The European Union Monitoring Mission (EUMM) and the Ministry of Defence of Georgia signed a Memorandum of Understanding on Monday 26 January. The provisional arrangement stipulates certain restrictions on the movements of the Georgian armed forces in the vicinity of the administrative boundary lines of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, as well as the commitment of the Georgian Ministry of Defence to give advance information to EUMM of certain troop movements.
The EUMM organized a press briefing on 28 January to explain to the media the content and implications of the agreement .
This Memorandum of Understanding will help to stabilise the situation along the administrative boundary lines. It contributes to the implementation of Point one of the Six-Point-Plan, which demands that there shall be no recourse to force. It also enhances the stabilisation efforts that EUMM undertakes in Georgia as part of its mandate.
The EUMM organized a press briefing on 28 January to explain to the media the content and implications of the agreement .
This Memorandum of Understanding will help to stabilise the situation along the administrative boundary lines. It contributes to the implementation of Point one of the Six-Point-Plan, which demands that there shall be no recourse to force. It also enhances the stabilisation efforts that EUMM undertakes in Georgia as part of its mandate.
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Transcript: Head of Mission press briefing on the MOU with the Georgian MOD
28 January 2009-01-29
Good afternoon, I am Hansjorg Haber, the Head of the EU Monitoring Mission. I want to say a couple of words about the agreement that we concluded the day before yesterday, (Monday 26th) the provisional arrangements with the MOD, afterwards Clive Trott, our Deputy Head of Operations is going to show you the details of this agreement.
Our mandate as you may know consists of four pillars, that is, stabilisation, normalisation reporting and confidence building, and what we are talking about now is confidence building.
After we have taken over our Monitoring in the adjacent areas after the Russian Forces (RU) withdrew on October the 8th. we started working on a mechanism for confidence building on the ground which should bring together the law enforcement agencies on both sides of the Administrative Boundary Lines (ABLs), South Ossetia (SO) ones and the Abkhazia (ABK) ones.
In this context we concluded two agreements with the Ministry of the Interior (MoI), in the second of which the MoI declared its readiness to participate in such a mechanism, which would unite us, the Georgian government, the “de facto” governments of SO, ABK and the Russians. The missing link there is the cooperation of the “de facto” governments, and this mechanism is now been discussed in the Geneva talks. Hopefully it can be concluded during the next meeting in Geneva on the 17 and 18 February. In the meantime we discovered that a confidence building measure in the military domain was also necessary because there is still an extreme lack of confidence on both sides. Many Georgians are convinced that the conflict of August is not yet over and the Russians complain that they don’t think that the Georgians will respect the provisions of the Sarkozy-Medvedev peace plan in good faith. There are certain objective factors on the ground, the Russians are in Akhalgori very close to the Georgian capital. All of this was reasonable enough for us to try to negotiate the agreement which we now have finally signed the day before yesterday. It is a very long standing project-we began broaching the idea to the Georgian side already at the end of October. So you can depart from the assumption that the Georgian government has not really thoroughly considered its position before signing it. What we want to translate into practice with the Arrangement is the non use of force at the ABLs. While at the same time not recognizing that these ABLs are final or that they are outer boundaries of Georgia. So this position of all 27 EU members states to recognise Georgia only entirely including SO and ABK is in no way compromised by this arrangement. And this EU position is very valuable for Georgia because it sends out a signal to all other states who might consider to recognise or not recognise the two entities and so far did not except for Nicaragua. You have to view the arrangement against this background. We are convinced that we will increase security while at the same time not sacrificing anything about status. I think there is another point where the arrangement is of value for the Georgian side. I think it is a very clear invitation to the Russian side to reciprocate and we will use all the channels that we have to very seriously invite the Russians to consider options to reciprocate and introduce more transparency about its troops in SO and ABK and also to step back from the immediate vicinity of the ABLs just as the Georgians are doing under this arrangement. I will not conceal from you that initially negotiating these arrangements we have aimed for more generous provisions but we are nevertheless satisfied with what we have got. And I think if the Russian side wants more they can always reciprocate and then this can be the beginning of a process that leads to still more security. For the moment I leave it at that.
Q: (Channel 1) What kind of information have the Monitoring Teams about the other side?
HH: Very little, we have only the official announcements of the RU and the ABK and the SO that they want to station 3.800 troops in each of the regions but we have no confirmation about how many there are in actual fact, we do not know that. We hear all sorts of rumours that there are more, that in the process of transition and deployment they may even have many more. But we have never heard anything official from the Russian side other than the 3.800 and we have no independent confirmation for that.
