"I Accuse Russia of Ethnic Cleansing"

“In the eyes of the mankind Russian troops are perpetrating ethnic cleansing, brutally mercilessly in my country and we can not do anything about it,” President Saakashvili said at a late-night press conference for foreign journalists on August 14.

He said not only the Georgian villages of the South Ossetian conflict zone, as well as of the Gori distinct have been “cleansed,” but upper Kodori Gorge as well.

“What Russia did by this [military] intervention is that they came in and ethnically purified, ethnically cleansed two areas of Georgia – totally cleansed Upper Abkhazia [areas in breakaway Abkhazia that were under the Tbilisi control before August 12] and totally cleansed South Ossetia,” Saakashvili said.

“I accuse the government of Russia of deliberate ethnic cleansing and I can prove it with international organization already bringing testimony to what I am saying. We’ve received 1,400 reports of brutal attacks, slaughters and rapes.”

Georgia filed a lawsuit against Russia in the International Court of Justice (ICJ), claiming Russia, through the separatist authorities in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, violated a convention meant to eliminate racism in a period between 1990 and August, 2008.