tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-58934304318257702472024-03-13T03:27:49.523-07:00THE TRUTH ABOUT ABKHAZIA AND "SOUTH OSSETIA"Abkhazia and South-Ossetia,
All about Abkhazia and South-Ossetia,
Truth About South-Ossetia and Abkhazia.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger15125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5893430431825770247.post-49050749387579664392009-09-17T04:33:00.000-07:002009-10-28T12:55:45.670-07:00Putin: The dark rise to power (the full text of article of GQ magazine banned in Russia)<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_0qL_nbYCiig/SrIhTHjPazI/AAAAAAAAAKk/dGLHTssexwg/s1600-h/Putin_dictator.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5382401116989254450" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_0qL_nbYCiig/SrIhTHjPazI/AAAAAAAAAKk/dGLHTssexwg/s320/Putin_dictator.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 78px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 320px;" /></a><br />
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Ten years ago this month, Russia was rocked by a series of mysterious apartment bombings that left hundreds dead. It was by riding the ensuing wave of fear and terror that a then largely unknown Vladimir Putin rose to become the most powerful man in the country. But there were questions about the nature of those bombings - and disturbing evidence that the perpetrators might actually have been working for the Russian government. In the years since then, the people who had been questioning the official version of events began one by one to go silent or even turn up dead. Except one man. Scott Anderson finds him.<br />
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The first building to be hit was the barracks in Buynaksk housing Russian soldiers and their families. It was a nondescript five-story building perched on the outskirts of town, and when the enormous truck bomb went off late on the night of September 4, 01999, the floors pancaked onto each other until the building was reduced to a pile of burning rubble. In that rubble were the bodies of sixty-four people - men, women, and children.<br />
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In the predawn hours of last September 13, I left my hotel in central Moscow and made for a working-class neighborhood on the city's southern outskirts.<br />
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It had been twelve years since I'd been in the Russian capital. Everywhere, new glass-and-steel buildings had gone up, the skyline was studded with construction cranes, and even at 4 A.M., the garish casinos aroudn Pushkin Square were going full tilt and Tverskaya Street was clogged with late-model SUVs and BMW sedans. The drive was a jarring glimpse at the colossal transformation that Russia, its economy turbocharged by petrodollars, had undergone in the nine years since Vladimir Putin came to power.<br />
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But my journey that morning was to a place in "old" Moscow, to a small park where a drab nine-story apartment building known as 6/3 Kashirskoye Highway had once stood. At 5:03 on the morning of September 13, 01999 - exactly nine years prior to my visit - 6/3 Kashirskoye had been blasted apart by a bomb secreted in its basement; 121 of its residents had died while they slept. That explosion, coming nine days after the one in Buynaksk, was the third of what would be four apartment-building bombings in Russia over a twelve-day span that September, leaving some 300 citizens dead and the nation in panic; it was among the deadliest series of terrorist attacks in the world until September 11. Blaming the bombings on terrorists from Chechnya, Russia's newly appointed prime minister, Vladimir Putin, ordered a scorched-earth offensive into the breakaway republic. On the success of that offensive, the previously unknown Putin became a national hero and swiftly assumed complete control of the Russian state. It is a control he continues to exert today.<br />
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Where 6/3 Kashirskoye had stood there was now an orderly grid of well-tended flower beds. These surrounded a stone monument engraved with the names of the dead and topped by a Russian Orthodox cross. For the bombing's ninth anniversary, three or four local journalists had shown up, discreetly watched over by a couple of policemen in a nearby squad car, but there really wasn't much for anyone to do. Shortly after 5 A.M., a cluster of perhaps two dozen people - most of them young, relatives of the dead, presumably - trooped up to place candles and red carnations at the foot of the monument, but they retreated as quickly as they had appeared. The only other visitors that morning were two elderly men who had witnessed the bombing and who dutifully related for the television cameras how terrible it had been, such a shock.<br />
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I saw that one of the old men became quite emotional as he stood before the monument, repeatedly brushing at his cheeks to wipe away tears. Several times he turned and walked purposefully away, as if willing himself to leave, but he never got very far. He would linger by the trees at the edge of the park and then inevitably make a slow return to the shrine. Finally, I approached him.<br />
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I lived very close to here, he said, and I was awoken by the sound, I came rushing over and... He was a big man, a former sailor, and he waved his hands helplessly over the flower beds. Nothing. Nothing. They pulled a young boy and his dog out. That was all. Everyone else was already dead.<br />
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But as it turned out, the old man had a more personal connection to the tragedy. His daughter, son-in-law, and grandson had lived at 6/3 Kashirskoye, and they had all perished that morning, too. Leading me up to the monument, he pointed out their names in the stone, and desperately brushed at his eyes again. Then he angrily whispered: They say it was the Chechens who did this, but that is a lie. It was Putin's people. Everyone knows that. No one wants to talk about it, but everyone knows that.<br />
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It is a riddle that lies at the very heart of the modern Russian state, one that remains unsolved to this day. In the awful events of September 01999, did Russia find its avenging angel in Vladimir Putin, the proverbial man of action who crushed his nation's attackers and led his people out of a time of crisis? Or was that crisis actually manufactured to benefit Putin, a scheme by Russia's secret police to bring one of their own to power? What makes this question important is that absent the bombings of September 01999 and all that transpired as a result, it is hard to conceive of any scenario whereby Putin would hold the position he enjoys today: a player on the global stage, a ruler of one of the most powerful nations on earth.<br />
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It is peculiar, then, how few people outside russia seem to have wanted that question answered. Several intelligence agencies are believed to have conducted investigations into the apartment bombings, but none have released their findings. Very few American lawmakers have shown an interest in the bombings. In 02003, John McCain declared in Congress that there remain credible allegations that Russia's FSB [Federal Security Service] had a hand in carrying out these attacks. But otherwise, neither the United States government nor the American media have ever shown much inclination to explore the matter.<br />
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This apparent disinterest now extends into Russia as well. Immediately after the bombings, a broad spectrum of Russian society publicly cast doubt on the government's version of events. Those voices have now gone silent one by one. In recent years, a number of journalists who investigated the incidents have been murdered - or have died under suspicious circumstances - as have two members of Parliament who sat on a commission of inquiry. In the meantime, it seems that most everyone whose account of the attacks ran counter to the government's version now either refuses to speak, has recanted his earlier statements, or is dead.<br />
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During my time in Russia this past September, I approached a number of individuals - journalists, lawyers, human-rights investigators - who had been involved in the search for answers. Many declined to speak with me altogether. Others begrudgingly did so but largely confined their statements to a recitation of the known inconsistencies in the case; if pressed for an opinion, they allowed only that the matter remained "controversial." even the old man in Kashirskoye park ultimately underscored the air of unease that hovers over the topic. After readily agreeing to a second meeting, at which he promised to introduce me to other victims' families who doubted the government's account, he had a change of heart.<br />
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I can't do it, he said when he called me back a few days later. I spoke to my wife and my boss, and they both said that if I meet with you, I will be finished.<br />
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I was curious what he meant by "finished," but the old sailor hung up before I could ask.<br />
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No doubt part of this reticence stemmed from recalling the fate of the man who made proving the conspiracy behind the bombings a personal crusade: Alexander Litvinenko. From his London exile, the rogue former KGB officer had waged a relentless media campaign against the Putin regime, accusing it of all manner of crimes and corruption - and most especially of having orchestrated the apartment-building attacks.<br />
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In November 02006, in a case that riveted the world's attention, Litvinenko was slipped a lethal dose of radioactive polonium, apparently during a meeting with two former Russian intelligence agents in a London hotel bar. Before the poison killed LItvinenko - it took an agonizing twenty-three days - he signed a statement placing the blame for his murder squarely at Putin's feet.<br />
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But Litvinenko had not worked alone on the apartment-bombing case. Several years before his murder, he had enlisted another ex-KGB agent in his search for answers, a former criminal investigator named Mikhail Trepashkin. The two men had a rather complicated personal history - in fact, back in the '90s, one allegedly had been dispatched to assassinate the other - but it had actually been Trepashkin, working on the ground in Russia, who had uncovered many of the disturbing facts in the case.<br />
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Trepashkin had also run afoul of the authorities. In 02003 he had been shipped off to a squalid prison camp in the Ural Mountains for four years. By the time of my visit to Moscow last year, however, he was out on the streets again.<br />
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Through an intermediary, I learned Trepashkin had two young daughters, as well as a wife who desperately wanted him to stay out of politics; combining these factors with his recent prison stint and the murder of his former colleague, it seemed likely that my approach to him would go as badly as had my conversations with other former dissenters.<br />
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Oh, he'll talk, the intermediary assured me. The only way they'll stop Trepashkin is by killing him.<br />
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On September 9, five days after the blast in Buynaksk, the bombers struck Moscow. This time it was an eight-story apartment building on Guryanova Street, in a working-class neighborhood in the city's southeast. Rather than a truck bomb, the device had been stashed on the building's ground floor, but the result was virtually identical; the explosion brought down all eight floors and killed ninety-four residents as they slept.<br />
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It was with Guryanova Street that the general alarm first went out. Within hours a number of Russian-government officials strongly suggested that terrorists from Chechnya were responsible, and the nation was sent into a state of high alert. As thousands of police fanned out to question - and in several hundred cases, to arrest - anyone resembling a Chechen, residents of apartment buildings throughout Russia organized themselves into neighborhood-watch patrols. Calls for retaliation rose from all political quarters.<br />
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At Trepashkin's request, our first meeting took place at a crowded coffee shop in central Moscow. One of his aides showed up first, and then twenty minutes later Trepashkin arrived in the company of his bodyguard of sorts, a muscular young man with a crewcut and an opaque stare.<br />
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Trepashkin, while short, was powerfully built - a testament to his lifelong practice of a variety of martial arts - and still very handsome at 51. His most arresting feature, though, was a perpetual amused grin. It gave him an aura of instant likability, friendliness, although I could imagine that anyone who sat across an interrogation table from him back in his KGB days might have found it unnerving.<br />
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For a few minutes, we chatted about everyday things - the unusually cold weather in Moscow just then, the changes I'd noticed since my last visit - and I sensed Trepashkin was trying to figure me out, deciding how much to say.<br />
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Then he began to tell me about his career at the KGB. He'd spent most of his years as a criminal investigator who specialized in antiques smuggling. He was, in those days, an absolute loyalist to the Soviet state - and most especially the KGB. Trepashkin was such a dedicated Soviet that he even supported a group that attempted to thwart the ascent of Boris Yeltsin in favor of preserving the Soviet system.<br />
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I could see that this was going to be the end of the Soviet Union, Trepashkin explained in the coffee shop. But even more than that, what would happen to the KGB, to all of us who had made it our lives? I saw only disaster coming.<br />
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And that disaster came. With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Russia plunged into economic and social chaos. One particularly destructive aspect of that chaos stemmed from the vast legions of Russian KGB officers who suddenly entered the private sector. Some went into business for themselves or joined on with the mafiyas they had once been detailed to combat. Still others signed on as "advisers" or muscle for the new oligarchs or the old Communist Party bosses who were frantically grabbing up anything of value in Russia, even as they paid obeisance to the "democratic reforms" of President Boris Yeltsin.<br />
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Of all this, Trepashkin had an intimate view. Kept on with the FSB, the Russian successor the the KGB, the investigator found it increasingly difficult to differentiate criminality from governmental policy.<br />
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In case after case, he said, there was this blending. You would find mafiyas working with terrorist groups, but then the trail would lead to a business group or maybe to a state ministry. So then, was this still a criminal case, or some kind of officially sanctioned black operation? And just what did ‘officially sanctioned' actually mean anymore, because who was really in charge?<br />
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Finally, in the summer of 01995, Mikhail Trepashkin began work on a case that would change him forever, one that placed him on a collision course with the seniormost commanders of the FSB and, Trepashkin says, would lead at least one of them to plot his assassination. As with so many other incidents that exposed the malevolent rot in post-Soviet Russia, this one centered on events in the breakaway southern republic of Chechnya.<br />
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By December 01995, rebels fighting for the independence of Chechnya had fought the Russian army to a bloody and humiliating stalemate after a full year of war. The Chechens' success was not as simple as mere force of arms, however. Even during the Soviet era, Chechen mafiyas had controlled much of the Russian criminal underworld, so when Russian society itself became criminalized it played beautifully to the Chechen rebels' advantage. For their steady supply of sophisticated weapons with which to fight the Russian army, the rebels often had only to turn to corrupt Russian army officers who had access to such weaponry, with the funds for such "purchases" supplied by the Chechen crime syndicates operating throughout the nation.<br />
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Just how high up did this cozy arrangement go? Mikhail Trepashkin got his answer on the night of December 1, when a team of FSB officers stormed a Moscow branch of Bank Soldi with guns drawn.<br />
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The raid that night was the culmination of an elaborate sting operation, one that Trepashkin had helped supervise, designed to finally bring down a notorious bank-extortion team linked to a Chechen rebel leader named Salman Raduyev> It was a huge success: Caught up in the Soldi dragnet were some two dozen conspirators, including two FSB officers and a Russian-military general.<br />
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But inside the bank, the FSB men found something else. To ensure they weren't walking into a trap, the conspirators had planted electronic bugs throughout the building, and those were linked to an eavesdropping van parked outside. While their precautions obviously needed some fine-tuning, it begged the question of how the gang got their hands on bugging equipment.<br />
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All these sorts of devices have serial numbers, Trepashkin explained in the Moscow coffee shop, and so we traced the numbers back. We discovered that it had all come from either the FSB or the Ministry of Defense.<br />
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The implication of this was staggering, for access to such equipment was severely restricted. It suggested that high-ranking security and military officers had colluded not only with a criminal gang but with one whose express purpose was to raise funds for a war against Russia. By the standards of any country, that wasn't just corruption, it was treason.<br />
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Yet no sooner had Trepashkin started down that investigative trail than he was removed from the Bank Soldi case by Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the FSB's internal-security department. What's more, he says, no charges were brought against any of the Russian officers implicated, and nearly all of those caught in the initial dragnet were soon quietly released. Instead, Patrushev ordered an investigation of Trepashkin. That investigation lasted nearly two years, at the end of which Trepashkin had reached his personal breaking point. In May 01997, he wrote an open letter to President Yeltsin detailing his involvement in the case and charging much of the senior FSB leadership with a host of crimes, including forming alliances with mafiyas and even recruiting their members into FSB ranks.<br />
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I thought that if the president knew what was happening, Trepashkin said, then he would do something about it. This was a mistake on my part.<br />
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Indeed. Boris Yeltsin, it turned out, was fabulously corrupt himself, and the letter alerted the FSB that they now had a serious malcontent on their hands. The very next month, Trepashkin resigned from the FSB, burn out, he says, but the harassment he'd been subjected to. But that didn't mean Trepashkin was going to go quietly into the night. That summer he brought a lawsuit against the FSB leadership and began filing complaints that extended all the way to the FSB director himself. It was as if, even at this late date, the investigator imagined that the honor of the Kontora (Bureau) could still be redeemed, that some as yet invisible reformer might step forward. Instead, his persistence apparently convinced some senior FSB officials that it was time for a permanent solution to their Trepashkin problem. One of the first people they turned to was Alexander Litvinenko.<br />
