EU monitors may be forced to stay in Georgia: chief

BRUSSELS, – European Union ceasefire monitors may soon be the only observer mission in Georgia yet still have no access to breakaway regions and face continued hostility, the mission’s head warned on Thursday.

The official, Hansjoerg Haber, said observers from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) were set to leave in late June two weeks after the UN’s monitoring mission in Georgia expires. 

The OSCE team has enjoyed some access to breakaway Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which Russia recognised in September as independent from Georgia to widespread condemnation, while UN monitors had entered Abkhazia.

“If indeed after June we have no more OSCE and UN mission, this Georgian need (for security) will concentrate on EUMM (EU Monitoring Mission),” he told reporters in Brussels.

The EU mission, which currently has 209 monitors, runs until September.

But Haber said ambassadors agreed “there is the need for stability in the form of an international presence on the ground and therefore we could not at this point in time consider phasing out or just reducing the mission.”

He said the mission could be extended by “six months or a year”.

Haber also said the authorities in Abkhazia and South Ossetia — which he called “defactos” — are hostile to his mission because the EU has refused to recognise their independence.

“We pursued an active policy of knocking on the door,” he told reporters in Brussels, some six months after the monitors deployed in Georgia as part of an EU-brokered ceasefire agreement to end the war with Russia in August.

“To the great grief of the defactos we repeat that we want to have closer liason with them, but the understanding would have to be that we are working in the context of the EU’s non-reognition policy,” he explained.

“This makes them very aggressive, especially towards us.”

He said the breakaway authorities failed to understand that the observers could be of use to them, by confirming any reports of incidents caused by Georgians that they might make.

Haber also underlined that relations with Russia were difficult and that he had reported this to Moscow’s ambassador to the European Union. Contacts with Georgian officials, he noted, had been easier.

“With the Russians we still have very bad liaison,” he said.