The decision of the de facto government of Abkhazia to refuse to co-operate with the Russian authorties, who provide finance and security for the Georgian region, on restitution of Russian citizens' property - for fear it might encourage displaced Georgians to return to their homes in the province - shows that no real progress has been made on solving the Abkhaz crisis.

This weekend it became clear that, even at the price of upsetting the sponsors of their regime, the Abkhaz authorities were not prepared to discuss property restitution and were happy to leave Russians who lost their homes in Abkhazia in much the same situation as the despised Georgians - who actually made up a majority of the population before the civil wars of the early 1990s but were then forced to flee or simply murdered.

Under Communist rule the Abkhaz, ethnically closer to the peoples of the Northern Caucasus than the Georgians (Kartuli) and Mingrelians, were given privileged access to jobs and education as it was judged the best way to maintain peace in the province.

With the fall of Communism and the election of a hardline nationalist president in the form of Zviad Gamsakhurdia, Abkhazia increasingly was uneasy with the Georgian government but did not declare its independence until after Georgian militia invaded the territory in pursuit of Gamsakhurdia in the civil war that followed his outser: showing brutality to non-Georgian peoples, particularly the Abkhaz and the Armenians. By the summer of 1993 the Georgians had suffered a catastrophic defeat and civilians had fled or been murdered in large numbers.

Since then Abkhazia has been a running sore on the Georgian polity.

Mikheil Saakashvili first looked for a military solution, massively building up his armed forces after he came to power in 2004. Those same forces were, however, shattered by Russian military might in August 2008.

Since then the Georgian state has declared its commitment to peaceful means and persuasion, but the explicit endorsement of ethnic cleansing - a crime in international law - by the Abkhaz authorities these last few days has shown no progress has been made.

Ruling party MP David Darchiashvili has smeared French Academician Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, born Hélène Zourabichvili, as an apologist for Soviet and Russian crimes who "is still crying for the USSR" after she criticised Mikheil Saakashvili's conduct in the August war of 2008 with Russia.

Carrère d'Encausse is only the second woman to be admitted to the Académie française in the 350 year history of one of Europe's oldest learned societies and is a noted historian of Russian history, Stalin's terror and the process of de-Stalinisation, prediciting, in 1976, the break up of the USSR.

She caused extreme controversy in France in 2005 when she made remarks - judged by many to be highly offensive - about alleged "political correctness" - comparing it to Vladimir Putin's censorship of Russian TV:

Nous avons des lois qui auraient pu être imaginées par Staline. Vous allez en prison si vous dites qu'il ya cinq juifs ou dix noirs à la télévision.  Les gens ne peuvent pas exprimer leur opinion sur les groupes ethniques, sur la Seconde Guerre mondiale et sur beaucoup d'autres choses.  On vous juge tout de suite pour infraction. [...] Le politiquement correct de notre télévision est presque comme la censure des médias en Russie. 

(Of course, on Georgian TV the president faces no such problems and can use live broadcasts to talk of "niggers" and "savages".)

Carrère d'Encausse is a cousin of Salome Zourabichvili, the former Georgian foreign minister and now a leading opposition politician.

A civil rights activist in South Ossetia has been physically attacked, allegedly by supporters of the de facto president of the breakaway region, after he signed a joint appeal to negotiators in Geneva to prioritise the needs of the local population.

Timur Tskhovrebov, editor of the newspaper "21st century" was attacked by a group of 10 people, including three members of the self-declared republic's parliament, on 24 July.

Earlier he and other signatories of the appeal, made with civil rights activists from Georgian-controlled territory as well as from Russian-occupied South Ossetia, were denounced as traitors.

Talks in Geneva, part of a regular round established by the ceasefire agreement of August 2008, are underway today.

In another sign that the Saakasvili government has not lost its enthusiasm for military expansion, despite defeat in the war of August 2008, the government is proposing to make military reserve service compulsory for all men under-40 and more than double the service time demanded to 40 days.

The effective introduction of conscription for the military reserve is unlikely to impress NATO whose two biggest military forces - the US and UK are exclusively volunteer-based and where conscription is in serious decline (for instance, France's ever closer reintegration into the military structures of the alliance saw conscription disappear).

Mikheil Saakasvili's frequent use of military rhetoric and the failure to conclude a "non-use of force" agreement in South Ossetia and Abkhazia are known to have caused concern with Georgia's western allies.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, NATO's general secretary, has sent a coded warning to Mikheil Saakashvili's regime about the lack of democratic accountability of the armed forces in Georgia - saying that "civil control" was a "necessity" if the country was to make progress towards NATO membership.

Under constitutional changes pushed through in the opening days of Saakashvili's presidency he has absolute personal control over senior military appointments, while later changes made the interior minister and defence minister accountable to him and not the prime minister.

In reality almost all Georgians would acknowledge that the interior minister, Vano Merabishvili, is Saakashvili's key lieutenant in the "force ministries" - effectively controling the defence ministry as well as the large network of interior ministry forces, including the various descendants of the Soviet security organs, such as the Constitutional Security Department, the direct inheritor of the USSR's Committee for State Security (KGB) in the transcaucasian republic.

Under Merabishvili the armed wing of state has essentially acted as though beyond the law and even when senior officials have been caught in acts of murder - as in the case of Sandro Girgvliani - the state, from the prosecutors to the courts, prisons and the president himself have bent over backwards to ensure the punishment was the lightest possible and that the transgressors were released at the earliest possible date.

This level of political manipulation was widely blamed for the fiasco of August 2008 where individual Georgian units fought bravely against Russian attack but were poorly led and directed by politicians playing at generals - Tbilisi mayor Gigi Ugulava (pictured) in particular has been indentified as seeking to insert himself as a military leader before running away when the Russians advanced. Like most armies with weak leadership individual bravery was not enough and the Georgian army cracked: tactical retreat soon became a rout.

However, democratic control and accountability for the interior ministry and the army would also threaten the regime's ability to use force as weapon against political opponents. Georgia is not Russia and opposition figures are, in general, not shot down on the street or made to look like suicides, but that does not mean pressure is not applied by arresting family members or planting drugs on party officials or mounting armed raids on companies associated with opposition to the government (the regime recently had the misfortune to mount such a raid when the American ambassador was on the premises).

It could even mean an end to the Potemkin village of Georgian justice, where distressed suspects are nightly paraded on TV making "confessions" and less than one in two thousand criminal cases ends in an acquittal.