Last update - 00:00 01/11/2006
Georgian president compares his country to Israel
By The Associated Press
Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili compared current Russian policies toward Georgians to 18th-century czarist edicts against Jews during an official visit Tuesday, marking marked a further strengthening of ties between Israel and the former Soviet republic.
Russian policies singling out Georgians for discrimination and deportation were reminiscent of czarist policies dispossessing Jews, Saakashvili charged, and were one of the reasons that "Georgians and Jews understand each other on a visceral level."
Saakashvili, whose country is embroiled in a feud with Russia over Russia's support for secessionists in two Georgian regions, is to meet with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and other officials during his three-day visit.
Saakashvili spoke at an energy conference at Haifa University on Tuesday evening.
The Georgian reformist leader noted his country's "complications" with Russia and compared Georgia to Israel. "I know what it means to try to build one's nation when danger is knocking at the door," he said.
Georgia is important to world fuel supplies because three important pipelines - two for oil and one for natural gas - pass through the state.
Saakashvili stressed that the pipelines symbolized his country's ties to the West, and urged Israelis to invest in Georgia, where he said business opportunities "abound."
Another former Soviet republic represented at the Haifa energy conference was Kazakhstan, a rising central Asian power thought to possess three to five percent of the world's oil reserves.
Kasim Massimov, Kazakhstan's deputy prime minister, said Kazakhstan was interested both in selling oil to Israel and in getting Israeli investments as part of the country's push to diversify its economy, currently heavily dependent on oil sales. Massimov told reporters that relations between his country and Israel "have a very big future."
He said ties between Israel and Kazakhstan, a moderate Islamic state, also have symbolic value for both countries.
"Our cooperation will be a good example for cooperation between moderate Islamic countries and the Western world and Israel," Massimov said.
"Beyond economic ties, Israel has an interest in good relations with countries at the moderate end of the Islamic world, like Kazakhstan," Prof. Yaacov Roi, a Central Asia expert at Tel Aviv University, told The Associated Press.
Noting neighboring Iran's drive for nuclear weapons, Massimov said his country had inherited a sizable Soviet nuclear arsenal but had voluntarily disarmed.
"Such weapons bring nothing but misfortune," he said.
National Infrastructures Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer also spoke at the conference, proposing extending to Israel an existing pipeline from Central Asia through Georgia to Turkey, turning Israel into "a passage state" through which oil and natural gas would be sent to the Far East instead of being shipped around the African continent.
"My dream is to place the state of Israel in the first tier of countries in the field of energy, using Israel's strategic location in the Middle East," Ben-Eliezer said.