WASHINGTON, Aug 12 (AFP) - The United States on Thursday urged Russia and Georgia to end rising tension over the separatist Georgian region of South Ossetia where deadly hostilities have broken out and threaten to escalate.
"We are urging Georgian officials to move quickly to avoid further conflict," deputy State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said.
"We're also making the point with Russian officials that it's important to work with the South Ossetian authorities to end hostilities immediately."
He said US diplomats had been in touch with Georgian authorities in Tbilisi and that the message had been conveyed to Moscow in meetings with officials from the Russian embassy in Washington.
Ereli also told reporters that the United States backed Russia's call for an emergency meeting of the so-called "Joint Control Commission," a tripartite Georgian-Ossetian-Russian commission charged with resolving the festering dispute.
His comments came after Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili raised the prospect of "ethnic cleansing" after fighting in South Ossetia had killed four soldiers and Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Valery Loshinin said the situation was "worsening by the hour and could spin out of control at any moment."
Eduard Kokoity, the self-styled South Ossetian president, appeared on Russian television and vowed to continue fighting to break from Georgia.
The current round of violence is the most serious since May and comes amid heightened tensions over the fate of South Ossetia, a mosaic of villages inhabited by both ethnic Georgians and Ossetians that has enjoyed a measure of de facto independence since the early 1990s.
The Georgian government and officials in South Ossetia's self-declared capital, Tskhinvali, have traded blame over who started the latest fighting, which has included exchanges of automatic gunfire and occasional mortar shelling.
Saakashvili has vowed to reassert Tbilisi's authority over the entirety of his Caucasian country, which splintered into several separatist regions in the wake of the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.