 Russia dismantles checkpoints in western Georgia
(China Daily)
Updated: 2008-09-11 07:50 Russian soldiers were dismantling checkpoints in western Georgia yesterday, official and witness said, two days after Moscow pledged to pull back forces from deep inside its neighbor. A television reporter saw soldiers removing concrete blocks and wooden posts at a checkpoint in the village of Pirveli Maisi near Khobi, about 30 km from the de facto border with breakaway Abkhazia. Some 40 km west, in the Black Sea port of Poti, mayor Vano Saginadze said some soldiers and armored vehicles had been removed from two checkpoints at the entrance to the town, and trucks had taken away ammunition. "They are actively dismantling the checkpoints," Saginadze said. Russian troops routed Georgian forces in a brief war last month after Georgia tried to recapture South Ossetia, which like Abkhazia is a separatist, pro-Russian region of the former Soviet republic. Moscow has since recognized both provinces as independent states. But under Western pressure, it agreed on Monday to withdraw its soldiers within a month from buffer 'security zones' it set up on Georgian territory along their borders. It also pledged to pull out within a week from the area around Poti, a small oil and dry grain shipment port. Its actions there will be seen by the West as a key test of Russia's promises. In a separate incident yesterday, a Georgian policeman was shot dead near a Russian checkpoint at a buffer zone adjacent to South Ossetia. Georgian police said the officer was shot in the head from the direction of the Russian checkpoint. They said Russian forces had denied involvement and promised to investigate. Moscow said on Tuesday it planned to station around 7,600 troops in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, more than twice the number based in the two regions before the war. Russia previously had a peacekeeping force of 1,000 servicemen in South Ossetia and a contingent of about 2,500 in Abkhazia under peacekeeping mandates dating back to the early 1990s, when the two regions threw off Georgian rule. 'EU twisting deal' Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov yesterday accused European Union leaders of unscrupulously distorting a Russia-EU deal on the deployment of international ceasefire monitors in Georgia. Lavrov said French President Nicolas Sarkozy and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso signed a document late on Monday in the Georgian capital which contradicted a deal sealed earlier that day in Moscow. The document states that the EU "stands ready to deploy monitors in the whole of Georgian territory". But Lavrov said the deal Russia had signed stated the ceasefire monitors would be deployed only outside the breakaway South Ossetia and Abkhazia. "It is a completely unscrupulous attempt not to honestly explain to (Georgian President Mikheil) Saakashvili what commitments the EU had taken on itself, and what commitments Russia had undertaken, but to be led on a string by Mr Saakashvili," Lavrov said. Agencies (China Daily 09/11/2008 page11) |
