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Complied by Keti Baramidze
Wednesday, May 19
NATO-Russia cooperation discussed again

24 Saati reports that a group of analysts led by Madeleine Albright, the former US Secretary of State, has suggested that NATO should agree to cooperate with Russia, though Albright also hints that this step won’t be approved by all the member states of the alliance.

At the conference in Prague Albright talked about the US's "reset" relationship with Russia. She also pointed out that the NATO charter's 5th paragraph says that if a member state is under threat of attack from an aggressor the other member states are responsible for helping it, using all methods - even force. So they shouldn’t stop at anything to preserve peace in the North Atlantic region.

NATO has 26 member states at present and 40 partners, including Russia, Australia, India, Pakistan, Japan and others. Under the abovementioned agreement the alliance isn’t obliged to protect the partner states. There is however a split in the alliance which complicates the formulation of a new strategy: some states want NATO to defend its members only and others (including the USA and Great Britain) want it to undertake larger scale activities.



I don't understand Alasania's attitude: Beselia

Akhali Taoba writes that Eka Beselia, leader of the Movement “Solidarity with Illegal Prisoners”, has announced at a press conference that May 21 has been declared the Day of Solidarity With Prisoners. The great majority of political parties and the family members of prisoners support this action.

"The parties involved in defending prisoners’ rights will further this initiative but I don't know whether the National Forum or Alliance for Georgia will support it. Other parties will undoubtedly join us, but certain politicians’ extremely critical and pointless pronouncements about this really astound me. It’s beyond my understanding why they shrink from participating in such an event," states Beselia.

"Irakli Alasania’s position on this is also vague. How can he be indifferent to our initiative? We don’t want him to take part in continual demonstrations, but when such important events are organised a Mayoral candidate should certainly attend them and express solidarity by his presence. The unfortunate reality however is that everyone is acting according to his own will, without any co-ordination, and such unreasonable behaviour elucidates perfectly the mistakes being made by the opposition even at this stage," says Eka Beselia.



What did Putin and Noghaideli talk about in Russia?

Rezonansi writes that on May 9 Zurab Noghaideli and other Georgian politicians attended the Victory Day celebrations in Russia. Noghaideli's opponents advised him to stay in The Kremlin, however he is in Tbilisi now and says that at present he is concentrating on the forthcoming elections.

“At the meeting with Putin our conversation mainly concerned Russia-Georgia relations and the perspective for their improvement in the future. It doesn’t matter what we say, we can all see perfectly well that the consolidation of our country depends to a large extent on Russia," says Noghaideli.

The former Prime Minister added that we shouldn’t give ourselves bogus hopes and rely on other states, as no one really intends to fight our battle for us. Furthermore, all our partners are warning us that improving relations with Russia is vitally important if we want to resolve our present problems. If we still can’t understand, May 9 was the clear testimony of this.

In his interview the opposition leader stresses that Georgia must stop at nothing to restore its territorial integrity and promises that if Saakashvili presents a plan for reuniting our country he will stop visiting Russia.