Some Details of Planned International Probe into War Reported

EU is expected to adopt a wide-ranging mandate for the commission that will investigate the causes of the August war and the commission is expected to put conclusions on November 30, 2009, the Brussels-based EUobserver.com reported.

“The mission’s objective will be to enquire into the origins and evolution of the conflict that started on 7 August 2008, with reference to international law and human rights law. The geographic and temporal scope of the enquiry must be sufficiently large to determine all the possible causes,” the EU’s draft decision on the enquiry says, a diplomatic source familiar with the text told EUobserver.com.

The commission, which will be chaired by a Swiss diplomat Heidi Tagliavini, who was UN’s envoy in Georgia in 2002-2006, will have to present its final report to the EU, the UN, the OSCE, Russia and Georgia next November.

Eka Tkeshelashvili, the Georgia’s foreign minister, reiterated on November 19 that Tbilisi was open for international inquiry into the war. She, however, stressed that Tbilisi wanted a comprehensive approach to the matter.

“We have called for the international probe shortly after the war not only into what has happened immediately before and during the conflict, but also to broadly investigate and analyze what has been happening years before the conflict. Russia’s actions in previous years clearly indicate on how Moscow was preparing ground for what eventually has happened [in August],” Tkeshelashvili said.

In her testimony before the Georgian parliamentary commission studying the August events, Tkeshelashvili said on October 25: “Any type of international investigative commission’s mandate should involve a probe of not only the August events, but also an in-depth study of the ethnic cleansing, which was carried out not only in August, but also in the early 90s. A failure by the international community to investigate the first wave was to a certain extent a cause for the most recent ethnic cleansing.”

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