Georgian, Abkhaz participants meet in İstanbul talks on persons missing from Abkhazia war

The International Committee of the Red Cross Georgia on Thursday said a meeting involving Georgian and Abkhaz participants for finding and determining the fate of 1,860 individuals missing from the 1992-1993 armed conflict in Georgia’s Russian-occupied Abkhazia region had been hosted in İstanbul.

Chaired by the neutral moderator of the International Committee of the Red Cross, the 16th meeting of the coordination mechanism between the participants emphasised the need to find further information about the graves of missing people and challenges related to the identification process, as well as the progress made since the last meeting in December.

In her comments, Agnès Coutou, the Chair of the meeting and the ICRC Envoy on Missing Persons in the Caucasus, said 526 human remains had been found and recovered, with 285 identified and handed over to their families for burial since the establishment of the coordination mechanism.

A dialogue between the participants, grounded in the humanitarian principles of the coordination mechanism, is critical to securing progress and ultimately providing answers to families”, she said.

Under the ICRC's auspices, the coordination mechanism was formed in 2010 to handle issues related to determining the fate of the missing individuals.

The conflict in the northwestern region began on August 14, 1992 and took the lives of between 13,000 to 20,000 ethnic Georgians and approximately 3,000 Abkhaz before it ended on September 27, 1993.

Over 250,000 Georgians fled the region and became internally displaced in the country, while more than 2,000 - including about 1,500 ethnic Georgians, up to 200 ethnic Abkhaz and about 100 ethnic Ossetians -  were declared missing in the aftermath of the war.