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On paper, Litvinenko looked just the man for the job. Having just returned to Moscow from a stint on the brutal Chechen battlefield as a counterterrorism operative, he had been transferred into a new and highly secretive of the FSB called the Office for the Analysis of Criminal Organizations, or URPO. While Litvinenko didn't know it at the time, it seemed the URPO had been formed to serve as a death squad. As reported in the book Death of a Dissident, by Alex Goldfarb and Litvinenko's widow, Marina, Litvinenko learned of this when he was summoned by the URPO commander in October 01997. There is this guy, Mikhail Trepashkin, the commander allegedly told Litvinenko. He is your new object. Go get his file and make yourself familiar with it.<br />
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When he did, Litvinenko learned of the criminal investigator's involvement with the Bank Solid case, as well as his lawsuit against the FSB leadership; it left him puzzled as to just what he was supposed to do with Trepashkin.<br />
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Well, it's a delicate situation, Litvinenko quoted his commander as saying. You know, he is taking the director to court and giving interviews. We should shut him up, director's personal request.<br />
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Shortly after, Litvinenko claimed his target list expanded to include Boris Berezovsky, an oligarch and Kremlin insider whom apparently someone powerful now wanted dead. Litvinenko stalled for a time, making continual excuses for his inability to carry out the assassination orders.<br />
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According to Trepashkin, at least two attempts were made on his life during this period: a failed ambush on a deserted stretch of Moscow highway, and a rooftop sniper who couldn't get off a clean shot. On other occasions, he says, he was tipped off by friends still in the Kontora.<br />
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In November, the alleged FSB plot against Trepashkin and Berezovsky was exposed in dramatic fashion when Litvinenko and four of his URPO colleagues appeared at a Moscow news conference to detail the kill orders they'd been given. Also in attendance was Mikhail Trepashkin.<br />
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And there, somewhat anticlimactically, the matter seemed to end. Litvinenko, the ringleader of the dissident officers, was summarily dismissed but otherwise suffered no immediate retribution. As for Trepashkin, after improbably winning his lawsuit against the FSB, he married for a second time and settled into his new job with the Russian tax police, determined, he says, to quietly serve out his term until he was eligible for retirement.<br />
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But then, in September 01999, the apartment-building bombings would shake Russia's political foundations to their core. Those attacks would also propel Trepashkin and Litvinenko back into the shadow world, this time with a common purpose.<br />
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Amid the near hysteria that gripped Moscow after the Guryanova Street bombing, early on the morning of September 13, 01999, authorities were called to check on reports of suspicious activity at an apartment building on the city‘s southern outskirts. Finding nothing untoward, security personnel completed their search of 6/3 Kashirskoye at about 2 A.M. and left. At 5:03 A.M>, the nine-story building was collapsed by a massive bomb, leaving 121 civilians dead.<br />
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Three days later, the target was an apartment building in Volgodonsk, a city south of Moscow. This time it was a truck bomb, and it left another seventeen dead.<br />
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In the Moscow coffee shop, Trepashkin grew uncharacteristically somber, staring into the distance for a long moment.<br />
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It just seemed incredible, he said finally. That was my first thought. The country is in an uproar, vigilantes are stopping strangers on the streets, there are police roadblocks everywhere. So how is it possible that these bombers are moving about so freely, that they have all this time to set up and carry out these sophisticated bombings? It seemed impossible.<br />
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Another aspect that Trepashkin had a problem with was the question of motive.<br />
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Usually, this is quite easy to find, he explained, it is money or hatred or jealousy, but for these bombings, what was the Chechens' motive? Very few people thought about this.<br />
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On one level, this was perhaps understandable. Antipathy for Chechens is deeply ingrained into Russian society, and it had grown much worse during their secessionist war in the '90s. Unspeakable atrocities were committed by both sides in that conflict, and the Chechen rebels had shown no compunction against taking their fight into Russia proper or targeting civilians. Except that war had ended in 01997, with Boris Yeltsin signing a peace agreement recognizing Chechnya's autonomy.<br />
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So why? Trepashkin continued. Why would the Chechens want to provoke the Russian government when they already had everything they had fought for?<br />
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And there was something else that gave the former criminal investigator pause: the composition of the new Russian government.<br />
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In early August 01999, just weeks before the first bombing on Buynaksk, President Yeltsin had appointed his third prime minister in less than three months. He was a slight, humorless main, virtually unknown to the Russian public, named Vladimir Putin.<br />
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The chief reason he was so little known was that, until a few years earlier, Putin had been just one more midlevel KGB/FSB officer toiling away in obscurity. In 01996, Putin was given a position in the presidential-property-management department, a crucial office in the Yeltsin patronage machine that gave Putin leverage to grant or withhold favors to Kremlin insiders. He apparently put his time there to good use; over the next three years, Putin was promoted to deputy chief of the presidential staff, then to director of the FSB, and now to prime minister.<br />
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But though Putin was still obscure to the general public in September 01999, Mikhail Trepashkin already had a pretty good sense of the man. Putin had been the FSB director at the time the URPO scandal went public and had personally dismissed Alexander Litvinenko for provoking it. I fired Litvinenko, he had told a reporter, because FSB officers shouldn't hold press conferences... and they shouldn't make internal scandals public.<br />
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But equally alarming to Trepashkin was who had been chosen to be Putin's successor as FSB director, Nikolai Patrushev. As head of the FSB internal-security department, it was Patrushev who had removed Trepashkin from the Bank Soldi case and who was now among those government officials most vehemently claiming a Chechen connection to the apartment-building bombings.<br />
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So what you saw was this dynamic building, Trepashkin said, and it was the government promoting it. ‘The Chechens are behind this, so now we must take care of the Chechens'.<br />
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But then something very strange happened. It happened in the sleepy provincial city of Ryazan, some 120 miles southeast of Moscow.<br />
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Amid the state of hypervigilance that had seized the nation, several residents of 14/16 Novosyolov Street in Ryazan took notice when a white Zhiguli sedan pulled up to park beside their apartment building on the evening of September 22. They became downright panicked when they observed two men removing several large sacks from the car's trunk and carrying them into the basement before speeding away. Residents called the police.<br />
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Discovered in the basement were three 110-pound white sacks wired to a detonator and explosive timer. As police quickly evacuated the building, the local FSB explosives expert was called in to defuse the detonator; he determined that the sacks contained RDX, a explosive powerful enough to have brought the entire apartment building down. IN the meantime, roadblocks were established on all roads out of Ryazan, and a massive manhunt for the Zhiguli and its occupants got underway.<br />
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By the following afternoon, word of the incident in Ryazan had spread across Russia. Prime Minister Putin congratulated the residents on their vigilance, while the interior minister lauded recent improvements by the security forces, such as the foiling of the attempt to blowup the apartment building in Ryazan.<br />
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There the matter may well have ended, except that same night two of the suspects in Ryazan were apprehended. To the local authorities' astonishment, both produced FSB identification cards. A short time later, a call came down from FSB headquarters in Moscow that the two were to be released.<br />
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The following morning, FSB director Patrushev appeared on television to report a wholly new version of events in Ryazan. Rather than an aborted terrorist attack, he explained, the incident at 14/16 Novosyolov Street had actually been an FSB "training exercise" to test the public's alertness. Further, he said, the sacks in the basement had contained not explosives, but rather common household sugar.<br />
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Contradictions in the FSB's account were manifold. How to reconcile FSB headquarters' sacks-of-sugar claim with the local FSB's chemical analysis that had found RDX? If this truly had been a training exercise, how was it that the local FSB branch wasn't informed ahead of time, or that Patrushev himself didn't see fit to make mention of it for a day and a half after the terrorist alert was raised? For that matter, why did the apartment-building-bombing spree suddenly stop after Ryazan? If the attacks were truly the handiwork of Chechen terrorists, surely the public-relations black eye the FSB had received over the Ryazan affair would spur them to carry out more.<br />
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But the time for such questions had already passed. Even as Prime Minister Putin gave his speech on the night of September 23 praising the residents of Ryazan for their vigilance, Russian warplanes began launching massive air strikes on Grozny, the capital of Chechnya. Within a few more days, Russian armored battalions that had been massed on the border for months crossed into Chechnya, marking the start of the Second Chechen War.<br />
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Events moved very quickly after that. On New Year's Eve 01999, Boris Yeltsin stunned the nation by announcing that he was stepping down from the presidency effective immediately, which made Vladimir Putin acting president until new elections could be held. And instead of holding them sometime in the summer, as originally scheduled, those elections would now occur in just ten weeks' time, leaving Putin's many competitors for the position little time to prepare.<br />
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In a presidential poll taken in August 01999, Putin had garnered less than 2 percent support. By March 02000, however, riding a wave of popularity for his total-war policy in Chechnya, he swept into office with 53 percent of the vote. The reign of Vladimir Putin had begun, and Russia would never be the same.<br />
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For our next meeting, Trepashkin invited me into his apartment. I was a bit surprised by this - I'd been told that, for security reasons, Trepashkin rarely brought visitors to his home - but I guess he figured all his enemies knew where he lived, anyway.<br />
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It was a pleasant enough place, if a bit on the spartan side, on the ground floor of a high-rise tower surrounded by other high-rise towers in southern Moscow. Trepashkin gave me a quick tour, and I noticed that the only space with even a hint of clutter was the tiny, paper-filled room - a converted walk-in closet, really - he used as his office. One of his daughters was home, and she brought us tea as we settled in the sitting room.<br />
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With a vaguely embarrassed smile, Trepashkin offered that there was actually another reason he rarely had work-related meetings at his home: his wife. She wants me to stop all this political stuff, but since she is away this morning... His smile eased away. Well, it's because of the raids. You know, they came charging in here - he waved toward the front door - with their guns, shouting orders; the children were terrified. It really affected my wife, and she is always worried it will happen again.<br />
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The first of those raids had occurred in January 02002. Late one night, a squad of FSB agents burst in and proceeded to take the apartment apart. Trepashkin maintains they found nothing but instead planted enough evidence - some classified documents from the FSB archives, a handful of bullets - to enable prosecutors to hang three "pending" charges over his head.<br />
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It was their way of putting me on notice, he explained, of letting me know they would come after me if I didn't straighten up.<br />
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Trepashkin had a good idea of what had sparked the FSB's attention: Just days before the raid, he had started getting telephone calls from the man regarded by the Putin regime as one of Russia's greatest traitors, Alexander Litvinenko.<br />
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Lieutenant Colonel Litvinenko's fall from grace had been swift. After his 01998 press conference alleging the URPO assassination plots, he'd spent nine months in prison on an "abuse of authority" charge and had then fled Russia as prosecutors prepared to move against him again. With the help of the now exiled tycoon Boris Berezovsky, Litvinenko and his family settled in England, where he joined forces with Berezovsky to expose to the world what they claimed were the crimes of the Putin regime. A primary focus of that campaign was getting to the truth of the apartment-building bombings.<br />
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So this is why he was calling, Trepashkin explained. Litvinenko couldn't come back to Russia, obviously, so they needed someone here to help with the investigation.<br />
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Easier said than done, for by January 02002, Russia had become a very different place. In the two years since Putin had been elected president, the once-thriving independent media had all but disappeared, while the political opposition was being steadily marginalized to the point of insignificance.<br />
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One indication of this chilling effect was the revisions performed on the shakiest aspect of the government's bombing story, the FSB "training exercise" in Ryazan. By 02002 the Ryazan FSB commander who had overseen the manhunt for "the terrorists" now supported the training-exercise explanation. The local FSB explosives expert who had insisted before television cameras that the Ryazan sacks contained explosives suddenly went silent on the whole matter and disappeared from sight. Even some of the residents of 14/16 Novosyolov Street who had appeared in a television documentary six months after the incident to angrily deride the FSB's account and insist the bomb was real now refused to talk with anyone beyond allowing that perhaps they'd been mistaken after all.<br />
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I told Litvinenko that the only way I could become involved was in some kind of official capacity, Trepashkin explained in his sitting room. If I just went out on my own, the authorities would move against me immediately.<br />
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That official capacity was fashioned at a meeting held in Boris Berezovsky's London office in early March 02002. one of those in attendance, a Russian member of Parliament named Sergei Yushenkov, would organize a blue-ribbon committee of inquiry into the bombings and make Trepashkin one of his investigators. Another attendee was Tatiana Morozova, a 31-year-old Russian émigré living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Morozova's mother had been killed in the Guryanova Street blast, and under Russian law that gave her the right to review the government's records on the case; since Trepashkin had recently obtained his license to practice law, Morozova would appoint him as her attorney and petition the courts for access to the FSB's Guryanova Street files.<br />
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So I agreed to both of these ideas, Trepashkin said, but the question was where to look first. So many of the reports were unreliable, and so many people had changed their stories, that my first goal was to get access to the actual forensic evidence.<br />
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Also easier said than done, for a hallmark of the government's response to the bombings had been a peculiar haste in clearing away the ruins. Whereas, for example, the Americans had spent six months sifting through the remnants of the World Trade Center after September 11, regarding it as an active crime scene, Russian authorities had razed 19 Guryanova street just days after the blast and hauled everything away to a municipal dump. Whatever forensic evidence had been preserved - and it wasn't clear that any had - was presumably locked away in FSB storehouses.<br />
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While what he discovered didn't pertain to the specifics of the bombings, Trepashkin did soon manage to come up with something quite interesting.<br />
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One of the odder footnotes to the whole affair was a statement that Gennady Seleznyov, the Speaker of the Duma, had made on the floor of Parliament on the morning of September 13, 01999. I have just received a report, he had announced to legislators. An apartment building in the city of Volgodonsk was blown up last night.<br />
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While Seleznyov got the basics right - an apartment building had indeed just been blown up - he had the wrong city; the blast that morning had been at 6/3 Kashirskoye Highway in Moscow. Which put the Speaker in kind of an awkward spot when an apartment building in Volgodonsk was blown up three days later. At least one Duma member found that puzzling.<br />
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Mr. Speaker, please explain, he had asked Seleznyov on the Parliament floor, how come you told us on Monday about the blast that occurred on Thursday?<br />
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In lieu of an answer, the questioner had his microphone quickly cut off.<br />
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To many observers, it suggested that someone in the FSB chain of command had screwed up the order in which the bombings were to take place and had given the "news" to Seleznyov in reverse.<br />
