South Ossetian Border Guards Seize Georgian Farmland

GORI, Georgia – Georgian farmworkers living near the contact line with the breakaway South Ossetia region claim Russian border guards are blocking their access to sections of farmland that lay on the Georgian side of the contact like that separates the rebel region from the rest of Georgia.

Georgian news agency Interpressnews reported that uniformed gunmen appeared on the outskirts of the Gori Municipality village of Sobisi and started to harvest the crops of one of the residents living in the village.

The gunmen said the agricultural area was a part of the Russian-occupied South Ossetia region and therefore under the jurisdiction of the separatist authorities in their self-declared capital Tskhinvali.

"My family has owned this land for years. Of course, this is Georgian territory and under the control of the central government. However, the occupants (Russians) came to us last year and said that part of my land, 6 hectares, was within South Ossetia’s borders. I had been working there throughout the year; I spent a lot of money, and now they are stealing my crops. They don’t let me enter the area,” he said.

The Georgian government fought three wars against Russian-backed separatist forces in Abkhazia and South Ossetia between 1991-2008.

Formal relations between Tbilisi and Moscow have been frozen since the Kremlin recognized South Ossetia and Georgia’s other Russian-occupied region Abkhazia as independent states.

International law and the United Nations continue to state that the regions remain parts of Georgia.

Russia continues to violate a 2008 ceasefire agreement by maintaining a massive military presence in both Abkhazia and South Ossetia by basing thousands of occupation forces in the two regions.

By Tamar Svanidze 

Edited by Nicholas Waller