Government Accuses Opposition of Stirring Tensions
Chief of the President’s Administration Giorgi Arveladze accused those opposition parties which have staged a series of protest rallies recently of an attempt “to stir up situation” in the country.
“Those people who call themselves opposition use all means in an attempt to maximally stir up and aggravate situation in the country and to create an impression that there is a catastrophic wave of public protests and disorders. In reality it is not so and we all see this very well. They fail to give desired form to those protest rallies which they try to organize. They [opposition parties] only can gather their activists, but they fail to achieve growing these [rallies] to a mass [demonstrations],” Giorgi Arveladze said at a news conference on March 17.
Arveladze also said that in some cases the recent protest rallies aim at giving a reason to the Russian television stations to portray situation in Georgia as unstable.
He also said that these opposition forces “mainly serve to certain oligarchic interests and in some cases, unfortunately [serve] to criminal interests.”
Several hundred protesters gathered outside the President’s Office on March 17 to demand Interior Minister Vano Merabishvili’s resignation and a unbiased investigation of a high-profile murder case.
