Post-war Period
| “ | For all those volunteers who have contributed in our victory, we shall reward them with residency and citizenship. | ” |
The Human Rights Watch report which was drafted in 1995 and included detailed account of the war crimes and atrocities committed during the war concludes that, "Human Rights Watch finds Abkhaz forces responsible for the foreseeable wave of revenge, human rights abuse, and war crimes that was unleashed on the Georgian population in Sukhumi and other parts of Abkhazia. In Human Rights Watch's judgment, these practices were indeed encouraged in order to drive the Georgian population from its homes."
- "And out of group of 12 front line soldiers, 2 were Abkhazian, 2 were Armenian, 1 Armenian locally from Sukhumi, 1 from Yerevan who was too young to go fight the good fight in Karabakh, and the rest were either from the North Caucasus or from places like in Siberia. What were they motivated by? Looting. They had been promised houses with tangerine gardens. They had been promised cars."
The legacy of ethnic cleansing in Abkhazia had been devastating for the Georgian society. The war and the subsequent systematic ethnic cleansing produced about 200,000-250,000 of IDPs that fled to various Georgian regions, mostly in Samegrelo (Mingrelia) (112,208; UNHCR, June 2000). In Tbilisi and elsewhere in Georgia refugees occupy hundreds of hotels, dormitories and abandoned Soviet military barracks for temporary residency. Many of them have to leave for other countries, primarily to Russia, to search for work.
Many refugees living in Georgia resist assimilation into the Georgian society. Georgia's government also has not encouraged the assimilation of the refugees fearing that it would "lose one of the arguments for retaining hegemony over Abkhazia".
Some 60,000 Georgian refugees spontaneously returned to Abkhazia's Gali district between 1994 and 1998, but tens of thousands were displaced again when fighting resumed in the Gali district in 1998. Nevertheless from 40,000 to 60,000 refugees have returned to the Gali district since 1998, including persons commuting daily across the ceasefire line and those migrating seasonally in accordance with agricultural cycles. The human rights situation remains precarious in the Georgian-populated areas of the Gali district. The United Nations and other international organizations have been fruitlessly urging the Abkhaz de facto authorities "to refrain from adopting measures incompatible with the right to return and with international human rights standards, such as discriminatory legislation... to cooperate in the establishment of a permanent international human rights office in Gali and to admit United Nations civilian police without further delay."
Read more about this topic: Ethnic Cleansing Of Georgians In Abkhazia
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