Terror as Policy: Georgia's War Against Abkhazia, by Saida Vozba

Vozba, S., 'Terroristicheskii faktor v gruzino-abkhazskom konflikte' [The Terrorist Factor in the Georgian-Abkhaz Conflict], in Abkhazovedenie: Arkheologiya. Istoriya. Etnologiya [Abkhazology: Archaeology. History. Ethnology], Issue VIII to IX, ed. O. Kh. Bgazhba (editor-in-chief), Sukhum: Abkhazian Institute of Humanitarian Research named after D. I. Gulia, Academy of Sciences of Abkhazia (AbIGI), 2013, pp. 182 to 192.

International terrorism is one of the gravest problems facing the contemporary world. Yet a scientific definition of international terrorism, whether criminological or grounded in international law, is difficult to establish, since no generally accepted legal definition of the concept exists. Attempts to define the term were made as far back as the League of Nations and later the United Nations, but persistent disagreement and debate meant that neither body succeeded in doing so.

Thus, under the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, terrorism is defined as 'the perpetration of an explosion, arson or other act creating a danger to human life', provided that such acts are committed with the aim of undermining public security, intimidating the population, or influencing the decisions of the organs of state power, and also encompasses the threat of committing such acts for the same purposes (Article 205.1). The United States Department of State, for its part, defines terrorism as 'premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience.'[1]

It should first be noted that the problem of international terrorism is directly bound up with the principal spheres of activity of the world community: politics, relations between nations, religion, the environment, organised crime and the like. This is in turn reflected in the existence of various types of terrorism, among them political, state, national and religious terrorism.

Political terrorism occurs mainly in Europe and also in the Caucasus. On one hand, it takes the form of a struggle waged by various groups against the existing order: the Ulster Defence Association in Northern Ireland, the White Legion, the Forest Brothers, and Monadire in Abkhazia (Gal district, upper Kodor Valley). Members of groups that carry out political terror aim, above all, to bring about political, social or economic change within a given state, as well as to undermine relations between states and the international legal order.

On the other hand, there is state terrorism. This may take the form, firstly, of states employing methods of total suppression of civil society and mass repression, of which the Stalinist and Hitlerite regimes are striking examples. State terrorism must also be taken to include actions by state structures aimed at suppressing the resistance of nations, settlements or individuals marked for destruction, in order to clear space for their own activities. State terrorism naturally has its own particular character. What distinguishes it from other forms of terrorism is the absence of a 'demonstration effect': that is, the security services and states implicated in terror attempt not to publicise their activity, although they do not always succeed in this. State terrorism therefore amounts to the preservation of power by a political elite that has seized power unlawfully in a given country and has lost the support of the population. In order to preserve that power, the so-called political elite naturally resorts to various methods of intimidating the population, the physical elimination of undesirable persons, and mass killings.[2] The clearest example of such terrorism is furnished by the Shevardnadze regime in Georgia, in its conduct towards Abkhazia and the Abkhazian people.

National terrorism is a method by which peoples struggle to create their own state, and it takes two forms. In the first, peoples who lack a state of their own demand independence and take up arms, as in the case of the Kurdish struggle to create Kurdistan. In the second, peoples fight for independence in order to restore what they regard as historical justice: examples include the struggle of the Basques, who live in southern France and northern Spain (historically, the Basques sought full independence), and the campaign of the IRA (Irish Republican Army), which used acts of terrorism in Britain to secure the independence that Northern Ireland had once possessed. It often happens, however, that national terrorism runs alongside state terrorism, becoming a response to it, as illustrated by terrorism in Northern Ireland. It is clear that, in most cases, people resort to terrorist methods because they have no legal means of upholding their views or pursuing them through peaceful political methods. A desperate situation, unresolved problems and the absence of anyone to turn to in a dispute with the authorities are the principal cause of national terrorism.[3] It is commonly assumed that Catholic nationalists are the chief instigators of terrorist acts, although Northern Ireland has also seen a large number of Protestant terrorist organisations with ties to British circles. Acts of violence carried out by Catholics are a response to the actions of Protestant extremists. Protestants, who form the majority, have an interest in preserving the status quo, that is, in keeping Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom. The Catholic population, a minority in Northern Ireland throughout the existence of the autonomous state since 1921, sought the unification of Ireland, and republican nationalists, resorting to extremist, terrorist methods, gave expression to these interests.

