friday (8 August) sent letters to the commission president, vice-president, and commissioners in charge of industry, energy, research, health and environment to ask whether the commission intends to take the name-publishing step "by the summer" as it promised earlier this year.

The commission has often been accused by NGOs of giving industry too much of a say

It said it is "deeply concerned about the lack of progress so far on the issue of over-representation," referring to advisory groups where business lobbyists outnumber NGOs and civil society groups.

The transparency group says that the only way to avoid "privileged access for certain specific interests" is to establish consistent membership criteria and called in the letters for an "open and transparent process" for the selection of such expert groups.

BELGRADE: Former US and French Presidents Bill Clinton and Jacques Chirac "personally" blocked plans to arrest the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, wanted for a genocide trial over the past 13 years, a former official of the UN war crimes tribunal said in an interview published yesterday. Florence Hartmann, a former spokeswoman of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) prosecutor, said in an interview with the daily Blic that "sometimes the arrest was blocked personally by Chirac, another time it was Clinton." Karadzic was arrested in July in Belgrade after 13 years on the run. ICTY accused him in 1995 of genocide and leveled other charges over his role in atrocities such as the massacre of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica during the 1992-95 Bosnian War. The former president of the Serb entity in Bosnia, Karadzic claims that he made a deal with the former US envoy, Richard Holbrooke, to withdraw from politics and fade away and so avoid arrest and trial.

Czech President Vaclav Klaus has vetoed a law placing the country's chemical industry under tougher European Union rules, calling it bureaucratic and bad for business.

In a statement released on Monday, Klaus said that neither the Czech Republic nor the whole EU needs such a regulation.

 

"There is no reason to further toughen legislation in this field. People are not endangered by chemicals," he added.

 

The bill, passed by parliament last month, implements an EU directive that requires manufacturers and importers to register chemicals with the new Helsinki-based European Chemicals Agency.

Democracy Now! | Rwanda Accuses Top French Officials in 1994 Genocide

ANJALI KAMAT: Why, in your analysis, do you think that the French officials and the French government was supporting Hutu militias in Rwanda?

LINDA MELVERN: ... the rebel army that was created, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, invaded Rwanda from neighboring Uganda in October 1990. The French saw this as aggression by an Anglophone country, Uganda, against a Francophone country, Rwanda. They did not see the RPF fighting for stateless refugees. They saw the RPF as part of a plot by Yoweri Museveni in Uganda to take over a part of Francophone Africa, and for that reason they supported the Habyarimana regime.

For the three years of civil war, without French military help, then the dictatorship would have fallen. It was French military help that kept Habyarimana in power. And he was, by all accounts, although this is very difficult to prove, he [Mitterand] was friendly with Habyarimana. These two men, Mitterrand and Habyarimana, were friends. They spent time together. Their children spent time together. Habyarimana had a flat in Paris. So it was a very close relationship, apparently.

The fear--and this comes through in documents that have been released from the Mitterrand archives--certainly Mitterrand feared that what he called a Tutsiland was going to be created. And once Rwanda was lost to Anglophone influence, then French credibility on the African continent would suffer a blow, he believed, from which it would never recover.

As Russian troops and tanks advance further into Georgian, officials from NATO and the EU scheduled talks over the war in the Caucasus to show they can make a difference in their own backyard.

Pleading for a hands-on approach from NATO and the European Union, Salome Samadashvili, Georgia's ambassador to the EU, told journalists in Brussels on Monday, Aug. 11, that the organizations "need to show that there will be a political cost for this action in terms of the relationship of the Russian Federation with its Western partners," DPA news agency reported.

 

"Either we find a way to respond to (Russia's military action) together or we have to live with the decision that we will face a different world tomorrow," she added.

 

Georgian forces retreated on Monday to Tbilisi from other parts of the country in order to defend the capital.

 

As the bloody military mismatch between Russia and Georgia unfolded over the past three days, even the main players were surprised by how quickly small border skirmishes slipped into a conflict that threatened the Georgian government and perhaps the country itself.
Several American and Georgian officials said that unlike when Russia invaded Afghanistan in 1979, a move in which Soviet forces were massed before the attack, the nation had not appeared poised for an invasion last week. As late as Wednesday, they said, Russian diplomats had been pressing for negotiations between Georgia and South Ossetia, the breakaway region where the combat flared and then escalated into full-scale war.
"It doesn't look like this was premeditated, with a massive staging of equipment," one senior American official said. "Until the night before the fighting, Russia seemed to be playing a constructive role."
But while the immediate causes and the intensity of the Russian invasion had caught Georgia and the Western foreign policy establishment by surprise, there had been signs for years that Georgia and Russia had methodically, if quietly, prepared for conflict.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The suspension of EU-Russia negotiations on a new bilateral pact, freezing talks on visa-free travel for Russian citizens and holding back EU humanitarian aid to Chechnya until Russia ends aggression in Georgia could be among ideas debated by EU foreign ministers in Brussels on Wednesday (13 August).

