First meeting in IPRM in four years will take place on Friday - Abkhaz Foreign Ministry
SUKHUM. May 25 (Interfax) - The work of the five-party Incident Prevention and Reaction Mechanism (IPRM) on the areas adjacent to the Georgian-Abkhaz border, will resume on May 27, Abkhaz Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Chirikba said in Sukhum on Wednesday, after meeting with the co-chairs of the Geneva debate on security and stability in Transcaucasia.
"We are resuming the work within the Incident Prevention and Reaction Mechanism (IPRM) for the first time in four years. It is a very important mechanism for discussing all of the incidents occurring in the border zone on the Abkhaz-Georgian border," the minister said.
He believes that the border incident in which a Georgian citizen was killed, will be the central issue addressed in the meeting. "It is very important that the incident and other issues be discussed constructively, and ways of resolving them be found," the minister said.
Chirikba believes it is important "to give a constructive tone to the five-party negotiations from the very start."
"If that happens, the Gali meetings will continue, but it depends on the responsible approach of all sides to their tasks," he said.
The meetings in Gali between representatives of Abkhazia, Georgia, Russia, the UN and the OSCE in the Incident Prevention and Reaction Mechanism stopped in April 2012. The parties agreed to resume the work of the IPRM at the round of the Geneva debate on security and stability in Transcaucasia, held in March 2016.