Many nationalist terrorists maintain that they are not terrorists but freedom fighters for their people. A typical example is the Irish Republican Army, which declared in the 1990s that it was renouncing terrorist methods of struggle. The fight for territory and enhanced status, whether autonomy, federalism or an independent state, is the most enduring factor behind terrorist violence, since it inherently makes compromise between the parties to a conflict harder to reach. A stereotype of the Irish as a people prone to violence took hold in the British press. In August 1969, for instance, the Daily Mirror wrote: 'the Irish have a sad tendency, in periods of political trouble, to use guns and explosives instead of ballot boxes.'[4] In truth, the violence in Ireland, and the terrorism that followed from it, was a great tragedy for the Irish people, one fomented by Britain itself. If the Irish terrorist deserves unqualified condemnation for his actions, then Britain bears collective responsibility for the policy against which those actions were directed. The violence that took root in Ireland became the seedbed of retaliatory violence, giving rise to a commitment to armed methods of struggle and a conviction of their historical justification. Nor does responsibility for all these years of violence, fear and lawlessness in the region rest with Catholic extremists alone.

Clashes between extremists, and above all between deeply hostile young people from the two communities, continue to this day on the boundary between two districts in the east of the city: the Protestant Newtownards Road and the Catholic Short Strand. These clashes between young people generally take the form of street fighting, including the throwing of petrol bombs. According to police figures, around seven hundred people took part in clashes that began on 20 June 2011.[5]

Religious terrorism, too, deserves mention, and may be called the most dangerous form of terrorism, being founded on religious intolerance. It occurs when armed groups or communities, professing one religion or another, such as the Catholics and Protestants of Northern Ireland, wage a struggle against the state.

Regrettably, terrorism has today become one of the symbols of the modern world. At the same time, every society has its own understanding of the phenomenon of terrorism. What is an obvious crime to some may therefore appear to others as an act of heroism and the purpose of an entire life. In the case of the Irish, or Catholics, their actions are regarded by Britain as terrorist even though they were fighting to create a unified state, whereas the actions carried out by the British administration towards the people of Northern Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s might equally be classed as terrorist. The actions of Georgian terrorist organisations on the territory of Abkhazia, which have carried out and continue to this day to carry out subversive activity and the abduction of people, are regarded by the Abkhazian side as terrorist.

It can certainly be said that terrorism poses a threat to every aspect of contemporary life, and that it is, more often than not, wholly innocent people who suffer.

This brief preamble is necessary in order to show the full complexity and many-sidedness of the problem, and the numerous aspects requiring resolution. My own task is quite specific: I wish to use the example of the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict to approach a small part of the complex of problems connected, in one way or another, with political or state terrorism.

One notable manifestation of this phenomenon was Georgian terrorism, which was especially evident during the years of the Georgian-Abkhaz war (1992 to 1993) and in the years that followed. The attack by Georgia, with a population of five million, on sovereign Abkhazia is contrary to the Charter of the United Nations, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1974. In the words of Taras Shamba, 'Georgia's aggression against Abkhazia was the result of the planning of a war of aggression (paragraph 4, Article 3), given the manner in which it was unleashed and waged on a full scale on the territory of another state, namely through offensive action and attack (paragraphs 7 and 9, Article 3), using aircraft, missiles and other heavy equipment.'[6] One of the clearest examples of the policy pursued by the Georgian leadership was the following: at midday on 25 August 1992, Colonel Giorgi Karkarashvili, commander of the Georgian occupying force in Abkhazia, declared in a broadcast on the captured Abkhazian television station in Sukhum that he would not spare 100,000 Georgians in order to destroy the entire Abkhazian people, then numbering 97,000, and that the Abkhazian nation would be left without descendants.[7] This statement was followed by the destruction and expulsion of the population from the occupied zone of the Republic of Abkhazia, and by the destruction of homes and of historical and cultural sites of great importance to the country.

