A new stage in Abkhaz conflict settlement?
By M. Alkhazashvili
(Translated by Diana Dundua) 

The restoration of territorial integrity has been this country’s top domestic priority since Abkhazia and South Ossetia broke away in the early 90s, and the Saakashvili administration is under pressure to make progress where there has been little so far.

And so the government warmly received the latest UN Security Council resolution on the Abkhazia conflict. Particularly positive was a paragraph which “stressed anew” the plight of IDPs, and reaffirmed both their right to return and their continuing rights to their property in the conflict zone.

It has been years since the UN included a nod to IDP property rights in its biannual Abkhazia resolutions, and its presence now is a significant achievement.

Tbilisi’s priority for the next resolution is language condemning the ethnic cleansing of Georgians during the Abkhaz conflict.

In the meantime, Tbilisi and the separatist leadership are now set to resume weekly dialogues, sitting down with each other and UN and Russian representatives. That is encouraging, but Tbilisi has other ideas.

Following the signing of the new UN resolution, Tbilisi proposed a UN-led commission of experts to examine why the Abkhaz conflict remains unresolved after more than a decade of international effort—and how it could be resolved.

Georgian envoy to the UN Irakli Alasania, in announcing the proposal, said that the UN is aware that little has been accomplished to date in securing return of IDPs and guaranteeing stability and security in the conflict region.

Most of the UN Security Council supports the idea, he added, specifying that his government would make a point of consulting with Russian officials.

Nor does this proposal mean that Georgia is abandoning the UN process; rather, Alasania said, it will fulfill all its obligations to the UN and look at ways to improve the process.

If anything prevents the commission’s creation, it will be Russian objections. Alasania, speaking with the newspaper Rezonansi, suggested that the commission’s eventual findings would be necessarily negative for Moscow: the Russian peacekeepers will naturally be ruled ineffective, he said.

What Tbilisi is really looking for with this reassessment of the peacekeeping process is to replace Russia’s peacekeeping presence with a truly neutral international force. Not only should neutrality be a given precondition for a negotiator and peacekeeper, but the Abkhaz conflict especially would benefit from doing away with a Russian presence with many interests other than a consensual resolution.

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