OPINION:
To understand the case made by Sergei Bagapsh in “Abkhazia will succeed” (Opinion, Friday), it is vital to know one fact conveniently absent from the article: The proxy “government” of Mr. Bagapsh was established on the basis of wide-scale ethnic cleansing, a sad truth confirmed in resolutions like the one passed in September by the United Nations General Assembly and in multiple reports by international human rights organizations.
The Bagapsh proxy regime is directly responsible for the ethnic cleansing of fully 80 percent of the legitimate population of the now Russian-occupied, Georgian sovereign territory of Abkhazia. With articles like this, Mr. Bagapsh is trying to whitewash this human tragedy, hoping the international community will turn a blind eye to some of the gravest war crimes of the last century.
For those who still suffer - a multiethnic mix of some 450,000 internally displaced persons and refugees from Abkhazia - Mr. Bagapsh’s arguments sound eerily similar to those of the indicted war criminal Radovan Karadzic. They conjure up the worst memories of ethnic cleansing from the 1990s, an era that the international community was correct to condemn then - and now.
Beyond this telling omission, Mr. Bagapsh’s Op-Ed is riddled with untruths and half-truths. He cites, for instance, the European Union report on last year’s Russian invasion of Georgia but omits some of its main findings - that Russia provided arms and military training to proxy regimes in both regions, that regular units of the Russian army and mercenaries under its control entered the territory of Georgia prior to the beginning of large-scale military operations and that Georgian villages in South Ossetia were bombed, killing civilians and Georgian peacekeepers before the Georgian government took defensive action.
Mr. Bagapsh also omits what the report explicitly states, to wit, that his proxy regime violated international law through the illegal use of force in August, when it bombed and invaded the only area in Abkhazia, Georgia, outside his proxy “government’s” control. Indeed, it was Mr. Bagapsh who personally allowed the Georgian sovereign territory of Abkhazia to be used as a Russian staging ground for the full-scale invasion of the rest of Georgia, resulting in a second wave of ethnic cleansing.
Georgia has fought against Russia’s de facto annexation of Abkhazia, offering multiple peace plans based on broad autonomy, for one fundamental reason: to reverse two decades of ethnic cleansing that have denied hundreds of thousands of residents their fundamental right to return. These are the facts. It is no wonder, therefore, that the immoral and illegal independence claims of these violent proxy regimes - as spelled out in the EU report - remain recognized only by rogue nations and the current occupying power, the Russian Federation.
BATU KUTELIA
Ambassador to the United States, Canada and Mexico
Embassy of Georgia
Washington
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