NEWS BRIEFS
11/16/09
Print this article
Email this article
Following a series of detentions of ethnic Georgians by Russian border guards in breakaway South Ossetia, European monitors deployed in Georgia are planning to conduct satellite monitoring of the conflict area to help prevent further incidents and to resolve disputes between Tbilisi, Moscow and Tskhinvali.
Steve Bird, spokesperson for the European Union Monitoring Mission (EUMM) in Georgia, told EurasiaNet that satellite images will help track militia and border guard movements, and identify possible security threats.
Tbilisi has expressed strong support for the initiative. "It is not important to us whether we actually get access to these satellite photos, it will be enough for us that [...] the EU itself gets an objective picture of the situation on the ground," Georgian Deputy Foreign Minister Nino Kalandadze told Rustavi-2 television on November 16.
Ambassador Hansjörg Haber, head of the EUMM, said on November 13, however, that satellite pictures "cannot entirely replace monitoring on the ground." The separatist governments of South Ossetia and Abkhazia have not allowed EU monitors access to the two territories.
Posted November 16, 2009 © Eurasianet
http://www.eurasianet.org
|
The Central Eurasia Project aims, through its website,
meetings, papers, and grants, to foster a more informed
debate about the social, political and economic
developments of the Caucasus and Central Asia.
It is a program of the Open Society
Institute-New York. The Open Society Institute-New
York is a private operating and grantmaking foundation
that promotes the development of open societies around
the world by supporting educational, social, and legal
reform, and by encouraging alternative
approaches to complex and controversial issues.
The views expressed in this publication do not necessarily
represent the position of the Open Society Institute and
are the sole responsibility of the author or
authors.
|
|
Get RSS Feed
