President expressed his gratitude to the ICRC representatives for the work that the mission has been doing in Abkhazia for many years.

“The International Committee of the Red Cross is an organization associated with humanism, with the right approaches to solving problems that arise in conflict situations. The leadership of Abkhazia intends to continue to cooperate with you, to provide you with all kinds of support in your work, ” Aslan Bzhania said.

Head of the humanitarian mission in Abkhazia Matthias Weinreich introduced the new envoy of the mission Daniel Mac Sweeney.

“We will talk about the missing persons program. This is the specific task of our colleague. He will work on these issues in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The Missing Persons Program in Abkhazia has been operating for over 10 years. Naturally, there are some changes needed in this program and its tasks, ” Weinreich said.

Daniel Mac Sweeney highlighted the progress made by the Missing Persons Program despite the unresolved conflict.

“This is primarily due to the fact that you were able to establish a dialogue with the Georgian authorities through the mediation of the ICRC on the issue of missing persons, which ultimately led to the fact that 177 unidentified remains were identified and handed over to their families,” said the ICRC envoy on missing persons in the Caucasus.

He noted that working in various parts of the world, he can say that the work on the search for missing persons and identification of the remains is quite at a good level here. At the same time, in his opinion, certain changes are already required in the work on this program.

According to ICRC representative, the percentage of those identified in other regions is higher than in Abkhazia and it is necessary to jointly consider further ways to advance this process.

“We would like to suggest you to appoint a person who will specifically deal with issues related to missing persons here, being directly in your subordination. We turn to you with this request. The same request was addressed to the Georgian authorities. I was appointed by the ICRC, and now it is necessary to make the same appointments by the leadership of Abkhazia and Georgia, so that in the future we can advance the solution of the issues of finding the missing, ” Daniel Mac Sweeney said.

Then the meeting continued without journalists.