By DPA,
Vienna : Georgia’s foreign minister called on the UN Security Council Thursday to take action against Russia, alleging it had breached international security by its action in her country.
At a special meeting of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in Vienna, Foreign Minister Ekaterine Tkeshelashvili said the Security Council should act under Chapter 7 of the UN charter, which deals with non-military and military sanctions to restore peace and security.
“It is not only a threat to international security, but a breach of it,” Tkeshelashvili said, referring to Russia’s military involvement in Georgia and its recognition of Georgia’s separatist provinces South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
The minister also alleged that Russian forces had conducted ethnic cleansing in South Ossetia.
“The territory previously known in Soviet times as South Ossetia is completely cleansed of remnants of the Georgian population,” she said. In the buffer zone around the breakaway province, ethnic cleansing was ongoing, she added.
The Permanent Council of the OSCE, the organisation’s decision-making body, was meeting to discuss recent developments in Georgia and the modalities of sending up to 100 additional observers there.
By Thursday evening, the Vienna-based organisation will increase the number of monitoring officers to 22, a spokesman said.
The 56 OSCE members still have to agree on where in Georgia the officers will be deployed for observing the ceasefire between Russian and Georgian forces, as Moscow has so far refused to allow them in South Ossetia.
Moscow’s recognition of independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia was “an additional factor that needs to be taken into account” in finding agreement on the modalities of the observer mission, OSCE spokesman Martin Nesirky said.
Georgia’s foreign minister reiterated Tbilisi’s position that any geographic limitation for monitors “cannot be tolerated”, as South Ossetia was at risk of becoming a closed area to international observers.