Gogi Khaindrava, the Georgian minister for Abkhazian affairs, told the French weekly Le Monde diplomatique that resistance in Abkhazia could be broken by 'destroying 10,000 Abkhaz, all the young men.'[8] The purpose of this aggression was the physical extermination of Abkhaz and of citizens sympathetic to Abkhazia, the deportation of the country's non-Georgian population, and the abolition of Abkhazian statehood.

Following its military defeat in Abkhazia, the Georgian leadership, adhering to the same ideology, further intensified its terrorist, or partisan, war against Abkhazia and its people. In doing so, members of Georgian paramilitary formations called themselves partisans, seeking thereby to lend their activity a legitimate character, since, under the Martens Clause contained in Article IV of the Hague Convention, partisan warfare is regarded as lawful.[9] This was precisely what the Georgian leadership sought to achieve. The actions of these saboteur-terrorists cannot, however, be regarded as elements of a partisan movement, since they were directed against the local population and served only to intensify destabilisation and tension within the republic. In order to assess the lawfulness of the actions of Georgian forces on the territory of Abkhazia, it is necessary to examine the meaning of the terms 'partisan warfare' and 'terrorism' as they apply to the actions of Georgian armed groups against Abkhazia.

Terrorism is often regarded as synonymous with partisan warfare, and not without reason. Partisans quite often employ the same tactics as terrorists, killings, abductions, the bombing of public buildings, the taking of hostages and so forth, in pursuit of the same aims: intimidation and coercion, that is, influencing people's behaviour through fear. Moreover, like terrorists, partisans wear no special uniform or insignia and are therefore frequently indistinguishable from ordinary civilians. Yet, despite the tendency to lump the two together into a single category of criminals, fundamental differences exist between them.

Paul Wilkinson draws a clear distinction between terrorism and partisan warfare in terms of the harm each inflicts on the civilian population: 'Guerrillas may fight in small numbers and often with inadequate weapons, yet they can, and often do, fight according to the traditional rules of war, taking and exchanging prisoners and respecting the rights of the non-combatant population. Terrorists make no such distinction in the means they employ, and frequently resort to large-scale killing, spreading "universal terror" among the local civilian population and even killing innocent foreigners who may never even have visited the revolutionaries' own homeland...'[10]

As the Abkhazian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has observed, 'since the end of the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict, the Georgian leadership has continued openly to support terrorism.' One instance cited is that of the president of Georgia personally decorating the Georgian terrorist Levan Mamasakhlisi with a state award after he had been released from prison in Abkhazia at the personal request of the Council of Europe's Commissioner for Human Rights.[11] Speaking at the Federation Council on 18 September, the minister of foreign affairs, Sergey Lavrov, referred to 'the readiness of certain foreign patrons to prepare sabotage and terrorist groups in Georgia for the continuation, so to speak, of the restoration of constitutional order.'[12]

Temur Shashiashvili, the president's plenipotentiary for the Imereti region of Georgia, once declared: 'We do not rule out a forcible resolution of the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict, but there are other paths too, we have money. We have sent sabotage groups into Abkhazia, we have people on the ground, and our first task is to set the Abkhaz against one another: they will fight, they will beat each other quite thoroughly, their strength will run out, and then we will arrive with our own ancient word, gamarjoba ('hello')!'

As the chairman of the Union of Warriors, Ruzgen Gogokhia, remarked in conversation with Rezonansi, 'If we want to get back the lost territories, we need to kill at least two or three "Apsua separatists" a day, to make the enemy abandon his intentions and realise that you are the stronger side. Once that happens, he will never come to the negotiating table. Only what is already an accomplished fact is settled peacefully.'[13]

Georgian terrorist activity aimed at retaking Abkhazia by force thus grew in scale from 1996 onward. Being too weak to take Abkhazia outright, these groups instead destabilise the situation and undermine the peace process.

Mkhedrioni earned a bad reputation by terrorising the population of western Georgia, and confidence in the group was weakened still further by its defeat in Abkhazia. The organisation finally fell apart, however, when its members were accused of an attempt on the life of Eduard Shevardnadze in August 1995.

