Georgia's UN ambassador calls for independent war probe

United Nation: Georgia's UN ambassador Monday called for an international investigation to determine whether Georgia or Russia started the war in South Ossetia in August that badly damaged ties between Moscow and the West.

Russia and Georgia blame each other for launching the five-day war in the separatist Georgian region of South Ossetia. But recent media reports quoted observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe as casting doubt about Georgia's claim that it responded to aggression by Russian-backed separatists.

"We're watching the reports," Georgia's UN Ambassador Irakli Alasania told a news conference. "We believe that we need to conduct a very thorough investigation international investigation."

He said Georgia has called for such an investigation "from the outset of the breakout of this military confrontation."

"And we dearly hope that the European Union's leadership will actually, really try and make it happen," Alasania said.

He said Georgia was already committed to providing "all the information, all the details, even classified materials, which will be used by this investigation."

Ryan Grist, a former British military officer who was an OSCE representative in Georgia when the war broke out, told the British Broadcasting Corp. on November 9 that he had warned of Georgian military activity before the August war, but that the reports were not passed on.

Finnish Foreign Minister Alexander Stubb, the current OSCE chairman, said the organisation only had three observers in Georgia when the war erupted and it was not in a position to judge who was to blame for starting it.

Irakli noted that the OSCE as an organisation had not backed the report.