Parliament Speaker Accuses International Organizations of Supporting “Fake organizations and Schemes”
Speaker of the Georgian Parliament Shalva Papuashvili attacked today the opposition parties and international organizations that support their development and called for audit services to “take interest” in the matter.
In conversation with the journalists today, he said that “foreign money is being invested in Georgian politics through fake organizations and schemes. Recently, such schemes were revealed in the case of “Girchi”, “Droa”, “European Georgia” and other parties. It is important for the audit service to take an interest in this issue”.
He also said “it is important that for these organizations to publish their funding, including the donors who fund these organizations, even the IRI, to publish the amount of money it funds with these so-called CSOs.” He added: “This CSO is actually a continuation of the “Girchi” party, with what money and for what purposes it is financed, why the money paid by the IRI is used to get young people used to weapons and to introduce them to revolutionary scenarios”.
The spokesman was referring to the footage prepared by the pro-government Imedi TV Channel about the recent youth camp in Surami organized by the Institute for Individual Liberty- think-tank affiliated with Girchi-More Freedom party. The event was co-funded by the IRI as part of its support program for various political parties, and which the ruling party claims is being used to prepare for revolution in the country.
The leader of Girchi-More Freedom, Zurab Japaridze, said that the youth camps are providing education on political ideologies, the economy, the legal system, the different types of state arrangements and similar issues, and denied that any preparation for revolution or training for violence was taking place at the meetings with young people. The leader of Girchi-More Freedom said that his party, which has long advocated the liberalization of arms legislation in Georgia, had invited trained specialists to some of the previous meetings to talk about the safety and use of weapons, but denied that this had anything to do with inciting violence or that it happened in the above-mentioned formats. He also said the aim of this attack is to achieve what GD aimed to achieve through the “foreign agents’ law” adoption: to stop the western funding from helping political party building in Georgia, something the Western partners have been doing for years.
Notably, in his today’s comments Papuashvili recalled the “foreign agents” law, saying: “This is what we meant when we talked about the importance of transparency in foreign funding. Then you know that, unfortunately, it has been misrepresented to the public. In fact, we see that there may have been other interests to cover the money that is going into Georgia”.
He then explicitly mentioned the IRI again, saying: “I have repeatedly argued with our partners that their taxpayers’ money is being used to promote the idea of violence in Georgia and to encourage violence. Now it turns out that the IRI is directly funding exactly this kind of event, which is designed to familiarize young people with weapons so that they will not hesitate to get hold of them when the time comes”.
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