Lado Bitchashvili, Shida Kartli
On April 20, the 65 th round of the meeting in the frame of the Incident Prevention and Response Mechanism was held in Ergneti village; the representatives of the Government of Georgia raised the issue of giving permission to the citizens of Georgia to visit graves of their family members and churches in the occupied territory.
“Together with the representatives of the de-facto authority and occupation power we spoke about giving permission to our citizens to visit the graves of their ancestors and relatives in the occupied territory on the Easter Holiday,” representative of the Analytic Department of the State Security Service Davit Beraia said.
The Government of Georgia has been raising the issue of visiting graves on the Easter Holiday for eight years already but all in vain. Although the representatives of the Tskhinvali de-facto authority are not against it, the Georgian citizens could not travel to the occupied territory on the Easter Holiday.
“Citizens of Georgia can travel to our territory only official via the checkpoint. Otherwise they will be arrested,” representative of Tskhinvali de-facto authority Davit Sanakoev said.
Since the last meeting in Ergneti until April 20, 13 citizens of Georgia were arrested for the illegal crossing of the so-called border. Davit Beraia said 11 of them are already free. He protested the arrest of the Georgian citizens as well as ongoing “borderization” process during the IPRM meeting once again.