A mountain top church in the Georgian countryside

Once fighting dies down, the EU may also offer to send policemen - but not soldiers - to help keep the peace in Georgia's breakaway regions and speed up free trade and visa facilitation deals with Georgia and Ukraine, "to show that those countries are not part of a 'grey zone' for Russia to expand [into]," a senior EU diplomat told EUobserver.

The EU launched talks in July on a new pact to replace its old Partnership and Cooperation Agreement with Russia and pays around €18 million a year in aid to help rebuild war-torn Chechnya. But Russia's incursion into Georgia last week threw EU-Russia relations into turmoil, in the gravest European security crisis since the 1999 Kosovo war.

The Georgian president has said that he has signed a cease-fire pledge proposed by envoys from the European Union.

Mikhail Saakashvili said on Monday he signed the document together with Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister and Alexander Stubb, his Finnish counterpart.

While a Kremlin spokesman dismissed Saakashvili's cease-fire claim, Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, said the West had mistaken the real aggressors for the victims.

Putin, shown speaking on Russian state television, singled out the United States, saying Washington was helping to bring Georgian troops home from Iraq.

Christopher King argues that the US and NATO are behind the Georgian invasion of South Ossetia but have misjudged Russian resolve. He says it is time for Europe to distance itself from NATO, which has become a US tool, and to choose whether it wants Russia as a friend or an enemy.

 
The European Union needs to re-evaluate its relationship to both the United States and NATO.

I've said recently (see "The USA, Russia and the spinoff from Iraq and Iran" and "Iran's `provocative missile test'") that US plans to instal a missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic are designed to cause trouble between Europe and Russia as well as distracting Europe from US Middle Eastern outrages. These missiles, under US control, are supposed to protect Europe and if you believe that, you probably believe in the tooth fairy. US negotiations for these missiles don't appear to be going very well since the Poles and Czechs don't much like the idea of being targeted in response by Russian missiles and the Russians have been musing about installing their missiles in Cuba for a re-run of the Cuban missile crisis and near nuclear war of the 1960s. That would not be popular with US voters. What do do? Are there any trouble spots that can be stoked up to show Russia as an aggressor? What about Georgia and the South Ossetia separatists on Russia's southern border?

So we've arrived at having a US/NATO-sponsored provocation with Georgia invading its breakaway semi-independent province. South Ossetia's declaration of independence was supported by almost all its residents. The South Ossetian argument is that if the West and NATO supported Kosovo's independence from Serbia, they should support its independence from Georgia. That sounds reasonable. No? Of course, no! The difference is that South Ossetia wants ties with Russia and the US has been pressing for Georgia to join NATO.

A defiant Vladimir Putin hit out at America and the West today for its "cynical support" of Georgia, saying that Russia would continue its military operation until "its logical end".

The Russian Prime Minister blasted the West for continuing to support President Saakashvili despite Georgia's attack on South Ossetia, which he said "wiped from the face of the earth ten Osettian villages".

"The scale of cynicism is surprising and the skill to present white as black and black. The trick to present the aggressor as the victim of an aggression and to place the responsibly for the effects on the victims," Mr Putin said.

He criticised the United States for transporting 800 Georgian soldiers from Iraq, some of whom have been deployed in Gori on the border of South Ossetia.

by Ronald D. Asmus and Richard Holbrooke  

In weeks and years past, each of us has argued on this page that Moscow was pursuing a policy of regime change toward Georgia and its pro-Western, democratically elected president, Mikheil Saakashvili. We predicted that, absent strong and unified Western diplomatic involvement, we were headed toward a war. Now, tragically, an escalation of violence in South Ossetia has culminated in a full-scale Russian invasion of Georgia. The West, and especially the United States, could have prevented this war. We have arrived at a watershed moment in the West's post-Cold War relations with Russia.

Exactly what happened in South Ossetia last week is unclear. Each side will argue its own version. But we know, without doubt, that Georgia was responding to repeated provocative attacks by South Ossetian separatists controlled and funded by Moscow. This is a not a war Georgia wanted; it believed that it was slowly gaining ground in South Ossetia through a strategy of soft power.

