UN chairs meeting in bid to jump-start Georgian-Abkhaz peace talks

In the latest United Nations effort to advance the Georgian-Abkhaz peace process, diplomats met in Geneva today to prepare for talks with the parties to the conflict, in which the Georgian Government and Abkhaz separatists fought a war 10 years ago that forced nearly 300,000 refugees to flee.

Chaired by UN Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations Jean-Marie Guéhenno, the meeting of high-level representatives of the so-called Group of the Friends of the Secretary-General (Germany, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States) reviewed key challenges related to security and political matters, the return of refugees and internally-displaced persons, and economic cooperation.

They plan to meet with the Georgian and Abkhaz sides early next year and expressed the hope that by then negotiations would resume and progress could be made on the three issues. In his most recent report on the situation Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the peace process had come "perilously close" to a standstill.

Mr. Annan's Special Representative for Georgia, Heidi Tagliavini, participated in the meeting, as did UN High Commissioner for Refugees Ruud Lubbers, who briefed participants on his visit to the region.

The UN has maintained an observer mission in Georgia (UNOMIG) since 1994 when an accord reached in Moscow ended the fighting.

In recent reports Mr. Annan has regretted that there has been no movement by the Abkhaz side on the core political question, referring to its refusal to receive a paper on distributing "competences" between the two sides and its continued invocation of its unilateral "declaration of independence" of 1999.