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Georgian Foreign Minister Maia Panjikidze (left) and NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen at NATO Headquarters earlier this year.
Georgian Foreign Minister Maia Panjikidze (left) and NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen at NATO Headquarters earlier this year.

Speaking on June 25 at the NATO foreign ministers' meeting in Brussels, Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said the organization's September summit in Wales will not address the question of granting Georgia a Membership Action Plan (MAP).

Instead, according to Rasmussen, in recognition of the progress Georgia has made towards meeting the criteria for membership, NATO will offer Georgia a "substantive package" of measures to strengthen cooperation.

Following a meeting with Georgian Foreign Minister Maia Panjikidze the previous day, Rasmussen had stressed NATO's readiness "to support [and] assist Georgia in their ambitious defence reforms."

Rasmussen said the specifics of that package are to be hammered out in talks with Georgia over the next few months. But NATO Special Representative for the South Caucasus and Central Asia James Appathurai characterized it as "unprecedented" and "connecting Georgia to NATO more deeply and more substantially than it has ever been before -- and, I believe, more than any other non-NATO country."

That may be an overstatement, however: the Reuters news agency reported that the package could comprise closer political cooperation, training for the Georgian military, and beefing up the NATO liaison office in Tbilisi. Georgia's Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration, Aleksi Petriashvili, told journalists that the latter proposal "is not really what the Georgian authorities aspire to."

Appathurai acknowledged that many people in Georgia will be disappointed that the long-hoped for MAP -- the last stage prior to a formal invitation to join the alliance – is not forthcoming. Neither he nor Rasmussen offered any explanation for the decision. According to unnamed NATO diplomats quoted by Reuters, up to a dozen of NATO's 28 members, including Germany and France, are opposed to granting Georgia a MAP. Another source reportedly estimated the split as 50:50.

Those diplomats explained that that some NATO members argue that offering Georgia an MAP at this stage would only serve to antagonize Russia, while others protest that Russia should not be a factor in any decision regarding NATO enlargement. Rasmussen appears to support the latter approach: he stressed that "NATO's door remains open and no third country has a veto over NATO enlargement." A related question is whether NATO could protect Georgia if it came under attack.

In the wake of the NATO-Georgia Commission session in Brussels on June 4, Georgian Defense Minister Irakli Alasania said it was "clearly visible that the majority of our partners in NATO clearly voice that Georgia is ready for a MAP." Prime Minister Irakli Gharibashvili, for his part, warned against creating "false expectations," as was the case in the months preceding the April 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest.

The Georgian authorities had pinned their hopes on securing a MAP on that occasion; some diplomats, as Appathurai noted this week, believe it was the alliance's failure to propose one that emboldened Russia to send troops into Georgia in August 2008 in response to the Georgian artillery attack on Tskhinvali, capital of the breakaway Republic of South Ossetia.

Georgian parliament speaker Davit Usupashvili predicted early this year that the failure to offer Georgia a MAP at the Wales summit could undermine domestic political stability and substantiate the argument that Georgia has nothing to lose by resorting to force to bring South Ossetia and Abkhazia back under its control.

The announcement earlier this week by Anatoly Bibilov that the newly-elected South Ossetian parliament of which he is speaker will start preparations for a referendum on whether the region should become part of the Russian Federation also lends force to that argument.

-- Liz Fuller

A screen grab of the film "Ordered to Forget," which looks at a reported atrocity that occurred during the Chechen-Ingush deportation of 1944.
A screen grab of the film "Ordered to Forget," which looks at a reported atrocity that occurred during the Chechen-Ingush deportation of 1944.
The Chechen film "Ordered to Forget" («Приказано забыть») which tells how some 700 residents of the Chechen village of Haybakh were burned alive at the time of the February 1944 deportation of the entire Chechen and Ingush nations on Soviet leader Joseph Stalin's orders, was screened on June 20 at the Moscow International Film Festival.

The premiere had originally been scheduled to take place in Grozny last month, but Russia's Ministry of Culture refused to certify the film for public distribution on the grounds that, since the archives of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD, the forerunner of the present-day Interior Ministry) contain no evidence that the atrocity ever took place, the film constitutes "a falsification of history" that could give rise to interethnic hatred, according to its Chechen producer Ruslan Kokanayev.

