Opposition says Georgian authorities are hiding demands from de facto South Ossetian authorities
The opposition party Gakharia for Georgia claims that the de facto authorities of the Tskhinvali region (South Ossetia) are demanding the removal of a Georgian police checkpoint near the village of Chorchana and the handover of the territory to them. The Georgian authorities have not informed the public about the demands.
The party’s statement followed the latest meeting under the Incident Prevention and Response Mechanism (IPRM) in the village of Ergneti.
After the meeting, Yegor Kochiev, head of the delegation representing the de facto authorities in Tskhinvali, said no agreement had yet been reached with official Tbilisi over the Chorchana checkpoint. However, he said the issue had been discussed “very seriously”.
“The only acceptable option is to remove this checkpoint and subsequently withdraw it from the territory of South Ossetia,” Kochiev said.
What the Gakharia for Georgia party claims
“The Tskhinvali occupation regime has once again aggressively demanded the removal of the Georgian police checkpoint in the village of Chorchana and, accordingly, the transfer of these Georgian territories to the occupation forces,” representatives of the Gakharia for Georgia party said. The party was founded by Giorgi Gakharia, a former interior minister and former prime minister of Georgia.
According to the party, the Tskhinvali side is trying to portray the territory around Chorchana as its own land, while the ruling Georgian Dream party remains silent and has not told the public either about Tskhinvali’s demands or its own position.
Gakharia for Georgia also criticised the government over the ongoing criminal case against Giorgi Gakharia, which the party believes is directly linked to the establishment of the Georgian police checkpoint in Chorchana.
“Instead of defending the national interest, Georgian Dream is putting Georgia’s former interior minister on trial for setting up a Georgian police checkpoint in Chorchana and protecting Georgian land from creeping occupation,” the party said in a statement.
The party called on the authorities to immediately tell the public about their plans for Chorchana, saying that removing the checkpoint would amount to handing Georgian territory over to the occupation forces.
Background
The police checkpoint near the village of Chorchana was established in August 2019, when Giorgi Gakharia was Georgia’s interior minister. About five months earlier, a road had been built through the Chorchana forest leading to the future checkpoint.
Around the same time, the de facto authorities in the Tskhinvali region began placing borderisation markers in the area, including green banners and flags. In February 2019, the Tskhinvali side also began marking trees in the Chorchana forest.
Georgian Dream accuses Giorgi Gakharia of establishing the checkpoint without authorisation, which the government says led to an escalation of tensions in the area.
Gakharia told a parliamentary investigative commission that representatives of the occupation regime had been patrolling the Chorchana forest, detaining Georgian citizens and planning to expand the occupation line based on so-called 1992 maps. He said this posed a risk of losing around 1,800 hectares of the Chorchana forest.
After Georgian Dream declared the establishment of the Georgian police checkpoint near the village of Tsnelisi illegal, representatives of Tskhinvali and Russia called on Tbilisi to acknowledge the decision as a “mistake” and remove the checkpoint.
Checkpoint in Chorchana
