Shalva Papuashvili on Salome Zurabishvili: She could never truly become Georgian; She took a Georgian passport, she has Georgian blood in her veins, but she does not have a Georgian mind, soul, or character - She has no connection to what it truly means to be a child of this country
“You know that Ms. Salome was a citizen of a foreign country, born and raised there, and it seems she could never truly become Georgian.
She took a Georgian passport, she has Georgian blood in her veins, but she does not have a Georgian mind, a Georgian soul, or a Georgian character. She lacks the connection to what it means to be Georgian — to be a child of this country and to care for its independence,” – said the Speaker of the Parliament, Shalva Papuashvili.
He made this statement in response to the initiative of Georgia’s 5th President, Salome Zurabishvili, who suggested that the upcoming elections should be conducted by an international administration.
According to Papuashvili, Zurabishvili now wants to throw the country’s independence into the water.
“What she [Zurabishvili] is saying is a disgrace. When a former president, on the 34th anniversary of Georgia’s independence, says that we should become an ordinary vassal state—or an unformed, non-existent entity whose elections are held by others, whose judges are appointed by outsiders—that is shameful.
But this isn’t new. This is something they had been slowly sneaking in, when they were telling us that their funded organizations should be the ones to decide who appoints judges and the Central Election Commission.
What Ms. Salome has done is reveal what others have been planning for Georgia all along—that we should be governed from the outside, as if we were still in some primitive communal system and incapable of managing our own country. That is a disgrace.
To belittle our nation to this extent—our nation, which had created a European-style republic earlier than many EU member states (I’m referring to the 1918–1921 Democratic Republic)—and now to suggest that some foreign country should come here and run our elections?
Some candidate countries have been taken to that level by Brussels, but if this is the intention toward us, then why did we even want independence?
We broke away from the Soviet Union to stand on our own, and now Ms. Salome wants to throw all of that away—everything our independence stands for," – stated Shalva Papuashvili.
