Powell rules out support for restive regions

US Secretary of State Colin Powell said yesterday no support should be given to Georgia's restive regions, a day after Georgia accused Russia of meddling in its domestic affairs.

"No support should be given to breakaway elements seeking to weaken Georgia's territorial integrity," Powell told a meeting in Maastricht, Holland of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

Georgia's interim President Nino Burdzhanadze said at the OSCE summit on Monday that her country wanted to repair relations with Russia but not at the cost of its sovereignty.

Ms Burdzhanadze was appointed after Eduard Shevardnadze quit following mass unrest among Georgians who accused his regime of vote-rigging in parliamentary elections last month.

The new Georgian government was irritated last week when Russian officials met leaders from South Ossetia and Abkhazia which broke free of Georgian control more than a decade ago and Adzhara, which has never espoused outright separatism.

"Russia is not ready yet to begin new relations with Georgia," she said. "They want their military bases to remain on Russian territory. They want to have Georgia not as a friend but as a dependent partner."

"I want to begin to build new relations on the basis of a peaceful resolution of problems not on the basis of the syndrome of Big Brother that Russia had during its imperial past," she added.

"Our proposal is to have something like a triangle, Georgia, the US, Russia, because we have a lot of problems where the US could play a very positive role."

Western states see Georgia as a key country for a pipeline to bring Caspian oil to the Mediterranean and are watching events there closely, mindful of a chaotic civil war that gripped the country in the 1990s.

Mr Powell urged support for Georgia's new leaders after what he called last month's "revolution of the roses" and called on Russia to stick to a deal struck with the OSCE for it to scale back its forces in Georgia.

Regional leaders accuse Mikhail Saakashvili, the Georgian opposition leader who is favourite to win the January presidential election, of contemplating restoring control possibly through force over territories lost to Tbilisi for a decade or more.

The Kremlin has vowed not to interfere in Georgia's internal politics. But after Russia's meeting with regional Georgian leaders last week, the respected Moscow daily Izvestia said the Kremlin may engineer a formal break between Tbilisi and the two regions most hostile to Georgian rule.