THE SIX-POINT ceasefire agreement which French president Nicolas Sarkozy negotiated in Moscow and Tbilisi on August 12th, and which carries the signature of Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili and Mr Sarkozy, “must enter into force in its totality,” the French leader told his ambassadors at the Élysée Palace yesterday. “I will tell Mr Medvedev this tonight,” he added.
“Military forces who haven’t pulled back to where they were before the outbreak of hostilities must move without delay,” he said, not mentioning that he’d given in to Russian demands for a “security zone” inside Georgia proper, and agreed to “special operations” by the Russians in Georgia after the ceasefire.
Speaking on French radio, the French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner defended these concessions to Russia as the lesser of two evils, saying Russian tanks would otherwise have rolled into the Georgian capital Tbilisi.
“The international mechanism which must replace Russian patrols around South Ossetia must be deployed rapidly,” Mr Sarkozy continued. The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe is still negotiating with the Russians over the dispatch of 100 monitors to the area.
The French president also called for rapid international discussions on “stability and security in Abkhazia and South Ossetia”. But the Russian parliament pre-empted these talks by recognising the independence of the two enclaves. “The European Union firmly condemned the unilateral decision by Russia to recognise the independence of these territories,” Mr Sarkozy said, calling the decision “quite simply unacceptable”.
But there was no “or else” in Mr Sarkozy’s speech, no intimation of what Europe might do if Russia failed to comply with his demands.
The French leader said that no one wanted to go back to the days of the cold war; that “Nato is not an adversary but a partner for Russia”. The EU, he said, “has the will to build with [Russia] a positive relationship”.
Next Monday’s European Council in Brussels would enable the union “to define a common line on this essential dossier”, he said.
Mr Sarkozy made the dubious assertion that “the crisis in Georgia has shown for the first time that Europe can, if she wants to, be on the front line at the beginning of a conflict to search for a peaceful solution”.
Mr Sarkozy began his annual foreign policy address with a defence of French involvement in Afghanistan, where 10 French soldiers were recently killed in an ambush. Opinion polls show a majority of the French now favour a withdrawal. Earlier this week, Mr Sarkozy said France will lose her rank as a middle power if she pulled out of Afghanistan.
He had justified more than doubling the French presence in Afghanistan by claiming it would enable Paris to influence Washington’s conduct of the war.
“They fell in the service of a just cause, in the framework of a mission approved by the UN: the struggle against terrorism, the struggle for our values, for freedom and human rights in a country martyred by obscurantist barbarity,” Mr Sarkozy said of the dead French soldiers. “I hope that no one has forgotten images of lapidations in stadiums, of mutilations, of women’s rights violated as they have never been before.”
Espousing US president George Bush’s line that the West is fighting terrorism in Afghanistan, he added: “Our soldiers fell to protect France, to protect the French from the direct threat of terrorism, much of which springs from this part of the world. It is the struggle against terrorism that is at stake in Afghanistan.”
Mr Sarkozy briefly mentioned Ireland and the Lisbon Treaty. “As president of the European Council, my duty is to bring the European family together,” he said. “The Irish people deserve respect and to be listened to. At the same time, we all need the Lisbon Treaty. With the prime minister Brian Cowen, we will identify the guarantees that will enable Europe to make this new step.
“If necessary, I shall return to Dublin. I am convinced we must bring everyone to the Treaty of Lisbon. I told our Irish friends we respect them, but we must hear other Europeans who want new institutions.”