Group of former Soviet states in crisis as leaders fail to show

Agence France Presse — English
July 21, 2006 Friday 4:46 PM GMT

by Nick Coleman

Georgia and Ukraine pulled out of a summit of former Soviet states
on Friday, underscoring rising tensions 15 years after the collapse
of the Soviet Union.

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who has been embroiled in a row
with the Kremlin over the Georgian separatist region of South Ossetia,
said he had cancelled his attendance due to a cabinet reshuffle.

"The president is busy with important questions linked to his cabinet,"
the head of the presidential administration, Giorgi Arveladze, said.

Saakashvili’s non-attendance was one of a string of no-shows by
leaders of the 12-member Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS),
set up after the break-up of the Soviet Union to try to maintain
economic and political ties.

Other presidents who failed to turn up included Robert Kocharian of

Armenia, Viktor Yushchenko of Ukraine and Saparmurat Niyazov of
Turkmenistan.

Yushchenko’s office blamed the "political situation" in Ukraine, where
rival parties have been struggling to form a coalition government,
while Kocharian, who has close ties with Moscow, was said by his
office to have a "respiratory illness".

The Kremlin has sought to make CIS summits less formal affairs as
rivalries between leaders threatened to spill into the open at earlier
set-piece press conferences.

This time the leaders met at a riverside restaurant on Friday and
were due to hold brief formal talks on Saturday before attending a
horse-racing event, the Nezavisimaya Gazeta newspaper said.

Commentators said the friendship symbolised by the CIS looked
increasingly threadbare.

"Whether to get rid of the CIS or keep it will be decided today,"
the Vedomosti business daily said.

The CIS formally includes all the former Soviet republics except the
three Baltic states, but the meetings have been patchily attended,
with Turkmen leader Niyazov almost never showing up in recent years.

Vedomosti noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin himself has
said that the CIS might have a limited lifespan.

Another paper, Kommersant, said that relations between Georgia and
Russia had "never before been so fraught" and had even reached the
stage where threats of force were being made.

Georgia’s parliament this week demanded the withdrawal of Russian
peacekeepers from the separatist region of South Ossetia, the third
such demand it has made in a year.

Saakashvili, who came to power in 2004 in a "rose revolution", has
promised to reunite his fractured country and integrate it with the
West, in particular the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO).

Some observers saw the cabinet reshuffle as a conveniently timed
pretext for not coming to Moscow, where Saakashvili had hoped to
talk to Putin about South Ossetia and a Georgian demand for Russia
to withdraw peacekeepers from the territory.

"It is possible that the change of ministers is linked to the fact
that Saakashvili felt there was nothing to be gained from Moscow,"
said Soso Sinsadze, an analyst with the Institute for International
Relations in Tblisi.

Russia has been holding military exercises on its border with South
Ossetia, a move seen by some analysts as a warning to Tbilisi not
to eject the peacekeepers, who have been there since South Ossetia
fought for independence in the early 1990s.

Among the leaders who did attend Friday’s summit, the president of
Moldova, Vladimir Voronin, signalled tough talks ahead over Russia’s
support for the breakaway region of Transdnestr, which has scheduled
a referendum for September on leaving Moldova and "freely uniting"
with Russia.

"An informal summit without a strict agenda doesn’t mean there won’t
be discussion of the hottest, most unpleasant questions," he told
Echo Moscow radio station.