‘NATO Corner’ in School in Ergneti Angers Moscow

Opening of NATO ‘information corner’ at a Georgian public schools in the village of Ergneti on the breakaway South Ossetia’s administrative border, prompted Russian Foreign Ministry to release a statement saying that the move is part of Tbilisi’s attempts to involve the Alliance into conflict resolution.

On March 7 public schools in Ergneti hosted an event dedicated to opening of so called “NATO corner” in the school. The event was part of a campaign by Information Center on NATO – an organization established by the Georgian government as part of its individual partnership action plan with the Alliance in 2005 to increase public awareness about the NATO.

The opening of the NATO corner in Ergneti school was attended by Giorgi Baramidze, the Georgian Deputy PM and State Minister for Euro-Atlantic Integration and Lithuanian Ambassador to Georgia Jonas Paslauskas.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said in its statement that selecting Ergneti “for holding of propagandistic event was not an accidental” as it represents a venue for holding regular meetings between the sides in frames of Incident Prevention and Response Mechanism.

“The Georgian side’s intention is clear – to try involve the North Atlantic Alliance one way or the other in resolution of notorious ‘problem of the territorial integrity of Georgia’. But at the same time, for some reasons, [Georgia] forgets to get interested in the opinion of neighboring states – the Republic of Abkhazia and the Republic of South Ossetia,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said.

The statement also mentions remarks by head of NATO Information Center, Tengiz Gogotishvili, made at the opening ceremony in Ergneti, who reportedly said that “Ergneti, like any other village in Georgia is a zone of NATO.”

“Taking into consideration the presence of the Lithuanian Ambassador to Georgia [at the event in Ergneti], who is head of the NATO Contact Point Embassy in Tbilisi, we want to ask the leadership of this organization [NATO] in Brussels – what is exactly meant by ‘zone of NATO in Georgia’?”

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