NATO war games in Georgia. By- Dr. Abdul Ruff Colachal

After the Russia-led SCO military exercises in Tajikistan recently, the US-led NATO has launched military exercises last week to continue for days in former Soviet Georgia after heavy criticism from neighboring Russia and a brief mutiny in the Georgian military. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili accused Russia, which fought a war with Georgia last year, of trying to foment a coup after a local tank battalion rebelled against the Tbilisi government on May 05. But Moscow denied involvement. Saakashvili's domestic political opponents, who have paralyzed central Tbilisi with tents in the streets and weeks of protests demanding he resign, questioned the Georgian government's explanation for the mutiny. Georgia's government claimed that the mutiny at a tank base east of the capital Tbilisi was part of a Russian attempt to disrupt the NATO exercises, as well as to foment a wider rebellion against Saakashvili. Russia said the accusations were "insane" and accused Saakashvili of trying to shift the blame for weeks of opposition protests demanding he resign over his record on democracy and last year's disastrous military defeat.

The mutiny in Georgia ended without bloodshed but cast a shadow over the start of the month-long exercises, in which over 1,000 soldiers from NATO countries including the USA and allies will practice a crisis response and train peacekeepers. Soldiers began arriving on 06 May, before practicing staff procedures in a simulated NATO-led crisis response operation. They will conduct field training for peacekeeping missions in the second half of May. The exercises are being held at a former Russian air force base east of Tbilisi and a few kilometers from the Mukhrovani base, where the government said tank commanders had rebelled on Tuesday and were arrested several hours later.

The war games, a year in the planning, have increased tension between Russia and NATO, just as the two sides resumed formal contacts suspended after Moscow's war with Georgia last August. NATO said this month's exercises should not be misused. "This exercise has nothing to do with Georgia, it has nothing to do with Russia," said a spokeswoman for NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer. "Georgia is just hosting the exercise and nobody should interpret the exercise in a different way and use it for other purposes." Russia is deeply annoyed by the NATO‘s continuing tirade against the former Soviet state.

NATO, which invited many non-member countries to take part as well, insists the exercises pose no threat to Russia. They are seen as a gesture of solidarity with Georgia, whose NATO membership ambitions have been put on hold since the August war. Russia fiercely opposes membership for Georgia and Ukraine as an encroachment on its ex-Soviet sphere of influence. Armenia, Russia's closest ally in the South Caucasus, joined Moscow's friends Kazakhstan, Serbia and Moldova in pulling out of the NATO exercises they had been invited to join despite not being members of the alliance. Georgia and Azerbaijan, also not in NATO, are the only former Soviet republics left taking part.

The Georgian Defense Ministry said NATO would spend the next few days setting up a staff headquarters at the Vaziani base outside Tbilisi ahead of field exercises next week. Russia has strongly criticized the exercises on its southern flank as "muscle-flexing." Its envoy to NATO Dmitry Rogozin said the alliance would be better off holding the maneuvers "in a madhouse" than in a country where troops were "rioting against their own president."

Russia crushed a Georgian military attempt to retake the pro-Moscow “separatist” region of South Ossetia last August, routing Tbilisi's army and prompting criticism in the West for a "disproportionate response." Further souring the mood, Russia announced the expulsion of two Canadian staff at NATO's information center in Moscow -- a response to the Western military alliance's decision to throw two Russian diplomats out of Brussels last week over a spying scandal.

A Word

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Joint military exercises have come to stay as a contemporary fashion in international arena as groups of nations from different regions get together to conduct war games in regions aimed at threatening their common opponents or enemies, but they do state that these joint military games have got noting to do with other issues of the region concerned and are not targeted to any other set of nations. Last summer Russia and Georgia went to war over the fate of two of Georgia’s breakaway regions South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Russia is furious as it views Georgia as within its own sphere of influence and does not want the country to join NATO.  

As emerging strong economies Russia and Iran assert themselves globally, the USA finds itself in a fix while several others like India ad Israel are trying to use the opportunity to make USA support their colonial ambitions. Both Russia and China are using SCO to reinvent their lost power status, although the SCO does not equal the NATO in any sense. USA employs all tricks to keep China under its influence to “democratize” the communist state, while Moscow is keen to thwart all such American attempts.

On May 09, warning the ANTO misadventures in region considered backyard to Russian natural interests, the Russian President Dmitri Medvedev has issued a stern warning to any countries considering what he called "military adventures". Medvedev said they would be met with the proper response. He was speaking at a military parade in Moscow commemorating the victory over Nazi Germany in World War II. The speech comes as tensions have flared up again as Georgia hosts a military exercise this month organized by the NATO military alliance. Speaking in front of thousands of troops on parade in Red Square, Medvedev said that the Soviet Union’s defeat of German forces during World War II was a great lesson to all nations which was still relevant today. Because, he said, some countries were resorting to military adventures. Although he did not specify which countries he was referring to, it is widely assumed this warning was aimed at neighboring Georgia. Some military analysts are warning there could be further conflict in the region.

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Yours Sincerely,

Dr. Abdul Ruff Colachal

Columnist & Independent Researcher in World Affairs,

The only Indian to have gone through entire India, a fraud and terror nation,
South Asia.