Moscow - Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Thursday
accused the EU mission in Georgia of ignoring escalating violence in
buffer zones set outside the rebel regions under a ceasefire accord.
'We are concerned by the careless attitude toward what is
happening in these zones. This is a dangerous game, they are playing
with fire,' Lavrov told journalists in Moscow.
Officials in Georgia's separatist region of South Ossetia accused
EU monitors this week of remaining silent while Georgian troops
breached the ceasefire deal and fired at border villages near the
capital of Tskhinvali.
Police in South Ossetia have been given permissed to return
fire if attacked, Russian newspapers reported this week, in a sign of
spiraling tensions in the region.
In the border town of Gali in Georgia's other separatist region of
Abkhazia on Thursday, news agency Interfax reported that the body of
an Abkhaz defence ministry official was found dead with a bullet in
his head.
'This last terrorist attack by Georgians shows that EU observers
do not want or are not capable of stopping such attacks,' the leader
of the rebel region Sergei Bagapsh was quoted by the agency as
saying.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who holds the EU's rotating
presidency, brokered the deal setting some 300 unarmed EU observers
in the area to end the five-day war between Russia and Georgia in
August.
EU monitors have replaced Russian troops in areas surrounding
Georgia's two separatist regions to facilitate a pull out of Russian
forces occupying Georgia proper after the conflict.
'We won't forget that the European Union is a guaranteer of the
non-use of force against South Ossetia and Abkhazia,' Lavrov said at
a meeting with the Foreign Minister of EU member state Latvia in
Moscow.
Without an immediate demilitarization of the buffer zones by
international observers, 'serious clashes could begin,' he warned.
But some Western diplomats charge that Russia has subverted the
ceasefire agreement by refusing to allow EU-monitors into the
separatist regions and by declaring it will base 3,700 troops in
each of the provinces, which it has recognized independent states.
The unarmed EU observer mission has been in effect reduced to
enforcing the border between Georgia and the Russian-backed regions,
analysts note.
Moscow signed partnership accords with the leaders of South
Ossetia and Abkhazia shortly after recognizing the regions, who have
held de facto independence since winning wars of succession from
Tbilisi in the early 1990s.
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