Russian peacekeepers must leave, Tbilisi says
By Nino Mumladze

Your job is done, Burjanadze
tells Russian peacekeeping forces


Tbilisi is giving the boot to Russian peacekeepers in Georgia’s conflict zones, Speaker of Parliament Nino Burjanadze announced Wednesday at the end of a closed door meeting between top lawmakers and ministers.

“A decision on the withdrawal…of the peacekeepers has been adopted. As to the concrete date [of the withdrawal], consultations with the international community and our partners are still underway, so that this doesn’t turn out as a surprise to them,” Burjanadze told news media, saying the exact date would be announced later on.

Defining the “very simple” mechanism of withdrawal, influential majority MP Giga Bokeria spoke of the “sovereign right” of Georgia to notify the Russian peacekeepers that their mandate has been revoked—obliging them, he says, to leave within a month.

“… I want to stress once again, the decision has practically been taken,” Bokeria added, reiterating that the exact date would be hashed out in international talks.

The decisions is not an end in itself, Burjanadze explained, but rather something the peacekeeping forces has forced the government into by “often acting as the main destabilizing factor” in the region, rather than as the guarantor of stability as they are tasked with.

This is not the first time Burjanadze announced a call to push out the Russian peacekeepers. On July 18, 2006, parliament passed a resolution instructing the government to immediately suspend “the so-called peacekeeping operations” in breakaway Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

At the same time, the government was to devise a new peacekeeping format and arrange the deployment of international security forces in the conflict zones.

Parliament’s resolution did not on its own end the Russian peacekeepers’ mandate. To do so, the executive branch had to leave the agreements which allowed for the peacekeepers to be deployed in the first place.

However, there was no follow up from the chancellery—until Wednesday, a day after a tense confrontation between Georgian police and Russian peacekeepers in the village of Ganmukhuri, just before the administrative boundary with secessionist-controlled Abkhazia.

President Mikheil Saakashvili revived the mandate issue Tuesday night at an emergency session of the National Security Council, convened after the Ganmukhuri incident.

There, in the vicinity of the village’s youth patriot camp, Saakashvili says Russian peacekeepers violated Georgian-controlled territory, beating five Georgian policemen bloody in the process.

Moscow blames Georgian forces for instigating the confrontation.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs lodged an official protest with Russian Ambassador to Georgia Vyacheslav Kovalenko that day.

The Georgian side demanded from Moscow and the CIS Executive Committee an explanation and an apology for the peacekeepers’ “unprovoked attack” and the immediate recall of the CIS peacekeepers’ commander-in-chief in the conflict zone, Sergey Chaban.

Ambassador Kovalenko, echoing Moscow officials, blamed an aggressive Georgian officer for provoking the incident by threatening to kill Russian peacekeepers. He also repeated Russia’s refusal to recall Chaban.

“It is in the rights of the Georgian side to raise a question [over the dismissal of the CIS commander-in-chief], but the issue of General Chaban’s further stay is not decided solely in Tbilisi,” Kovalenko commented.

A copy of the Foreign Affairs Ministry’s letter of protest was forwarded to the CIS Executive Committee, but, the RIA Novosti news agency reported, CIS Executive Secretary Sergey Lebedev said they had not received it by the next day.

St Petersburg is currently hosting a CIS interparliamentary session. Georgia is not attending.

“We received a letter that explains the reason for the Georgian delegation’s absence. The reasons are excusable and we’ve approached it with understanding,” said Sergey Mironov, head of the CIS interparliamentary council.
Back in Tbilisi, Georgian Foreign Minister Gela Bezhuashvili met with the ambassadors of Germany, France, the UK and the US, all members of the UN secretary-general’s Group of Friends of Georgia. A UNOMIG representative was also present.

Bezhuashvili briefed them on the Ganmukhuri incident, and filled them in on the resulting decision made by the Georgian government.

Meanwhile, the Russian Foreign Ministry called upon CIS peacekeepers deployed in Abkhazia and South Ossetia to show restraint in the face of “increasing provocations from the Georgian side,” according to RIA Novosti.

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