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Searching around nearly three years after the fact, Trepashkin says he determined that Seleznyov had been given the erroneous report by an FSB officer, though he won't say how he knows.<br />
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But with progress also came the potential for danger to Trepashkin. One of those who had attended the London meeting, human-rights activist and Berezovsky lieutenant Alex Goldfarb, became concerned enough about Trepashkin's welfare that he arranged a meeting with him in Ukraine in early 02003. The two had never met before, and Goldfarb found it an odd encounter.<br />
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He was one of the stranger people I've ever met, Goldfarb recounted. He had no interest in the philosophical or political implications of what he was doing. To him, this was all just a criminal case. In the back of my mind, I was thinking, ‘Is this guy crazy? Doesn't he appreciate what he's up against?' but I finally concluded he was this kind of supercop - you know, a Serpico figure. He was determined to do the right thing because it was the right thing to do; it was just that simple. Still, Goldfarb felt it his duty to at least alert Trepashkin to the deepening peril, the very little that could be done if the authorities decided to go after him. The more he pressed on this, though, the more Trepashkin seemed to bristle.<br />
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He didn't care about any of that, Goldfarb remembered. I think he still believed he was fighting to reform the system, rather than that he was up against the system itself.<br />
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But as it turned out, the hammer first fell elsewhere. In April 02003, Sergei Yushenkov, the Duma member who had hired Trepashkin for his committee of inquiry, was murdered in front of his Moscow home, shot down in broad daylight. Three months later, another committee member died under mysterious circumstances. The two deaths effectively ended the independent inquiry - which also meant that Trepashkin was now essentially on his own. Still, acting as Tatiana Morozova's attorney, he soldiered on - and in July 02003, he finally hit pay dirt. It hinged on another loose end in the case, one that no amount of cleaning up after the fact could quite tie off.<br />
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In the hours just before the Guryanova Street bombing, the FSB had released a composite sketch of a suspect based on information provided by a building manager. But soon after and with no explanation, that sketch had been withdrawn and replaced with that of a completely different man. This second man had long since been identified as one Achemez Gochiyayev, a small-time businessman from the region of Cherkessia, who had immediately gone into hiding. In the spring of 02002, Alexander Litvinenko had tracked Gochiyayev to a remote area of Georgia where, through an intermediary, the businessman steadfastly insisted that he had been framed by the FSB and had only run because he was sure they would kill him.<br />
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It made Trepashkin very curious to learn the identity of the man in the first sketch, even more so when, going through the voluminous FSB files on Guryanova Street, he discovered there wasn't a copy of it to be found anywhere. As a last resort, he started sifting through newspaper archives to see if any had run that sketch before the FSB had pulled it from circulation. And there it was.<br />
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It depicted a square-jawed man in his mid-30s, with dark hair and glasses. Trepashkin was convinced he knew the man, that in fact he had arrested him eight years before. He believed it was a sketch of Vladimir Romanovich, the FSB agent who had manned the electronic-surveillance van for the Raduyev gang during the robbery of Bank Soldi.<br />
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Trepashkin's first thought was to find Romanovich and try to compel him to reveal his role in the apartment bombings. Not likely. As far as Trepashkin could determine, shortly after the bombings, Romanovich had left Russia for Cyprus and died there in the summer of 02000, killed by a hit-and-run driver.<br />
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Trepashkin then tracked down the original source of the sketch, the Guryanova Street building manager.<br />
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I showed him the sketch of Romanovich, Trepashkin said in his sitting room, And he told me that was the accurate one, the one he had given to the police. But then they had taken him to Lubyakna [FSB headquarters], where they showed him the Gochiyayev sketch and insisted that was the man he saw.<br />
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With his bombshell, Trepashkin planned a little surprise for the authorities. the FSB had long since released the names of nine men they claimed were responsible for the Moscow and Volgodonsk bombings. Ironically, considering that the bombings had been the chief pretext for embarking on the Second Chechen War, none of these suspects were Chechen. By the summer of 02003, five of those men were reportedly dead, and two others remained at large, but the trial for the two in custody was slated to begin that October. As attorney for Tatiana Morozova, Trepashkin intended to attend the trial and introduce the Romanovich sketch as evidence for the defense.<br />
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He took an added precaution. Shortly before the trial's tart, he met with Igor Korolkov, a journalist with the independent magazine Moskovskiye Novosti, and described the Romanovich connection in detail.<br />
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He said, ‘If they get me, at least everyone will know why,' Korolkov explained. He was apprehensive, tense, because I think he already knew they were coming for him.<br />
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Sure enough, shortly after meeting with Korolkov, Trepashkin was picked up by authorities. while he was being held, the FSB conducted another raid on his apartment, this one involving a whole busload of agents.<br />
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I understand it was very exciting for the neighbors, Trepashkin said with a laugh, the biggest thing to happen around here in a long time.<br />
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They brought him up on an old FSB standby - possession of an unlicensed gun - but the judge, apparently familiar with that tired cliché, immediately dismissed the charge. Prosecutors then turned to the charges they still had pending on Trepashkin from the raid two years earlier and the classified he maintains were planted. It wasn't much, but it was enough; tried in a closed court, trepashkin received a four-year sentence for "improper handling of classified material" and was shipped off to a prison camp in the Ural Mountains.<br />
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In his absence, the two men tried for the apartment bombings were found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. Declaring the matter officially closed, the government then ordered all FSB investigative files on the case to be sealed for the next seventy-five years.<br />
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My last question to Mikhail Trepashkin was something of a throwaway.<br />
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We were standing on the sidewalk outside his apartment building, and I asked him if, in looking over the trajectory of his life for the past fifteen years, he would have done things any differently.<br />
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It was a throwaway because people in Trepashkin's position, those who have waged battle against power and been crushed, almost invariably say no: In the pursuit of justice or liberty or a better society, they explain, they'd do it all again and in just the same way. It's what such people tell themselves to give their suffering meaning.<br />
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Instead, Trepashkin gave a quick laugh, his face creasing into his trademark grin.<br />
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Yes, he said, I would have done things very differently. I see now that one of my flaws is that I am too trusting. I always thought the problems were with just a few bad people, not with the system itself. Even when I was in prison, I never believed that Putin could actually be behind it. I always believed that once he knew, I would be released immediately. Trepashkin's grin eased away; he gave a slow shrug of his powerful shoulders. So a certain naïveté, I guess, that led to mistakes.<br />
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I wasn't wholly convinced of this. More than naïveté, I suspected his "flaw" was actually rooted in a kind of old-fashioned - if not downright medieval - sense of loyalty. At our first meeting, Trepashkin had given me a copy of his official résumé, a document that ran to sixteen pages, and the first thing that struck me was the prominence he'd given to the many awards and commendations he had received over his lifetime of service to the state: as a navy specialist, as a KGB officer, as an FSB investigator. As bizarre or as quaint as it might seem, he was still a true believer. How else to explain the years he had spent being the dutiful investigator, meticulously building cases against organized-crime syndicates or corrupt government officials, while stubbornly refusing to accept that, in the new Russia, it was the thieves themselves who ran the show?<br />
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Of course, it was also this abiding sense of loyalty that rather paralyzed Trepashkin and prevented him from learning from his past "mistakes," from living his life any differently in order to get out of harm's way. For that matter, even the change of venue of our meeting from his apartment to the sidewalk outside was kind of a testament to Trepashkin's obduracy; his wife, returning home earlier than expected, had been so incensed at finding him meeting with a Western journalist that she'd promptly kicked both of us out of the house.<br />
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Well, what can you do? Trepashkin had whispered as we'd fled, as if he really had no control over the matter.<br />
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But perhaps his wife's edginess that day - September 25 - was rooted in something else. That afternoon, Trepashkin was headed downtown to meet with a handful of his supporters, and then at 6 P.M. they would hold a demonstration in Pushkin Square to demand a new investigation into the bombings. You should come by, he said with his usual grin. It could be interesting.<br />
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In the five years since Trepashkin had first gone off to prison, there'd been a lot of changes in Russia - but none of them particularly auspicious for a man like him. In March 02004, Vladimir Putin had been reelected with 71 percent of the vote, and he'd use the mandate to even more forcefully restrict political and press freedoms. In October 02006, Anna Politkovskaya, Russia's leading investigative journalist and someone who had written extensively on the murky connections between the FSB and Chechen "terrorists," had been shot to death in the elevator of her Moscow apartment building. The following month, it had been Alexander Litvinenko's turn to be eliminated.<br />
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But perhaps most dispiriting, it appeared the Russian public saw very little cause for worry in all this. Instead, with their economy booming on a flood of petrodollars, most seemed rather pleased with Putin's tough-guy image and his increasingly belligerent posture to the outside world, the whiff of superpower redux it conveyed. This image was fittingly captured in May 02008 when Putin, constitutionally barred from a third term as president (although he remained on as prime minister), officially handed the reins of state over to his handpicked successor, Dmitry Medvedev. For the occasion, the two men donned matching black jackets with Medvedev in jeans, looking less like co-heads of state than a pair of gangsters as they strutted about Red Square. Even Russia's ferocious intervention in Georgia in August 02008, an act roundly denounced in the West, spawned a new burst of Russian national pride, a new spike in Putin's popularity.<br />
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Perhaps not surprising, then, the rally in Pushkin Square was a rather pitiful showing. Other than Trepashkin and his closest aides, perhaps thirty demonstrators showed up. Many of them were elderly people who had lost relatives in the bombings, and they stood mutely on the sidewalk holding up posters or faded photographs of their dead. The small band was watched over by eight uniformed policemen - and presumably a number of others in plainclothes - but it seemed quite unnecessary. Of the vast throngs passing on the sidewalk at rush hour, very few gave the protestors a second glance, and fewer still took the leaflet proffered them.<br />
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Watching Trepashkin that evening, it seemed there might be another way to understand why someone like him was still alive while people like LItvinenko and Politkovskaya were dead. Part of it, no doubt, is that Trepashkin has always shied away from pointing an accusatory finger directly at Putin or anyone else in connection with the apartment bombings. This fits with his criminal investigator's mind-set: that you only make accusations based on facts, on what is knowable and certain.<br />
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But surely another part of it is his single-minded focus on getting to the bottom of the apartment bombings, his bringing the same level of dogged tenacity to that case as he did to the Bank Soldi affair. This was the problem for Litvinenko and Politkovskaya: They made so many accusations against so many members of Russia's ruling circle that they gave their enemies safety in numbers. For Trepashkin, there is really nothing else but the apartment bombings, and if he is murdered, everyone in Russia will know why.<br />
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The irony, though, is that by continuing to push on with the case, and by continuing to call for a public investigation, Trepashkin may also be propelling himself ever closer to the answers that will destroy him. So long as those behind the bombings are confident that they have won or that they have at least sufficiently buried the past, he remains relatively safe. It is when the crowds start taking his leaflets that the danger to him grows.<br />
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That day may now be fast approaching. Amid the international economic collapse of the past year, few countries have been more ravaged than russia, and almost every day brings accounts of new popular protests: against the oligarchs, against government policies, increasingly against Vladimir Putin himself. It may not be very long now before the Russian people start to ask themselves how all this was set in motion and remember back to the awful events of September 01999.<br />
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But it didn't come on that day in Pushkin Square. On that day, the throngs were still true believers in the Russian renaissance, and they hurried on past Trepashkin toward the subway and home, hurried toward the bright, shiny future their ruler has promised them.<br />
<br />
Scott Anderson,<br />
GQ MagazineUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5893430431825770247.post-71262382561517232132009-09-13T02:16:00.000-07:002009-10-28T12:57:15.879-07:00UNGA Passes Georgia IDP Resolution<span style="font-family: times new roman; font-style: italic;">Civil Georgia, Tbilisi / 10 Sep.'09 / 11:41</span><br />
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The UN General Assembly passed on September 9 a resolution recognizing the right of return of all displaced persons and refugees and their descendants to their homes in breakaway Abkhazia and South Ossetia and underlining “the urgent need for unimpeded access for humanitarian activities” in those regions.<br />
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The resolution, entitled “Status of Internally Displaced Persons and Refugees from Abkhazia, Georgia and the Tskhinvali Region/South Ossetia, Georgia”, was passed with 48 countries voting in favor; 19 – against; with 78 abstentions.<br />
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“We’ve won with 48 to 19,” Alexander Lomaia, Georgia’s UN envoy told RFE/RL Georgian service.<br />
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He said that the voting result was better than the one of last year and although the General Assembly’s resolutions are not binding, it was an important additional leverage for Georgia on the diplomatic front.<br />
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The General Assembly adopted with small margin of 14 votes in favour to 11 against and 105 abstentions a similar resolution in May, 2008. The previous one, however, only referred to Abkhazia.<br />
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On top of those 14 countries (including Georgia itself), which voted in favor of the last year’s resolution (Albania, Azerbaijan, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Sweden, Ukraine and United States), 34 additional countries joined their support to the recent resolution on September 9.<br />
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These countries are: Andorra, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Montenegro, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Saint Lucia, San Marino, Slovenia, Spain, The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Uganda, United Kingdom and Vanuatu.<br />
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Like in case of the May, 2008 resolution, nine countries again voted against the new resolution on September 9 – Armenia, Belarus, Democratic People's Republic of Korea, India, Iran, Myanmar, Russia, Syria and Venezuela; plus 10 additional countries - Algeria, Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Laos, Sri Lanka, Viet Nam, Zimbabwe.<br />
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Serbia, which voted against last year, now abstained and Sudan, which was also against last year, now was absent.<br />
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Like the May, 2008 resolution, the recent document also notes the need for developing a timetable to ensure safe return of displaced persons and refugees and requests the UN Secretary General to submit a comprehensive report on the implementation of the resolution at the General Assembly’s next plenary session.<br />
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Pursuant to the May, 2008 General Assembly resolution, UN Secretary General submitted his report late last month, which says that “no timetable for the voluntary return of all refugees and internally displaced persons has yet been developed given the prevailing environment and continued discussions between the parties.”<br />
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It also says that the although competent UN agencies are mandated to contribute to supporting creation of necessary conditions on the ground for safe return of internally displaced persons, “responsibility for the actual creation and maintenance of the requisite conditions (security, economic, integration etc.) for sustainable returns rests with the parties themselves.”<br />
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Prior to the vote on September 9, Russia tried to remove the issue from the agenda, but its motion was not supported.<br />
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Andrei Nesterenko, a spokesman of the Russian foreign ministry, said on September 3 that the draft resolution “falls behind the existing reality” on the ground.<br />
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“And the reality is that two independent states – Abkhazia and South Ossetia – have emerged in the region and both the Georgian leadership and its foreign patrons will sooner or later have to reckon with this fact,” he said.<br />
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According to the Georgian Ministry for Refugees and Accommodation there are <span style="color: red; font-weight: bold;">more than 293,048 internally displaced persons currently residing in Georgia, of whom 245,363 are from Abkhazia.</span><br />
