Inner City Press, NY
Aug 9 2008
As UN Stalls on Georgia, Talk of Oil Pipelines and Armenia Airbases
Byline: Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press at the UN: News Analysis
UNITED NATIONS, August 9 — With explosions all over Georgia, Russian
and U.S. representatives were similarly downbeat on the chances for
the Security Council to adopt the three sentence statement they’ve
spent two days and nights negotiating. Facts have changed too quickly
on the ground for the draft press statement, submitted Thursday night
by Russia, to have much chance of passing. Outside the Council
chamber, a well-placed diplomat clutching a Blackberry told Inner City
Press that the conflict’s impact on the BTC pipeline is the talk of
oil-trading circles. The T in the middle is Tblisi, Georgia’s capital.
At Friday’s UN noon briefing, Ban Ki-moon’s spokesperson Michele
Montas was asked what calls, if any, Ban had made about the conflict.
"None," Ms. Montas said. "He hasn’t done any special effort today to
try to reach people since the Security Council is right now examining
the situation." Inner City Press asked, How about Vijay Nambiar, who
was at the Council’s meeting Thursday night? Ms. Montas answered, "No,
we haven’t done anything specific because, as I said, it is a matter
right now in the hands of the Security Council and we’ll leave it to
the Security Council." Transcript here. And what of UN Political
chief, the American Lynn Pascoe, present at Friday’s fruitless
meeting?
Amb. Churkin and team in the Council, cheese on a string not shown
As the acting chief of UN Peacekeeping, Edmund Mulet, Saturday
briefed the Council behind closed doors, presumably on the spillover
of the conflict from South Ossetia to Abkhazia and the Kodori Gorge, a
Georgian diplomat told Inner City Press he was multitasking, trying to
arrange for a car to take his family from their misbegotten vacation
spot in the Georgian countryside back to the capital, Tblisi. "I don’t
know what the next step after that would be," he said. He was also
spinning, telling Inner City Press that Russia is flying bombing raid
from out of a rented airbase in Armenia. "It’s very bad," he
said. "Georgia has had good relations with Armenia." But what about
Nagorno-Karabakh, one wag wondered?
He said that Georgia has shot down six Russian planes. Are you
holding any pilots? Four or five, he said. They will come in handy.
One reporter analogized the situation to the cartoon in which a cat
jumps for a piece of cheese on a string, and get slapped. South
Ossetia was the cheese, Georgia was the cat, and Russia is now
slapping.
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