NATO Delays MAP for Georgia
NATO said no to Georgia and Ukraine’s bid for Membership Action Plans (MAP) at its summit in Bucharest, but said it would review the decision at its foreign ministerial summit in December.
The final communiquй of the summit is still unavailable.
The U.S. national security advisor, Stephen Hadley, said on April 3 that the NATO leaders had mandated their foreign ministers to take a decision on the matter. “It does not have to come back to a NATO summit,” he added.
Meanwhile, lawmakers from the ruling party in Tbilisi have already said that NATO’s decision amounted to an indirect veto by Russia.
“The first and decisive factor was Russian pressure,” MP Nino Nakashidze, the chair of the parliamentary committee for Euro-Atlantic integration, said. “Russia has said directly that in the event of NATO enlargement and MAP for Georgia and Ukraine, they would perceive it as a direct provocation against Russia. Of course, this pressure by Russia was a decisive factor in the decision-making process.”
Some opposition lawmakers, however, immediately pointed the finger at, what they called, the Georgian authorities’ failure to follow democratic reform commitments.
“Granting MAP to Georgia was postponed because Georgia has a government responsible for the events of November 7,” MP Davit Berdzenishvili of the Republican Party said, referring to the break-up of anti-government demonstrations and a raid on Imedi TV last November. “The denial of MAP to Georgia at this stage was defined by the [position] of the EU founder-states – three big and three smaller ones. When Germany, Italy, France, Luxemburg, Belgium, Holland, Spain and several other countries are against, it is nonsense to declare them as agents of Gazprom and Putin.”
