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By Llanesca T. Panti, Reporter
Moscow’s envoy to Manila said that another
Cold War has not erupted with Russia’s recent military operations
in Georgia, even as he warned that Western forces appear to be
moving to isolate his country.
Russia’s offensive in Georgia last month was
justified, as it was done to protect the pro-independence South
Ossetians and Russian citizens living in that region, Ambassador
Vitaly Vorobiev stressed Thursday during an exclusive roundtable
interview with The Manila Times.
Georgia started the fight when its military
attacked civilians and started shooting at Russian peacekeepers, he
explained.
What’s important now is for all sides to start
confidence-building measures, which Vorobiev claimed is contrary to
what Russians are seeing from the West, primarily from the forces of
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
Russia feels as if the West is trying to
befriend several of the troubled former Soviet states and eastern
European countries, he said.
Then in 2005, Georgia started to lobby for NATO
membership.
“We see no reason for the expansion of
NATO,” Vorobiev told The Times, saying that the move is
reminiscent of “containment” policy of the United States against
the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
“We don’t want again to have an Iron
Curtain,” he added, referring to the famous warning made by
Winston Churchill at the end of World War II, when Russia’s Joseph
Stalin occupied eastern European nations that it had liberated from
Nazi Germany.
On Thursday, Vorobiev said Russia has long ago
brought down “political fences,” since the removal of the Berlin
Wall in the 1990s.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there
were assurances that NATO would not expand toward Russia and that
anti-missile weapons would not be deployed so near that country, the
envoy recalled.
“Everything is forgotten now on their side,”
he added, referring to NATO.
The ambassador said Russia does not want a
revival of the Cold War, which resulted in a nuclear arms race.
NATO’s moves, however, do not represent a
military threat against the Russian Federation, “not in a direct
way,” he said. But it is bad in a “political, emotional and
psychological” way.
Moving forward
Vorobiev said Moscow has had a long and peaceful
history of co-existence with Georgia, whose sons became top Soviet
leaders. Even Stalin’s father was from there, the envoy added.
The tension there now is “not an understanding
between peoples,” he said. “[It is a] misunderstanding, I would
call it, of politicians.”
He traced the roots of the current problem to
Georgian politicians who pushed populist slogans, like “Georgia
for Georgians.” And the situation, he added, worsened after the
Georgian government started to forcibly drive out non-Georgians.
“We didn’t want [to attack Georgia],” he
said, referring to the offensive that coincided with the start of
the Olympic Games in Beijing. “We didn’t have military
installations there, except our peacekeepers.”
The challenge in Georgia now is how to help the
people restore their normal lives, which were destroyed in part by
Georgian forces, he said.
“We recognize the fact that there was a split
in South Ossetia, and that they want certain areas of autonomy and
establishment of their own state. But we are not going to settle
that problem by military moves,” he said, referring to Georgia’s
attacks on its own people.
Georgia gained its independence after the fall
of the Soviet Union in 1991. Little by little, various state
institutions prospered following the bloodless change of power
during the 2003 Rose Revolution that unseated President Eduard
Shevardnadze and ushered in a pro-Western government, according to
Internet sources citing the British Broadcasting Corp.
Despite an end to the fighting, Georgia’s
relations with Russia remain sour because of Russian President
Dmitry Medvedev’s official recognition of the Georgian regions of
South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent nations and of Georgia’s
aspirations to join the NATO.
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