Saakashvili: Stability is Our Key Responsibility

It is the authorities’ responsibility to secure stability and no one will be able to block highways in the country, President Saakashvili said on May 19.

“There are people, who say ‘we should block ports, airports, roads, because we want the chairs’,” Saakashvili said while visiting port town of Poti. “I will do everything in order not to let anyone to ever block roads in Georgia or to block the railway and cause suffering to our people.”

“We need calmness most of all now. We do not need bloodshed,” he continued. “The country does not need political instability, nore elections once in three months – as if we were a banana republic and such things usually happen there; the country does not need coup attempts, as it happens in some African countries or an imitation of coup attempts – nobody will ever manage to stage a coup in Georgia; the country does not need constant threats that ‘we will blow up something’ and ‘we will block something’ – they hit directly the people by that and not the government, they deprive the people of their incomes by that; when televisions show things like that one may think that it is happening throughout the country and one can not understand that it is only happening on only two streets.”

“The country needs a dialogue; the country needs mutually agreed actions. But one – no matter how radical politician one might be or what kind of personal ambitions one might have – should not humiliate a citizen by paying 40 or 50 Lari for spending a night in the cage,” he said referring to the opposition’s improvised cells mushroomed on number of protest venues in Tbilisi.

Use of term “cage” to refer to mocked-up cells is regarded by the opposition as a derogative form, which the opposition says, insults protesters camped in ‘cells’. Saakashvili used the same term on May 18 when he said: “If someone wants to sell scrap there are lots of cages, which can serve as a perfect scrap metal.”

“Those people [camped in improvised cells] face financial problems,” he said on May 19. “I do not blame them, they are hungry and they have financial problems; but don’t you have any responsibility [referring to protest organizers]? First of all, we all know very well whom you are taking this money from and where you are investing this money. Feed them [protesters camped in improvised cells] and let them go and they will be grateful to you.”

“The government and I have the responsibility before each citizen. We understand people’s hardship well, we understand people’s impatience well, because people live in poverty for many years and it has already acquired a chronicle nature. But everybody should have a responsibility.”
 
“Therefore, our key responsibility is to provide stability, to simplify taxes and to continue our reconstruction in order to establish Georgia as a modern European state,” Saakashvili said.

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