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It is estimated that out of 245,363 IDPs from Abkhazia, approximately 45,000 people spontaneously returned to their homes in the Gali district, although they are still considered internally displaced persons in Georgia and are eligible for government assistance.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5893430431825770247.post-5654592723869748202009-08-15T14:27:00.001-07:002009-10-28T12:57:54.958-07:00Georgia in Flames<object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/yiRUTKl4VbM&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x234900&color2=0x4e9e00"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/yiRUTKl4VbM&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x234900&color2=0x4e9e00" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5893430431825770247.post-46813616901898151372009-08-15T13:49:00.000-07:002009-10-27T15:02:22.669-07:00Georgia, Ukraine awaken the BearThe Kremlin’s recent moves show that Russia is not going to take a step back from its ambitious plans to be a superpower and will “punish” neighboring states that rebel against its “sphere of influence.”<br />
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After a series of harsh statements to the Georgian leadership and President Mikheil Saakashvili, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev initiated a bill to create a legal basis to use Russian troops beyond Russian borders.<br />
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According to the Kremlin, the draft law will supplement Clause 10 of the Federal Law On Defense with Paragraph 21, specifying that the Russian armed forces can be used in operations beyond Russia’s borders for the following purposes: to counter an attack against the Russian armed forces or other troops deployed beyond Russia’s borders; to counter or prevent aggression against another country; to protect Russian citizens abroad; and to combat piracy and ensure the safe passage of shipping.<br />
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Medvedev did not hide that his initiative is linked to the Georgian-Russian war last August. Deputy Head of the Duma’s Security Committee Viktor Ilyukhin told the Moscow Times that the bill aims to streamline legal procedures for military deployments and “press Georgia’s sensitive spots.”<br />
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According to Ilyukhin, the new provisions allowing Russia to defend foreign forces and countries would apply to states that have signed military cooperation pacts with Russia.<br />
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Both Georgian breakaway regions have signed such treaties.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Real threat or bluffing</span><br />
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The Kremlin also aims to punish Ukraine for its efforts to integrate into Western alliances. Medvedev’s address to Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko this week made clear the Kremlin’s intolerance of the current government and its aspirations to NATO, while indicating new attempts by Moscow to interfere in Ukraine’s internal affairs.<br />
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“This statement is a direct interference in the internal politics of Ukraine as it regards not only bilateral Russian-Ukrainian relations, but also issues that are internal issues of Ukraine, in particular issues of external policy,” Ukrainian Deputy Irina Gerashchenko was quoted by NEWSru.ua as saying.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Medvedev said relations will soon resume on a fundamentally different level.</span><br />
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“There can be no doubt that the multifaceted ties between Russia and Ukraine will resume on a fundamentally different level – that of strategic partnership – and this moment will not be long in coming,” Medvedev said in his video blog on the Kremlin’s Web site. “I hope that the new leadership of Ukraine will be ready for the breakthrough.”<br />
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The Russian president topped the list of Kiev’s alleged hostile actions toward Russia by mentioning arms deliveries to Georgia. Accusing Ukraine’s government of being “anti-Russian” and delaying the sending of an ambassador to Kiev, Medvedev said Ukraine shares responsibility for the deaths of Russian soldiers.<br />
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“The leadership in Kiev took an openly anti-Russian stance following the military attack launched by the Saakashvili regime against South Ossetia,” Medvedev said.<br />
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“Ukrainian weapons were used to kill civilians and Russian peacekeepers.”<br />
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The president’s attacks against Kiev received widespread coverage in Tbilisi with a row of Georgian officials seeing the address as an attempt to intimidate Ukraine from continuing along its Western path.<br />
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Although relations between Kiev and Moscow have been strained in recent years and the Kremlin’s accusations have come as no surprise, Medvedev’s tone emphasized Russia’s ability to cause once more destabilization in a neighboring country. Crimea might be a target for realizing the Kremlin’s scenario.<br />
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Expert Irakli Sesiashvili told Interpressnews that after the military build ups in Georgia’s breakaway regions, Russia’s main target is Crimea. He said at this stage, the Kremlin will avoid using force, but will use Russian citizens there to organize rallies demanding Russian fleet stay in Crimea after 2017.<br />
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Center for European Integration Studies President Vasili Tchkoidze told Georgia Today that Ukraine was able to prevent a “well-planned Russian provocation” based on the complex ethnic map in Crimea. This was a key reason for Russia’s anger against Ukraine and its leadership, he said.<br />
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“For attempting such a provocation, a famous diplomatic scandal ensued in Ukraine when two Russian diplomats were expelled from the country,” Tchkoidze said. “These individuals attempted to create serious provocations on an ethnic base. Afterwards Russia presumably would have tried through political or military mechanisms to become involved in that conflict. This failure seemed to trigger Russia’s anger.”<br />
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However, he added that Russia does not seem to be stepping back from Crimea and is searching for a way to maintain a military presence in the region. The country might interfere in ethnic tensions in Crimea using the pre-text of “defending its citizens,” he said.<br />
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Medvedev said that Russia continues “to experience problems caused by a policy aimed at obstructing the operations of its Black Sea Fleet.”<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Medvedev in search of new Ukrainian leader</span><br />
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Local media immediately called Medvedev’s speech shortly ahead of the Ukrainian presidential elections a “diplomatic scandal.”<br />
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Analysts in Tbilisi and Kiev said the statement is an attempt to influence the pre-election campaign.<br />
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“This is a tough diplomatic demarche,” Ukrainian think-tank Penta head Vladimir Fisenko was quoted as saying by Reuters. “This is a signal for the presidential campaign aimed against Yushchenko. It is also a signal to all Ukrainian politicians that it is time for Kiev to change its course.”<br />
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Viktor Yanukovych, who heads the Party of Regions backed by Moscow during the 2004 elections, said it is not worth counting on improving Ukraine-Russia ties under the current government. He added that in the event that the party comes to power, it will first try to revive “good neighborly, equal and mutually beneficial relations” with Russia.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Kiev responded on Thursday.</span><br />
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Yushchenko wrote to Medvedev in a letter yesterday, saying he is “very disappointed” with the unfriendly character of the Russian president’s address.<br />
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“I cannot disagree that there are serious problems in the relations between our countries, but it is surprising that you completely rule out Russia’s responsibility for this,” Yushchenko wrote.<br />
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Discussing Ukraine’s position toward the events in Georgia last year, Yushchenko said it coincides with the position of practically all countries and represents respect for the sovereignty, territorial integrity and firmness of Georgia’s and all other nations’ borders. He added that Russian reproaches of arms deliveries to Georgia are groundless, and stressed that the country is not the object of any international embargoes or sanctions on arms deliveries.<br />
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Yushchenko has little chance for victory in the upcoming elections. However, some experts in Ukraine said Medvedev’s statement will backfire and increase Yushchenko’s rating over the Moscow-backed Yanukovych.<br />
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“Moscow takes risky steps,” Georgian Diplomatic Academy Rector Soso Tsintsadze told the Rezonansi newspaper. “It is not excluded that such an imperialistic style will increase anti-Russian moods in Ukraine and movements will commence.<br />
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It is also not excluded that pro-Russian forces would incite an alarm, but there are forces in Kiev and western Ukraine to withstand such provocation. Moscow knows this well.”<br />
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Tchkoidze said even in the case of Yanukovych’s victory, radical changes to Ukraine’s foreign policy are not expected.<br />
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“Yanukovych’s victory naturally will change Ukraine’s foreign course, but I do not think it will change by 180 degrees,” he said. “There would be some corrections, but the majority of Ukraine is for the country’s integration into Europe. So whoever will be the new leader of Ukraine, he should take into consideration this reality.”<br />
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According to Tchkoidze, in the event that Ukraine veers from the path of Euro-Atlantic integration, Georgia would need to invest more efforts to maintain Western interests in the region. However, it hardly will affect the country’s aspirations for European and NATO integration, he said.<br />
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Nina Akhmeteli<br />
14.08.2009Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5893430431825770247.post-69892391561774568112009-03-27T06:26:00.000-07:002009-03-27T08:17:04.931-07:00Russian aggression in Georgia, august 2008<img style="visibility:hidden;width:0px;height:0px;" border=0 width=0 height=0 src="http://counters.gigya.com/wildfire/IMP/CXNID=2000002.0NXC/bT*xJmx*PTEyMzgxNjcwNTEwOTMmcHQ9MTIzODE2NzA4MzQzNyZwPTUzMTUxJmQ9Jmc9MSZ*PSZvPTFiZDM3MGIyZjg3NzQ4NWRhODI5NGVlYmQ4MTFhYTcx.gif" /><embed src="http://www.xatech.com/web_gear/poll/poll.swf" quality="high" bgcolor="#000000" width="420" height="315" name="poll" FlashVars="id=2393707" align="middle" allowScriptAccess="sameDomain" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.xat.com/update_flash.shtml" />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5893430431825770247.post-81366804710417272782009-03-23T13:56:00.000-07:002009-10-27T15:02:45.231-07:00Teachers In Abkhazia's Gali District Under Pressure To Give Up Georgian Language<div style="margin-bottom: 8px;"><span style="color: #666666;">By Eka Kevanishvili</span><br />
</div>TBILISI, March 20, 2009 (RFE/RL) -- Schoolteachers in the southern Gali district of Abkhazia have long been accustomed to operating on a shoestring.<br />
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For them, the free delivery of brand-new textbooks should be cause for elation. Unless, that is, the textbooks are in Russian.<br />
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Teachers in Gali, the one district in breakaway Abkhazia where at least 40,000 ethnic Georgians are believed to be living, say they are coming under pressure from local officials to drop all Georgian-language instruction and give up their standard textbooks.<br />
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Recent reports by Georgia's Rustavi-2 and Imedi television networks showed new Russian-language schoolbooks being delivered to schools in Gali. The Russian-language texts teach sensitive subjects like geography and history from an Abkhaz point of view.<br />
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In Georgia proper, such reports are feeding fears that Abkhaz officials are subjecting Gali's 40,000-plus ethnic Georgians to a forced assimilation campaign.<br />
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Inga, a teacher in the Gali village of Pichori, told RFE/RL's Georgian Service in a telephone interview that she and her colleagues have been warned by Abkhaz authorities that teaching in Georgian will soon be banned in their school.<br />
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"While we're teaching in Georgian, there are Abkhaz standing on the other side of the classroom door, spying on us. We can't convey over the phone what we're actually feeling. We've managed to survive so far, though," Inga said.<br />
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Neither Inga nor a second Gali teacher, Karina Ekhvaia, was able to confirm that new textbooks had been brought to their schools.<br />
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<b>Steady Pressure</b><br />
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But both attested to mounting pressure being placed on teachers and school administrators to give up the Georgian language in favor of Russian-language instruction -- and a curriculum dominated by a decidedly Abkhaz view of local history and geography.<br />
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Ekhvaia, an instructor at Gali's public school No. 13, expressed concern about the fate of her pupils, for whom school is a critical link to their Georgian identity.<br />
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"I can confirm that Georgian schoolteachers are indeed being put under pressure. I can't say whether new textbooks are being provided," Ekhvaia said.<br />
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"But Georgian teachers are frequently visited by Abkhaz authorities for inspections. Of course it's a very hard time for us. We want to bring up our children in the Georgian language." <br />
<div class="quote"><div class="innerQuote">While we're teaching in Georgian, there are Abkhaz standing on the other side of the classroom door, spying on us<br />
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Pressure on Georgian schools is nothing new in Abkhazia. But last year's war between Georgia and Russia over a second breakaway region, South Ossetia, has emboldened separatist authorities in both territories.<br />
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With backing from Moscow, de facto officials in Tskhinvali and Sukhumi have applied steady pressure on the few remaining Georgians on their territory, laying claim to their land, imposing a Russian passport regime, and -- in the case of Gali -- saying no to Georgian-language instruction.<br />
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The Abkhaz constitution offers nominal protection to ethnic minorities to receive education in their native languages. But Sukhumi has also passed laws placing formal limits on school hours spent in non-Russian instruction.<br />
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<b>Outrage In Tbilisi</b><br />
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That law has been exercised unevenly. The approximately 40 Armenian-language schools that have been established in the republic to serve the needs of ethnic Armenians have largely been allowed to function without interference from local officials. Georgian schools have been less fortunate.<br />
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The school crackdown has been a rallying cry for Tbilisi, which was deeply wounded by the perceived loss of South Ossetia and Abkhazia when Moscow moved to recognize their independence bids last autumn.<br />
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Georgian media frequently reports on the plight of ethnic Georgians inside Gali -- sometimes to an extent the residents themselves find uncomfortable as they attempt to maintain a formal peace with their Abkhaz neighbors.<br />
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In one recent incident, Georgian media reported that children crossing from the Gali village of Saberio were robbed and came under fire when Abkhaz border authorities attacked the bus transporting them to their school in the Georgian village of Tskoushi.<br />
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The headmaster of the Tskoushi school, however, downplayed the incident, saying the bus showed no sign of damage and that the pupils were studying normally.<br />
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Speaking to RFE/RL's Georgian Service, Ruslan Kishmaria, the Abkhaz head of the Gali local administration, accused Georgia of fabricating the story in order to stir resentment against Abkhazia:<br />
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<div class="contentImage floatLeft" style="width: 203px;"><div class="watermark"><a href="http://gdb.rferl.org/1B15856E-E83E-4F03-9EAB-4CC99EBBD7EB_mw800_s.gif" rel="ibox" title="Georgia -- conflict zones - Abkhazia and South Ossetia"><img alt="" border="0" class="photo" src="http://gdb.rferl.org/1B15856E-E83E-4F03-9EAB-4CC99EBBD7EB_w203_s.gif" /></a><br />
</div></div>"Don't believe [the reports]. The Georgian Education Ministry is lying," Kishmaria said. "[The students] have studied, are studying, and will continue to study, just as before. There are no problems. Nothing [the Georgian side is saying] is true. They're studying the same way they always have."<br />
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Most teachers in the Gali district receive two salaries -- one from Georgia, and the other from Abkhazia. The Georgian salary, the equivalent of approximately $330, is currently almost three times larger than the Abkhaz contribution.<br />
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But some Gali teachers, including Inga from Pichori, have reported hearing rumors that their Abkhaz salaries would be increased in return for pledges to drop Georgian-language instruction.<br />
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"There was talk about increasing the salaries. But no one has explained the reasoning behind it," Inga said.<br />
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<b>International Concerns</b><br />
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Rising fears of an assimilation campaign have drawn the attention of the international community.<br />
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Norway's former Foreign Minister Knut Vollebaek, who currently serves as the OSCE's high commissioner on national minorities, traveled to Abkhazia in January and said he found the situation "difficult" for Georgian parents eager for their children to be educated in their mother tongue. <br />
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Vollebaek says one rationale frequently cited by Abkhaz authorities for the all-Russian education campaign is that they see there is a shortage of Georgian textbooks but lack the funding to buy new supplies. <br />
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The OSCE is attempting to address the situation by funding translations of existing texts from Russian into Georgian. There's just one catch -- the books to be translated are geography and history texts, written from a distinctly Abkhaz perspective.<br />
