CENTRE OF CONVERGENCE

A new "painful point" has appeared in relations between Moscow and Tbilisi. The European Court of Human Rights has received a suit from Georgia against Russia. The Georgian Ministry of Justice said that Russia is being accused of systematically violating the rights and freedoms of Georgian migrants during the deportation actively carried out by the Russian authorities at the end of the last year. In Tbilisi's opinion, this was nothing other than eviction because on the basis of national affiliation. "The basis for preparing and filing this suit was a gross violation of human rights during the deportation of thousands of Georgian citizens and people of Georgian origin from Russia (2006)," the Ministry of Justice said in a report issued in Tbilisi.

Judges in Strasbourg will have to study a lot of materials. Tbilisi's suit includes 200 pages of printed text and 30 hours of video tapes. The Georgian side insists that when relations between Moscow and Tbilisi worsened in the autumn of 2006, "about 5,000 Georgian citizens" were deported from Russia to Georgia for breaking the Russian migration law. Seven people died during deportation. The parliamentary secretary of the Georgian government, Giorgi Khuroshvili, told journalists that "the Georgian side had spent a long time gathering evidence". As a result, "five boxes containing materials on the cases of those deported from Russia" were sent to Strasbourg. The representative of the Georgian government also stressed that "the suit was not politicized and was based on specific facts and evidence of human rights violations". "Tbilisi is sure that the court will examine these facts in line with its main principles contained in the main human rights documents," Khuroshvili stressed.

Moscow reacted to the Georgian suit immediately. "Such actions do not promote the normalization of relations between Russia and Georgia, which we take as a basis in our work on the Georgian direction," an official spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, Mikhail Kamynin, said. In turn, the Federal Migration Service (FMS) of Russia cited its main argument: we detained and deported from Russian territory only those Georgian citizens who were visiting the Russian Federation illegally, had overdue visas and did not have work permits.

Observers are not trying to guess the court verdict. On the one hand, such words as "illegal migration", "overdue visa" and "work without a work permit" have an immediate effect on the Europeans. But on the other hand, the anti-Georgian campaign when, according to Russian TV reports, even Moscow school teachers were required to make a list of Georgian pupils was not welcomed in Europe either.

However, this problem has other aspects as well. The reports about the suit appeared just before Russia imposed a ban on foreigners working in the sphere of retail sale when only a very lazy person would not predict mass inspections at markets and deportations of "the culprits". The attention of the Strasbourg court to the incidents that occurred during the Georgian deportation allows us to hope that now the same FMS will be more "careful".

Moreover, the day when the suit filed with the European Court of Human Rights was news number one in Tbilisi, the House of Representatives of the US Congress approved a bill backing Georgia's and Ukraine's entry into NATO, which was earlier approved by the secretariat of the House of Representatives and endorsed by the Senate. The document says that Tbilisi and Kiev are trying their best to meet the criteria of the organization. For this reason, the USA called on their NATO allies to support the admittance of "worthy states". Congress also decided, within the framework of preparations for membership of NATO, to include selected countries in the American programme "on security assistance", for which the US federal budget of 2008 is planning to allocate "funds that will be needed to help Albania, Croatia, Georgia, Macedonia and Ukraine". In the period 2008-12, it is planned to spend about 30m dollars on this purpose.

According to the well-established American legislative procedure, now the bill called "NATO Freedom Consolidation Act of 2007" has been submitted to US President George Bush for signing. In turn, journalists already recall that on 13 March, the Georgian parliament unanimously, with 160 votes, adopted the text of the declaration on Georgia's full and urgent membership of NATO. The declaration is supplemented with a memorandum of political forces which was signed by the leaders of all parliamentary factions and political parties. One month before, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili said that Georgia will join NATO in 2009. "For us, this means that we will become a member of the strongest military-political alliance in the history of mankind. Georgia has dreamt of this for centuries," Saakashvili said.

Meanwhile, most observers are sure that "the NATO breakthrough" and the suit filed with the Strasbourg court are manifestations of the same strategy - the Georgian authorities seriously hope to involve European organizations, NATO and the USA in their "silent standoff" with Moscow. Today, against the background of the "cooling" in Russia's relations with the West, first of all with the USA, Tbilisi is really managing to enlist solid "moral support". Specifically, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made a demonstrative statement recently. "The Bush administration will continue actively developing its relations with former Soviet states bordering on Russia, although the Russian side has `difficulty` understanding this. I understand that after many decades and even many centuries of absolutely different mutual relations with these countries, Russia has difficulties at times when it sees them turning into free and independent states with their own international relations. But for Russia it is important to realize that the USA will take these countries equally, not as Russian vassals," Rice said.

At the same time, stressing that "tensions emerge" in American-Russian relations when it comes to the "consequences of the Cold War" or the consequences of the downfall of the Soviet Union", Rice highly rated relations between Russia and the USA on the whole.

Thus, the words of Condoleezza Rice cannot be assessed as anything other than a clear warning to the Kremlin. What is more, if until recently the United States preferred talking about interaction with Russia in the post-Soviet area, it has now made it absolutely clear that Washington is ready to act without heeding Moscow's grievances. It is not difficult to notice that among all the countries of the post-Soviet area with which the USA is ready to develop relations, Rice mentioned by "name" only Georgia where the interests of the West and Russia have clashed more heatedly.

Perhaps, it is not enough for talking about the beginning of a "cold war" in a separate region. Nevertheless, it is obvious that Moscow's pressure on Tbilisi is not just, or to be more precise, is not so much an issue of mutual relations between Russia and Georgia.