Whatever mistakes Tbilisi has made, they cannot justify Russia's actions. Moscow has invaded a neighbor, an illegal act of aggression that violates the U.N. Charter and fundamental principles of cooperation and security in Europe. Beginning a well-planned war (including cyber-warfare) as the Olympics were opening violates the ancient tradition of a truce to conflict during the Games. And Russia's willingness to create a war zone 25 miles from the Black Sea city of Sochi, where it is to host the Winter Games in 2014, hardly demonstrates its commitment to Olympic ideals. In contrast, Moscow's timing suggests that Putin seeks to overthrow Saakashvili well ahead of our elections, and thus avoid beginning relations with the next president on an overtly confrontational note.

Could the media please stop to repeat the lunatic uttering of this idiot?

Georgia's President Mikheil Saakashvili told foreign reporters his country's army has killed several hundred Russian servicemen and shot down at least 80 Russian aircraft.

Someone should tell Saak to SHUT UP instead of emphasizing Russian casualties (which are very likely much lower than he says). Consider how such talk sounds on Russian TV and how Russian civilians and politicians will react to it.

TBILISI, Georgia: Russia issued an ultimatum to Georgian forces on Monday to surrender completely in and around the western pro-Russian separatist enclave of Abkhazia, in a sign that fighting could escalate on a second front in the west of Georgia.

The ultimatum called for Georgian forces to surrender in the Zugdidi district along the border of Abkhazia. A Georgian official close to the president, Giga Bokaria, said the ultimatum raised alarms that Russian troops would now push into Georgian territory in the west unchallenged by Georgian troops, which have been tied up in fighting further east near the other pro-Russian separatist enclave of South Ossetia.

The pivotal question in the conflict, which has involved heavy fighting since late last week, is now whether Russia -- which has poured troops into both Abkhazia and South Ossetia -- will push beyond these regions and further into Georgia.

The Web site of the president of Georgia, the small nation that is battling Russian forces over a breakaway enclave, was moved to a U.S. hosting facility this weekend after allegedly being attacked by Russian hackers.

The original servers located in the country of Georgia were "flooded and blocked by Russians" over the weekend, Nino Doijashvili, chief executive of Atlanta-based hosting company Tulip Systems Inc., said Monday.

The Georgian-born Doijashvili happened to be on vacation in Georgia when fighting broke out on Friday. She cold-called the government to offer her help and transferred president.gov.ge and rustavi2.com, the Web site of a prominent Georgian TV station, to her company's servers Saturday.

Speaking via cell phone from Georgia, Doijashvili said the attacks, traced to Moscow and St. Petersburg, are continuing on the U.S. servers. The president's site was intermittently available midday Monday. Route-tracing performed by the AP confirmed that the sites were hosted at Tulip.

Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia's president, has spoken of the "cold-blooded, pre-meditated, murder" of his country and said that there would be "no surrender" to Russian aggression.

 

Appealing to the international community to step in to resolve fighting over the breakaway region of South Ossetia, he said: "The world has a moral duty to stop the madness."

 

Saakashvili made the comments at a news conference in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, on Monday.

 

His remarks came as Russia's Interfax news agency said Georgian forces were continuing to shell Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital, early on Monday, killing three Russian peacekeepers and wounding 18 others.

While watching Putin and company roll over Georgia, I was reminded of an article I read last summer in the excellent international security journal published by Stratfor.

The article, published on August 21, 2007, was written by George Friedman, CEO of Stratfor. Friedman is a self-described "conservative Republican," but he warned then of the dangers to U.S. interests of Bush's growing lame duck status:

Thus, Bush is a lame duck commander in chief as well. Even if he completely disregards the politics of his position, which he can do, he still lacks the sheer military resources to achieve any meaningful goal without the use of nuclear weapons. [...]
 This opens a window of opportunity for powers, particularly second-tier powers, that would not be prepared to challenge the United States while its forces had flexibility. One power in particular has begun to use this window of opportunity -- Russia.

The outbreak of war in Georgia on Friday offers a disturbing and somewhat surreal taste of what to expect from John McCain should he become our nation's Commander in Chief. As the centuries-old ethnic animosities between Georgia and Ossetia boiled over into another armed conflict, drawing in neighboring Russia, McCain issued a stark-raving statement from Des Moines that is disturbingly reminiscent of the language used in the lead-up to NATO's war against Yugoslavia in 1999, a war McCain zealously pushed for:

"We should immediately call a meeting of the North Atlantic Council to assess Georgia's security and review measures NATO can take to contribute to stabilizing this very dangerous situation," McCain said.

Calling on NATO to "stabilize this dangerous situation" is not going down well with Russia, where images of dead Russian peacekeepers and of frightened Ossetian refugees streaming across its borders have put the country in a very vengeful mood. It's hard to imagine what measures NATO could take under a McCain presidency, but in the mind of a man who thinks US troops should stay in Iraq for 100 years, and who runs around singing "Bomb Bomb Iran!" it's not hard to guess-and even harder not to be horrified by what it may mean come January 2009, should he win.