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Even in Georgian, such books are unlikely to be welcome among ethnic Georgians. Vollebaek says with regret the OSCE is "not in the situation where we can choose the ideal situation in Gali district."<br />
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Nor is the government in Tbilisi. The Georgian Foreign Ministry has amplified its complaints in recent weeks of attempts by Sukhumi and its Russian supporters to ratchet up the pressure on Abkhazia's Georgian population.<br />
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In a briefing this week, Foreign Ministry official Sergi Kapanadze said Georgians in Gali had been given until March 20 to renounce their Georgian citizenship and receive new passports. Those who refuse have reportedly been threatened with fines, arrest, or possible deportation.<br />
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A Georgian news report earlier this month claimed Abkhaz authorities had rejected 3,000 Russian passports set to be distributed in Gali because they stated the residents' place of birth as Georgia.<br />
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Vollebaek says the pressure could lead to a fresh humanitarian crisis if Georgians begin to flee Abkhazia.<br />
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"It's important for us to address the situation for the Georgians, both with respect to education but also with respect to the other fundamental rights, like property rights and freedom of movement," Vollebaek said.<br />
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"There is also the question of passportization, which we see as a problem if it is forced on people. All these pressures together may create a situation that makes it unbearable for Georgians to live in Gali."Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5893430431825770247.post-70189705446499735852008-12-03T11:31:00.000-08:002009-03-23T14:03:54.098-07:00<embed src="http://www.xatech.com/web_gear/quiz/quiz.swf" quality="high" bgcolor="#000000" name="xatshow" flashvars="id=536089" allowscriptaccess="sameDomain" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.xat.com/update_flash.shtml" align="middle" width="420" height="315"></embed><br /><a target="_BLANK" href="http://www.xat.com/web_gear/?qz">Get Your Own Quiz!, </a><a target="_BLANK" href="http://www.xatquiz.com/gallery/?qz">More Quizzes</a><br /><br /><br /><img style="visibility: hidden; width: 0px; height: 0px;" src="http://counters.gigya.com/wildfire/CIMP/Jmx*PTExOTY1MTEwNDE*ODYmcHQ9MTE5NjUxMTA*NTUxMiZwPTUzMTUxJmQ9Jm49.jpg" border="0" width="0" height="0" />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5893430431825770247.post-58064456103080056252008-10-02T09:24:00.000-07:002009-10-28T13:01:54.831-07:00Andrei Ilarionov – Russia Prepared War with Georgia and It Was Started by Russia<b>Former advisor of Vladimir Putin in economic issues Andrei Ilarionov has opposed his former chief for two years already and openly criticizes the Kremlin policy. Ilarionov showed his protest at the very beginning of Russian aggression perpetrated on Georgia. He introduced his opinions about Georgian-Russian war reasons to Katon Institute Summer School listeners in Ukraine on September 4. His viewpoints appeared to be interesting and we decided to present brief variant of his opinions expressed in summer school.</b><br />
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<b>A.I.:</b> The most important thing is to find out the reason of starting war in Georgia. This was larger scale war, where all kinds of sub divisions took their part. In spite of the ceasefire agreement, war continues on Georgian territories.<br />
If the Kremlin aimed at protecting the people who wanted existence independently, it had to recognize Chechnya. Chechen people have been fighting for independent for 10 years and it has not stopped fight for independence for 200 years. Moscow used tanks, hails, aviation, artillery and chemical weapon against Chechnya. Chechen warriors were killed exactly by chemical weapons.<br />
Comparison of amount of damage in Chechnya and Tskhinvali is impossible. 134 people died in war activities in South Ossetia. 80% of them were fighters, the rest were peaceful civilians. It is obvious that death of each person is tragedy, but we can not compare these numbers to those dead in Chechnya. 200 thousand people died in Chechnya from both sides.<br />
Russian government has not recognized independence of Chechnya and Kosovo. It has not recognized them even after Abkhazian and South Ossetian recognition. It is obvious that Russian government has double standard policy.<br />
When Russia states that it acted in South Ossetia to protect its citizens is at least unbelievable. 90% of South Ossetian population is Russian citizens, but about 48 thousand Ossetian nationalities and 20 thousand Georgians lived in South Ossetia. Up to 10 thousand of Ossetian citizens supported Georgian oriented Ossetian administration, headed by Dmitri Sanakoev. Sanakoev was one of the leaders of separatist movement in 90-ies opposing Kokoity. He created administration where there were Ossetian and Georgian villages.<br />
Russia has to take more interest in Russian citizens living in Turkmenistan, whose rights has been violated since period of Turkmen bash’s government.<br />
Announcements made by Russian government about its actions aiming to protecting Russian citizens are hypocrisy that was used as reason of starting war activities.<br />
First number stated regarding ethnical cleansing was 1400, then it was 1600 and later 3000. The first announcement about genocide was made on August 8, at 5 o’clock by Kokoity who was in Java, who was not in Tskhinvali and who left the capital as soon as the war activities started. Russian official propaganda stated that victims of genocide were 1600. Russia continues the same today, in spite of the fact that Putin who visited Vladikavkaz stated that there were several tens of dead people. Special group of Russian office of general prosecutor found out after one month work that 134 citizens were dead, 80% of them were warriors, and others were peaceful citizens. According to international law, genocide was proved only in three cases. Genocide of Armenians, Genocide of Jews and genocide in Rwanda carried out in 1994. Genocide is discussed in Sudan, where more than half million people died. Genocide was not discussed in other cases and it is qualified as ethnical cleansing.<br />
Even in case of Kosovo it is not said that it was genocide, in spite of the fact that 30 thousand Albanians were killed and one million left the territory of the state.<br />
Destroying each other by Georgians and Abkhazians is considered to be ethnical cleansing. 3 000 Abkhazians and 17 000 Georgians were killed in 1992-93 war activities. After collapse of Soviet Union, Abkhazians made up 17% of Abkhazian population, Georgians – 52%. 250 thousand Georgians left Abkhazian territory as a result to Abkhazian events. Georgians now live only in Gali region of Abkhazia.<br />
None of official versions of Georgian-Russian wars are close to truth.<br />
I think that reasons of starting war between Russia and Georgia are processes developed in Georgia in the last 4 years. A lot of reforms were carried out in Georgia – in economics among them. Georgia developed as modern, European, democratic state. Responsible government was formed in Georgia that is responsible for the population. Work of state institutions became transparent.<br />
I can not name state in the world that has developed in the shortest period of time with so many reforms and in different fields so successfully. Liberalization of Georgian economics made it possible for the state to grow rapidly. Georgia imported electro energy to Russia before August events. Nobody would believe 3-5 years ago that Georgia, having energetic problems would import energy. Economic wonder took place in Georgia.<br />
Abkhazia and South Ossetia are Stalin enclaves economically, especially South Ossetia. Population in South Ossetia has not been working for the last 4 years and living on subsidies of Russian budget that increases annually. Subsidies for South Ossetia made up 700 million USA dollars last year. If we divide this amount of money into 40 thousand residents of South Ossetia, we receive picture that Moscow never financed any of its regions like South Ossetia. Moscow practically decayed the local population by financing them; they have become unused to working. Russian journalists, who visited Tskhinvali together with Russian tanks, told how none of the masters were found to fix the water pipeline problems. On the question why the local population didn’t fix the pipeline, they responded: - do it yourself. According to Putin’s command, additional 10 milliard Russian Rubles were allocated for South Ossetia.<br />
Big military base is being built in Java now. Russian tanks were withdrawn to Java before August events. Russian military technique supply has been gathered in South Ossetia for 4 years. Russian propaganda used to say that Georgia was the most militarized state in Caucasus. Let’s compare the numbers and we’ll perceive that this was not so. South Ossetia, where there lived 40 thousand people, had 87 artillery equipments. Georgian military budget increased in 30 times in the last 4 years: from 30 million USA dollars to almost 1 milliard. Georgia allocated 8% for military field in 2008. But budgets of Abkhazia and South Ossetia were much higher than it was needed and what is the most important, Abkhazia and South Ossetia were provided by weapons by Russia. Only 6 from 1000 people in Georgia were military servants, 60 in Abkhazia and 65 in South Ossetia, this means that both of these regions had ten times more unit compared to Georgia. Georgia had 4,6 artillery equipments on 100 000 men, Abkhazia-35, South Ossetia – 190. Georgia had 5 units of armored carriers on 100 000 men, Abkhazia-75, South Ossetia – 391.<br />
Russia deployed big amount of military technique in South Ossetia and Abkhazia in May and July.<br />
More than 1500 armored technique, artillery equipment, tanks and different kinds of technique were taken to Abkhazia. We don’t have information of GDP in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, but we can approximately say that Abkhazia spent 50% of its budget on military equipments, South Ossetia spent – 60%. It is obvious that Russia provided them with weapons free of charge.<br />
We can say that there were Russian military bases before start of military activities in Abkhazia and South Ossetia on August 7. Aim of Russian government was to change Saakashvili’s government in Georgia. Nobody even hid it in Russian government. War against Georgia was prepared 4 years ago. After Georgia had solved Ajarian problems painlessly, Moscow started to think about changing Saakashvili. Russian energetic company’s heads were called to the Kremlin in 2005 and the government told them to make problems in providing Georgia with electro energy. They were rejected by the heads of the companies and they started to act themselves. All oil pipelines and electro lines leading to Georgia were exploded. Russian government stated that it was done by terrorists. It was found out later that terrorists used the same explosive materials used by Russian special units.<br />
Georgian special units detained Russian spies and they were extradited to Russian government without noise. In spite of this Russian special units didn’t stop working in Georgia but on the contrary, their works were reinforced. Georgian special services detained 4 Russian agents in 2006 and it was noisy ceremony of extraditing them to Russia. Russia started economic blockade against Georgia. Transportation, wine, ‘Borjomi’, blockade followed this. Russia strengthens Abkhazia and South Ossetia in military field. Russian diplomats don’t hide that war had to be started before September in Georgia. Russia rehabilitated Ochamchire and Sokhumi-Ochamchire 54 kilometers railway. Russia deployed 50 echelons of military technique to Abkhazia. There was impression that war had to be started from Abkhazia. Georgian villages were fired on August 1. If Ossetians used to stop firing after respond from Georgian side, this didn’t happen this time. Ossetian side continued to fire with artillery equipments. Ossetian information department didn’t hide on August 6 that there were Russian units in South Ossetian territory. Russian defense minister assistant Nikolai Panko and head of reconnaissance service visited Tskhinvali on August 3. They had meeting with Kokoity. Kokoity moves to Java after their departure and evacuation of the population starts on August 3. Russia started war activities on August 3. 58th army is already mobilized near Georgian border for this time and 9000 soldiers, 700 units of armored technique are sent from Russian regions. Russian frontiers occupied Roki tunnel on August 6. Russian information sources informed from August 3 that war had started in South Ossetia, this was when war activities didn’t took place.<br />
Georgian side tried to negotiate with Ossetian side on August 7. Georgian reincarnation minister Temur Iakobashvili visits Tskhinvali who has to meet with Kokoity together with Russian special tasks ambassador Popov. Popov says that he was not able to be on the meeting due to problems of car tyre. He is offered to change the tyre, but he says that the extra tyre is also damaged. Iakobashvili meets with peaceful forces commander in Tskhinvali Marat Kulakhmetov, who offers to Georgian side to cease fire. Iakobashvili tells the proposal of the general to President Mikheil Saakashvili on phone at 18:30. Saakashvili makes televised announcement at 19:00 that Georgian side is interested in peace. He demanded and practically bagged to reach ceasefire. He declared ceasefire partially, but Ossetian side started to bomb Georgian village Tamarasheni and then other villages at 22:10.<br />
Russian journalists in Tskhinvali said that there practically wasn’t Ossetian population in Tskhinvali. According to official information, 34 thousand people were evacuated before starting war activities. After emerge of Russian defense ministry tank colonies, Georgian government concluded that war was started by Russian politicians.<br />
Fights to three direction start after this. Tskhinvali assault, skirmishes near java and Roki direction. Both sides had big losses. It must be stressed that tanks that entered from Roki tunnel reached Tskhinvali only on August 10. Russian troops occupy Kodori Gorge in Abkhazia at the same time. Russian ships are near Georgian coasts. Russian defense ministry had sub divisions mobilized in Zemo Larsi and Georgian-Armenian border.<br />
It is obvious that the war is not over and it continues. Russian government has not refused to overthrow Georgian government. Russia doesn’t hide that Georgian pro-Western choice is unacceptable to it. I think that everything starts from now on. Russian government acted like scoundrels, when they attack weak ones. Russia of course wouldn’t attack NATO member Baltic States. Kiev’s strive to the West is also unacceptable to Russia. Moscow didn’t like when Kiev supported Tbilisi in August events.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5893430431825770247.post-76773244711321484422008-09-17T03:00:00.000-07:002009-10-27T15:03:03.661-07:00Pavel Felgenhauer on Russia's Preemptive War PlanningPavel Felgenhauer is a respected Russian military reporter and generally well known man-about-town among the opposition, and his latest piece in Novaya Gazeta about Russia's early war planning for the invasion of Georgia is making quite a stir, and has gotten picked up by numerous other sources. Below is an exclusive English translation of the original NG piece.<br />
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"This was not a spontaneous war, but a planned one"</span><br />
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<span style="font-style: italic;">By Pavel Felgenhauer, columnist for Novaya Gazeta</span><br />
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Today it is perfectly obvious to me that the Russian incursion into Georgia was planned in advance, moreover the final political decision to complete preparation and begin the war in August was, it would seem, taken already in April.<br />
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And the Ossetians intentionally provoked the Georgians, and any response, tough or mild, would have been used in the capacity of an excuse to attack. And if the Georgians had endured without complaining, then the Abkhazians would have begun, like now, a long prepared operation for the «mopping up» of the upper part of the Kodori Gorge. If a war has been planned, an excuse will always be found.<br />
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Towards August, a significant part of the ships of the Black Sea Fleet was ready for a lengthy battle outing, units of constant readiness of the Land forces, the airborne-landing forces and the marine infantry were ready to move out, while during the course of the «Caucasus-2008» training, which ended on 2 August, a week before the war, the forces of the military-air forces, the military-sea fleet and the army completed on a locale at the Georgian border the last readiness inspection. Concurrently towards the beginning of August the Railroad troops in Abkhazia completed repair of RR routes, along which this week were flipped over to Inguri tanks, heavy equipment and items of supply for an approximately 10-thousand-strong grouping, intruded without any excuse or formal reason into Western Georgia. Naturally, not for any «national-economy aims», as officially declared Moscow, the rapidly repaired railroad was used.<br />
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The state propaganda apparat likewise carried out preparation, working over the controlled population with constant reports about the inevitable Georgian attack and about how behind this stand the USA and the West, for whom this conflict was absolutely unneeded.<br />
Naturally, one can not endlessly hold troops and the fleet at 24-hour readiness to advance. In October the weather will get bad, the snow will close the passes of the Main Caucasian Range. Therefore the second half of August was the deadline for the start of a full-scale war with Georgia.<br />
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In April at a summit of NATO in Bucharest, in which Putin took personal part, it became clear that the accession of Georgia and Ukraine to the alliance, although for now the decision is deferred, is unavoidable. Russian civilian and military chiefs honestly warned both the West and the authorities in Tbilisi and Kiev that attempts to «drag into NATO» (in the words of our diplomats) countries that in Moscow are considered traditional patrimonial estate would lead to a crisis. It was declared that Russia «using any means» would not allow the entry of Georgia into NATO, but this did not have an effect on Mikhail [sic] Saakashvili. Then events started to develop with growing speed.<br />
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Putin entrusted the government to «elaborate measures with respect to the rendering of targeted assistance» to Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which juridically abnegated the state sovereignty of Georgia. Then a Russian fighter shot down in the sky of Abkhazia a Georgian drone. Into Abkhazia under the guise of peacekeepers were introduced combat units with heavy attack weaponry, then – RR troops. There followed a series of maneuvers, incursions of Russian combat airplanes into the Georgian sky, a factual rejection of a diplomatic settlement of the conflict under contrived pretexts and at last the war, which was supposed to liberate Abkhazia and South Ossetia once and for all of a Georgian population, Tbilisi – of Saakashvili, and the Trans-Caucasus – of NATO and Americans. In principle Moscow is even prepared formally to preserve the territorial integrity of Georgia in a form of a kind of confederation and to give the Georgians the opportunity to democratically elect themselves as president anybody whom, preferably, they will approve in Moscow as well.<br />
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In precisely the same way did the Russian leadership prepare in ’99 the incursion into Chechnya. Then already in early spring, according to the witness of former premier Sergey Stepashin, was adopted a principled decision to start the war in August-September. All summer went on engineering and other preparation for the deployment of shock groupings. Then Putin and his team were restoring the territorial integrity of the RF, today, it seems, they have taken to getting the post-Soviet space in line.<br />