Over the course of the conflict, influential Georgian terrorist organisations came into being, and from 1998 they intensified their attacks still further, particularly in the Gal district and in the upper Kodor Valley. These were Monadire, the Forest Brothers and the White Legion. The conflict also saw the presence, on the Georgian side, of foreign mercenaries such as the Balts, mainly women snipers known as 'white tights',[a] and later Ukrainians, volunteers from the extreme nationalist Ukrainian organisation UNA-UNSO, specifically its 'Argo' volunteer corps. What attracted them, in the first place, was the money the Georgians offered military specialists prepared to take part in the Georgian-Abkhaz war, promising them 60,000 roubles and 60 dollars a month. The second attraction was a desire to fight against Yeltsin's Russia.[14] Speaking of the Georgian terrorist organisations, it should be noted that they were united by a single common goal: the restoration of Georgian jurisdiction over Abkhazia.

Monadire (Georgian: მონადირე, 'Hunter') was an armed formation established in the Upper Kodor Valley by the Svan Emzar Kvitsiani in 1992, during the Georgian-Abkhaz war, as a people's militia unit. The tactics employed by its fighters were marked by particular cruelty towards the Abkhaz. This cruelty towards the civilian population also expressed itself in looting, itself a consequence of the presence within the unit of convicted criminals, the unit otherwise being made up of ethnic Georgians. The unit, which later took the name of a battalion, came under the command of the Georgian Ministry of Defence from 25 July 1998, drawing its pay from the ministry's budget (on average around 160 lari).[15] In April 2005, however, the Georgian Ministry of Defence ceased to fund the unit and disbanded it, which ultimately became one of the causes of Kvitsiani's conflict with the government, a conflict that culminated in a special operation conducted by Georgian troops and police in the Kodor district in July and August 2006.

+ Jaba Ioseliani: 'War is War'

+ [Georgian] President accused of manipulation (Le Figaro)

+ Chair of electoral committee kidnapped in Abkhazia (February 3, 2007, Caucasian Knot)

+ Is Georgia a terrorist state? By Aage Borchgrevink

+ Abkhazia as the Theatre of Georgia’s Terrorist Activities and Sabotage, by Sergey Markedonov

The Forest Brothers were the largest unit of Georgian terrorists, operating from the forests of the western Georgian region of Mingrelia, in close proximity to the administrative border with Abkhazia. This armed formation was founded by Dato Shengelia. Another, no less significant, terrorist organisation was the White Legion, led by Zurab Samushia. Both were created with the direct involvement of the Georgian side. Funding came from various sources, including the state budget of Georgia itself, though this was conducted in strict secrecy. The Georgian authorities subsequently distanced themselves from the White Legion, however, because Zurab Samushia himself became unmanageable. It is worth noting that Zurab Samushia had at one time served within the structures of Georgia's Ministry of Defence before leaving the armed forces. The principal aim of these groups was the restoration of Georgian jurisdiction over Abkhazia. Observers noted an improvement in the coordination of combat operations and in the quality of weaponry among the terrorists from 1997 onward. The intensification of terrorist, or partisan, activity in early 1998 was an important factor in the non-resumption of military operations in May 1998.[16][b]

As is well known, the Forest Brothers and the White Legion were directly involved in the events of May 1998, which claimed a large number of lives and produced yet another mass exodus of refugees from the Gal district. The conflict is also known as the Six-Day War in Abkhazia (20 to 26 May 1998). According to Abkhazian sources, approximately 300 Georgian terrorists, or partisans, moved illegally into the Gal district of Abkhazia and began preparations for a large-scale sabotage mission. On 25 May, however, a protocol 'On the Cessation of Fire, the Separation of Armed Formations and Guarantees against the Resumption of Hostilities' was signed in Gagra, providing, among other things, for the disbandment of the White Legion and the Forest Brothers.[c] In order to monitor compliance with the obligations assumed by the parties, special groups were to be formed from representatives of the two sides, the UN Military Observer Mission and the CIS Collective Peacekeeping Force. The Abkhazian side also undertook not to permit unlawful armed action against the civilian population of the Gal district, while the Georgian side undertook to take effective measures to prevent the infiltration into Abkhazia of terrorist and sabotage groups, armed formations and individuals.[17] The Georgian side, however, did not depart from its usual practice and once again violated the terms of the agreement. Barely six weeks later, following a fresh terrorist attack on Russian peacekeepers, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs declared that, should such actions be repeated, it would consider the expediency of the continued presence of the 'blue helmets' in the zone of the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict. The Russian Foreign Ministry also criticised statements by leaders of the Georgian parliament in support of White Legion fighters who had threatened Russian peacekeepers, and described as 'wholly at odds with reality' attempts to present the White Legion or the Forest Brothers as organisations 'unconnected with and not directly controlled by the Georgian special services.'[18]

