Georgian Parliament Speaker: time has come for EU to officially distance itself from slanderous allegations of MEPs

Georgian Parliament Speaker Shalva Papuashvili on Thursday said the European Union had to officially distance itself from the “slanderous” allegations of MEPs, in response to an amendment to a resolution of the European Parliament introduced by a MEP Anna Fotyga to urge the Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili to pardon the former President Mikheil Saakashvili.

In a social media message, Papuashvili noted that a “huge gap” of misunderstanding about Saakashvili between his foreign patrons and the Georgian people continued to harm “our foreign relations”.

“This is not new. We heard such calls before and we know that they are not leading anywhere. What authors of such statements completely fail to understand is the overwhelmingly negative attitude towards Saakashvili and his foreign patrons among the Georgian public. While Saakashvili’s lobbyists hail Georgian ex-president’s ‘deeds’, for most Georgians things are diametrically opposite. Moreover, such inexplicable statements from Western politicians raise certain cognitive dissonance, when people start asking how the democratic West may still support a widely despised authoritarian figure. This also raises suspicions as to whether hailed ‘Western values’ are a mere ruse for promoting certain geopolitical objectives”, Papuashvili said.

TWITTER POST

“The former and acting foreign politicians who vouch for Saakashvili, usually point to the latter’s role in democratic transformation, institution-building, and his handling of the 2008 invasion by Russia. In fact, these are the exact issues for which Saakashvili remains a villain for most Georgians. Unlike Saakashvili’s artificially concocted international image, Georgians know first-hand what his regime brought to the country and to individual citizens. Mass violations of human rights, silenced media, terrorised business, elite corruption, arrogance towards own people, and the cowardly conduct during the war with Russia are how an average Georgian remembers Saakashvili’s almost decade-long heavy-handed rule”, he continued.

The chief Georgian legislator stressed that an even greater cause of bewilderment for Georgians was the hypocritical behaviour of Saakashvili’s foreign friends and protectors when it came to democracy in Georgia, and further pointed out that “despite mass human rights violations between 2003 and 2012, these foreigners remained loyal to Saakashvili, virtually never raising their voice against his excesses”.

“The time has come for the European Union to officially distance itself from the slanderous allegations of MEPs. Our question to the EU is whether they share common values with Georgian people or MEPs’ particularistic interests guide them. We believe what matters is our common cause of Georgia’s European and Euro-Atlantic integration. We should look to the future”, he concluded.