Q: (Channel 1) Incidents?
HoM: There are incidents all the time and all are reported by Georgian media as well. We report all the information we can get on these incidents. So there are really no incidents that are not in the public domain here.
Q: (Radio Free Europe): Why was Georgian Government thinking for a while on the MOU? What is the reason for it?
HoM: They had simply to reconcile the military appraisal of the worth of the document with the diplomatic one. For example one of the tasks of the MoD is clearly to defend Tbilisi from any military attack. So they have to evaluate how this agreement is affecting the options.On the other side as I explained there are a number of diplomatic advantages for Georgia from the arrangement and this has also to be taken into account so this took some time. Lastly there was a change of Minister during the time we negotiated this agreement so I think the new Minister had to acquaint himself with the subject matter because he is politically responsible.
Q: (Messenger newspaper): From which side the problems come from. From which side there are more violations. If there is such a document with this information can we have it?
HoM: No, I am afraid we can not give you such a report as we report to Brussels and the reports are for member states of the EU. But I can tell you what the general tendency is. The problem is that in very many cases we cannot put down the blame for any particular incident to one of the sides. This is because we apply very high standards of proof. For example the policeman who was shot in Knolevi a week ago was shot probably from relatively close range ie from territory outside SO, and also there are certain indications that there is no absolutely unambiguous evidence that will link the authorship of the incident to any one side. I realise that this may be unsatisfactory for you as an answer, but the important thing for us is to point out which general factors affect the security situation in the adjacent areas. In every given case we invite both sides to investigate it, even if it has happened on one side of the ABL. In this context we are still waiting for the confidence building mechanism because there people would have to place the facts on the table in our presence and then there can be no nonsense but facts would have to be presented. If such a mechanism worked we could form a much more exact picture of what is actually happening.
Q; How often do you have violations of HR in the patrolling areas ?
HoM: In the patrolling areas ie in the areas under the control of the Government of Tbilisi we do not have significant violations of human rights. In the other areas we have some information about violations of human rights but as we have yet no access to ABK and SO we cannot ourselves verify them.
Q: (Sbobodna Gruzia): You have mentioned that you have already asked the Russians to have this kind of agreement. At which kind of level? With whom were you negotiating?
HoM: This is indeed one of our problems, we have very little contact with the Russians on the ground, ie the military leadership in ABK and SO, so most of what we do is through the diplomatic channels and this again mostly goes through Brussels. We have often invited the Russians to make the process more transparent and to give us better possibilities to communicate here on the ground but so far they have not responded so we are really limited to Brussels. On the other hand the communication through Brussels is not working badly but certainly it could be improved here on the ground so we have a symmetric situation with regard to the Georgian Government and the Russian forces.
28 January 2009-01-29
Good afternoon, I am Hansjorg Haber, the Head of the EU Monitoring Mission. I want to say a couple of words about the agreement that we concluded the day before yesterday, (Monday 26th) the provisional arrangements with the MOD, afterwards Clive Trott, our Deputy Head of Operations is going to show you the details of this agreement.
Our mandate as you may know consists of four pillars, that is, stabilisation, normalisation reporting and confidence building, and what we are talking about now is confidence building.
After we have taken over our Monitoring in the adjacent areas after the Russian Forces (RU) withdrew on October the 8th. we started working on a mechanism for confidence building on the ground which should bring together the law enforcement agencies on both sides of the Administrative Boundary Lines (ABLs), South Ossetia (SO) ones and the Abkhazia (ABK) ones.
