President Saakashvili said Georgia did not need international organizations’, and in particular the UN’s, as he put it, “amoral and meager recommendations,” but instead, needed meaningful action from them to achieve a breakthrough in conflict resolution.
In a bellicose speech, delivered at a state-sponsored youth camp in the village of Ganmukhuri, less than a kilometer from Abkhaz-controlled territory, Saakashvili said that Tbilisi was unhappy with the UN Secretary General’s recent report on Abkhazia.
In the report, issued in July, Ban Ki-moon called on Tbilisi to remove a youth camp from the Abkhaz conflict zone.
“I want to tell bureaucrats in the international organizations,” Saakashvili said, “we do not need amoral and meager recommendations and friendly advice about removing this camp from the Abkhaz border.”
He said “bandits” in Abkhazia had forced out hundreds of thousand of Georgians and other nationalities from their homes in Abkhazia in the early 90s, “so let those bandits be removed from there; we don’t intend to move from here.”
“We do not need this type of recommendation, we want them to speak out and we want the UN and other international organizations to report what they have done in order to undo the results of one of the most terrible crimes of the 20th century,” Saakashvili said, referring to what he called “an ethnic cleansing of Georgians” in Abkhazia in the early 90s.
“We want to know what has been done to achieve the return of internally displaced persons, not only to Gali, as UN resolutions often indicate, but to Gagra, Bichvinta, Ochamchire and Sokhumi [towns in breakaway Abkhazia],” he said.
UN Security Council resolutions on Abkhazia usually call on Sokhumi to facilitate the return of IDPs, “particularly to Gali” which is a predominantly Georgian populated district in breakaway Abkhazia and next to Georgia proper.
Saakashvili is expected to leave for New York in late September to participate in a UN General Assembly Session.
In his speech, Saakashvili again warned Russia to refrain from buying assets in breakaway Abkhazia.
Those assets belong to those who were forced out of Abkhazia, he said, “and the Georgian state will act as the major guardian of these assets.”
“I guarantee that even a small plot of land purchased by a Russian fortune-hunter will be confiscated,” Saakashvili said.
In his address, broadcast live on television, Saakashvili also spoke about the necessity of maintaining unity – a common theme in many of his recent speeches.
“Today we have a historic chance to finally unite and strengthen Georgia and it needs much effort and unity,” he said. “Not a single generation of Georgians in the past ten centuries had this kind of chance.”