McCain's call to NATO-ize the war is not only frightening, it's also delusional: both NATO and US forces are already stretched beyond the breaking point, even by Joint Chief of Staff chairman Michael Millen's own recent assessment.

However, the main thing one should notice is that this effort to equally blame Russia and Georgia is predicated on a kind of colonial erasure.  Namely, absent from this formulation are the South Ossetians themselves. Their agency is rendered invisible or worse reduced to the body upon which the larger powers dance.  Perhaps we should redo the narrative to include them?

The reality is that South Ossetia is not alone in its aspirations for ethnic self-determination.  The situation in South Ossetia, as with other places where political borders don't align with ethnic ones, is kind of ethno-waste of modernity. When the Bolsheviks drew up its Republics, Autonomous Regions, and autonomous oblasts in 1936, the North Caucuses was an artificially crafted mosaic where political borders ran counter to (emergent) ethnic ones.  The Ossetians where split politically into North and South, while their ethnicity remained unified.  When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the South Ossetians became one of the many internal Others for the Georgians to proclaim their new found nationalism. That is, Great Georgian Nationalism was predicated on its vicious denial to the Other.  Brutality comenced.  As Human Rights Watch reported in 1996,

Between 1989 and 1992, fighting flared in the South Ossetian A.O. and in Georgia between ethnic Ossetian paramilitary troops and Georgian Interior Ministry (MVD) units and paramilitaries. South Ossetia had demanded to secede, and Georgia cracked down on the renegade area by sending in troops. Approximately 100,000 ethnic Ossetians fled Georgia and South Ossetia, and another 23,000 Georgians headed in the other direction. One hundred villages were reportedly destroyed in South Ossetia. Also the North Ossetia-Georgian border went largely uncontrolled, providing an almost unhindered access point for weapons, fighters, and ammunition in both directions.

Since then South Ossetia has overwhelming approved seceding from Gerogia in two referendums, yet their right to self-determination remains ignored.

Contrary to Cold War Triumphalists, neo-Hegelian End of Historyites, Kantian Perpetual Peaceniks, and the Death of Nation State globalists, walls continue to be erected to create or harden ethnic-religious identities. If the symbol of the 20th Century was the Berlin Wall, the 21st appears to be marked by its fragmentation and redepolyment across a variety of ethno-political spaces. The concrete walls at the US-Mexico border, Israel-Palestine, and the streets of Baghdad (For the conjunction between walls and Shia and Sunni ethnic cleansing see Derek Gregory's excellent "Biopolitics of Baghdad"), have their biopolitical and virtual expression in the new states of Southeastern Europe and the aspiring ones in the Caucuses, South Asia, and China. The formerly bipolar world of the 20th century has begotten a shotgun splatter of ethno-nationalist states of the 21st.

This is why, however much people want to point to South Ossetia as a Russian proxy, they still have to somehow account for the fact that South Ossetians gleefully take those passports, use Russian currency, and are running not into Georgia but into Russia to escape the violence.  I think we have to remember that however one wants to attribute blame for the conflict, there are some real reasons why the South Ossetians want to ditch Georgia altogether. Yet in all the reporting that has come out in the last few days, the South Ossentian voice as an agent of his or her own present and future has been more or less muted.  In its place has stood a number of metonyms: Russia, Putin, Georgia, rebels, proxies, oil pipelines, NATO, the United States . .

Saakashvili just didn't think it through. One reason he overplayed his hand is that he got lucky the last time he had to deal with a breakaway region: Ajara, a tiny little strip of Black Sea coast in southern Georgia. This is a place smaller than some incorporated Central Valley towns, but it declared itself an "autonomous" republic, preserving its sacred basket-weaving traditions or whatever. You just have to accept that people in the Caucasus are insane that way; they'd die to keep from saying hello to the people over the next hill, and they're never going to change. The Ajarans aren't even ethnically different from Georgians; they're Georgian too. But they're Muslims, which means they have to have their own Lego parliament and Tonka-Toy army and all the rest of that Victorian crap, and their leader, a wack job named Abashidze (Goddamn Georgian names!) volunteered them to fight to the death for their worthless independence. Except he was such a nut, and so corrupt, and the Ajarans were so similar to the Georgians, and their little "country" was so tiny and ridiculous, that for once sanity prevailed and the Ajarans refused to fight, let themselves get reabsorbed by that Colussus to the North, mighty Georgia.