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In ’99 the incursion of Chechen fighters into Daghestan became the excuse for war, but its unexpected initial success led to a crisis and to the replacement of Stepashin with Putin.<br />
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Today the unexpectedly mighty strike by Saakashvili – the instantaneous rout of Ossetian formations – also seriously messed up the cards. Moscow could no longer pretend that this is the brave Ossetians slugging it out with the Saakashvili regime, while our side is merely attempting to keep the sides separated, establish peace and only for this is introducing troops. It became necessary to start an overt incursion, bear losses and subject oneself to western pressure, impossible for the Russian bureaucracy integrated into the world financial system.<br />
The troops it became necessary to throw into combat in relatively not-large detachments. In the Roki Tunnel (6 km in length), which due to narrowness can be used alternately only for one-way traffic, on the road to Java and to Tskhinvali there arose enormous traffic jams. The outdated, dilapidated Russian equipment was constantly breaking. The evacuation of wounded and civilians, the approach of volunteers absolutely not needed in the given situation – all led to an enormous and continuing today crisis with supply, while the vanguard relatively small-numbered forces had to be thrown into combat on a just-in-time basis by units.<br />
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The elite units, including air-landing forces spetsnaz, pulled forward towards Tskhinvali on 8 August, for nearly two days could not dislodge the Georgians from the city, despite the massed use of artillery, tanks and combat aviation. Even commander of the 58th army general Anatoly Khrylev, who set out to the vanguard to bring order, the Georgians wounded. Georgian regula troops came out of Tskhinvali, only obeying the order of the political leadership. Deputy chief of the General staff Anatly Nogovitsyn admitted that the armed forces of Georgia are not those who 15 years ago lost the war to the separatists: «In the present moment this is a modern, well mobilized grouping, outfitted with modern weaponry».<br />
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After coming out of Tskhinvali the Georgian troops continued the retreat. Towards 11 August nearly the entire army was concentrated around Tbilisi. By that time on the territory of Georgia, including Ossetia and Abkhazia, were pulled out up to 20 thsd. of our soldiers. The vanguard detachments came up to Gori, occupied Zugdidi, entered into Senaki and demolished there a Georgian military base. Vanguard intelligence entered into the city-port Poti. Georgian troops nearly everywhere were retreating, not engaging in combat. Russian troops got far away from bases of supply, there are too few of them for a successful occupation, their movements through Georgia lost meaning and only led to further losses in equipment due to constant breakdowns. Having ordered a retreat, the Georgian leadership saved the regular army, which with the lightning-like rout of the Ossetians had elevated its prestige in society. Having saved the army, Saakashvili preserved, as it seems to him, a united Georgia and simultaneously the foundation of his own regime, while dealing with the Russian incursion he left to the western leaders and diplomats.<br />
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All of its history the Georgian people has lived at the crossroads of warring world empires and has learned a flexibility in questions of survival and the use of one strong opponent against another that is beyond our wildest dreams. Some of today’s Russian leaders only imagine that they are acting like Stalin.<br />
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The demolished military bases and miscellaneous infrastructure will be restored for western money, and in so doing there will appear new jobs as well. The smashed radars and weaponry will be replaced with newer and better ones. In so doing Saakashvili has successfully solved his main strategic task – he has internationalized the Ossetian and Abkhazian problems once and for all, which in the end result may lead to the gradual displacement of Russia and reduction of its influence in the region. Already at the end of June in Tbilisi French ambassador in Georgia Eric Fornier was declaring in the presence of a «Novaya» correspondent: «The international community does not consider Abkhazia and Ossetia a serious problem. We have got Iran, Afghanistan, Sudan, Lebanon, Iraq. Nobody in Brussels regards the possibility of the deployment of international peacekeeping forces in the region. In any case, the EU does not have spare solders for such a little-important question. This is altogether the affair of the Russians, Russia is the key player in the region».<br />
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Now all has cardinally changed, the Russian incursion has roused Europe. President of France Nicolas Sarkozy advanced a peace plan, coordinated with NATO allies and with Japan, which envisages an unconditional cease-fire, the return of all refugees, including to Abkhazia, the full withdrawal of Russian and Georgian troops from the zones of conflict and the introduction of international peacekeeping forces, who will likewise include a Russian contingent. The previous format of sole Russian peacekeeping is now completely unacceptable for the West, our aggression has crossed everything out. For simple people in the Caucasus, for Ossetians, Georgians, Abkhazians and others such an outcome signifies real peace, security, huge foreign assistance for the restoration and development of the region. For Russia this can signify a military-political defeat as the result of a successful apparent incursion.<br />
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It is understandable that the French plan was rejected out of hand by our ambassador in the UNO Vitaly Churkin as unacceptable, but then Moscow began to maneuver. Today’s Russia, dependent on the West, can speak a lot about its resurgent might, but in practice things turn out a bit different. The matter is not only in that the old equipment is constantly breaking down, while the Georgians are turning out about to knock down our supersonic strategic bombers. All Russian leaders, both from the faction of the «siloviki», and the «liberals» – are in essence businessmen-billionaires, their personal interests are connected with the Wets, with stock market quotes, their main political goal – the «modernization of Russia», while the incursion into Georgia is ravaging all of them today and clearly threatens even greater unpleasantnesses in the future. Retaining the possibility of the integration of Russia with the West, on Tuesday president Dmitry Medevedev declared «about cessation of the operation with respect to coercion to peace in South Ossetia». In the words of Nogovitsin, this signifies cease-fire.<br />
<br />
But nothing yet is finished. In Moscow they are still hoping to depose Saakashvili, although this will unlikely happen, and any successor of his, for example the exile Irakli Okruashvili, with whom Saakashvili has publicly made peace, will be no better. The conflict is complicated, apparently, by the personal strong enmity between Saakashvili and Putin. In Tbilisi in diplomatic and political circles they are talking about how Saakashvili disparagingly in front to witnesses responded about «the Kremlinites». In a personal meeting Saakashvili told me and permitted to publish that he had heard about these rumors, but he himself had never said anything like this, and «this is all the provocations of the Russian special services».<br />
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It is insufferable to come to terms with the fact that the viperish Saakashvili, who took Georgia out of the CIS, declared Abkhazia and South Ossetia officially occupied territories, with whom our leaders can not compete in public street politics, nevertheless remains in power in Tbilisi. In circles around the Kremlin they are demanding the creation of a special international tribunal on crimes in the Caucasus. («Novaya gazeta», by the way, considers this imperative, under the condition that the investigation touches upon all sides of the conflict. – P.F.) However, even if such a tribunal will suddenly be created, although there already exists the International criminal court engaging in war crimes, then its jurisdiction will extend too to the Russian military-political leadership, which can in first order find itself under the blow for previous doings in the North Caucasus and for current ones. Once founded, the International tribunal will not depend on the Russian powers, but will be guided by law.<br />
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According to the witness of eyewitnesses, onto the territory of Georgia has been introduced through the Roki Tunnel a missile brigade of the 58th army – «Uragan» systems of salvo fire (RSZO) «Uragan» and «Tochka-U» ballistic missiles. «Grad» RSZO systems (122 mm caliber) are extremely little effective during strikes on cities and on entrenched troops, as opposed to the significantly more powerful «Uragan» (220 mm). From the rayon of Tskhinvali the «Tochka-U» can hit Tbilisi and surrounding rayons. The high-explosive-fragmentary warhead of the «Tochka-U» covers three hectares, the cartridge type – 7.<br />
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The «Uragan» RSZO and the «Tochka-U» missiles were massively applied for the bombardment of Chechnya in the years 1999 and 2000, which led to the mass death of peaceful inhabitants and demolitions. Last week, targets in Western Georgia were pelted from Abkhazia with «Tochka-U» missiles. The launches were registered by the American global system for monitoring missile launches. The Abkhazian powers declared that it was they who had produced the launches of the ballistic missiles. Now our side can likewise assert that it is the Ossetians (and not the 58th army) who are delivering strikes against Tbilisi in revenge, supposedly for Tskhinvali. Such strikes, without a doubt, will evoke in Tbilisi a frightening panic, and perhaps it will still be possible to succeed in overthrowing Saakashvili’s regime.<br />
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The cease-fire will be very shaky until that moment when foreign peacekeeping contingents enter Georgia.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5893430431825770247.post-50829081918243115882008-03-23T03:59:00.000-07:002008-09-17T03:10:21.361-07:00Status of Abkhazia<span class="postbody">The present de facto government of Abkhazia refers to the existence of the Soviet Socialist Republic that was created in 1925.<br />This republic was created by the greatest dictator of all time, Stalin, and his helpers. In the 30s Nestor Lakoba (an Abkhazian communist/nationalist) organized the assimilation of the Georgian peasant population. People who agreed to register as Abkhazian were freed from military service, received cattle and other privileges. Tens of thousands of Georgians were happy to accept such an offer because in their opinion they were already Abkhazians (i.e. inhabitants of the province of Abkhazia). But the real purpose was to increase the (registered) number of Apsua (a Northern Caucasus people that moved to the (attractive) Black Sea shores.<br />In the 70s such assimilation programs were repeated, now with promise of cars, houses and university access.<br />In 1993 hundreds of thousands of Georgians were driven from Abkhazia, tens of thousands were brutally murdered and abused. Participants in these murders now hold posts in the Abkhazian government.<br />Most other ethnic groups have meanwhile also left Abkhazia. The result is a mono-ethnic "republic". In this so-called republic the Georgian language is officially forbidden as well as Georgian schools and education in the Georgian language. Georgian refugees are not allowed to return to their homes. In the Gali district a young child played with a Georgian flag. Because of this it was brutally hit in the face by Abkhazian police-officers.<br />Some Georgians dared to return to this Gali district, the part of Abkhazia closest to Georgia. They are forbidden to harvest any fruit from their gardens.<br />This criminal government is financed by Russia, the Russian government knows this and takes part in it. They provide weapons and military instructions.<br />Fake tourism programs are launched to promote Abkhazia as a tourist destination.<br />The country is full of hidden mass-graves of Georgian inhabitants (including many women and children), their families are still looking for them.<br /><br />Solution: 300.000 Georgian refugees return to their homes, democratic elections are held and a referendum to decide the future status of Abkhazia. Those who participated in war crimes and genocide have to be brought to justice.<br />Until this happens the Abkhazian republic is a fake.<br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">See for more:</span><br /></span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:100%;" ><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing_of_Georgians_in_Abkhazia">Ethnic cleansing of Georgians in Abkhazia</a><br /></span><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.hrw.org/reports/pdfs/g/georgia/georgia953.pdf" class="external text" title="http://www.hrw.org/reports/pdfs/g/georgia/georgia953.pdf" rel="nofollow">Report by Human Rights Watch Helsinki about ethnic cleansing committed in Abkhazia</a><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=2D62579F9E2564F5"><span>Playlist: 1992-93 ETHNIC CLEANSING OF GEORGIANS IN APKHAZETI</span></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5893430431825770247.post-62957512517270552672008-03-22T03:58:00.000-07:002009-10-27T15:03:21.776-07:00Independence Illusions of Separatist Regimes<o:smarttagtype name="City" namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags"></o:smarttagtype><o:smarttagtype name="country-region" namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags"></o:smarttagtype><o:smarttagtype name="place" namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags"></o:smarttagtype><style>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><st1:city><st1:place></st1:place></st1:city><o:p></o:p>After the declaration of independence of Kosovo, Kremlin-backed separatist leaders of Abkhazia (Georgian Apkhazeti) and Tskhinvali region of <st1:country-region><st1:place>Georgia</st1:place></st1:country-region> (soviet-communist name: <st1:place>"South Ossetia</st1:place>", Original name: Samachablo) have increased their contacts and travels to <st1:city><st1:place>Moscow</st1:place></st1:city>. They are trying to arrange their regions’ independence this way. The Kremlin will not back them openly of course, but in reality it is quite generous towards these regimes. At the beginning of March 2008 for example, <st1:country-region><st1:place>Russia</st1:place></st1:country-region> lifted the economic sanctions against the regions. It will not even mean a lot of change, because <st1:country-region><st1:place>Russia</st1:place></st1:country-region> was already importing contraband and providing arms, money and military instructors to the regimes. The so-called Russian peacekeeping troops in the regions are loyal to the Kremlin and are unfamiliar with principles of freedom of press and human rights. <br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Another question is what justice there is in the claim to independence of Abkhazia and <st1:place>"South Ossetia"</st1:place>(Original name: Samachablo) in comparison with Kosovo.<br />
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<div class="MsoNormal">And why are the leaders of both regions in a hurry to get it? The regime in Abkhazia claims that a referendum and election results prove that the majority of the population wants to separate from <st1:country-region><st1:place>Georgia</st1:place></st1:country-region> and live in an independent state. But how was the ‘majority’ established? In September 1993 more than 300,000 ethnic Georgians were driven out of Abkhazia. By international standards this was nothing short of an ethnic cleansing. These refugees now live in <st1:country-region><st1:place>Georgia</st1:place></st1:country-region> and dream each day of returning to the homes they had to leave behind. The regime in Abkhazia resists this by all means. After the Georgians other inhabitants left: Greeks, Jews, Armenians, Russians and even quite a few Abkhazians. In 1989 Georgians were over 50 % of the population of Abkhazia. Of the population of 1989 only 20 % remains today. Manipulated referenda and elections held for this 20 % population are given by the regime as proof of the will of the people. More than 70,000 that have already returned and live in Abkhazia(Georgian: Apkhazeti) cannot take part in the referenda and elections. The reason for this was that they had not applied for citizenship of (non-recognized republic) Abkhazia! <br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">A similar situation exists in the Tskhinval region. (soviet-communist name: <st1:place>"South Ossetia"</st1:place>, Original name: Samachablo) where Georgians are already a majority. The Tskinvali regime states that they do not have citizenship of (non-recognized republic) <st1:place>"South Ossetia</st1:place>" and can therefore not take part in the referenda and elections. <br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The United Nations or any other international organization could not be present during these referenda and elections. They did not recognize them. Only <st1:country-region><st1:place>Russia</st1:place></st1:country-region> did.. That was no wonder, because <st1:country-region><st1:place>Russia</st1:place></st1:country-region> spent a lot of money on them and Russian observers were present. <st1:country-region><st1:place>Russia</st1:place></st1:country-region> is the only country that continuously threatens <st1:country-region><st1:place>Georgia</st1:place></st1:country-region> with recognizing the independence of the republics, thus trying to force <st1:country-region><st1:place>Georgia</st1:place></st1:country-region> away from a Western orientation. <br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Now the question remains: when will the international community finally demand of Abkhazia(Georgian: Apkhazeti) and <st1:place>"South Ossetia"</st1:place>(Original name: Samachablo) to let the refugees return to their homes? Both regimes know that when this happens, balance will be restored and independence will remain an illusion.<br />
