TBILISI. Aug 13 (Interfax-AVN) - Georgia has officially invited the UN to resume the monitoring of Abkhazia's volatile Kodori gorge, Georgian Minister without Portfolio Malkhaz Kakabadze said on Wednesday.
"Georgia is ready to provide full security guarantees to UN military observers in case the monitoring is resumed," Kakabadze told Interfax-Military News Agency.
"Involvement of additional Georgian law-enforcement units is unlikely, but local forces should be quite enough," he said.
The patrolling was suspended after unidentified persons captured a UN military patrol and held it hostage from June 5 to 10.
"While the patrolling is suspended, some forces may make use of it and come up with various suspicions concerning the Kodori gorge, but there is nothing in the gorge that can cause suspicions of the Abkhaz party or damage the negotiating process," Kakabadze noted.
Georgia is opposed to the establishment of stationary posts of the CIS Collective Peacekeeping Forces in the gorge, the only Abkhaz region controlled by Tbilisi after the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict of 1992-1993, the minister said.
He noted that he was hoping for sooner resumption of the gorge's patrolling by the UN in order to remove all suspicions.