No official investigation was ever conducted into the suspected complicity of Georgian officials in arming and training these groups, nor were any measures taken to detain known persons implicated in the affair.[19]

The Abkhazian leadership repeatedly drew the attention of the United Nations and of mediators to the principal destabilising factor in the region: the actions of Georgian terrorist formations. Yet the international community took no measures whatsoever to condemn the Georgian leadership. On the contrary, Georgia was admitted to the Council of Europe while actively preparing to join the North Atlantic Alliance.

The inaction of the international community can thus be regarded as tacit encouragement of Georgian terrorism, or partisan warfare.[20] It should be noted that Georgia pursued a policy of state terrorism in a manner that was practically open, yet this was never reflected in UN reports, which ought to have led to the application of specific sanctions against Georgia. A policy of double standards is plainly at work here. The United Nations is, as is well known, the principal centre of global resistance to terrorism, yet this resistance is not always and everywhere in evidence, appearing only in those cases where it suits the United Nations, in the person of the United States.

As is well known, on 25 July 2006 a large-scale operation was launched in the upper Kodor Valley under the command of Georgia's ministers of internal affairs and defence, in gross violation of the 1994 Moscow Agreement on a Ceasefire and Separation of Forces.[21] Not all of Georgia's terrorist groups supported the country's central authorities, however. For instance, the terrorist organisation Monadire, under the command of the Svan Emzar Kvitsiani, opposed this operation.[d] Kvitsiani was even put on a wanted list by the Georgian authorities, with a reward of 55,000 dollars placed on his head.

The Prosecutor General's Office of Georgia opened a criminal case against Emzar Kvitsiani, the former presidential plenipotentiary in the Kodor Valley, who was also charged with forming an illegal armed group and with the acquisition and use of firearms.[22]

Sergei Shamba, the minister of foreign affairs of the Republic of Abkhazia, meanwhile declared that the Georgian authorities had begun hunting down inconvenient political figures under cover of an operation to detain Emzar Kvitsiani, the rebel leader in the Kodor Valley.[23]

In a video address to the population of Georgia, broadcast on Abkhazian state television, the Svan rebel leader declared: 'I appeal to Saakashvili and to all those who deceitfully sent troops into the Kodor Valley to withdraw them from there in order to avoid bloodshed, or else they will be carried out of there.' Turning to the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict, Kvitsiani said that he himself had fought against Abkhazia in 1992 and 1993, and now recognised this as a mistake. 'Relations with the Abkhaz and the Ossetians must be regulated exclusively by peaceful means,' he declared. The Georgian authorities, he said, were nonetheless 'actively preparing for a war that could turn out to be the worst possible outcome, both for the current authorities and for the Georgian people.'[24] On 27 July 2006, however, the president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, announced the completion of the special operation and the relocation of the Tbilisi-based government of the Autonomous Republic of Abkhazia to the upper Kodor Valley. The problem of the rebellious Svans led by Emzar Kvitsiani had been used as a pretext. One of Georgia's principal aims, of course, was to secure the actual return of at least a small part of Abkhazia, complete with an 'Abkhazian government in exile'. On 26 December 2006, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Abkhazia issued a statement calling on the international community to pay attention to the terrorist threat emanating from Georgia. As was to be expected, however, no effective measures were forthcoming from the United Nations with respect to Georgia.