In this context we concluded two agreements with the Ministry of the Interior (MoI), in the second of which the MoI declared its readiness to participate in such a mechanism, which would unite us, the Georgian government, the “de facto” governments of SO, ABK and the Russians. The missing link there is the cooperation of the “de facto” governments, and this mechanism is now been discussed in the Geneva talks. Hopefully it can be concluded during the next meeting in Geneva on the 17 and 18 February. In the meantime we discovered that a confidence building measure in the military domain was also necessary because there is still an extreme lack of confidence on both sides. Many Georgians are convinced that the conflict of August is not yet over and the Russians complain that they don’t think that the Georgians will respect the provisions of the Sarkozy-Medvedev peace plan in good faith. There are certain objective factors on the ground, the Russians are in Akhalgori very close to the Georgian capital. All of this was reasonable enough for us to try to negotiate the agreement which we now have finally signed the day before yesterday. It is a very long standing project-we began broaching the idea to the Georgian side already at the end of October. So you can depart from the assumption that the Georgian government has not really thoroughly considered its position before signing it. What we want to translate into practice with the Arrangement is the non use of force at the ABLs. While at the same time not recognizing that these ABLs are final or that they are outer boundaries of Georgia. So this position of all 27 EU members states to recognise Georgia only entirely including SO and ABK is in no way compromised by this arrangement. And this EU position is very valuable for Georgia because it sends out a signal to all other states who might consider to recognise or not recognise the two entities and so far did not except for Nicaragua. You have to view the arrangement against this background. We are convinced that we will increase security while at the same time not sacrificing anything about status. I think there is another point where the arrangement is of value for the Georgian side. I think it is a very clear invitation to the Russian side to reciprocate and we will use all the channels that we have to very seriously invite the Russians to consider options to reciprocate and introduce more transparency about its troops in SO and ABK and also to step back from the immediate vicinity of the ABLs just as the Georgians are doing under this arrangement. I will not conceal from you that initially negotiating these arrangements we have aimed for more generous provisions but we are nevertheless satisfied with what we have got. And I think if the Russian side wants more they can always reciprocate and then this can be the beginning of a process that leads to still more security. For the moment I leave it at that.
Q: (Channel 1) What kind of information have the Monitoring Teams about the other side?
HH: Very little, we have only the official announcements of the RU and the ABK and the SO that they want to station 3.800 troops in each of the regions but we have no confirmation about how many there are in actual fact, we do not know that. We hear all sorts of rumours that there are more, that in the process of transition and deployment they may even have many more. But we have never heard anything official from the Russian side other than the 3.800 and we have no independent confirmation for that.
Q: (Channel 1) Incidents?
HoM: There are incidents all the time and all are reported by Georgian media as well. We report all the information we can get on these incidents. So there are really no incidents that are not in the public domain here.
Q: (Radio Free Europe): Why was Georgian Government thinking for a while on the MOU? What is the reason for it?
HoM: They had simply to reconcile the military appraisal of the worth of the document with the diplomatic one. For example one of the tasks of the MoD is clearly to defend Tbilisi from any military attack. So they have to evaluate how this agreement is affecting the options.On the other side as I explained there are a number of diplomatic advantages for Georgia from the arrangement and this has also to be taken into account so this took some time. Lastly there was a change of Minister during the time we negotiated this agreement so I think the new Minister had to acquaint himself with the subject matter because he is politically responsible.
Q: (Messenger newspaper): From which side the problems come from. From which side there are more violations. If there is such a document with this information can we have it?
HoM: No, I am afraid we can not give you such a report as we report to Brussels and the reports are for member states of the EU. But I can tell you what the general tendency is. The problem is that in very many cases we cannot put down the blame for any particular incident to one of the sides. This is because we apply very high standards of proof. For example the policeman who was shot in Knolevi a week ago was shot probably from relatively close range ie from territory outside SO, and also there are certain indications that there is no absolutely unambiguous evidence that will link the authorship of the incident to any one side. I realise that this may be unsatisfactory for you as an answer, but the important thing for us is to point out which general factors affect the security situation in the adjacent areas. In every given case we invite both sides to investigate it, even if it has happened on one side of the ABL. In this context we are still waiting for the confidence building mechanism because there people would have to place the facts on the table in our presence and then there can be no nonsense but facts would have to be presented. If such a mechanism worked we could form a much more exact picture of what is actually happening.
Q; How often do you have violations of HR in the patrolling areas ?
HoM: In the patrolling areas ie in the areas under the control of the Government of Tbilisi we do not have significant violations of human rights. In the other areas we have some information about violations of human rights but as we have yet no access to ABK and SO we cannot ourselves verify them.
Q: (Sbobodna Gruzia): You have mentioned that you have already asked the Russians to have this kind of agreement. At which kind of level? With whom were you negotiating?
HoM: This is indeed one of our problems, we have very little contact with the Russians on the ground, ie the military leadership in ABK and SO, so most of what we do is through the diplomatic channels and this again mostly goes through Brussels. We have often invited the Russians to make the process more transparent and to give us better possibilities to communicate here on the ground but so far they have not responded so we are really limited to Brussels. On the other hand the communication through Brussels is not working badly but certainly it could be improved here on the ground so we have a symmetric situation with regard to the Georgian Government and the Russian forces.