Shelling, shooting resumes in breakaway Georgian region
Posted: 18 August 2004 0156 hrs
TBILISI : Shooting resumed in Georgia's pro-Russia separatist region of South Ossetia, as President Mikhail Saakashvili appealed for international peacekeepers to mediate the escalating conflict.
A Georgian soldier was killed and three others were wounded as both Georgian and South Ossetian officials blamed an unnamed "third hand" for stoking the conflict.
"Today military from both sides looked for the so-called 'batmen' in the conflict zone," said Lev Mironov, a Russian representative in a joint commission trying to mediate the conflict.
"They need to be captured by joint efforts and be put behind bars or destroyed," Mironov said.
Georgian Defense Minister Georgy Baramidze said that "there is a well-prepared armed group of about 15-20 people in the conflict zone -- the South Ossetian side agrees with this. During the night they shoot at positions of both sides, trying to provoke all-out war."
Said South Ossetian representative Boris Chochiyev: "There is a third side that wants war and we must neutralize them together with Russian peacekeepers."
The spiraling violence in the volatile region prompted Georgian leader Saakashvili to call for international peacekeepers to provide security for civilians and ensure that conditions for talks on a permanent settlement were met.
"An international peacekeeping operation that is balanced and takes into consideration Georgia's Euro-Atlantic partners should be mandated in South Ossetia to provide security for the population and ensure the conditions for political negotiations towards a lasting settlement," Saakashvili said in an op-ed article in the Wall Street Journal Europe.
The latest clashes also led to a telephone conversation between US Secretary of State Colin Powell and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov, as US diplomats met with Russian and Georgian officials in an effort to cool tensions, according to the Russian foreign ministry.
Repeated clashes have undermined the internationally brokered ceasefire signed late last week between Georgia, Russia and South Ossetia and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, in an intense drive to defuse the crisis in the region.
The four sides were due to meet again on Wednesday in South Ossetia's capital Tskhinvali.
The United States on Monday urged all sides in the South Ossetian conflict to show restraint and restore the ceasefire.
Tensions have soared and clashes have repeatedly broken out in the area over the past two months as Georgia has stepped up pressure to bring separatist regions back under its control -- turning its attention to separatist Ossetia after winning back semi-autonomous Adjara in June.
Inhabited mainly by ethnic Ossetians, South Ossetia has enjoyed de facto independence after an armed conflict with Tbilisi following the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Georgia also has another separatist region of Abkhazia, which also declared independent from Tbilisi after a brutal civil war in the early 1990s.
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