These actions resulted in the negotiation process for settlement of the Georgian-Abkhaz coming to a complete halt. Sukhumi refuses to conduct any negotiations with the official authorities of Georgia until Tbilisi withdraws its armed forces from the upper part of the Kodori Gorge. This demand found reflection in the latest UN Security Council resolutions on Abkhazia, Georgia (1716, 1752, 1781 and 1808), whose provisions indicate that the Georgian side must ensure conformance of the situation in Upper Kodori to the 1994 Moscow Agreement.
According to information coming in from, inter alia, peacekeepers’ posts of the Collective CIS Peacekeeping Force (CIS PKF) in the Georgian-Abkhaz zone of conflict, recording both the transfer to Upper Kodori of weapons, fuel and lubricants, food and other supplies and of Georgian armed forces personnel, the total strength of army and police units in the upper part of the Kodori Gorge already exceeds 1,500 men.
Analysis of the structure of the armed forces present in this region leads to the conclusion that a bridgehead is being prepared for the start of military operations against Abkhazia. Apart from the own police of the “Abkhazian government in exile,” units of Georgian special forces, of criminal and patrol police from the Samegrelo and Zemo Svanetia regions, of counterintelligence, and Georgian Defense Ministry troops are present in Upper Kodori. In addition, there is artillery (several 122-mm guns, and mortars) there. Georgian air force planes on a regular basis make flights entering the peacekeeping forces’ zone of responsibility. On March 18 and April 20, 2008 unmanned spy planes belonging to the Georgian side were shot down in the security zone.
On September 27, 2006 Georgian law enforcement bodies rudely arrested in Tbilisi and Batumi several Russian army officers and other members of the Group of Russian Forces in Transcaucasia (GRFT), whose principal functions were to ensure the withdrawal of Russian military bases under the relevant Russian-Georgian agreement. Absurd charges of espionage and of involvement in terrorist acts were brought against them. The GRFT Headquarters building in Tbilisi was blocked for several days.
According to the media statement of Marat Kulakhmetov, commander of the Joint Peacekeeping Force (JPKF) in the Georgian-Ossetian zone of conflict, members of Georgian special troops on September 29, 2006 attacked a vehicle of the North Ossetian battalion of the peacekeeping force as it left the Avnevi village and beat up the peacekeeper that was in it, Sergeant G. Kudziyev.
On October 25, 2006 Azhara, an inhabited point in the upper part of the Kodori Gorge, came under artillery fire. The shooting attack coincided with the visit to the district of the Georgian interior minister, Vano Merabishvili. Official Tbilisi rushed to accuse the Abkhaz military and Russian peacekeepers of this incident.
But later, two investigation teams of the UN Observer Mission in Georgia (UNOMIG) that worked in Azhara and Tkvarcheli refuted the Georgian version of the events. It turned out that three rocket missiles of the BM-21 Grad system had indeed been fired, yet not from Abkhaz-controlled territory or the CIS PKF zone of responsibility, as Tbilisi had claimed, but from an area located directly in the upper part of the Kodori Gorge, that is from territory under Georgia’s “full control”. It was also established that the rocket missiles had not exploded because of the absence of fuses in them. Thus, a classic picture of a staged provocation clearly emerges.
On the night of March 11-12, 2007 the villages of Azhara, Gentsvishi and Chkhalta in Upper Kodori, the seat of the “Abkhazian government in exile,” came under fire. The Georgian side came up with assertions that they had been fired on by two MI-24 helicopters that had flown in from Russia and simultaneously by artillery guns and mortars from Abkhaz-controlled territory.
The Russian Ministry of Defense and the Sukhumi authorities denied involvement in the incident. It was stressed that the terrain of the gorge combined with the weather conditions of that night had made participation of aerial vehicles throughout the incident impossible. Besides, it did not appear possible to conduct rocket artillery fire simultaneously with the use of helicopters. These considerations were taken into account by the UNOMIG Joint Fact-Finding Team, whose report did not confirm the accusations brought forward by the Georgian side.
In March-April 2007, during the Abkhazian parliament election campaign, the Georgian side launched an extensive provocative activity along the ceasefire line in the security zone and in the Gali District. Several abductions of local-level Abkhaz leaders were carried out. Georgian students organized a series of anti-Russian rallies in front of the observation posts of the CIS PKF. A Georgian military-patriotic youth camp called “Patriot” was opened in direct proximity to the ceasefire line.
Despite the UN Secretary General’s recommendation to dismantle the camp as an object directly provoking the Abkhaz side, Tbilisi continues sending new groups of Georgian youth there. Moreover, Georgian President Saakashvili subjected the recommendations of Ban Ki-moon to sharp criticism, calling them “meaningless” and “amoral.”
On August 7, 2007, the Georgian side charged that, on the evening before, two Su-25 planes “with Russian identification markings” had intruded into the airspace of Georgia and had fired a missile at the Georgian radar station in the Gori region, which, by the way, did not suffer.