According to Kokanayev, it was intended to give an impression of life in the Checheno-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR) during the period 1939-1945, i.e. at the height of the Stalinist terror. "We try to show that the story of Haybakh is interwoven human tragedies," he explained. "Some were forced to give orders, others to carry them out. A few tried to resist, a few refused to kill [people]."

WATCH: A trailer for the film "Ordered to Forget"

Sulban Khasimikov, director of the Grozny film studio, said the movie, which was financed by Chechen businessmen, is not about the 1944 deportation as such. He said it is in part a love story, which at the same time showcases the customs and traditions of the Chechen people and the "difficulties" of life at that time.

Kokanayev says the Ministry of Culture did not raise any objections when he first submitted the scenario for approval, and that, when the finished film was first screened in Moscow in early February, Union of Cinematographers of Russia First Deputy Chairman Sergei Lazaruk praised it and said he hoped it would be a success. Kokanayev plans to contest the ban in court.

The rationale for the Haybakh killings was shockingly banal: Stalin's Mingrelian henchman Lavrenti Beria had issued orders that the entire Chechen and Ingush nations (an estimated 485,000 people) were to be rounded up, loaded onto trains and deported to Kazakhstan and Central Asia within 15 days (February 23-March 9). Some local officials realized that they would be unable to meet that deadline due to logistical constraints (inclement weather conditions, lack of transport or gasoline), and so, rather than incur the wrath of the regime by failing to comply, they simply killed the population of some villages on the spot.

In Haybakh, some 700 people, including twin infant boys born that morning, were herded into a barn that was set alight. Those who tried to escape the flames were mown down by mortar fire. Some 200 people died on the same day in the Ingush village of Targim. Similar mass killings took place in the Chechen mountain village of Melkhesty and at Kezenoy-Am, the mountain lake that Chechen Republic head Ramzan Kadyrov is transforming into a resort.

In his landmark "secret speech" to the 20th congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in February 1956, then Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin's crimes, including the deportations of the Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars, Balkars, Karachais, Kumyks, and other ethnic groups, and gave the green light for their rehabilitation and return home.

It was Khrushchev, too, who ordered the first investigation into what happened in Haybakh after meeting with Dziyaudin Malsagov. As a senior official in the Checheno-Ingush ASSR Justice Ministry, Malsagov had witnessed the events first hand and subsequently submitted written reports, first, in January 1945, to Stalin, and then to U.S.S.R. Council of Ministers Chairman Georgy Malenkov.

The findings of the Khrushchev-era probe were never made public, however, and Haybakh remained a taboo subject until the late 1980s, when then CPSU General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev launched his policy of glasnost. First to raise the issue was young journalist Said Bitsoyev, now deputy editor of the Moscow daily "Novye izvestiya." In response to his article, the prosecutor's office in Chechnya's Urus-Martan district opened a criminal case in 1989.

Ruslan Tulikov, former ideological secretary of the local Communist Party district committee, now deputy administrator of Urus Martan district, described in a recent interview how he and a group of others began digging in the ruins of Haybakh and found charred bones, together with coins, earrings and spent bullets. He recalls how Malsagov showed up a few days after they started digging and explained to them precisely what happened.

Both Kokanayev and the Chechen authorities have challenged the Ministry of Culture's claim that no documentary evidence of the mass killing exists. Chechen parliament speaker Dukvakha Abdurakhmanov told the official Chechen daily "Vesti respubliky" in early June that "we have such documents and they will be made public in the next few days." He mentioned in particular Malsagov's letter to Malenkov. But neither that missive nor any other relevant materials have appeared in the Chechen press to date.

Kokanayev, for his part, told Caucasus Knot that, in writing the script for the film, he drew on the expertise of a group of Chechen scholars who co-authored a book on the Haybakh killings based partly on the testimony of witnesses. (One of those authors, Salamat Gayev, was five years old at the time; he, his mother, and three siblings managed to escape death by hiding in the surrounding forest.) Kokanayev further points out that the film includes at the very end footage of Mumadi Elgakayev, one of the last remaining eyewitnesses, a few months before his death. He is unable to speak for weeping.

-- Liz Fuller

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About This Blog

This blog presents analyst Liz Fuller's personal take on events in the region, following on from her work in the "RFE/RL Caucasus Report." It also aims, to borrow a metaphor from Tom de Waal, to act as a smoke detector, focusing attention on potential conflict situations and crises throughout the region. The views are the author's own and do not represent those of RFE/RL.

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