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As UN Stalls on Georgia, Talk of Oil Pipelines and
Armenia Airbases
Byline: Matthew Russell Lee of
Inner City Press at the UN: News Analysis
UNITED NATIONS,
August 9 -- With explosions all
over Georgia, Russian and U.S. representatives were similarly downbeat
on the
chances for the Security Council to adopt the three sentence statement
they've
spent two
days and nights negotiating. Facts have changed too quickly on the
ground for the draft press statement, submitted Thursday night by
Russia, to
have much chance of passing. Outside the Council chamber, a well-placed
diplomat clutching a Blackberry told Inner City Press that the
conflict's
impact on the BTC pipeline is the talk of oil-trading circles. The T in
the
middle is Tblisi, Georgia's capital.
At
Friday's UN noon briefing, Ban Ki-moon's spokesperson Michele Montas
was asked what
calls, if any, Ban had made about the conflict. "None," Ms. Montas
said. " He hasn’t done any special effort today
to try to
reach people since the Security Council is right now examining the
situation."
Inner City Press asked, How
about Vijay
Nambiar, who was at the Council's meeting Thursday night? Ms. Montas
answered,
"No, we haven’t done anything specific because, as I said, it is a
matter
right now in the hands of the Security Council and we’ll leave it to
the
Security Council." Transcript here.
And what of UN Political chief, the American Lynn
Pascoe, present at Friday's fruitless meeting?
Amb. Churkin and team in the Council, cheese
on a string not shown
As the acting
chief of UN Peacekeeping, Edmund Mulet, Saturday briefed the Council
behind
closed doors, presumably on the spillover of the conflict from South
Ossetia to
Abkhazia and the Kodori Gorge, a Georgian diplomat told Inner City
Press he was
multitasking, trying to arrange for a car to take his family from their
misbegotten vacation spot in the Georgian countryside back to the
capital,
Tblisi. "I don't know what the next step after that would be," he
said. He was also spinning, telling Inner City Press that Russia is
flying
bombing raid from out of a rented airbase in Armenia. "It's very
bad," he said. "Georgia has had good relations with Armenia."
But what about Nagorno-Karabakh, one wag wondered?
He said
that Georgia has shot down six Russian planes. Are you holding any
pilots? Four or five, he said. They will
come in
handy.
One
reporter analogized the situation to the cartoon in which a cat jumps
for a
piece of cheese on a string, and get slapped. South Ossetia was the
cheese,
Georgia was the cat, and Russia is now slapping.
Watch this
site.
And
this --
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