The leadership of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces categorically denied the fact of any flights by Russian aircraft at that time in the airspace adjoining the territory of Georgia. The results of the work of the Russian experts who visited Tbilisi on August 16-17 have shown that at issue was a large-scale anti-Russian provocation. Furthermore, Georgian representatives were unable to explain a whole array of glaring inconsistencies in the Georgian version of the events. The Georgian side then refused to continue the joint investigation.
The meeting scheduled for August 9-10 in Tbilisi of the Joint Control Commission (JCC) on the issues of the settlement of the Georgian-Ossetian conflict was scuttled as a result of the “air incident.” The situation in the conflict zone became sharply aggravated.
On August 29, 2007 the Georgian side arrested two members of the North Ossetian battalion of the JPKF in the Georgian-Ossetian zone of conflict, Russian citizens T. Khachirov and V. Valiyev, and had them sentenced by a Georgian court to two months of preliminary detention (they were actually remanded until February 2008). This was done in violation of the generally accepted norms of international law and the existing agreements on the settlement of the Georgian-Ossetian conflict. It has to be particularly stressed that after arrest the Georgian side denied both JPKF command representatives and officials from the consular department of the Russian Embassy in Tbilisi access to them, and the legal proceedings were held without the participation of lawyers.
On September 20, 2007 a Georgian special-forces detachment, having penetrated into the border zone of Abkhazia on the territory of the Tkvarcheli District, attacked a group of Abkhazian servicemen undergoing training at the base of the antiterrorist center of the Abkhazian interior ministry, brutally killing two members of the group (Russian officers who had previously served in the CIS KPF), wounding one and taking seven away as prisoners.
The Georgian side asserted (including Saakashvili personally from the rostrum of the UN General Assembly) that it had been a battle with Abkhaz saboteurs having intruded into Georgian territory. But the official report of the UNOMIG Fact Finding Team published in January 2008 has confirmed that the incident took place on Sukhumi controlled territory (300 meters from the administrative border with Georgia) and the two killed persons were both shot at point-blank range.
On October 30, 2007 in the Georgian-Abkhaz zone of conflict (in the Ganmukhuri area) a CIS KPG patrol having disarmed several aggressive-minded Georgian policemen was surrounded by large numbers of Georgian special forces, and President Saakashvili, who urgently flew to the scene, demanded that the peacekeepers “vacate the territory of Georgia” and declared the CIS PKF commander, Major General Sergey Chaban, “persona non grata.”
Tbilisi has been continuously making attempts to remove Chaban from the post of Commander. But the farfetched claims against him are groundless and reflect the overall unconstructive approach of the Georgian leadership to the presence in Abkhazia of the CIS peacekeepers hindering Tbilisi’s plans to solve the conflict by force. An objective assessment of the PKF activities is given in practically all the UN Security Council resolutions on Abkhazia. Thus, UNSC resolution 1808 of April 15, 2008, gives a positive assessment of cooperation between UNOMIG and the CIS peacekeeping force “as they currently play an important stabilizing role in the conflict zone“.
Against the background of last fall’s aggravated internal political situation, Saakashvili tried to present the massive protest actions of the opposition in Tbilisi as resulting from “the designs of Moscow.” On the evening of November 7, 2007, after the harsh dispersal of the anti-presidential rally in Tbilisi, Saakashvili publicly accused Russia of organizing a “coup attempt.” Three of our diplomats were declared in Georgia “personas non grata.” And on November 25, 2007 in an interview with the Rustavi-2 television channel the Georgian leader disavowed himself by admitting that “Russia wasn’t the main source of disorders” (apologies for the slander and the expulsion of our diplomats did not follow, though).
Despite the appeals contained in the latest UN Security Council resolutions and in the recommendations of the Group of Friends of the UN Secretary General for Georgia, the Georgian side stubbornly keeps refusing to sign with Sukhumi and Tskhinvali documents on the nonuse of force to resolve the conflicts. In particular, it argues that the principle of peaceful settlement is already reflected in many international documents relating to the Georgian-Abkhaz and Georgian-Ossetian conflicts. Yet they are all dated by the period before the “rose revolution” and the advent to power of Mikhail Saakashvili.
In the regular report of the UN Secretary General on the current situation in the settlement of the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict (of January 29, 2008), considerable attention (more than 7 paragraphs) is paid to the actions of the Georgian side involving the intentional dissemination of disinformation in respect of the Abkhaz side and the CIS peacekeeping force. The report points to “an almost daily flow of inaccurate reports originating in the Georgian media and, occasionally, by the Georgian authorities themselves“. In the UN Secretary General‘s judgment, this has led to deeper distrust and weaker security and, in the final analysis, increased the probability of a confrontation between the conflicting parties, the official Commentary of the Russian MFA reads.