Well, like I've said before, there's nothing as dangerous as victory. Makes people crazy. Saakashvili started thinking he could gobble up any secessionist region--like, say, South Ossetia. But there are big differences he was forgetting--like the fact that South Ossetia isn't Georgian, has a border with Russia, and is linked up with North Ossetia just across that border.

Most likely the Georgians just thought the Russians wouldn't react. They were doing something they learned from Bush and Cheney: sticking to best-case scenarios, positive thinking. The Georgian plan was classic shock'n'awe with no hard, grown-up thinking about the long term. Their shiny new army would go in, zap the South Ossetians while they were on a peace hangover (the worst kind), and then...uh, they'd be welcomed as liberators? Sure, just like we were in Iraq. Man, you pay a price for believing in Bush. The Georgians did. They thought he'd help. And I just saw the little creep on TV, sitting in the stands watching the US-China basketball game. (Weird game--the Chinese were taller, muscled the boards inside but couldn't shoot from outside. Not what you expect from foreign b-ball teams at all.) I didn't even recognize Bush at first, just wondered why they kept doing close-ups of this guy who looked like Hank Hill's legless dad up in the stands. Then they said it was the Prez. They talk about people "growing in office"; well, he shrunk.

While the fighting in South Ossetia has been well-covered, both sides seemed to disagree on Monday on key aspects of the conflict. In comments from government officials and reports from news organizations, a complicated picture of the continuing fight emerged. Georgia is arguing that the entire country is threatened, while Russia insists that its ground assault remains limited to the first conflict zone. According to President Bush, Russia was responsible for a "dramatic and brutal escalation."

Russian-backed rebels in Abkhazia say they have begun an operation against Georgian forces, as UN moves to achieve a ceasefire failed to make progress.

The rebels say they are trying to push Georgian forces from a strategic gorge in the west of the breakaway province.

France's president is visiting Russia and Georgia on Tuesday but a new French draft resolution at the UN has already drawn strong Russian criticism.

The US president has meanwhile strongly attacked the Russian "invasion".

George W Bush said the Russian actions in Abkhazia and the other breakaway province of South Ossetia were "unacceptable in the 21st Century" and that Moscow was guilty of a "dramatic and brutal escalation".

Georgia and Russia have both invoked international law to justify their actions in the current conflict. But German legal experts say that only one side seems to have a justifiable point in doing so.

Was it legal for South Ossetia to secede from Georgia in 1992? Did this happen in line with international law, which grants every nation the right to self-determination?

 

It's a clear-cut case, said Andreas Zimmermann, who teaches international law at the University of Kiel. Even if South Ossetia were to be recognized internationally as a nation and were granted the right to self-determination, this would by no means give it the right to secede, he said.

 

"The right to self-determination does not come with a right to secede," Zimmermann said. "It's a right to autonomy, to minority rights and the like. It only becomes a right to secede when we're talking about a situation of genocide, hence when fundamental basic and human rights are no longer guaranteed."

 

Le président russe annonce la fin de l'opération militaire en Géorgie
Le président Dmitri Medvedev a annoncé, mardi, avoir donné l'ordre de mettre fin à l'opération militaire russe "visant à contraindre la Géorgie à la paix", rapporte l'agence Interfax. (AFP et Reuters)

Russian president Dmitri Medvedev announced on tuesday he had given order to end the military operation "aiming at force Georgia to accept peace"

"Ne te courbe que pour aimer..." René Char

Iran and the European Union reiterated their willingness to resume talks on the dispute over Iran's controversial nuclear programs, according to the ISNA news agency.

Iran's chief nuclear negotiator Saeid Jalili and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana agreed by phone to continue what Iran called "talks in a constructive atmosphere," Iranian State media reported Monday, Aug. 11.

 

"Solana and Jalili voiced satisfaction at the constructive trend of negotiations in Geneva and the contacts afterwards," the television broadcast said.

 

According to the report, the two had voiced the same willingness in a phone call on Aug. 4.

MANILA: The number of Filipinos displaced from their homes reached 130,000 as fighting in the southern Philippines intensified Monday, with the military and the police sending more troops to fight against Islamic separatists, officials said.

The conflict, which began late last week, coincided with elections Monday in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao that had, in the past, proved to be violent. Although officials said the elections went on peacefully, sporadic violence was reported, including the bombing of electric towers in one province.

Social-welfare officials warned of a potential humanitarian disaster as the fighting between troops and elements of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, which had been confined to two provinces, threatened to spill over to other areas.

Thousands of refugees had been housed in more than 40 refugee centers, officials said, but most of them chose to leave their communities and seek shelter with relatives in other provinces.

The United States i