Minister: Nothing is being built in Abkhazia

Paata Zakareishvili (Official Photo)

Tbilisi, DFWatch – “After all contacts were broken, nothing is being built in Abkhazia,” Paata Zakareishvili, State Minister for Reconciliation and Civic Equality, stated at the parliament library on Sunday.
The library hosts photo exhibition of infrastructure projects in Abkhazia during 1950s and 1960s, depicting bridges, tunnels and roads. The exhibition is dedicated to the 22nd anniversary of the fall of Sokhumi that actually marked an end of the Abkhaz war.
“We see how Georgia builds bridges, roads, towns, while (everything in) Abkhazia is actually collapsing, and its powerful, so-called friendly state does not give even a single lari, sorry, a single ruble, to support its development,” Paata Zakareishvili said referring to Russia.
Politicians from the ruling Georgian Dream coalition as well as opposition, members of the government, war veterans and ordinary people gathered for a wreath laying ceremony at the memorial of the bloody Abkhaz war at Heroes Square in Tbilisi on Sunday.
On September 27, 1993, after fierce fighting Abkhazian forces, along with paramilitaries from North Caucasus and Russian Cossacks, with the support of the Russian military, took over Sokhumi. Georgian troops had to withdraw from entire Abkhazian autonomy except Kodori Gorge.
This was actually an end of the more than year-long conflict that claimed tens of thousands of lives from both sides, as well as over 200,000 people (by some accounts up to 300,000), mostly ethnic Georgians had to leave their homes and relocate to the parts of Georgia under control of the central government.