Separatists, Georgian gov’t in dispute
Separatists threatened Friday to use force to stop Georgia’s government from strengthening its control over a gorge on the edge of a breakaway territory. Georgian forces this week mounted a large operation to quell a rebel militia in the Kodori Gorge, the only part of Abkhazia that remains under nominal Georgian control. The rest of the province has been de-facto independent, run by an internationally unrecognized government, since the end of a separatist war in the 1990s. Full Story