Georgian Border Checks Beefed up to Foil Rebels

In the shadow of ghostly, centuries-old stone watchtowers, a hi-tech, multinational operation is making the mountain passes between Georgia and Chechnya harder than ever to penetrate.

Winter snows are melting in the sheer-sided ravines and valleys of the high Caucasus and, for Chechen guerrillas, the best season for crossing into Georgia has begun.

But this summer they will encounter new obstacles, due to a recent tightening in cooperation between the Russian and Georgian military, backed by monitors from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, OSCE.

Blinding white ridges some 4,000 metres high signal the edge of Chechnya, just a few kilometres from Omalo, the alpine base for 22 of the OSCE's 150 unarmed foreign monitors, most of them with military backgrounds.

"There's still a few weeks to go before the snow disappears completely, but it's beginning," said Jim Dillon, an Irish army officer stationed with the monitors, as he climbs aboard a helicopter headed to an outlying observation post.

In the prefabricated building in Omalo, team leader Per-Anders Husberg, a Swedish air force major, scrutinises maps showing the OSCE's operations along the eastern Georgian-Russian frontier. This includes Russia's regions of Ingushetia, Chechnya and Dagestan - 236 km of the Caucasus mountain chain. Here and there, yellow pins mark potential crossing points. They are few and often at high altitude.

"In the Chechen sector it's very difficult to pass. You have to be an alpinist, basically," Husberg told IWPR. "The Dagestani part is easier."

Equipped with Sony video cameras, Zeiss binoculars and satellite communications, OSCE monitors from 30 countries scan this wild and remote landscape around the clock. Helicopters patrol even less accessible places.

If fighters - or their Russian pursuers - are spotted on Georgian territory, the monitors film and send the footage by satellite to OSCE headquarters in Vienna. The information is then passed immediately to OSCE members, including Georgia and Russia. Last year, 373 incidents were noted of crossings on foot and 42 cases involving aircraft, according to Peter Marron, deputy head of the border monitoring operation.

Would-be Chechen infiltrators are also going to have to contend with growing levels of cooperation between the Russian troops they are fighting and US-trained Georgian troops patrolling the other side of the border.

Agreements have been struck between President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia and his Russian counterpart President Vladimir Putin to establish direct contact between detachments on both sides and to coordinate helicopter patrols and intelligence. Trilateral Georgian-Russian-OSCE meetings will be held too, Lt-General Alexander Manilov, deputy head of Russia's border guards, told Russia's ITAR-TASS news agency.

There is so far no sign that Russian troops will be allowed to operate across the frontier. And despite recent improvements, it is unclear how much of a contribution the still under-funded and lightly equipped Georgian troops can make.

The political impact of the Russian-Georgian coordination, however, is undeniable. For while experts believe the border is only a sideshow to the progress of the Chechen war, the political fall-out from the Chechen fighters' crossings has been explosive.

Moscow has accused Georgia of sheltering rebels ever since late 1999, the start of its second attempt in a decade to seize control of Chechnya, alleging that there was high-level complicity in helping Chechens to cross.

At the height of the crisis, in 2002, President Vladimir Putin's government threatened military strikes against Georgia's Pankisi valley, where thousands of refugees and a number of fighters had taken shelter.

A small-scale bombing raid was made against the valley that year, but Moscow denied involvement in it. Perhaps more seriously for Georgia, in late 2002 Putin scrapped visa-free travel for Georgians going to Russia - a blow for the former's huge population of economic migrants.

Then-president Eduard Shevardnadze's government denied there was any major flow of fighters over the border and accused Russia of using the issue as a pretext to undermine Georgian sovereignty.

But Saakashvili, who ousted Shevardnadze last year, is making efforts to rebuild relations with Russia, as this is seen as the key to the resolution of Georgia's own separatist conflicts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The deal on border guard cooperation signals an important shift from the two countries' previous mutual mistrust.

The OSCE operation - which began along the Chechen sector in 1999 and expanded to cover the Ingush border in 2001 and the Dagestani part in December 2002 - is also doing much to defuse political tension, military analyst Irakli Aladashvili said.

"Above all it's good for Georgia as we can't be accused unfairly now," said Aladashvili, also military commentator for the Kviris Politra weekly newspaper in Tbilisi. "The OSCE is a third force that says who is crossing or not."

By helping seal off Chechnya, the OSCE also provides an oblique boost to Russia's war effort. But Aladashvili said that the major sources of weapons for Chechen fighters are corrupt elements in the Russian forces themselves, while more sophisticated arms are available in Abkhazia and South Ossetia - both beyond full control of either Tbilisi or their backers in Moscow.

Besides, an important factor in blocking Chechen fighters might be not the OSCE or border guards, but simply the Georgian government's tightening of control over the Pankisi area, therefore reducing guerrillas' motives to cross.

In any case, determined groups used to years of fighting the vastly more powerful Russian military are likely always to find ways of slipping through.

"These are hard men," admitted one border monitor, speaking on condition of anonymity, at another OSCE outpost. "And I realise they can avoid us."

Sebastian Smith is IWPR's Caucasus Trainer-Editor based in Tbilisi.