Ambushed by Misunderstandings
// Armed Georgians Killed in South Ossetia
Yesterday the Georgian authorities accused the South Ossetian and Russian special forces of attempting to escalate the armed conflict in the region and to disrupt the process of negotiations. The Georgian outcry came after two members of the Georgian armed services were killed in an incident on Sunday near the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali. South Ossetia claims that the Georgians were wearing the uniform of the Georgian special forces and were killed by return fire after launching an unprovoked attack on soldiers from the South Ossetian Interior Ministry.
"The murder in a conflict zone of two Georgian policemen is an attempt to escalate the armed confrontation," said Georgian Conflict Minister Merab Antadze yesterday. According to Mr. Antadze, the authorities in Tskhinvali and associated representatives of the Russian special forces planned and carried out the murders.
According to Shota Khizanishvili, the chief of administration in the Georgian Interior Ministry, "a group of ten Ossetian soldiers organized an ambush on the road near the Georgian village of Nikozi for the moment when a Georgian police unit permanently based near Georgian villages according to four-sided peace agreements passed by during a routine patrol." "The Ossetian soldiers immediately opened fire with machine guns and grenade launchers," asserted Mr. Khizanishvili. "As a result, the leader of one of the divisions of the Georgian Interior Ministry, Archil Tskhakaya, and his driver Rostom Dzhaparidze were killed immediately."
Tskhinvali gives a different version of events. The South Ossetian Interior Ministry maintains that its soldiers were returning from carrying out a raid targeting smugglers when a car stopped and two men wearing the uniform of the Georgian special forces and armed with machine guns stepped out and opened fire. Both Georgians were killed in the exchange of fire that followed, while two other Georgians who had stayed in the car fled the scene. None of the South Ossetian soldiers were wounded. Tskhinvali insists that "special forces soldiers from the Georgian Defense Ministry planned an act of terrorism near the village of Didmukha, not far from Tskhinvali." According to Tskhinvali, the Georgians were killed by return fire, not in an ambush, as the Georgian side maintains. "Those who were killed were members of a special forces detachment from the Georgian Interior Ministry, who are not allowed to be in the conflict zone, as they have been warned repeatedly. Nevertheless, the Georgian special forces soldiers crossed the Georgian-Ossetian border and shot at soldiers from the South Ossetian Interior Ministry, who returned fire," said Tskhinvali.
South Ossetia insists that documents found on the dead men testify that they were part of a Georgian commando unit. Incidentally, the unit in question is made up of soldiers trained by American instructors. The commandos recently returned from Iraq, where they served in the coalition forces. Tbilisi denied the South Ossetian accusations. "All of this about how they were saboteurs is an absolute lie. It will be very easy to prove that they were ordinary policemen, not spies from a special forces detachment under the Georgian Interior Ministry," said Shota Khizanishvili.
The command of the peacekeeping forces in the region confirmed that two members of the Georgian armed services had been killed. "Initial reports indicate that, during monitoring carried out by observers from the peacekeeping forces and the OSCE [Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe] mission, two representatives of the Georgian armed services were killed in an exchange of fire on the administrative border of Georgia and South Ossetia, in the region between the Ossetian village of Muguti and the Georgian village of Zemo-Nikozy," said Vladimir Ivanov, an aide to the commander of the combined peacekeeping forces in the conflict zone. The Russian officer did not specify which branch of the armed services the dead men belonged to.
The Georgian side appealed to Roy Reeve, the chief of the OSCE mission in Georgia, for an evaluation of the incident immediately after the conclusion of an investigation that is being carried out by OSCE observers and representatives of the peacekeeping forces. In the meantime, on the order of Georgian Interior Minister Vano Merabishvili, patrols have been stepped up near Georgian villages in South Ossetia and in the border zone. For his part, Mr. Antadze has called on the Ossetian side to act cautiously, as "such actions will not go unpunished."
Russian peacekeepers in the region felt the sting of the threat late on Sunday night when, according to Vladimir Ivanov, "at 12:30 AM someone from the Georgian side opened fire with small arms at a battalion of Russian peacekeepers near the Georgian village of Megvrekisi. There were no casualties among the soldiers."
Vladimir Novikov, Tbilisi
All the Article in Russian as of Mar. 27, 2007
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