Tbilisi's move to reassert control over region bordering Abkahzia enrages separatists.
By Giorgi Kupatadze in Tbilisi and Inal Khashig in Sukhum
Georgia's decision to move the Abkhaz government-in-exile close to Abkhazia's border has enraged the secessionist administration in Sukhumi and further raised tensions.
The end of the 1992-93 conflict left Abkhazia a self-declared but unrecognised country. The Georgian government, which insists it is still the legitimate authority, set up its own administration for Abkhazia, although in reality this exerts no real control over the breakaway territory.
Until now, this government-in-exile has been based in Tbilisi. But that status quo was shaken on July 27, when Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili announced that the pro-Tbilisi administration was to be shifted to the upper Kodori gorge, the only part of Abkhazia not held by the separatists.
The gorge's 4,000 people are mostly Svans, an ethnic sub-group of Georgians, rather than Abkhaz.
The opportunity to make the move appeared in July, when the Georgian military went into the Kodori gorge to put down an insurrection by a local warlord, Emzar Kvitsiani.
Kvitsiani, formerly Tbilisi's official representative in this part of Georgia, had formed what amounted to a parallel system of local government, supported by an armed militia of around 350 men. Tbilisi allowed the militia to continue as a line of defence against the Abkhaz forces on the other side or the border, but after Saakashvili's administration took over in the "Rose Revolution" of November, it ordered the group to disband. Kvitsiani baulked at this and began making hostile statements about some of Saakashvili's ministers, a standoff resolved by the arrival of Georgian security forces in July.
Since the lightning military action, which Tbilisi prefers to call a "police operation" and insists does not violate de-militarisation agreements with Abkhazia, both Tbilisi and Sukhumi have accused each other of concentrating military forces in and around the gorge and have made belligerent threats.
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