Bakradze Comments on Detention of Georgian Teens

Georgian Parliamentary Chairman Davit Bakradze said on November 6 that “kidnapping” of Georgians in the Tskhinvali region is “at least agreed with [Russian] servicemen stationed there.”

“We have all grounds to suppose that it is coming from Russia and Russia’s attempt to create a pretext for another aggressive action stands behind it,” Bakradze said at the parliament’s session. “Therefore, we should not give them such pretext and we should act very vigorously… We should not allow Russia to use such incidents as a pretext and precondition for its own aggressive intentions.”

Bakradze made these remarks while commenting on the detention of four Georgian teenagers by the South Ossetian side on November 4. All of them still remain held in the breakaway region.  Recently Tskhinvali released 21 Georgians detained by Russian border guards for “violation of South Ossetian border.”

MP Akaki Minashvili of the ruling party, who chairs parliamentary committee for foreign affairs, said at the session that these recent facts confirm that “the EU Monitoring Mission is not so effective as to avert provocations on this territory.”

“We should convince our partners to increase the functions of this mission in a short-term perspective as well as to transform it into a peacekeeping police force in a long-term perspective. It requires very serious political pressure, first of all on Russian Federation,” Minashvili said.

These remarks followed after MP Nika Laliashvili of Christian-Democratic Movement, a leading party in the parliamentary minority, accused the Georgian authorities of “weakness” to protect its own citizens and demanded to raise the issue of “kidnappings” in frames of the National Security Council.

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