- TBILISI -- The Pentagon is
to privatise its military presence in Georgia by contracting a team of
retired US military officers to equip and advise the former Soviet republic's
crumbling military, embellishing an eastward expansion that has enraged
Moscow.
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- After a Georgian appeal for support to the US defence
secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, during a visit last month, a team of 20-30
private defence consultants are already in Tbilisi. Their employer, a Washington
security firm, Cubic, has a three-year $15m contract with the Pentagon
to support all aspects of the Georgian ministry of defence.
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- A senior western diplomat said: "One of the goals
is to make the army units capable of seizing and defending a given objective.
The consultants will work with US defence liaisons in the US Tbilisi embassy
and the European command in Stuttgart." He said the programme could
continue for much longer than three years.
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- About 60 US military trainers arrived in Georgia in the
summer of 2002 to help the dilapidated military deal with the perceived
threat of terrorists linked to al-Qaida hiding in the Pankisi gorge, on
the border with Russian Chechnya. The "train and equip" programme,
which left the Kremlin silently fuming at a Pentagon presence on its southern
border, was supposed to end this year.
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- Georgia has long sought a US base on its soil. "Our
desire was to continue the train and equip programme, and [Mr Rumsfeld's
response to our request] was this idea," Tedo Japaridze, the foreign
minister, told the Guardian. A Georgian security official said the Cubic
team would also improve protection of the pipeline that will take Caspian
oil from Baku to Turkey through Georgia. Georgia has already expressed
its gratitude by agreeing to send 500 troops to Iraq.
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- The western diplomat said the US was also considering
creating in Georgia a "forward operational area", where equipment
and fuel could be stored, similar to support structures in the Gulf.
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- The two moves would combine to give Washington a "virtual
base" - stored equipment and a loyal Georgian military - without the
diplomatic inconvenience of setting up a permanent base in a country where
Moscow already has two controversial bases.
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- Under an international agreement, the Russian facilities
should be dismantled within three years. But Mr Japaridze said: "We
have been having that discussion for five years, so it is quite surreal."
The Kremlin has said it will withdraw by 2011.
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- The diplomat said there remained 80-100 Chechen militants
in the Pankisi gorge. He said "a handful" of them were international
terrorists linked to al-Qaida, and that they could move across the borders,
particularly into Azerbaijan. Georgian officials have long insisted that
the gorge is no longer a problem.
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- Meanwhile, it has emerged that President George Bush
secretly wrote to Eduard Shevardnadze in the week after his resignation
as Georgia's president, thanking him for his historic decision that brought
a bloodless end to weeks of mass protest. A source close to the ex-president
said: "The letter was personal. It said he had made a very good choice,
and that the new leaders lacked experience and could benefit from his."
Mr Japaridze confirmed the letter was "personal in nature".
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004
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- http://www.guardian.co.uk/georgia/story/0,14065,1116716,00.html
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