Georgia lashed out at Russia on Tuesday for vetoing a resolution to extend UN monitors' mandate in breakaway Abkhazia, saying Moscow did not want "witnesses" in the region. Russia quashed a Western-proposed resolution at the UN Security Council late on Monday designed to buy time to negotiate a long-term plan for the 16-year-old monitoring mission in the Black Sea rebel region.
The mandate expired at 0400 GMT on Tuesday. Russia's UN envoy Vitaly Churkin said the draft resolution was unacceptable as it referred to a previous resolution reaffirming Georgia's territorial integrity, a reference he said was "political poison" after last year's Georgia-Russia war.
"Our (UN Security Council) partners knew that we would not accept it because Abkhazia does not figure there as an independent state," a Russian Foreign Ministry statement said. "There is no doubt that the full weight of responsibility for the departure of UN observers and workers from the region ... rests with those Western states which for many months now have been demonstrating ideological obstinacy," it said.
Russia recognised Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states after crushing a Georgian assault on South Ossetia last August, and deployed thousands of troops to secure both regions. "Russia does not need witnesses to register the results of the ethnic cleansing," Georgian Foreign Minister Grigol Vashadze told a news conference.
"For Russia, the main target here was to somehow endanger the legal status of the occupied territories, to somehow achieve legitimisation of the Sukhumi and Tskhinvali authorities, and to give some kind of legitimacy to the occupying armed forces of Russia in Abkhazia and South Ossetia." Military monitors of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) have suffered a similar fate.
Negotiations on extending their mandate in South Ossetia were halted after Russia insisted they be separated from the mission in Georgia. They have been denied access to South Ossetia since the war, and must leave Georgia by June 30. Monday's UN veto leaves the European Union alone with a 225-strong mission, deployed after the war but unable to enter either South Ossetia or Abkhazia. Vashadze said he expected discussions in the near future on whether to expand the mission.
UN mission head Johan Verbeke told Reuters that failure to extend the mission would undermine stability in Abkhazia and leave roughly 60,000 ethnic Georgians there unprotected. Further instability would worsen tensions in Georgia, where masked police on Monday beat dozens of opposition protesters in Tbilisi. The opposition is demanding President Mikheil Saakashvili quit over the war and his record on democracy.
The country of 4.5 million sits on Russia's southern border, at the heart of a transit region for oil and gas to the West. Abkhazia and South Ossetia threw off Tbilisi's rule in wars in the early 1990s with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
"We and Russia were in favour of extending the work of the United Nations mission in Abkhazia, but on condition it have a new mandate with a new name and new formulation, not linking Abkhazia to Georgia," Abkhazia's separatist foreign minister, Sergei Shamba, said on Tuesday, Interfax reported.
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