Moscow/Gali, Georgia - Georgia's rebel region of Abkhazia on Friday rejected as "unacceptable" an international peace plan for calming escalating tensions in the region. "These offers are unacceptable to us ... We are not prepared to discuss the status of Abkhazia, which is already for many our republic. Abkhazia is an independent state and this not open to discussion," Abkhaz president Sergei Bagapsh said Friday.
Bagapsh made the remarks after talks with German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier in the town of Gali on the separatist region's border with Georgia.
Steinmeier met with the Abkhaz leader as part of a two-day tour aimed at restarting peace talks between Georgia and the Russian- backed rebel region.
The German diplomat said all parties to the conflict had an obligation to prevent the crisis from escalating.
"With this goal we have presented a three-phase plan for the settlement of the conflict," Steinmeier was quoted by Interfax as saying.
"Both sides' positions are still very far from each other and we need to create the conditions for a dialogue," he added.
The peace plan blessed by the so-called United Nations Group of Friends is based on a mutual declaration of non-violence, repatriation of about 25,000 ethnic Georgians expelled from Abkhazia in the 1990s and joint projects for economic reconstruction in the province.
Negotiations over the status of Georgia's two rebel regions, which have enjoyed de facto autonomy since the end of a civil war in 1994, marks the final phase of the plan.
But the proposal is stuck with disagreements on what the first step should be and conditions being tagged on to each concession.
"We do not agree with the proposed plan in principle," Bagapsh was quoted by RIA Novosti as saying. "We have proposed that the German foreign minister include in the document two points. The first one: the withdrawal of Georgian troops from upper Kodori Gorge; the second one: signing of a treaty on the non-use of force."
""A return of Georgian refugees (to Abkhazia) would certainly lead to a new war," he added.
Russia, meanwhile, assessed Steinmeier peace efforts as "contructive," but Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov also threw cold water on the plan, calling it "unrealistic for now."
"We think that signing a treaty on the non-use of force without any preconditions is an absolutely unavoidable first step," Lavrov told journalists in Moscow.
"Our western partners try to link this demand with signing of a document on the return of refugees, which is absolutely unrealistic at this stage," he said.
Steinmeier was due to meet with Lavrov in Moscow later Friday in the last stop of his two-day peace tour.
Georgia's breakaway region of Abkhazia has enjoyed de facto autonomy since a UN ceasefire in the 1990s that provided for a permanent Russian peacekeeping mission of 2,500 men in the region.
But Moscow's recent moves to strengthen diplomatic ties and increase its peacekeeping mission in the region set off a dangerous row with Tbilisi, who says such steps amount to the creeping annexation of its territory.
Russia and a Georgian-American coalition were holding mass military exercises on their respective side of the Caucasus region this week, manoeuvres frowned upon by European allies.
