From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng (Original Message) Sent: 9/7/2007 1:08 AM 06-Sept-07 Georgians Angry At Abkhazia Peacekeepers
A series of confrontations between Georgian locals and Russian peacekeepers raises the temperature near ceasefire line.
By Tamuna Shonia in Zugdidi and Natia Kuprashvili in Tbilisi (CRS No. 409 06-Sept-07) The Georgian authorities are stepping up a campaign against Russian peacekeepers on their territory, highlighting a recent series of incidents in which they say the soldiers have abused the local population.
The most recent row has been over South Ossetia, where two Russian soldiers serving in the North Ossetian battalion of the joint peacekeeping force were detained by the Georgians last week.
The two men are still in custody after the Georgian authorities accused them of illegally detaining four Georgian television journalists and three other people.
The Russian foreign ministry called the arrest of the soldiers a “gross violation” of the 1994 protocol that established the joint peacekeeping forces, while the Georgians said it was a “criminal matter”.
Tbilisi is trying to win international approval for its desire to see the Russian-led peacekeeping forces established for Abkhazia and South Ossetia in the early Nineties to be replaced by international contingents. The Georgian government accuses the Russians of being biased towards the separatist administrations of the two territories.
The Georgian parliament voted in March this year to call for the Russians’ withdrawal.
Most of the attention this summer has been on the security zone around Abkhazia, where Russia provide the troops for a peacekeeping force operating under the aegis of the Commonwealth of Independent States that monitors both sides of the ceasefire line.
On September 6, President Mikheil Saakashvili made a defiant speech at the Ganmukhuri youth camp, close to the administrative border with Abkhazia, which United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon had asked to be moved earlier in the summer on the grounds that its presence so near the ceasefire line was “provocative”.
Saakashvili said the camp would not only stay where it was but would increase in size, and made a stinging response to the UN.
“We don’t need feeble and amoral advice and consultations to the effect that we should move this camp away from the borders of Abkhazia,” he said. “The children of refugees expelled from their homes come here, and we will not leave this spot. Let the bandits and separatists leave and give us back what belongs to us.”
He insisted that the camp did not serve a political purpose, adding that “this is why we are neither seeking or heeding advice like this”.
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