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5893430431825770247.post-32950318909787232472008-03-22T03:57:00.001-07:002008-09-17T03:17:12.434-07:00Black Archaeology-- big business in AbkhaziaInstead of discovering and preserving the history of Georgia, cultural artifacts are being pillaged in the separatist region of Abkhazia.<br /><br />The practice of black archeology (excavation for the purpose of robbery) began several centuries ago. However, even now, it is easy to find numerous artifacts from Abkhazia and all of Georgia on the Russian and European black markets. Just recently, Joseph Stalin’s pool table, kept in his villa in Ritsa, was sold to a Russian executive for $50,000.<br /><br />Our cultural heritage is being taken away and the process is so irreversible that even Abkhazians have begun to take it serious. Aleksandr Ankvab, premier-minister of de facto authorities, made statements on this issue and confirmed that valuable museum exhibits, historical monuments and precious icons are indeed being taken away from Abkhazian territory.<br /><br />Items found during archeological excavations in Abkhazia, exhibits from the Sokhumi state museum, icons and other units of cultural meaning are being sold in Russia. Some are sold illegally, others “officially”—like the medieval frescos from ancient Georgian churches—under the guise of rehabilitation and maintenance.<br /><br />Abkhazia’s museum exhibits are taken to Russia on the basis of an agreement between Sokhumi and Krasnodar territory museums to rehabilitate icons and mosaic coatings. They are taken from Abkhazia for rehabilitation but then they are never returned.<br /><br />This comes after the destruction of frescos and Georgian inscriptions in churches. Reportedly, the church inscriptions in Abkhazian villages of Likhni and Ilori have been removed. XIII century Bedia church and the grave of Bagrat III, the Ambari basilica, and the famous “Kelasuri wall” have been badly damaged. In addition, King Tamar’s bridge, the basilica in Gantiadi (II-III century), the Gentsvishi fortress (early medieval period), the Ilori Saint George church dated XI century, the Mokvi church, and the Tsebeldi fortress have been desecrated.<br /><br />Russian experts estimate that the budget of illegal archeological business in Russia is tantamount to the budget of the average region. The major portion of archeological findings appear on the black market and then later in private collections. Many artifacts are taken to Europe, as Europeans know where to invest money. For this reason, Moscow has adopted a special law against “black archeology”.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Georgian culture and frescos are disappearing</span><br /><br />Malkhaz Baramidze PhD, head of the Bronze Era Department of the Archeology Research Center and a member of Abkhazia’s Academy of Science, leads a group working on current, problematic issues in Abkhazia. Baramidze says that this topic is not new and that the materials found during archeological excavations in Abkhazia later appeared in the museums of Sochi or St.Petersburg and that many Georgian inscriptions dating from the early, middle and late medieval period have disappeared. In order to rescue Georgian monuments in Abkhazia the Georgian government asked UNESCO for help.<br /><br />“We are often informed that Georgian cultural monuments are damaged on the territory of Abkhazia. However we are not eligible to check this information. In this regard we demanded to implement monitoring of Georgian cultural monuments in Abkhazia in partnership with UNESCO representatives. In 1996 the program was launched. We demanded to involve Murtaz Uridia, one of the best specialists in this group. He used to be engaged in rehabilitation of Bedia church. Though unfortunately the monitoring of Georgian monuments on the territory of Abkhazia was not carried out, as Abhazians did not allow the group to the territory due to the lack of security guarantees,” states Baramidze.<br /><br />Georgian cultural monuments in Abkhazia are being badly damaged during the “rehabilitation” activities. Reportedly, the firm of uncertain origin “Baroque” is rehabilitating the churches of New Athens and Pitsunda.<br /><br />The Georgian Patriarchy has repeatedly expressed its resentment that the rehabilitation process may cause serious damage to ancient frescos, icons and churches themselves. According to Paata Davitaia, former Minister of Justice of Abkhazia’s legitimate government and leader of the political party “We Ourselves”, many samples of Georgian art were kept in the Sokhumi museum. Icons were there, along with wine pitchers, vases, pots, various jewelry, weapons and other items found in graves during archeological excavations. Currently there is almost nothing left in the museum.<br /><br />Davitaia explained that the premier of de facto authority, Ankvab, has made statements about it. He spoke on the TV channel NTV. “Recently studio ‘profession reporter’ made a program ‘Abkhazia’s black archeology’ depicting black archeologists arriving in Abkhazia, hold archeological excavations and take away found masterpieces of art and culture. In this regard Ankvab expressed his resentment and declared that Abkhazians blocked the border and strengthened control. Besides the frescos remained at churches are taken to Russia as if for the rehabilitation works. Then they are taken to various countries from Russia” stated Davitaia.<br /><br />According to Davitaia, black archeologists found samples from the antique period discovered by archeologists during decades of archeological excavations in Abkhazia after the cease-fire was removed.<br /><br />“Stalin’s billiard, a valuable thing for Georgian cultural heritage kept in Ritsa villa was sold to Russian businessman at USD 50 000. It is note-worthy that the ruins of the ancient city are discovered on Sokhumi coast. At present Black Sea covers the territory. The divers in Sokhumi always studied this ruins and they found many samples of Sokhumi art and life in the sea. Now this process is uncontrolled. Some interested people arrive from abroad, pay money, hire divers and take away anything they find. The local population is also involved in this process. Black archeologists buy things found by local inhabitants- antique pots, vases, gold, weapons, crosses decorated with precious stones,” said Davitaia.<br /><br />Black archeology was common even in the Soviet period. Artifacts discovered in Abkhazian territory often appeared in Sochi, Adleri or Tuabse museums.<br /><br />“Yuri Voronov was one of the biggest black archeologists. Many conferences are dedicated to his memory in Abkhazia. In Tsebelda he found and took away materials of Romanian period dated A.D. I-II centuries. He carried out excavations without any permission. In 1967 the Academy of Sciences of Georgia sent a special commission to Moscow in this regard. Voronin’s response was -“What’s up? What a noise? All our archeologists sell materials.<br /><br />Voronin took away the well-known ‘Primorsk treasure’ from Georgia and sold to Hermitage in St.Petersburg. When we learned about it we tried to find official documents on purchase, but they did not tell us the name of seller. They showed only part of documents listing purchased things,” states Malkhaz Baramidze.<br /><br />After the suspension of military activities from 1992 to1993, Madina Ardzinba, daughter of the former separatist leader Vladislav Ardzinba, became involved in the black archeology process. Three years ago, in autumn of 2004, before the inauguration of Sergey Bagapsh, Russian agencies disseminated news that Madina Ardzinba, historian and daughter of Vladislav Ardzinba, was detained at the check-point of the Georgia-Russian border carrying antique and precious items. Aleksandr Ankvab took part in this operation, but at that time, he was one of the opposition leaders.<br /><br />Finally, various Abkhazian and Russian websites provide information claiming that since 2001, joint Abkhazian-Russian archeological expeditions have been carried out in Abkhazia. Moreover, it seems that not only Russian but also Greek archeologists are interested in the excavation process. Greek specialists have expressed their willingness to participate in excavations in early 2003. The Russian Academy of Sciences assumed responsibility to finance joint activities. The matter concerned excavations not only at Abkhazian coast, but under water as well. This research was based on the photos made from cosmos.<br /><br />As it seems, Russian archeologists do not waste their time and there is nothing wrong with joint archeological expeditions. Nevertheless, the Georgian state should have control over the mechanisms and illegally found as well as legally discovered materials should not be taken to Russia.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5893430431825770247.post-64578942318735918902007-12-03T08:39:00.000-08:002009-10-28T13:00:56.123-07:00Upper Abkhazia<span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="color: green;"><span style="line-height: normal;"></span></span></span>Upper Abkhazia (Georgian: ზემო აფხაზეთი, Zemo Apkhazeti; Abkhaz: Аҧсны хыхьтəи , Apsny khykh'twi) is an official Georgian name for a mountainous district in northeastern Abkhazia, a breakaway republic, which is internationally recognized as an autonomous republic within Georgia. It is currently the only part of Abkhazia controlled by the central Georgian authorities and the de jure government of the Autonomous Republic of Abkhazia. The village of Chkhalta is an administrative center of Upper Abkhazia.<br />
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Geographically, Upper Abkhazia comprises the upper Kodori Valley, the Chkhalta Ridge, and the Marukhi Pass on the border with the Russian Federation. Populated by some 2,000 people, chiefly ethnic Georgians (Svans), the area occupies approximately 17 percent of Abkhazia’s territory and is of high strategic importance due to its proximity to the Abkhaz-held capital of Sukhumi, and other important cities in the region.<br />
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The term Upper Abkhazia has been largely used by the Georgian officials and media since the successful July 2006 operation of Georgian forces in the Kodori Valley which established firmer Georgian presence in the region. Prior to that, the Georgian government had exercised a very loose control over Kodori even though the Abkhaz separatist forces had never been able to penetrate the valley, and the area had largely been run, since 1994, by the local warlord Emzar Kvitsiani who was dislodged in the abovementioned Georgian police operation.<br />
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On September 27, 2006, on the 13th anniversary of the fall of Sukhumi to the Abkhaz rebels and their allies from the Northern Caucasus (1993) the Kodori region and the adjacent pieces of land governed by Georgia were officially renamed into Upper Abkhazia and declared as a "temporary administrative center" of Abkhazia and the headquarters of the de jure Abkhazian government. [4]In spite of Abkhaz and Russian protests, a new office of the de jure government was inaugurated, on the same day, by a high ranking delegation from Georgia's capital Tbilisi, including President Mikheil Saakashvili and the Catholicos Patriarch Ilia II.<br />
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The area is currently undergoing a major rehabilitation program, including the reconstruction of infrastructure and reinforcement of security services. The Central Election Commission of Georgia has recently established the constituency in Upper Abkhazia, allowing the population of the area, for the first time in the recent history of Georgia, take part in the Georgian local elections, 2006.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5893430431825770247.post-75158880555181069642007-12-02T08:20:00.000-08:002009-10-28T13:03:25.138-07:00Ethnic cleansing of Georgians in Abkhazia<a href="http://bp3.blogger.com/_0qL_nbYCiig/R3O5qeNxVVI/AAAAAAAAADQ/_1U0aHE2oyo/s1600-h/800px-Galleryabkhaziantbilisi9894.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"></a><br />
<blockquote><a href="http://bp3.blogger.com/_0qL_nbYCiig/R3O5qeNxVVI/AAAAAAAAADQ/_1U0aHE2oyo/s1600-h/800px-Galleryabkhaziantbilisi9894.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5148662938331075922" src="http://bp3.blogger.com/_0qL_nbYCiig/R3O5qeNxVVI/AAAAAAAAADQ/_1U0aHE2oyo/s320/800px-Galleryabkhaziantbilisi9894.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt;" /></a><br />
</blockquote><span style="color: #cc0000; font-size: 85%; font-weight: bold;"></span><br />
<blockquote><span style="color: #cc0000; font-size: 85%; font-weight: bold;"><span style="color: #666666;">Left:</span> Georgian survivors of the war are studying photographs of corpses, hoping to discover (the fate of) a loved-one.</span><br />
</blockquote><span style="color: #cc0000; font-size: 85%; font-weight: bold;"></span>In spring 1992, especially in June-July, acts of armed aggression and attacks got systematic character on highways and railways of Georgia. These attacks caused serious economic damages to the country. Criminal bands robbed trains and seized Georgian and other countries’ goods. Georgian government had no choice but to defend the highways and railways by the national army in order to secure safe travel of goods. As Autonomous Republic of Abkhazeti was the main area of the criminal bands action, on August 1992 Georgian central leadership decided to bring additional troops into Abkhazeti. This decision had been preliminarily submitted to the region leaders’ approval. It was personally coordinated with Chairman of Supreme Council Vladislav Ardzinba. The movement of the Georgian Army within the Georgian territory became a reason for starting the conflict. Here is what was written on this subject by Chervonaya Svetlana – Ph.D., leading specialist of Institute of Technology and Anthropology of Academy of Sciences of Russia (see the bibliography):<br />
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"Shevardnadze did not start this war. By noon of the 14th of August 1992, «the Georgian party» had not fired a shot, none Georgian soldier had been brought into Sokhumi yet, and nothing was threatening the peace in Abkhazian towns and villages. Vladislav Ardzinba declared this war on Georgia in his radio speech. He drew the Abkhazian people into the heinous crime. Vladislav Ardzinba announced total, forced «general mobilization» (every man from 18 to 45). He provided the soldiers with arms seized or stolen from Russian arsenal, and promoted unlawful actions of the Abkhazian armed troops in Abkhazian towns, villages, and roads (the "enemy" had not even reached this territory). The Abkhazian separatists searched for everything they considered worthy, terrorized and killed Georgian peaceful inhabitants. Abkhazian snipers opened fire to people being in Sokhumi sanatorium. They shot scores of Russian holidaymakers on the beach of the air defense forces’ and other sanatoriums. These were the crimes that had to be stopped. The criminals must answer for these deeds. The political purposes of the organizers of these crimes are known: division of Georgia, drawing Russia into a war, Soviet-communist revenge and restoring the Soviet Union."<br />
That is how the war broke out.<br />
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<span style="color: #666666; font-weight: bold;">"...When they [Abkhaz] entered Gagra, I saw </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamil_Basayev" style="color: #666666; font-weight: bold;" title="Shamil Basayev">Shamyl Basaev's</a><span style="color: #666666; font-weight: bold;"> battalion. I have never seen such a horror. They were raping and killing everyone who was captured and dragged from their homes. The Abkhaz commander Arshba raped a 14 year old girl and later gave an order to execute her. For the whole day I only could hear the screams and cries of the people who were brutally tortured. On the next day, I witnessed the mass execution of people on the stadium. They installed machine guns and mortars on the top and placed people right on the field. It took a couple of hours to kill everybody..."</span><br />
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Georgian government repeatedly appealed to the UN, CSCE, and other international organizations to intervene, while at the same time refusing offers of Russian military assistance. Several UN Security Council resolutions and decisions failed to lead to a de-escalation of the conflict. On July 27, 1993, a Russian-brokered trilateral agreement on a cease-fire and principles for the solution of the Georgian-Abkhazian conflict was signed. Complete demilitarization of the region, supervised by Russia, was to follow the separation of the military forces of the two sides. However, the UN failed to implement its long-sought decision to send a large group of military observers to Abkhazeti. Furthermore, the Russian military observers insisted that Georgians did not participate in the supervision of the withdrawal of heavy weaponry.<br />
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<span style="color: #666666; font-weight: bold;">"...When the Abkhaz entered my house, they took me and my seven year old son outside. After forcing us to kneel, they took my son and shot him right in front of me. After they grabbed me by hair and took me to the nearby well. An Abkhaz soldier forced me to look down that well; there I saw three younger men and couple of elderly women who were standing soaked in water. They were screaming and crying while the Abkhaz were dumping dead corpses on them. Afterwards, they threw a grenade there and placed more people inside. I was forced again to kneel in front of the dead corpses. One of the soldiers took his knife and took the eye out from one of the dead near me. Then he started to rub my lips and face with that decapitated eye. I could not take it any longer and fainted. They left me there in a pile of corpses..."</span><br />
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At the end of August 1993, S. Shoigu, chairman of the Russian Emergency State Committee, declared on Russian television that demilitarization had reached a stage at which resumption of the war would be impossible. Large numbers of hopeful refugees returned to their ruined homes and began rebuilding. Then on September 17, a surprise attack by Abkhazian tanks and artillery, supported by their Russian North Caucasian and Cossack allies, forced the remaining disarmed Georgian troops, together with tens of thousands of civilians, to flee in panic. Many of these victims later starved or froze to death in the Svaneti mountains. Shevardnadze himself, who was besieged along with the defenders of Sokhumi, had a narrow escape. The sudden clandestine Abkhazian rearmament remains a mystery only for the extremely naive.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: #666666; font-weight: bold;">"...The Abkhaz separatists killed people of other nationalities as well, including those who tried to protect Georgians. After the city was seized, the streets were covered with bodies. Separatists destroyed the Baramidze, Chkhetia, Baramia, Gvazava, Dzidziguri, Absandze, Shonia, and Kutsia families, as well as many others..."</span><br />
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The war ended in late September 1993 with Abkhazeti’s virtual secession from Georgia through a radical ethnic cleansing of its multi-ethnic population and the destruction of its cities, including Sokhumi.Just at the beginning of the war adherents of Vladislav Ardzinba started killing, tormenting, raping, and robbing the inhabitants of Georgian nationality. At first Georgians of the following towns and villages experienced the sadism of the separatists: Gagra and Gudauta, Akhaladze, Bzipi, Ipnari, Otkhara, Akhali Sopeli, Eshera, Kochara, Ketevani, Labra, Kvitouli, Kindgi, etc. Ugrekhelidze, an inhabitant of the village Eshera, was forced to dig a hole of his own height, then he was pulled out his teeth and nails, and buried alive. They left his hand above the ground (the symbol of the Abkhazian banner.) Another Georgian was captured, cut his veins. Then the Abkhazian separatists poured his blood into glasses and drank it. After this they let him go to Sokhumi to tell everybody how Abkhazians drank Georgian blood. The Abkhazian butchers captured sisters – Eka Jvania (17 years old) and Marina Jvania (14 years old), Leila Samushia and others in village Pshadi. They undressed them in front of their parents and neighbors, and raped them. After this the Abkhazian butchers executed all of them by shooting. The Abkhazian "liberators" did not spare workers of education system. They execute by shooting 78 teachers and lecturers. For instance, a teacher Bichiko Ekimiani, Armenian, was executed by shooting together with his family in his own house; a teacher of a secondary school at village Kochaki, Bajiko Vekua firstly raped, then tormented and killed; Bichiko Baramia – an assistant professor of Abkhazian University, diseased and disabled man was executed by shooting together with his wife; Shota Jgabadze – professor was executed by shooting when he was operating a wounded patient. It’s just a drop in the ocean of separatists violence. 30000 innocent people were killed in Abkhazian War in 1992-1993.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: #666666; font-weight: bold;">"...They captured a young girl. She was hiding in the bushes near the house where they killed her parents. She was raped several times. One of the soldiers killed her and mutilated her. She was cut in half. Near her body they left a message: as this corpse will never be as one piece, Abkhazia and Georgia will never be united either..."</span><br />
<br />
