Border incident in Georgia. European observers arrested (Update)

(BRUSSELS2, exclusive) A team from the European Monitoring Mission in Georgia (EUMM) was briefly arrested and detained along the administrative boundary (border) that separates Abkhazia from the rest of Georgia.

All the elements are not yet known. At the headquarters of the mission in Tbilisi as at the European External Action Service in Brussels, we remain eminently discreet about this "incident". According to information received by B2, the incident occurred while traveling between the villages of Grow up as well as Saber, November 3. The observers were arrested by Russian forces, border guards (*). They were pretty quickly released, “ in less than an hour " according to our information. Even minimized, this incident nevertheless prompted an immediate alert from the watchkeepers in Brussels as well as a detailed report to the various political authorities of the Member States.

This kind of incident is rather rare, in fact, especially on the Abkhaz border, where the situation was "stabilized" fairly quickly after the 2008 conflict; on the other hand, they are more frequent on the side of South Ossetia but do not directly target European observers. Thus at the end of last September, an incident opposed the South Ossetian guards and their Georgian counterparts, with an exchange of fire near Karzmani. But the situation also worsened in Abkhazia at the last school year, in September, the oldest children in the village of Saber (level 7 to 1) were forced to go to study in a Russian school; only the youngest schoolchildren of Gali (level 8 and 9*) were allowed to go to study at Grow up.

(Damien Kerlouet, with NGV)

(*) The Russian border guard corps is an eminently political force. This information had been put in the conditional in a first version. We can now confirm this. It was indeed the Russians who intercepted the Europeans.