GEORGIAN REBEL REGION TO VOTE ON INDEPENDENCE
By Niko Mchedlishvili

Reuters
11 Sep 2006 10:28:16 GMT

TBILISI, Sept 11 (Reuters) – Georgia’s breakaway region of South
Ossetia said on Monday it will hold a referendum on independence
in November, in a move that is likely to escalate tensions between
Russia and Georgia.

"South Ossetia will hold a referendum on independence on November 12,"
Tamara Kelekhsayeva, a spokeswoman for the South Ossetian leadership,
told Reuters by telephone.

The question will be "whether you agree or not that South Ossetia
should preserve its present status of an independent state and be
recognised by the international community," she said.

South Ossetia, a tiny region tucked away next to Russia’s southern
Caucasian border, fought a brief war in the early 1990s for
independence from ex-Soviet Georgia and is a frequent source of
tension between Moscow and Tbilisi.

After that conflict, South Ossetia voted for independence in a
referendum in 1992. It was not immediately clear why a new referendum
was needed.

Georgia accuses Russia of propping up the rebel province’s rulers and
its parliament in July accused Moscow of trying to annex the territory
together with Abkhazia, another breakaway province of Georgia.

Tension has risen since Mikhail Saakashvili was elected Georgian
President in 2004 and vowed to re-unify his country.

"This is political absurdity as this referendum will have no legal
force," Besarion Jugeli, one of the leaders of the United National
Movement party, which has a majority in the Georgian parliament,
told Reuters.

Russia has peacekeeping troops in South Ossetia. Moscow says they
keep the two sides apart, while Tbilisi complains that they side with
the separatists.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, at a meeting with scholars on
Saturday, said that if Serbia’s breakaway province of Kosovo was
given independence then ex-Soviet regions seeking self-rule should
also being given independence.

Putin mentioned South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the Dnestr region that
broke away from Moldova in the 1990s and Nagorno-Karabakh, a separatist
region of Azerbaijan, according to people at the meeting.

Dnestr will hold a referendum on September 17 to confirm
independence. The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe
(OSCE) has said it would not recognise the vote.