Translated material
Georgia is digging in in the Kodori Gorge
Saakashvili will build a city and an airfield there
The operation against the rebels in the Kodori Gorge, carried out back in July, is now being used by Georgia as cover for the redeployment of a large military group closer to the unrecognized Republic of Abkhazia. This was stated yesterday by the Deputy Commander of the Russian Ground Forces for Peacekeeping Forces, Lieutenant General Valery Evnevich. In his opinion, the Georgian side “is gaining a foothold in this region, creating infrastructure, carrying out work on the engineering equipment of the area, including setting up checkpoints, mining the territory, and building a road.” Georgia intends to send “up to 2.5 thousand military personnel” into the Kodori Gorge, where its security forces entered on July 25.Valery Evnevich believes that this “speaks of the military component of the operation.” Meanwhile, the presence of an armed group in the gorge is “illegal”; it violates the international obligations that Georgia has assumed to resolve the conflict. The general said that according to paragraph 4 of the 1994 ceasefire and separation of forces agreement, Georgian troops, under the control of representatives of the CIS peacekeeping forces and UN military observers, must leave the Kodori Gorge.
Noting that Georgia did not offer Russia to participate in monitoring the upper part of Kodori, Valery Evnevich said that Tbilisi connects this issue with the fulfillment of “far-fetched conditions.” Thus, the Georgians want to patrol the lower part of the gorge (controlled by the Abkhaz side) and insist on international monitoring of the former Russian military base in Gudauta. At the same time, in the upper part of the gorge, controlled by the Georgians, “no patrolling has been carried out since a helicopter carrying UN military observers was shot down there three years ago.”
Tbilisi takes a different point of view. First Deputy Defense Minister Mamuka Kudava said that Georgia “has the sovereign right” to introduce heavy military equipment, including tanks and armored personnel carriers, into the upper part of the gorge, but does not yet intend to do so. According to the Georgian side, monitoring in this territory will be carried out by UN military observers. “Russian peacekeepers are not, in our opinion, objective, so we do not consider it necessary for them to participate in monitoring the gorge,” Mr. Kudava emphasized.
Yesterday, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili in Tbilisi instructed Prime Minister Zurab Nogaideli and Interior Minister Vano Merabishvili to “monitor issues related to the restoration of infrastructure in the Kodori Gorge.” “We must perform a miracle and build a small city in the Kodori Gorge in just one to a month and a half, and an airfield in three weeks. This will be a lesson for everyone, including the separatists and their patrons. We need dozens of new houses there, a developed airfield, heliports, we need such infrastructure there so that the Abkhaz people see: what they could not do in 14 years, we were able to do in one month,” Saakashvili said, emphasizing that high-ranking officials “ Everyone is responsible for this with their heads.”
The task is not easy - Mikheil Saakashvili demanded that the city in the Kodori Gorge be the same as “the Americans, British, Germans and other advanced nations would have created it.” So little time has been allocated for construction that the Georgian authorities will only have time to build the “city” from prefabricated structures. This is how military bases are usually built.
Director of the Institute of CIS Countries Konstantin Zatulin reminded Vremya Novostey that “the Georgian side has repeatedly stated its intention to deploy Georgian troops in the Kodori Gorge” - according to Tbilisi politicians, this will be “the first step towards the return of Abkhazia to Georgia.” VN’s interlocutor emphasized “the danger of such rhetoric, and especially of translating it into reality.” He considers the relocation of the “government of Abkhazia in exile” to the upper part of the Kodori Gorge at the behest of the Georgian authorities to be no less “a dangerous and provocative step towards unleashing a military conflict in the region.” “The landing of this political landing is intended to provoke the unrecognized republic into military action, which could seriously destabilize the situation in the North Caucasus and Transcaucasia,” says Mr. Zatulin.