Apr 08, 2004

Abkhazia: Georgia-Abkhazia meeting to be held in Geneva


A Georgian-Abkhazian meeting over international security guarantees is scheduled to be for April 21 in Geneva with the participation of the secretary-generals special envoy for Georgian-Abkhazia conflict
TBILISI, April 7 - A Georgian-Abkhazian meeting over international security guarantees in the conflict region is scheduled be for April 21 in Geneva, a spokesman at the UN mission in Tbilisi told ITAR-TASS on Wednesday.

The meeting will be held under the UN auspices with the participation of the UN Secretary-General’s Group of Friends on Georgia, or the US, Russia, Britain, Germany and France, and of the secretary-general’s special envoy for Georgian-Abkhazia conflict resolution, Haidi Tagliavini.

State minister for settlement of conflicts Georgy Khaindrava will lead the Georgian delegation and Foreign Minister Sergei Shamba the Abkhazian one.

Several projects of international guarantees of security in the conflict region, which have been developed at the request of the UN in the Switzerland’s Institute of Strategic Studies and Russia’s Centre for Strategic Studies, will be presented to the participants in the meeting.

Khaindrava said on Wednesday that the sides would discuss “mechanisms of creating guarantees of the return of refugees to Abkhazia, at the first stage to the Gali district”, referring to Abkhazia’s Georgian community that fled the conflict, the centre of which was in the district.

About 300,000 people of different ethnicities, mostly Georgians, left the Abkhazia autonomy during the war of 1992-93, and live at present in other regions of Georgia, and in Russia, Ukraine and Greece.

Source: Itar-Tass