"Nowhere in Abkhazia was there any meeting supporting the president Mikhail Saakashvili of the neighbouring state," he said to Abkhaz journalists.
The day before the Geogian media spread information about people who appeared in the streets of Sukhumi with Mikhail Saakashvili portraits and about the arrests of some of them.
Sergey Shamba, giving the lie to these allegations, accuses Tbilisi of the poor knowledge of the situation in Abkhazia.
An armed conflict between Georgia and Abkhazia erupted in 1992 and was followed by the attainment of truce in 1993. The Geneva settlement process which began under the UNO aegis in 1993 involves, apart from the conflicting sides, also Russia and the UN Secretary General's special envoy in Georgia (who has presided over all the rounds of talks) as well as the OSCE as an observer. It was in 1998 that the process was officially joined by the Friends of the Secretary-General-the USA, Great Britain, Germany, Russia and France being a coordinator.
On May 14, 1994, Georgia and Abkhazia signed in Moscow the truce and disengagement agreement which enabled Russia to send its peace-keepers to the Ungury River zone for disengaging the conflicting sides while the UNO expanded the mandate of its observers having been in Abkhazia since 1992.
