Tbilisi, Georgia – Georgian authorities reported a second day of sporadic fighting Wednesday in a mountainous region where police are trying to subdue a defiant militia leader – the latest confrontation in a volatile former Soviet republic plagued by separatist movements.
Georgy Arveladze, the chief of President Mikhail Saakashvili’s administration, claimed police had secured control over a handful of villages in the Kodori Gorge district but skirmished with opponents in wooded areas or settlements where they faced resistance.
The operation in the Kodori Gorge area began Tuesday, several days after Emzar Kvitsiani, who was an envoy to the region under Saakashvili’s predecessor, threatened to reactivate a militia of about 300 men.
Arveladze asserted that the operation was being “conducted with great success” despite difficult terrain.
He claimed Kvitsiani and another man he referred to as a criminal figure were trying to escape from the region but added, “all roads are blocked and they cannot run away.”
The defense minister of Abkhazia, a separatist province in northwestern Georgia that technically includes the Kodori Gorge district, said Kvitsiani supporters were exchanging gunfire with police in Azhara after rejecting the ultimatum. The official, Sultan Sosnaliyev, said the extent of the fighting was unclear.
Arveladze said two police had been wounded in the operation.
The high-mountain Kodori Gorge region – with a population of about 4,000 – is the only part of breakaway Abkhazia that is nominally under Georgian control.
Saakashvili, who took office in 2004, has vowed to return Ab khazia and another breakaway province, South Ossetia, to central government control, keeping tensions in the region high. Rumors and allegations that Georgia is planning to seize one or both regions by force have percolated for months.
