Comment of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of South Ossetia with regard to adoption of the UN resolution on refugees
July 3, 2012 The UN General Assembly approved a draft resolution "Situation with the Internally Displaced Persons and Refugees from Abkhazia, Georgia and Tskhinval district / South Ossetia, Georgia",put to the vote by Georgia.
The Georgian delegation has already introduced this resolution before the secretariat of the General Assembly for the third time since August 2008, and the text of the resolution is absolutely similar to the document of previous years, thereby making attempts of political and diplomatic means to turn the situation back, ie, to return to Georgia the lost positions, using humanitarian themes. Somehow, none of the countries - members of the UN General Assembly, which had supported this resolution, was surprised at unilateral posture of the resolution, and none of them asked about, whether the document corresponded to the true state of affairs in these regions.
The main thing to find the due balance in issues of any conflict - is a comprehensive study of the problem, taking into account the existing realities and fundamental differences in approaches to the methods of settlement, otherwise it`s impossible to expect an agreement of a common final formula. Thus, the adoption of the resolution without taking into account the position of the interested parties is contrary to the purposes of settlement, its "philosophy". South Ossetia has repeatedly raised the question that its representative should have made a speech at the meeting of the UN General Assembly to bring the position of the South Ossetian people and to present its vision of the situation, including solutions of refugee problems, but this suggestion was ignored.
It seems strange some "regret", expressed in the resolution in connection with certain hypothetical refugees, when the real history remembers the ethnic Georgians, who were aware of impending aggression and voluntarily left the territory of South Ossetia a few days before the invasion of the Georgian military forces.
It is also surprising in this regard the position of the countries - members of the UN General Assembly, which are verbally committed to the obligation to protect the interests of the inhabitants of the world, but in reality - in fact, do it selectively. Apparently, when one needs to come from political considerations, it is more convenient to forget one`s obligations - to consider human rights as universal values. Otherwise, how one could understand why just now has been made such ado about the refugees and internally displaced persons, as in 1990-1992 over a hundred thousand Ossetians from Georgia and South Ossetia had to flee from ethnic cleansing. Most of these people took refuge in the Russian Federation; some have become refugees or internally displaced persons in the territory of South Ossetia. The vast majority of them are still in a state of displacement.
Until now, in the Republic of North Ossetia-Alania, as a part of the Russian Federation, are living descendants of those tens of thousands of the Ossetian refugees from South Ossetia, which in June 1920 were able to save their lives during the massacre, carried out by the troops of the Georgian Democratic Republic by order of their government. The total number of the Ossetian refugees and their descendants has already outnumbered the population of South Ossetia.
The repeated attacks of Georgia against South Ossetia, the mass killings and ethnic cleansings against Ossetians, repeatedly organized by the Georgian authorities, were carried out as consequence of the impunity of the Georgian leaders and executors of these savage crimes against the Ossetians.
On the basis of these facts one automatically resumes that the Western countries are seeing the problems of the region in a distorted, unilateral format, only in the light of the interests of the Georgian authorities, completely ignoring the reality and the interests of the people of South Ossetia.
The adoption of the politically engaged Georgian project by the UN General Assembly can only harm the work of the Geneva talks, which today is the only platform, where representatives of South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Georgia can exchange views on all the existing problems.
Tskhinval, July 5, 2012
