Monday, July 23, 2007, #138 (1405)

Sanakoyev: Most Ossetians Support Broad Autonomy
By Eter Tsotniashvili


Sanakoyev’s Kurta office

“South Ossetia must stay within Georgia,” says Dmitry Sanakoyev, head of the Tbilisi-backed temporary administrative unit of South Ossetia.

The 38-year-old Sanakoyev, once de facto prime minister of breakaway South Ossetia, spoke with The Messenger in his administrative base of Kurta—kilometers away from secessionist-controlled Tskhinvali. Ossetian and Georgian flags hang on the wall behind his desk, together with a three-foot-long Georgian sword.

A key priority for his administration, he says, is to enshrine guarantees of autonomy in the Georgian constitution.

“There are examples all over the world where the minority ethnicity has autonomy. In my view, Georgia should have a federal structure, with the republic of South Ossetia as one of the subjects. Georgia should have a single foreign policy and army, but in other spheres South Ossetia should have autonomy,” he says.

In a South Ossetian ‘alternative’ presidential election orchestrated by Sanakoyev and his allies in November 2006, Sanakoyev won 80 percent of the vote from a constituency of Georgian-controlled villages. In his March state of the nation address this year, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili announced that his government would open talks with Sanakoyev’s faction. Two months later, the incipient alternative government morphed into the Tbilisi-backed temporary administrative unit with Sanakoyev at its helm.

The push for an alternative government, Sanakoyev says, came from South Ossetians who want to see their region developing in peace.

“We [the alternative South Ossetian government] acted without any agreement with the Georgian government. Kokoity’s government was lying to the world by saying that all of South Ossetia supported his regime. We knew that wasn’t so, and his activities could bring things to a bloody war. Most people in South Ossetia support Saakashvili’s idea to have broad autonomy for the region as part of Georgia,” Sanakoyev tells The Messenger.

Sanakoyev’s visibility leapt with Tbilisi efforts to sell him to the international community; on June 26, he addressed an EU parliamentary committee in Brussels in the Ossetian language.

“We have meetings with many international organizations. They express great interest in solving the problems in South Ossetia, and—what is most important for us—they also think that the problem must be solved peacefully,” Sanakoyev says.

He fought against Georgian forces in the 1991–1992 war. Recounting his participation in the fight for Ossetian independence, he said that he did not consider himself to be shooting at true Georgians.

“I was fighting against people who can be Georgians, but unfortunately I couldn’t see any features of Georgians in them. These people did not represent the Georgian nation—they wanted to destroy everything connected with Ossetia, my country,” Sanakoyev said.

“I’ve never been an extremist, and I’ve always tried to search for something in common with my opponents,” he adds.

After the war, Sanakoyev worked in the South Ossetian de facto defense ministry. In 1996 he was appointed defense minister. He became de facto prime minister of South Ossetia in July 2001, serving until the end of the year when Eduard Kokoity took over from Lyudvig Chibirov as South Ossetia’s leader.

Existing within Georgia is the best way to ensure South Ossetia exists at all, Sanakoyev concludes.

“I’m glad that attention is paid to developing Ossetian culture in Georgia. I think that there are more guarantees of developing Ossetian language and culture in Georgia than in Russia. I don’t want the Ossetian people to disappear from the world political map,” Sanakoyev says.


Site Meter
© The Messenger. All rights reserved. Please read our disclaimer before using any of the published materials.