It is worth noting that, from 10 April 2007, the Abkhazian government in exile in the Kodor Valley (Upper Abkhazia) had at its disposal 300 police officers, former servicemen of the Georgian interior troops.[25]

The problem of Georgian state terrorism on the territory of Abkhazia and South Ossetia occupies a particular place in both the foreign and domestic policy of the Saakashvili regime. As noted above, terrorism is one of the most dangerous and unpredictable phenomena of the present day, one that in the twenty-first century is assuming ever more varied forms. In this instance, however, what is at issue is specifically Georgian state terrorism directed at Abkhazia and South Ossetia, as the principal factor 'in creating fear and horror among the Abkhazian and South Ossetian populations' and destabilising the situation in the two republics as a whole.[26]

As the head of the Caucasus department at the Institute of CIS Countries has observed, 'fighting in the Gal district has, in essence, never really stopped. It comes, as it were, in waves. Earlier the fighting was in the Kodor Valley. Then it died down.'[27]

In June and July 2008, a series of explosions occurred in the zone of the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict, resulting in the injury and death of several civilians.

Confronted with such a brutal form of arbitrary rule as state terrorism, a state has, under international law, the possibility of employing certain measures to defend itself and its citizens. In doing so, however, it must observe certain limits, so as not to sink to the level of the terrorists themselves. Counter-terrorist armed operations must be conducted using the minimum degree of force necessary. Perhaps the principal requirement governing the use of force by liberal states is the doctrine of minimum force, which is precisely what the Abkhazian leadership applied to Georgia's terrorist organisations until August 2008. Today, however, against the backdrop of the fight against terrorism, one can observe states struggling to resolve this question on their own, since their powers are constrained by both international and domestic law, whereas no such constraints exist for those who carry out violence, at least not for terrorists.

Nobody, of course, is born a terrorist: terrorists are bred by tyrants and dictators sheltering behind sovereignty. For many rulers, sovereignty serves as a kind of cover, behind which they do whatever they please to their own peoples and to states they find inconvenient.

That is to say, the ruler establishes his own 'special order', within which dissidents are pursued by special forces, pressure is applied to those who disagree, and social protest is suppressed besides. Meanwhile, the world community, in the person of the leading powers, fails to react in any way to such events whenever it is not in their interest to do so, displaying the well-known policy of double standards. One need only recall the situation in Northern Ireland, where the British leadership pursued a policy of destroying and oppressing the Irish people, a policy against which absolutely no measures whatsoever were taken. The justification for this was precisely that same sovereignty which, under international norms, does not permit interference in the internal affairs of states, at least whenever such interference is inconvenient and unprofitable for the leading powers.

It must nonetheless always be remembered that terror breeds terror in response.

Any hopeless situation pushes people towards actions capable of leading them out of the impasse. Lacking any means of standing up to dictators who have subjugated every sphere of a country's life, people begin to resort to terror as a means of resolving their political, religious or ethnic problems.

One particular cause that gives rise to terrorism is the national liberation struggle of ethnic groups. A state's refusal to recognise such peoples' right to self-determination leads to conflicts that may ultimately give rise to terrorism, as with the Ulster Irish or the Croats of Yugoslavia, ethnic groups that were forced to take up arms in order to resolve all their problems.

In the light of the foregoing, the terrorist acts carried out, and still being carried out, in the form of bombings of public places and the abduction of people, at the instigation of the Georgian state, can confidently be classed as state terrorism.

Under the Incident Prevention and Response Mechanism (IPRM), regular meetings are held in the town of Gal between the Abkhazian and Georgian sides, in the presence of international observers.

This inevitably raises the question: how, then, can one combat a phenomenon such as terrorism?

It is clear that humanity must unite its efforts in combating the danger of terrorism, and that this requires, first and foremost, combating every manifestation of dictatorship. The only way out of so difficult a situation is probably the adoption of a concept of limited sovereignty, meaning that the principles of human rights and freedoms must be elevated to a transnational status and observed by absolutely all states without exception. A state is sovereign in everything except matters concerning respect for human rights and freedoms. Where mass violations of human rights occur, restrictions, including military measures, should be applied by the international community against the governments of the countries concerned. Today, as always, the right of every person to be free, to express his opinions openly, and to choose his own government must be placed at the very centre of things. This is the only real way to put an end to the threat of international terrorism.[28] But the most important thing, in my view, is for the permanent members of the UN Security Council to abandon their policy of double standards; only then, perhaps, will we be able to fight this phenomenon of terrorism in a coordinated way. The degree of success of the fight against terrorism depends on the interests of the leading geopolitical powers, which must change their policies in line with a dialogue of civilisations and the adoption of the goals of sustainable development.

