EU backs monitors for Georgia ceasefire

By Ingrid Melander and David Brunnstrom

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - European Union foreign ministers gave broad support on Wednesday for sending monitors to Georgia's breakaway region of South Ossetia to help supervise a French-brokered ceasefire between Georgia and Russia.

"There was strong support for European peacekeepers, there will probably be European peacekeepers," a diplomat listening to the debate at an emergency meeting in Brussels said. Another said both parties would have to agree to the deployment.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner urged the EU to take a supervisory role on the ground when he arrived to chair the rare August session of the 27 EU ministers as the guns fell silent in Georgia after a six-day war.

"The idea of having monitors -- what you call peacekeeping troops, I wouldn't call them like that -- but European controllers, monitors, facilitators, yes, yes and yes. That is how Europe should be on the ground," Kouchner told reporters.

Kouchner, who accompanied President Nicolas Sarkozy on his mission to broker a peace agreement in Moscow on Tuesday, said he was convinced Russia would accept a European presence. He did not exclude Russian troops taking part.

Despite eyewitness reports to the contrary from the region, Georgian Foreign Minister Ekaterine Tkeshelashvili said on arrival in Brussels that Russia was still attacking the Georgian town of Gori, outside South Ossetia.

"Definitely, European monitors have to be on the ground. Europe has to get engaged physically on the ground and Europe has to stop that from happening," she told reporters.

Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, who visited Georgia for the pan-European Council of Europe, cast doubt on whether Moscow would allow European monitors into zones that it had held or captured.