Serbian citizen Siniša Šikman calls charges against him and Canvas “ridiculous”

Siniša Šikman, a citizen of Serbia, who was questioned by the State Security Service of Georgia regarding the activities of Canvas Georgia, calls the agency's accusations ridiculous.

As Siniša Šikman says in an interview with the journalist of the Serbian Service of Voice of America, he "is not afraid of the accusations of the State Security Service, because these accusations are false."

According to him, the video released by the agency was "poorly edited and pulled out of context".

In the interview, Siniša Šikman also explains the purpose of his visit to Georgia and the content of the trainings.

"The goal of the training was not to change the regime, as is often portrayed not only in the Georgian media, but throughout the world. Our main goal is to teach non-violent struggle based on specific examples. I saw what the Secret Service agents said and how they took specific examples out of context. Of course, some examples are quite crude, but this was my personal challenge with Milošević, so I used some examples from my personal experience”, said Siniša Šikman.

According to him, "they are not really trying to damage the political system.

"One of the worst things I hear from this accusation is that we are trying to do some kind of violence in Georgia. This is completely ridiculous. Anyone who knows how we operated under Milošević and how we defeated him through elections, how consistently non-violent our approach was, will never understand this message as if we were trying to do something violent in Georgia. It is absolutely ridiculous to accuse Canvas of being the ones who commit any type of violent act. This is completely incomprehensible to me", Siniša Šikman says in an interview.

“Whatever the charges are, I am not concerned because these are lies,” Šikman said, adding that the video materials “are pulled out of context and edited in a poor manner, and I can prove that.”

“I'm in Belgrade right now and the only thing I'm worried about is the civil society in Georgia, that's my main concern. It seems that they [Georgian government] are trying to intimidate civil activists and I think about the people who are active there because I have seen many countries that are going the wrong way. I hope Georgia will not choose this path", says Siniša Šikman.

For information, the State Security Service released information about the investigative action conducted against the organization Canvas and made public "part of the evidence".

According to SSG, on September 25, 2023, at the invitation of the East-West Management Institute of the USAID program, Serbian citizens Sinisa Sikman, Jelena Stoisic and Slobodan Jinovic arrived in Georgia. According to SSG, these persons are connected with the revolutionary events in Georgia in 2003, and in different years also had connections with similar process in Serbia, Ukraine and other states.

According to SSG, they were actively teaching methods of creating protest drives and tactics of conducting violent actions. As SSG says, they represent the management link of the Canvas organization, and also Sinisa Sikman and Slobodan Jinovic are former members of the Otpor organization, which was an analogue of the Georgian organization Kmara in Serbia.

According to the SSG, the declared reason for the arrival of the mentioned persons in Georgia was to conduct trainings for groups working in the field of culture in matters of "strategic non-violent fight", but the investigation established that this was not the only purpose of their arrival in Georgia. In particular, the real purpose of the visit was to establish communication and conduct trainings with those young people and influential non-governmental organizations, which should become the core of destructive and illegal actions planned in Georgia in October-December of this year.