Footnotes

[1] US Department of State, definition of terrorism under 22 U.S.C. § 2656f(d)(2), as published in the annual 'Patterns of Global Terrorism' reports; the author cites http://ftp.eurasia.org.ru. 

[2] http://fictionbook.ru/author/andreyi_vladimirovich_snegirev/osnoviy_zashitiy_ot_terrorizma_uchebnoe_posobie/read_online.html?page=3

3] http://www.iicas.org/page.php?id=54

[4] http://revolution.allbest.ru/political/00096532_1.html

[5] http://newsru.com/world/22jun2011/fight.html

[6] Nezavisimaya Abkhaziya: problemy i resheniya [Independent Abkhazia: Problems and Solutions], ed. Taras Shamba, 2007, pp. 208 to 209.

[7] Otechestvennaya voina Abkhazii i 'gruzinskie bezhentsy'. Dokumenty i materialy, Vol. 1 [The Patriotic War of Abkhazia and the 'Georgian Refugees'. Documents and Materials, Vol. 1], compiled with an introduction by Teimuraz Achugba, Sukhum, 2003, p. 217.

[8] Khvartskia, M., Ot lzhi k pravde ob Abkhazii [From Lies to the Truth about Abkhazia], Sukhum, 2008, p. 163.

[9] Mezhdunarodnoe pravo: Uchebnik [International Law: A Textbook], ed. F. I. Kozhevnikov, 4th edn, revised and enlarged, Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniya, 1981, p. 416.

[10] Wilkinson, Paul, Terrorism and the Liberal State, 2nd edn, Basingstoke and London, p. 54.

[11] http://journal-neo.com/?q=ru/node/6894

[12] http://www.paricom.ru/index.php?p=MC83&id=29904

[13] http://www.abkhaziya.org/books/polit_stud/terror_gruziya.html

[14] Zhidkov, Sergey, Brosok Maloi Imperii ['Adygeya'] [The Charge of the Little Empire ('Adygeya')], p. 223.

15] http://www.rosoomedi.info/?p=227#more-227

[16] Accord: Problema suvereniteta: gruzino-abkhazskii protsess mirnogo uregulirovaniya [Accord: The Problem of Sovereignty: The Georgian-Abkhaz Peace Process], Conciliation Resources, London, 1999; Moscow: Globus, 2000, pp. 113 to 114.

[17] http://www.mfaabkhazia.net/ru/node/268

[18] http://www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/msg/2004/08/m30973.htm

[19] Accord: Problema suvereniteta: gruzino-abkhazskii protsess mirnogo uregulirovaniya [Accord: The Problem of Sovereignty: The Georgian-Abkhaz Peace Process], Conciliation Resources, London, 1999; Moscow: Globus, 2000, p. 114.

[20] Vneshnyaya politika Respubliki Abkhaziya v period postroeniya nezavisimogo gosudarstva (1990 to 2000 gg.) [The Foreign Policy of the Republic of Abkhazia during the Building of an Independent State (1990 to 2000)], http://www.abkhaziya.org/books.html

[21] Konflikty v Abkhazii i Yuzhnoi Osetii: dokumenty 1989 to 2006 gg. [Conflicts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia: Documents, 1989 to 2006], compiled and annotated by M. A. Volkhonsky, V. A. Zakharov and N. Yu. Silaev, Moscow: NP ID Russkaya panorama, 2008, p. 496.

[22] http://www.newsru.com/world/26jul2006/4hours.html

[23] http://www.newsru.com/world/31jul2006/kod.html

[24] http://www.newsru.com/world/01nov2006/kwitziani.html

[25] Tsyganok, Anatoly, Voina na Kavkaze, 2008: russkii vzglyad. Gruzino-osetinskaya voina 8 to 13 avgusta 2008 goda [The War in the Caucasus, 2008: A Russian View. The Georgian-Ossetian War of 8 to 13 August 2008], Moscow: AIRO-XXI, 2010, p. 60.

[26] http://journal-neo.com/?q=ru/node/6894

[27] Ibid. [28] http://www.iicas.org/page.php?id=54