International Court Hears Georgian Case

[ikaotiki]

By MARLISE SIMONS

PARIS — Georgia and Russia carried their dispute over the breakaway provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia to the International Court of Justice on Monday, as three days of hearings began over Georgia’s request for an injunction ordering Russia to stop “terrorizing” ethnic Georgians and to allow refugees to return to their homes.

Georgia’s first deputy minister of justice, Tina Bujaliani, said her country was urgently turning to the court — the United Nations’ highest — “at a time of great distress in its history, a time when hundreds of thousands of its nationals are persecuted and displaced from their homes only because they are Georgians.”

Russia, as expected, challenged the court’s jurisdiction and asked it to dismiss the Georgian application. Roman Kolodkin, the legal department director at Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told the judges that Georgia had provoked the current crisis last month when it began an attack to recover control of South Ossetia. He said that Russia had no choice but to become involved to prevent further deaths, and that now that the two regions were independent, Russia could not be held responsible.

Georgia, offering sworn witness statements and satellite images taken during the conflict, argued that ethnic Georgians still living in the breakaway provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia continued to be driven from their villages by a “systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing” organized by Russia.

Payam Akhavan, a lawyer representing Georgia, said a distinction should be drawn between destruction resulting from the fighting and a systematic campaign against ethnic Georgian civilians. “The satellite images showed hundreds of houses burning, houses with missing roofs,” he said in a telephone interview. “This is damage from deliberate torching, quite different from war damage.”

The commercial satellite images were analyzed by a Geneva-based United Nations agency, Unosat. Human Rights Watch, which has also looked at the images, said that destruction of five ethnic Georgian villages near the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali “was caused by intentional burning and not armed conflict.”

Mr. Akhavan said that the conflict had already displaced some 160,000 ethnic Georgians.

“The pattern is continuing, but it is done more quietly without the burning and killing but through pressuring people,” he said, citing reports that residents near Akhalgori, a Georgian town south of South Ossetia, were being told they could only stay “if they have a Russian passport.”

Georgia filed an earlier case against Russia before the same court, on Aug. 12, shortly after the conflict began, charging Moscow with racial discrimination.