Military Watchdog Slams Government’s Defense Policy
On February 16, Irakli Sesiashvili, who chairs the military watchdog non-governmental organization Justice and Liberty, unveiled the results of the organization’s one year monitoring and assessment of the government’s activity in the defense sphere.
The report criticizes the government for a failure to develop a plan for reformation of the armed forces, misuse of defense funds, frequent staff changes in the Defense Ministry and in the General Staff of the Armed Forces, which hampers reforms, and for failing to effectively distribute power among the civil and military institutions.
The report also criticizes the current process of training reserve forces, for which the government has allocated 3.6 million Lari (approximately USD 1.9 million).
“Training of the reserve forces should be welcomed. However, the way the reserve forces are being trained currently is not envisaged by the law and it only represents a PR campaign for the Armed Forces…there is no necessity for this kind of reserve force, especially against the background of no effective command structure for these reserve forces,” the report reads.
According to the report, hundreds of thousands of Lari have been spent over the last year for the purchase of luxurious cars and for reconstructing the offices of top officials in the Defense Ministry, while social conditions in the military units still remain poor.
Justice and Liberty also notes problems persisting in civil-military relations. A new statute for the Defense Ministry was adopted last April which, according to the report, further complicated the process of distribution power among the particular departments and divisions of the Defense Ministry and “led to a duplication of functions and erased the threshold between military and political leadership.”
This statute has been amended twice since last April, once in June, 2004, when Giorgi Baramidze replaced Gela Bezhuashvili at the Defense Minister’s position, and secondly last December, when Irakli Okruashvili was appointed as the new Defense Minister. “But these amendments did not addressed those irregularities in the statute and only corresponded to personal interests of the particular Defense Ministers,” the report reads.
The report is currently available only in Georgian. A report in English will be available next week.
