Now you see it, now you don't. Only days after a second international team of investigators submitted their findings about an alleged violation of Georgian airspace by Russian aircraft, tensions between the two countries are intensifying over conflicting reports of an aircraft violating Georgian airspace and crashing somewhere in a strip of Georgian-controlled territory in the breakaway region of Abkhazia. The remains of the aircraft have yet to be found, leaving more questions than answers.
Depending on the source and the date, the plane has been variably described as Georgian, Russian, and even American and Turkish. The incident, which allegedly happened on August 21, preceded claims by separatist Abkhaz officials that an unmanned Georgian spy plane had flown over Abkhaz-controlled territory in the Kodori Gorge, a strip of land in the breakaway region of Abkhazia held by both Georgian and separatist forces.
Though there have been multiple reports of an explosion and crash, no plane wreckage has yet been found, making it impossible to confirm what actually occurred.
A Rustavi-2 television report that initially stated that the plane had been downed in separatist-controlled territory later changed, as well. Georgian media now report that the aircraft came down over the Georgian-controlled Upper Kodori Gorge.
If so, however, how the plane crashed remains a mystery. On August 24, Rustavi-2 cited an unidentified witness as saying that Georgian forces had fired on a Russian-made plane en route for Sukhumi via Georgian airspace.
Interior Ministry spokesman Shota Utiashvili, however, later told reporters that warning shots had been fired from automatic machine guns. In an August 27 interview with EurasiaNet, though, that gunfire was reduced to a "single shot."
In an August 29 interview with EurasiaNet, Deputy Defense Minister Batu Kutelia stressed that Interior Ministry troops, not regular Georgian military forces, had fired the warning shot. Given that the United Nations mandate prohibits heavy artillery in the Abkhaz conflict zone, he added, the only air defense system available to these troops are machine guns.
"[T]he crash may not have happened at all," commented Utiashvili, who maintains that nobody saw the aircraft crash and that reports of an explosion could have been thunder. "If we can't find anything, what can we investigate?"
As with the August 6 incident when a missile was dropped onto Georgian territory near the breakaway region of South Ossetia, though, the mystery airplane is feeding into a rising tide of anger among Georgian public officials about Russia's support for the breakaway governments of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Identifying the origin of the aircraft is also a venture into shadow play. The Interior Ministry's Utiashvili states that the plane fired upon has not been positively identified as Russian, though the Georgian foreign ministry on August 22 affirmed that the aircraft had come from the Russian Federation. Moscow has flatly denied the allegations, with Russian Army Chief of Staff General Yuri Baluevsky charging that Tbilisi is suffering from "hallucinations."
Some separatist Abkhaz officials have added a fresh twist. Abkhaz armed forces' Chief of Staff Anatoly Zaitsev initially claimed that the aircraft, which he said he had seen, was either American or from a North Atlantic Treaty Organization member country, Russian news agencies reported. Zaitsev later recanted the statement, saying he was mistaken.
Debris trails have also surfaced, reportedly. Roman Dbar, the head of Abkhazia's ecological service has asserted that "cosmic waste" entered the atmosphere and landed on Abkhaz-controlled territory. Russian Federal Space Agency head Anatoly Perminov has insisted that the "space junk" is not Russian, ITAR-TASS reported on August 28.
This latest phantom plane scandal comes on the heels of published findings by a second group of experts into the August 6 missile incident near Tsitelubani. [For details, see the Eurasia Insight archive]. The group, from Estonia, Poland and the United Kingdom, confirmed earlier findings that the aircraft entered Georgia from and returned to Russian airspace. The report names the Russian Federation as the only country capable of correctly using the Kh-58 anti-radar missile, the weapon Georgia states was used in the alleged attack. The report maintains that Georgia had no means of launching such a weapon.
The report also hypothesizes that the missile did not explode because "a combination of short range and similar elevation (aircraft and radar site heights) may have interrupted the normal arming sequence."
At an August 29 speech in Tbilisi's Sioni Cathedral for a religious holiday, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili asserted that "the miraculous force" of the Virgin Mary had protected a nearby air radar installation from destruction by the fired missile.
On August 17, a team of Russian experts came to Georgia for two days to examine evidence from the missile incident. The team has asserted that no Russian planes entered Georgian airspace, that the missile was not launched from an aircraft and that Georgia destroyed key missile evidence.
Repeating earlier denials, Deputy Georgian Defense Minister Kutelia categorically refutes the Russian team's findings, calling them groundless. "No evidence was destroyed. All we detonated was the TNT. Everything else serial numbers, factory codes were available in our storage [space]."
Georgia's ambitions to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization have also been pulled into the dispute. The Russian foreign ministry additionally claims the missile incident was staged to undermine relations between Tbilisi and Moscow relations and accelerate Georgia's integration into NATO.
Georgian media recently broadcast that NATO was discussing sharing radar data with Tbilisi, implying that such a transfer indicated that NATO was ready to support Tbilisi in its dispute with the Kremlin. An Interfax report quoting a NATO spokesperson later stated that a decision had been made against such a handover. Mario Marinov, the defense alliance's representative in Tbilisi, declined to respond to the reports.
Nodar Nadirshvili, head of the Euro-Atlantic Integration Coordination Department, dismisses the claim that politics influenced the reports of airspace violations or played into discussion of use of NATO radar data. Georgia has been working on joining the alliance's Radar Data Exchange program since 2003, he said. "Technically, Georgia is ready to be included; we have all the means," Nadirshvili said.
Deputy Defense Minister Kutelia forecasts that integration into the radar system could be achieved by the end of autumn 2007.
Paul Rimple is a freelance writer based in Tbilisi.
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