MOSCOW, July 23 (RIA Novosti) - Tbilisi is planning a march for peace into the capital of South Ossetia on the first anniversary of the August war between Georgia and Russia, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin said on Thursday.
Russia and Georgia fought a five-day war last August, which began when Georgian forces attacked South Ossetia in a bid to bring it back under central control. Two weeks after the end of the war, Russia recognized South Ossetia and Abkhazia, another former Georgian republic, as independent states.
"We have been taught that anything the Georgian government thinks up is always dangerous, be it a so-called 'march for peace' into Tskhinvali or creating patriotic youth camps near the borders of South Ossetia and Abkhazia," Karasin told RIA Novosti.
Georgia planned to hold a peace march of mostly young people into Tskhinvali from Georgian enclaves within South Ossetia and other areas on the republic's borders in September 2007, but the organizers called off the event. Russia's Foreign Ministry at that time believed the march was to disrupt a national Ossetian conference held September 18-19 and that its main goal was to foment clashes between Ossetians and Georgians.
Russian investigations into Georgia's attack on South Ossetia last August have found that 5,315 people were harmed by the onslaught, either killed or injured or having their homes damaged, Russia's chief investigator Alexander Bastrykin said earlier in July.
Russian investigators have officially reported that 162 civilians died in the conflict, as well as 48 Russian service personnel, of whom 10 were peacekeepers.
The republic, which had de facto independence since a brief conflict with Tbilisi in the early 1990s, is home to around 70,000 people, most of whom have had Russian citizenship for many years.
