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Pastimes : Kosovo -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: robnhood who wrote (12644)	6/22/1999 10:39:00 PM
From: George Papadopoulos	Respond to of 17770

Possible Russian-NATO military confrontation in the Caucasus and Central Asia highly likely. READ... TBILISI SEES SUPPORT FOR 'INTERNATIONALIZING' ABKHAZ PEACE PROCESS ======================= June 1999 rferl.org Georgian State Minister Vazha Lordkipanidze on 10 June said that Tbilisi's ambassador in Brussels has found support for adopting the "Kosovo pattern" for a resolution of the Abkhaz dispute, Prime-News reported. According to the Caucasus Press news agency, among those supporting this view are the U.S. and German ambassadors. Georgian-Abkhaz Talks Fail To Resolve Differences ======================================== 10 June 1999 Three days of UN-sponsored consultations in Istanbul on 7-9 June between Georgian and Abkhaz delegations failed to make notable headway towards reconciling the two sides' diverging of views on most aspects of the stalled peace process. The talks were intended primarily to restore confidence in the two sides' shared commitment to finding a solution to the conflict, rather than to address fundamental issues. Opinions differed as to how far they had succeeded in doing so. Turkish Foreign Minister Ismail Cem spoke of "an important step" towards a final solution to the conflict, while UN Special Envoy Liviu Bota said that the limited agreement reached surpassed his expectations. But the chairman of the Abkhaz government in exile, Londer Tsaava, termed the meeting a further demonstration of the "aggressive and destructive" approach adopted by the Abkhaz side, which he accused of "doing its best to bring the talks to deadlock." The two sides agreed only to resume talks within the framework of working groups set up under UN auspices18 months ago. They failed, however, to reach a consensus on such issues as the repatriation to Abkhazia of displaced ethnic Georgians, security guarantees for those returnees, or condemning as terrorism a series of ambushes over the past year in which over 30 Abkhaz police officers have been killed. The Abkhaz blame Georgian guerrilla groups, over which the Georgian authorities claim to have no control, for those murders. The first such UN-sponsored confidence building talks last October in Greece were followed by one-on-one talks between senior Georgian and Abkhaz representatives at which a draft protocol was crafted on the repatriation of ethnic Georgian displaced persons to Abkhazia. It was envisaged that that document would be signed in November at a meeting between Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze and Abkhaz leader Vladislav Ardzinba, but that meeting has been repeatedly postponed, and the two sides are apparently no closer to finalizing the text either of that document or of its companion agreement on the non-resumption of hostilities. Moreover, the escalation of the Kosova crisis and the NATO bombings of Yugoslavia have inspired Georgian politicians to draw comparisons between the two conflicts and to call for a similar "peace-enforcement" operation in Abkhazia to expedite the return of displaced persons as well as for Ardzinba's indictment for ethnic cleansing and genocide. The Abkhaz leader, who attended the Istanbul talks as an observer and hoped to meet on their sidelines with Georgian Minister of State Vazha Lortkipanidze, rejected any comparison between the deliberate Serbian ethnic cleansing in Kosova and the war in Abkhazia precipitated by Georgian forces' spontaneous and unprovoked invasion in August 1992. Ardzinba added that Abkhazia would be equally justified in accusing Georgian forces of the genocide of thousands of Abkhaz civilians. (Liz Fuller)