Saakashvili: Revolution Continues

On the sixth anniversary of the Rose Revolution, President Saakashvili said Georgia’s achievements since 2003 were “refutation of the Kremlin propaganda” and for that reason Russia “can not bear us.” 

“The real revolution in our country has not ended on November 23, 2003; it started [six years ago] and it continues today with more momentum then ever before,” he said at a meeting with a group of students, also attended by visiting former Spanish PM Jose Maria Aznar.

Saakashvili said that the Rose Revolution “marked the launch of one of the most important parts of our history,” which, he said, was “a triumph of Georgians’ European values.”

“Liberal democratic revolutions are not simply waving of flags, as some may think… We have seen it once during the Rose Revolution and then we have seen for many times a miserable attempt to imitate it [the Rose Revolution] by various political parties,” he said.

“Georgia has demonstrated to the entire region that freedom does not mean chaos; that it is not needed to kill journalists in order to increase efficiency of government, as it happens often in many countries in our neighborhood.”

“We have demonstrated that it is possible to have freedom and order simultaneously,” he added.

He said that what Georgia had achieved was “a refutation of the Kremlin propaganda.”

“And that is why Moscow can not bear us. And for that reason we should succeed at any cost,” Saakashvili said.

Saakashvili then recalled Russian PM Vladimir Putin’s recent remarks about him saying that Putin “dedicated most of his press conference while visiting Ukraine, speaking about my tie and speaking about some of my actions that I had undertaken in respect of my tie.”

Asked at a joint news conference with his Ukrainian counterpart, Yulia Tymoshenko, in Yalta on November 20 about Saakashvili’s visit to Kiev, where the latter had a meeting with President Yushchenko on the same day, PM Putin said: “If the two presidents decide having a dinner together, they’d better not to wear ties. Ties are expensive these days… Well, you know what I mean.”

Putin was alluding to a video footage of Saakashvili chewing his tie as he waited to be interviewed during the last year’s August war.

Then Ukrainian PM Tymoshenko, standing next to Putin at the same news conference, said, while laughing: “I definitely can hold dinners without ties.”

Saakashvili said that he could understand when Tbilisi-based “Maestro TV makes such things; well, it’s Maestro and let them do that.”

“But when the King of such a huge country… with its million of problems, whose economy, unlike of ours, is collapsing, has nothing to talk about but of a tie of [the President] of a neighboring, small state, whose territory’s 20% it [Russia] has occupied, it already means that we have succeeded,” Saakashvili said.

“I am now calm, because previously he [Putin] was speaking with President Sarkozy about other parts of the body, threatening other parts of the body and I will be calmer as he moves upper,” Saakashvili said referring to Putin’s remarks, he reportedly said while meeting Sarkozy last August, that he would hang Saakashvili “by the balls.”

He also said that he could not understand those western leaders who “who can calmly shake hand with the head of the state, which detains 13 years old children” – he was again referring to Russia, which is blamed by Tbilisi for holding four Georgian teenagers in Tskhinvali since November 4. 

“It would have been hard for me to have any business with a person like that [referring to Putin],” Saakashvili added.

This post is also available in: ქართული (Georgian)