The war was over in September 1993, by actual separation of Abkhazeti From Georgia, by genocide of Georgian population, by destroying towns. As a result of the war 200000 people were forced to leave their own places of residence. The refugees moved to various regions of Georgia.In spite of Russian repeated recognition of Georgian territorial integrity, since the beginning of militant actions representatives of Russian Federation officials, several ministries, and departments, various political parties and organizations have been supported the separatists with political, military, economical, financial and moral aid. Even before the conflict, on March 1992, Autonomous Republic of Abkhazeti without submission of Georgian government approval began making economic agreements with Russian Federation. In early March V. Ardzinba applied to B. Eltsin for economical aid. On March 19, 1992 B.Eltsin ordered Krasnodar and Stavropol Administration leaders to make direct trade-economic agreements with Abkhazeti. The orders were fulfilled during the next three months.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5893430431825770247.post-35803252799144017982007-01-27T06:32:00.000-08:002008-09-17T03:18:17.894-07:00Facts of Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing of Georgians in Gali Region<p style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);" align="center"><b>Facts of Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing of Georgians in Gali Region</b></p> <p align="center"><b>by the Abkhazian Separatists</b></p> <p align="center"><b>From 20 - 26 of May 1998 and Later</b></p> <b><span style="font-size:130%;"><i> </i></span></b><p align="center"><b><span style="font-size:130%;"><i> </i></span></b></p> <p style="color: rgb(51, 153, 153);" align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;"><i>Analytical group on Abkhazian issues of</i></span></p> <p style="color: rgb(51, 153, 153);" align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;"><i>the Parliament of Georgia</i></span></p> <p><b><span style="font-size:130%;"><u>Georgians' Genocide still is in progress in Abkhazia</u></span></b><span style="font-size:130%;"> </span></p> <p align="justify"><span style="font-size:130%;"> </span></p> <p align="justify"><span style="font-size:130%;">After 1993 tragedy in Abkhazia, Georgia, despite the efforts of Georgians, World Community and mediator-countries towards the peaceful settlement of the conflict, the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Georgians is in progress.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p align="justify"><span style="font-size:130%;">After the seizure of military operations, regular and extremely cruel genocide takes place in Gali region, where military confrontation never took place and the ethnic composition of population is homogenous- Georgian.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p align="justify"><span style="font-size:130%;">In the beginning of 1994 Abkhazian separatist government with carried out the cleansing of the remained and spontaneously returned IDPs in Gali. In February 8-13 Abkhazian "boeviks" and merceneries murdered more than 800 peaceful inhabitants, mostly women, children and the elders, they burnt down about 4200 houses and destroyed the economic capability of the region. Tens of thousands of people again became refugees.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p align="justify"><span style="font-size:130%;">In spite of the fact that peacekeeping forces under the auspices of the CIS, whose obligation was to secure return of refugees, entered Gali ragion, separatist government again carried out the cleansing of Gali population in summer and autumn of 1995-1996, the victims of these actions were more than 400 peaceful inhabitants, hundreds of residences were burnt and thousands of people again fled out from their dwellings.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p align="justify"><span style="font-size:130%;">Genocide and ethnic cleansing were conducted with different intensity during 1997.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p align="justify"><span style="font-size:130%;">Along with this, in the last two years, by means of Georgian Authority's peaceful politics and also peacekeeping forces, international military observers, UNHCR and OSCE's efforts, took place some kind of stabilization of situation, the result of it was the unorganized return of 40 000 Georgians to the security zone and creation of elementary living conditions for the population.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p align="justify"><span style="font-size:130%;">Separatist government, which is above all, afraid of the actual perspective of the conflict's settlement, returning of Georgian Population and restoration of the former demographic situation, from the beginning of the early spring 1998 began to implement the mean plan of Georgians' genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gali. For this purpose, the separatist government infringed the stabilization in the rayon, especially in its lower zone, in March, April and May, under pretext of fighting with so called guerrillas, they brought "boeviks", who took population as hostages, in order to receive ransom, committed different forms of violence and murders. Till May 20, 1998, "Boeviks" killed 13 peaceful inhabitants, took "hostages" about 250 people.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p align="justify"><span style="font-size:130%;">Separatist government with the silent consent and support of Russian peacekeeping forces, since May 20 brought into Gali rayon more than 1200 Abkhazian, Armenian, Cossaks and North Caucasian "boeviks" with a heavy armament and carried out large-scale punitive military operation against peaceful population.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p align="justify"><span style="font-size:130%;">In May 20-26 and the following period despite of sease-fire, taking away the troops and achieving agreement in Gagra on the returning of refugees, which was precisely fulfilled by Georgian side, separatist government killed with torture and burnt 56 people, 43 are missing, 100 were taken hostages, 2100 houses and 14 villages are completely ruined and burnt, 40 000 inhabitants became refugees again, the property of the population has been taken away. The houses, schools and health care objects, restored by UNHC (this cost 2 mln. dollars), were completely destroyed. </span></p> <p align="justify"><span style="font-size:130%;">During the armed confrontation 21 participants of the contradiction movement and members of Abkhazian Autonomous Republic's interior forces' limited troops were killed.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p align="justify"><span style="font-size:130%;">In the end of May in Gali rayon were distributed the leaflets- "Death to all Georgians, Abkhazia without Georgians," and this was actually achieved.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p align="justify"><span style="font-size:130%;">At present no one doubts that if not the unorganized defense of the population and the appropriate measures taken by Georgian limited troops of interior forces, - the number of victims among peaceful population would have been much more.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p align="justify"><span style="font-size:130%;">On the other side of Enguri - in Zugdidi and Tsalenjikha regions, the situation of the expelled Georgians is extremely grave: homeless, starving, diseased, jobless, hopeless - it is impossible to describe their suffering. People live in schools, kinder-gardens, administrative buildings and farms, in many places there are 20-25 people in one room. Despite the efforts of Georgian authority and international organizations, their situation is catastrophic.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p align="justify"><span style="font-size:130%;">At the end of 20th century, when human rights and freedoms are recognized as supreme legal and moral categories, in Abkhazia, Gali, no one is responsible for these actions.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p align="justify"><span style="font-size:130%;">Unfortunately, during the tragic days of Gali, the UN observers and representatives of human rights protection international organizations, who received the part of murders' observers, took no actions. Refugees are doubtful about the capability of these institutions to fix objectively the facts of genocide and react on them.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p align="justify"><span style="font-size:130%;">It's a fact that during the last five years there was no real progress in the settlement of the conflict, were not fulfilled any requirements of the international documents about the political settlement of the conflict, the violence towards Georgian population goes on in front of UN military observers, at the moment in Gali rayon Georgians are killed every day, only because they are Georgians.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p align="justify"><span style="font-size:130%;">Abkhazian separatism is obsessed with impunity syndrome and still goes on with abusing civilized world's efforts, violating human rights and freedoms, taking away the most precious thing - the life.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p align="justify"><span style="font-size:130%;">The punitive operations in Gali witnesses that situation in occupied Abkhazia is under the control of Russian policy.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p align="justify"><span style="font-size:130%;">Long time has passed after the seizure of military operations but despite the expectations and enormous spiritual and phisical sufferings, there was still hope for the future in the refugees. Genocide and ethnic cleansing that took place in May 20-26, made obvious for everybody that the returning of the lost territory is a very distant or unrealistic dream.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p align="justify"><span style="font-size:130%;">We present the facts of Georgians' genocide carried out by Abkhazian separatists in May 1998 and afterwards, these are materials in which you can see the terrible facts of ethnic cleansing and bloodshed in Gali.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p align="justify"><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);font-size:130%;" ><b>THE PRE-TRAGEDY PERIOD</b></span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p align="justify"><span style="font-size:130%;">On the 11 April from Gali rayon, village Saberio, Abkhaz "boeviks" kidnapped Gamgebeli (head of local administration) of the village Davit Eteria together with his son. Kidneppers asked for ransom. </span></p> <p align="justify"><span style="font-size:130%;">On the 12 April in Gali rayon's village Saberio took place the clash between Abkhaz police and local inhabitants, in which interfered Russian peacekeepers. One Abkhazian died and several Russian soldiers were wounded.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p align="justify"><span style="font-size:130%;">Abkhazian "boeviks" in Gali rayon's village Gudava killed brothers Barkaia and captured their sister.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p align="justify"><span style="font-size:130%;">The group of 150 fighters was brought to Gali rayon. The group mainly consisted Abkhazian and Armenian "boeviks," inhabitants of Gudauta and Gagra. They actively participated in 1992-93 Georgians' genocide.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p align="justify"><span style="font-size:130%;">On 27 April in Gali rayon local inhabitants were invaded by Abkhazian "boeviks". Regarding this fact was proofed that on that day 50 men group in Abkhazian police uniforms along with Russian peacekeeping forces' tanks entered village Sida. So called police took hostages several residents. Brothers Ekhvaia are wounded. The invaders placed the hostages in the building of village Sida administration and burnt several houses. The leader of the group, distinguished by extreme cruelty, was the nephew of Givi Eshba, Civil Proceedings Division's Head of so called Gali rayon.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;">On 28 April in village Mziuri of Gali rayon happened the spontaneous fight. From the side of Abkhazian "boeviks" were killed two fighters, some were wounded.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;">On 29 April in village Shesheleti of Gali rayon happened the fight between Abkhazian "boeviks" and local population. Some people were wounded, "boeviks" took as hostages 11 people.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;">On 10 May in village Mziuri of Gali rayon in order to carry out punitive operations Abkhazian separatists brought so called Bagramian Battalion. The Battalion attacked peaceful population, burnt the houses and took hostages.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;">On 18 May three buses with Abkhazian "boeviks" entered Gali</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;">On 20May two "Gaz 66" vehicles full of Abkhazian "boeviks" entered village Sida of Gali rayon. Took place unorganized resistance of the population. To avoid more danger the population was warned to leave their houses and take away children from the conflict zone.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;">Anti-Georgian meetings are organized in Ochamchire, Gudauta and Sukhumi.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);font-size:180%;" ><b>The facts of genoc in Gali rayon from May 20, 1998.</b></span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;">In the morning of May 20, with the purpose of punitive operations first 50 men were brought to Gali rayon. Than 70 men (May 16-17), afterwards 120 men (May 18) groups of Abkhazian "boeviks", and on the 20th of May - 120 "boeviks" entered the rayon. Later, 800 men groups with means of transport on which are so called "Shilka" and heavy guns, with the support and participation of Russian Peacekeeping Forces, began punitive operations in villages Sida, Repo-Etseri and Khumushkuri, where they opened the fire to peaceful population. The population of these villages, along with local guerrillas, in order to stop the punishing operations and avoid victims was forced to resist, which resulted in an open armed fighting.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;">On 21 May, heavily armed 100 men group of Abkhazia "boeviks" entered Gali rayon village Khumushkuri. Georgian guerrillas managed to stop Abkhazians but additional Abkhazian forces encircled guerrillas. Abkhazians used heavy artillery and grenade-launchers.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;">On 22 May, Abkhazian "boeviks" took hostages 4 local inhabitants, occupied 45 houses and a mill in village Sida of Gali rayon. From village Khumushkuri were taken hostages 10 peaceful inhabitants. 100 men Abkhazian group entered territory of Mziur-Makhunjia. Two men were taken hostages. Abkhazians occupied the territory of village Pirveli Gali and completely drove the population out of the village. In community Tskhiri Abkhazians shot Zaur Tsimitia and his two children, took as hostages 4 peaceful inhabitants: Omister Nakopia, Otar Nakopia, Arvelodi Bakarandze and the guest of the family from Gulripshi, where these four are, is unknown.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;">On the 23-rd of May, on Saturday, Abkhazian Separatists brought to Gali additional several hundreds of policemen to carry out punishing operations against Georgian population.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;">On the 24-th of May, at 10 o'clock in the morning Abkhazian separatists carried out the armed attack on Gali rayon villages Khumushkuri and Kvemo Barghebi, they opened the fire to peaceful population, burnt the houses, killed the helpless old people, women and children. Local population, along with guerrillas actively resisted. This is one more evidence of Separatists' decision to complete the ethnic cleansing of Georgian population.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;">On the 24th of May Abkhazian "boeviks" invaded the office of the mission of UN military observers in Gali, disarmed and beat the members of the guard and surrounded the building.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;">On 24 May, 1998 in order to secure safe escape of the civilian population from the conflict zone, armed unites of the Internal Ministry were introduced into certain villages of Gali region.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;">On 25 May, 1998 Abkhaz "boeviks" murdered correspondent of the newspaper "Resonance" Giorgi Chania in the Gali region village of Ganakhleba.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;">25-26 May, Abkhaz "boeviks", applying massive military force, committed large-scale punitive operations against in the following villages of the Gali region: Tagiloni, Nabakevi, Ganachleba, Gagida, Otobaia. They robbed local population of livestock, burnt down their dwellings and infrastructure and mercilessly looted the local population.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;">Shootings are still going on. 26-27 May, armed clashes took place in village Dikhazurga. At the same night, the Abkhaz separatists burnt more than 25 houses in villages Dikhazurga and Saberio. The next day hostilities resumed. According to the trustworthy source of information, there were 545 households in Dikhazurga. Because of violence, 80% of these households were burnt down. The Abkhaz separatists were supported by the Russia "peace keepers" in carrying out their punitive operations.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;">Despite of the agreement on cease fire by 6a.m. 0f 26 May reached between the parties to the conflict, by 9a.m. situation became very explosive in the Saberio direction, where Enguri hydroelectric station's control panel is situated. Abkhazians carried out punitive operations here and as a result peaceful civilians were forced to abandon their dwellings and found refuge in Zugdidi. The abkaz "boeviks" took hostages, murdered and burnt alive helpless civilians.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;">There are about 30 thousand IDPs from the Gali region in Zugdidi and Tsalendjikha regions. Mostly, they live in schools and other administrative buildings. As a rule, 15-20 persons live in one room. Despite the fact that different towns and regions of Georgia did their best to render humanitarian aid to refugees, it proved extremely difficult to provide IDPs with the essentials and food products. International humanitarian organizations are rendering humanitarian assistance as well.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;">The International Red Cross has not played any positive role in the course of the events. The IDPs asked the aforementioned organization to render assistance in the evacuation of the wounded, the elders, children and women from the conflict zone. In response, representatives of the Red Cross Zugdidi office demanded full guarantee of their safety.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;">On 28 May, the Abkhaz separatists staged another violent raid in Zugdidi region villages situated beyond the river Enguri. At that time separatists aimed at the village Khurcha and took two Georgian young men as hostages. The destiny of these men is unknown to the Georgian side.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;">According to the uncompleted date, during these days 17 partisans and 56 civilians were killed. It is believed that common grave of 100 civilians is in the surroundings of Gali. The Georgians were not allowed make a video shot of these corpses. According to the eyewitnesses, there were facts of brutal torture and burning alive of helpless civilians.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;">Situation is still tense in the Gali region. The Abkhazian militia and "boeviks" debauching. Due to the passiveness of Russian peace keeping forces,</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;">UN military observers and other missions, murder, robbery, burning of dwellings is frequent. Almost all goods are taken from the houses and aftermath these houses are burnt, cattle are slaughtered. There is complete chaos impunity. Abkhazians are mining bridges, roads and paths.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;">On 2 July, at 7a.m Abkhaz "boeviks" burnt several houses in Tagiloni and Nabakevi. In the village of Tagiloni Abkhazians took invalid Amiran Okudjava as hostage and looted villagers who happened to return to take their personal belongings.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;">On 2 June, the separatists enforced their checkpoints on the river Enguri. Passage of civilians between the Zugdidi and Gali regions is banned. The so called Internal Ministry forces of Abkhazia seek to control the whole coast line in order to prevent passage of population from Zugdidi to Gali.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <span style="font-size:130%;">Georgian population leaves their houses because of Abkhazians new attack. Abkhazians occupied villages Zemo and Kvemo Barghebi. Abkhazian "boeviks" actively carried out military operations using mine-shooters; they burn houses, administrative buildings, kill the rest of old people, take hostages.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1