Troops Find No Rebels in Pankisi
(Oh! what a surprise!! What's the bet that the Kodori Gorge will report the presence of rebels in the near future? I doubt if they will conveniently move to Chechnya to be captured by the Russians .. pb)
Georgian troops patrolled the lawless Pankisi Gorge on Monday in search of militants from Chechnya but came up empty-handed, while Georgian lawmakers called for a curtailment of Moscow's presence in the former Soviet republic.
President Eduard Shevardnadze said that before launching the sweep, his government warned militants they should leave.
"We had just one proposal for them: Leave the Pankisi Gorge as soon as possible, because we don't want bloodshed there," Shevardnadze said at a briefing.
Later, his office said he would visit the region Tuesday to meet with residents and the Interior Ministry troops sent in Sunday to search for militants.
There was no element of surprise in an operation that was announced more than a week ago, giving Chechen separatists and local criminals alike plenty of time to abandon the area.
"If some of them have left the gorge and headed elsewhere, I wouldn't be looking for their address," Shevardnadze said of the militants. "They themselves know where to go. Of course, it would be difficult for them to cross into Russia. Maybe they have other addresses. We haven't discussed it with them."
The gorge in northeastern Georgia has long been a haven for criminals involved in kidnapping, extortion and violence. The operation there, a major test for Georgia's ragged and demoralized forces, will be closely watched by both the United States, which fears the gorge could be a refuge for Islamic militants, and Russia, which has long been pressing Georgia to clear the area of rebels from neighboring Chechnya.
There were no immediate reports of clashes in Pankisi on Monday as government soldiers set up as many as 10 checkpoints. Georgia's independent Rustavi-2 television last week carried footage of an abandoned camp 30 kilometers north of Tbilisi that allegedly was used by Chechen warlord Ruslan Gelayev and up to 500 of his fighters. The report said the rebels had left the camp and headed north, toward the border with Chechnya.
Russian officials urged Tbilisi to detain the militants and hand them over to Moscow or, as Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov proposed Monday, kill them and produce their bodies for identification. They strongly warned Georgia against simply pushing rebels back into Chechnya.
"We don't want the bands of killers and terrorists to bring death to our territory," Ivanov said Monday, Itar-Tass reported.
Ivanov denied that Russia had conducted a cross-border bombing raid last week and suggested Georgia itself may have carried out Friday's aerial attack near the Pankisi Gorge, which Georgian officials said killed at least one civilian and wounded at least five others.
"I do not exclude the possibility that the Georgian armed forces undertook operations," Interfax quoted Ivanov as saying. "But because they do not want to fight with terrorists and rebels, who can at any moment turn their weapons toward Tbilisi, they conveniently say each time that someone is bombing them," Ivanov told journalists in the eastern Siberian region of Buryatia.
Shevardnadze scoffed at Moscow's complaints, saying it was the Russian military that pushed the rebels into Georgia when it launched its second invasion in Chechnya in the fall of 1999. He accused Russia of trying to derail the anti-terror operation in Pankisi by carrying out the air raid.
Georgian tanks and troops conducting military exercises near the village of Pichkhovani near the Pankisi Gorge on Sunday.
The reported air incursion sparked an unusually sharp rebuke from the United States on Saturday, with White House spokesman Ari Fleischer saying the Russian attack had been verified by monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
Asked by Interfax to reply directly to Fleischer's charge, Ivanov said: "My responsibilities do not cover commenting on the position of the U.S. State Department. For that we have the Foreign Ministry."
Earlier this year, Washington, concerned that some of the fighters in the gorge could have links to al-Qaida, sent U.S. military instructors to Georgia to train troops for anti-terror operations.
Georgian lawmakers gathered for an emergency session Monday to consider possible responses to the bombing.
Late in the evening, they passed a resolution calling on the government to unilaterally set a deadline for the shutdown of Russian military bases in Georgia and to put an immediate end to the Russian peacekeeping mandate in breakaway Abkhazia, Interfax reported. Lawmakers also asked Shevardnadze to begin Georgia's withdrawal from the Commonwealth of Independent States, a Russian-dominated alliance of former Soviet republics.
Shevardnadze had said earlier in the day that he opposed such action, saying that Georgia and Russia must work together to normalize relations.
The lawmakers also called on Georgia's Foreign Ministry to present Moscow with a bill for damages incurred during Friday's bombing, but stopped short of passing a proposal to break diplomatic relations with Russia, Interfax said.
Since the Soviet collapse, Shevardnadze's pro-Western course has vexed Moscow, which would like to keep the strategically placed Caucasus nation in its sway.
Russia, which has a pipeline for Caspian Sea oil from Azerbaijan, pushed for a bigger pipeline to follow the same path to its Black Sea port of Novorossiisk. However, it lost the bid as the United States strongly backed another route via Georgia and Turkey.
Shevardnadze said that the alleged Russian air raids were also aimed at disrupting big international projects involving Georgia.
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