ASTANA (AFP) - A summit of ex-Soviet republics billed as forging a common front against terrorism after the Beslan school siege descended into acrimony as Georgia accused Russia of double standards.
Georgia's new pro-Western President Mikhail Saakashvili lashed out at his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin for Moscow's ties with two breakaway Georgian republics.
"These questions cannot be solved by double-standards," Saakashvili said at the closing press conference of the Astana summit, in the capital of Kazakhstan.
"They represent a threat to all, they represent a threat to Georgia, a threat to Russia, and a threat to all humanity.
"Russia can and should and should play a positive role. All contacts should be at a state level," he said.
The 12-nation Commonwealth of Independent States issued a closing statement focused on common anti-terrorist measures and expressing solidarity with Russia after a wave of terror acts blamed on Chechen separatist rebels.
These culminated in a three-day school hostage siege at Beslan in southern Russia which ended in a massacre that killed 339 people, half of them children.
But Georgia, which accuses Russia of encouraging separatism in its former satellite state as a means of weakening Tbilisi, says this contradicts Moscow's tough stance against pro-independence rebels in Chechnya.
Last month, Georgia reacted angrily after Putin held talks with the self-declared prime minister of separatist Abkhazia ahead of controversial elections in the breakaway republic.
The spat worsened after Russia restored railway traffic between Moscow and Abkhazia after a 12-year pause.
Putin, however, rounded on Georgia for its attempts to rein in the renegade regions since Saakashvili came to power early this year vowing to reunite his fractured country.
"An economic blockade, not to mention military pressure, do not result in resolving problems," he said.
And he linked the Chechen rebel leaders to the international terror network of Osama bin Laden, saying there could be no question of negotiating with them.
"Bin Laden has twice offered Europe negotiations and no one thinks of negotiating with him.
"Naturally the atrocities we encountered in Beslan gave us the complete moral right to insist that the people who orchestrated this are part of the terrorist internationale," he said.
Putin meanwhile took over once again as head of the CIS, ending a short 18-month period during which he had handed over the reins to Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma.
Russian leaders have traditionally headed the CIS, a loose grouping of 12 former Soviet republics, since its creation in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Russia has long sought to use the ex-Soviet club as a means to extend its influence in Moscow's former satellite republics, but it has remained little more than a talking-shop.
This time, as usual at CIS summits, there were no-shows.
Turkmenistan's reclusive President Saparmurat Niyazov declined to attend due to a prior medical appointment.
The Moldovan leader Vladimir Voronin also stayed away from Astana, criticising the body as ineffective.
He said the Astana talks would be dominated by a meeting of four former Soviet states -- Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine -- which aim to establish an economic zone called the Common Economic Space (CES).
The commonwealth includes all the former Soviet republics except for the three Baltic states Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which have recently joined NATO and the European Union.