The FINANCIAL — According to Civil Georgia, the nine-party opposition coalition said it would try to pressure on the Georgian authorities through the country’s western allies in order to secure free and fair conditions ahead of parliamentary elections this spring.
Levan Gachechiladze, who was Mikheil Saakashvili’s main rival in the presidential election backed by the opposition coalition, said on January 21, that the bloc would present its “detailed plan” about what should be done to secure free and fair elections to the international community in a week or so. “If the current situation of violence remains, I doubt that we will participate in the parliamentary elections,” Gachechiladze told journalists after meeting with visiting Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves.
Meanwhile, Davit Usupashvili, the leader of Republican Party, part of the nine-party coalition, said on January 21, he had an impression that the governments of the U.S. and European governments “now owe to the Georgian people” after giving a positive assessments to the January 5 presidential election, which in fact, as he said, was fraudulent.
“I have an impression that every international organization and the U.S. as well as European governments – although no one is publicly admitting it – now owe the Georgian people and what they could not or did not do in respect of the presidential election, they will defiantly do in respect of the parliamentary elections,” Usupashvili said in an interview with the RFE/RL Georgian Service.
He explained the western governments’ mainly positive assessment of the January 5 election by the fact that they feared about possible unrests in cases the polls were denounced by the international community as invalid.
“Not a single international organization or foreign government has said it publicly, but I have an impression that after the presidential election they all have asked one simple question: what is an alternative? What will happen in Georgia, if we say publicly what we have really observed [during the election]?” Usupashvili said. “And they have seen that current situation in Georgia is not similar to the one that was in November, 2003, when people managed to protect their votes peacefully; instead they have seen a scenario wherein in case of saying truth about the election, it was possible that angry people would have clashed with police and repression machine and we already now that the myth that the Georgian police will not shoot at the Georgian people has been destroyed on November 7… This is my personal observation about the thoughts of the international community, based on my recent meetings with representatives of many international organizations and foreign governments. So it seems that their position is to resolve problems gradually ahead of the parliamentary elections and not immediately… So I think we should not be radical while assessing international community’s role.”
Usupashvili also said that it would be unfair to accuse “all the international observers” of bias and in particular he hailed the OSCE/ODIHR’s recent post-election interim report which was highly critical about the post-election process.
He also said that a dialogue with Nino Burjanadze, the Parliamentary Chairperson, would continue about reforming the election administrations, public TV and about increasing transparency of law enforcement agencies and judiciary – these are, he said, key issues to secure free and fair parliamentary elections. The opposition said it would not recognize Saakashvili as a legitimate president and instead would have a dialogue with the Parliament.
The opposition wants to have equal representation at all level of election administrations with the chairmen of election commissions, including of Central Election Commission, to be appointed through an agreement between the opposition and the authorities.
Meanwhile, Koba Davitashvili, leader of the Party of People, said his party planned to hold a protest rally outside the U.S. embassy in Tbilisi on January 22. “We will call on [the U.S. government] not to support falsification and violence in Georgia and to stand beside the Georgian people,” Davitashvili said on January 21.
Although Party of People is part of the nine-party opposition coalition, the planned protest rally is an independent initiative by the Davitashvili’s party.
Discussion about this post