EU Ready for Georgia Monitoring Mission ? Solana

EU has enough pledges from its member states to form a 200-strong team of monitors and deploy it in Georgia before the beginning of October, the EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana told Reuters on September 13.

“We have plenty of pledges and we will do it,” Solana told Reuters, referring to the monitoring team. “We will do it in time and we will do it properly.”

According to the September 8 agreement between the Russian and French Presidents Russian troops should withdraw from the Georgian territories outside Abkhazia and South Ossetia by October 10 and they should be replaced by EU monitors there.

“By the 10th of October that part [of Georgia] will be without any Russian troops. That is the most important thing,” Solana said. “That is what Georgian President Saakashvili wanted and that is we have been trying to broker with the Russians.” 

He also said that there will be “Europeans everywhere” – he did not say EU monitors – in Georgia, whether with the EU team, UN observers or with OSCE.

The September 8 agreement envisages that OSCE observers will continue to monitor inside South Ossetia as with the same mandate they had before the hostilities – that means that eight unarmed OSCE monitors will be able to monitor a 15-km radius around Tskhinvali.

The agreement, however, leaves room for possible change of the mandate, but any change would require Russia’s consent as decision within OSCE are made on the consensus-based system.

OSCE last month decided to send total of 100 additional observers to Georgia. 20 of them have already arrived in Georgia, but they are not able to monitor situation inside breakaway South Ossetia. Talks on modalities of deployment of remaining 80 observers are underway. The Associated Press reported on September 12, quoting unnamed western diplomat in Vienna, where OSCE headquarters is based, that talks with Russia on the matter had collapsed, as Moscow refused to approve sending of extra 80 OSCE monitors.

Meanwhile, UN observers, according to the September 8 agreement, will be able to continue monitoring inside Abkhazia in accordance to the mandate they had before the hostilities.

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