Tbilisi Says Sokhumi, Moscow’s Approach to Property Disputes is ‘Fascism’

• Lavrov said Moscow would protect interests of its citizens regardless of their ethnicity.

Decision of the Abkhaz-Russian joint commission, tackling property disputes in the breakaway region, not to discuss the applications of ethnic Georgian citizens of Russia is “fascism”, Grigol Vashadze, the Georgian Foreign Minister said on January 13.

“This is not a commission; this is a criminal gang consisting of two clans, which is now sharing booty,” Vashadze told journalists in Tbilisi.

“It can only be defined as fascism, the ethnic fascism,” he said.

“The fact that Russia is not intending to follow not a single international commitment it has undertaken, including the one charter of human rights, is no longer a news as we knew it for a long time already,” Vashadze continued. “Whatever the virtual reality they will create and whatever criminal group they will establish and whether name they will give to this group de-occupation of Abkhazia and Tskhinvali region is irreversible.”

Moscow-proposed joint Abkhaz-Russian commission to tackle property disputes of the Russian citizens in the breakaway region triggered controversy and debates in Sokhumi starting from August. The opponents of the proposal in Abkhazia criticized it as they feared it could have paved the way for the return of thousands of those Georgians, who fled Abkhazia after the armed conflict in early 90s and who now reside in Russia, holding Russian passports. Eventually the commission was launched in October and at the time Abkhaz officials said the commission would study disputes case-by-case carefully before taking decisions on each separate cases.

On December 30, after the joint commission’s meeting, the Abkhaz news agency, Apsnipress, reported quoting an Abkhaz member of the commission, Alexander Adleiba, as saying that as an exception, the commission would not discuss property complaints of Russian citizens of Georgian ethnicity, unless Georgia pays USD 13 billion, which Sokhumi claims in compensation for the damage caused during the armed conflict in 1992-93.

“Only after Georgia fully compensates the damage caused to Abkhazia, ethnic Georgian citizens, who lived in Abkhazia, will receive compensations for their housing at the prices existing back in 1992,” Alexander Adleiba said and stressed that even if Tbilisi paid the compensation, ethnic Georgian applicants from Russia would not be able to reclaim their dwelling spaces, but only be allegeable for pecuniary compensation for the lost property. 

In a written statement released on January 13, the Georgian Foreign Ministry said the decision of “so called commission” showed that Russia “employs an ethnically-based discriminative approach against its own citizens.”

It said that the decision “is nothing else but persecution along ethnic lines.”

“The so-called commission on Georgia’s occupied territories can be described as an attempt of the two criminal-fascist gangs to divide the plundered property between them,” the Georgian Foreign Ministry said in the statement.

According to the Abkhaz reports, 200 applications have been submitted to the joint commission so far; the commission has discussed 118 of them and ruled positively in only six cases; eight applications were sent for consideration to the court. No reports are available about how many, if any, application was submitted by ethnic Georgian citizens of Russia.

Asked about the issue at a news conference in Moscow, Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, said that Moscow would protect legitimate interests of its citizens regardless of their ethnicity.

“I want to clearly stress, that we are not dividing Russian citizens based on their ethnicity. All of our citizens are under our protection. We will ensure their rights in full,” RIA Novosti news agency reported quoting Lavrov.

He said that Russia “will insistently accomplish the task of satisfying all the justified complaints” of its citizens related to the property disputes in Abkhazia.

This post is also available in: ქართული (Georgian) Русский (Russian)