Sukhum/Agency Caucasus – Security Council of the United Nations, or UN, heard a complaint from Abkhazia soon after it had to summon an exclusive session on a charge from Georgia against Russia for shooting down its spy plane.
Sergei Shamba, Foreign Minister of Abkhazia, wrote a formal letter to the president as well as to the members of the UN Security Council to condemn Georgia for its provocative attempts to fly its spy planes over the air space of Abkhazia.
"With respect to an application from the Georgian administration to get the incident that occurred on April 20 in the conflict region to be dealt with at Security Council level, we now think that it is high time to consider condemning Georgia for its relentless provocations, because such provocations cause the tension to mount continuously," Shamba wrote. He further asked the Security Council to handle Georgia’s continuous deployment of its troops in Kodor despite the UN decisions as well as its past agreements not to do so.
Shamba’s letter appeared to be a reminder of the facts that neither those who had joined the 20 September 2007 attack on a camp of Abkhazian private soldiers were yet penalized nor the investigation into the kidnapping of David Sigua, a Gal border administration worker, was yet completed. The youth camp set up by the Georgian administration near the Abkhazian border was still there, Shamba wrote, despite a request from the UN to take it out of there. Added to all these violations was flights by Georgia’s spy planes, Shamba wrote: "We applied several times to the UN Observation Mission in Georgia and to the UN Secretary-General Friendship Group with a warning that we were reserved the right to ask necessary precautions to be taken."
When the first spy plane was shot down on March 18, Georgia refused to admit that it was a Georgian spy plane, wrote Shamba, and when the second spy plane was shot down on April 20, Georgia kept refusing to admit that it was also a Georgian spy plane: "All negotiation inter-mediators as well as the whole world was shocked at the obstinacy of the Georgian administration in denying the facts. Even after the March 18 incident, Georgia continued systematically to violate Abkhazia’s air space and the Moscow Pact."
Shamba accused in his letter the Georgian administration of both trying to redeem itself after its violations of agreements by accusing the Russian Federation of trespassing Georgia’s air space and of consciously misleading the UN and other negotiation inter-mediators.
Such actions clearly reveal Georgia’s aggressive intent to attack Abkhazia sooner or later, wrote Shamba, and he asked Georgia to be condemned for its intervention in the UN negotiations between Abkhazia and itself. KU/ÖZ/FT
