“Giorgi Baramidze will appear before the justice system and will be held accountable for what he has done. He has every right to defend himself in court and prove his innocence,” Tengiz Sharmanashvili, a member of the parliamentary majority, said.

According to him, Giorgi Baramidze’s statement posed a threat.

“I would like to draw your attention to the Prosecutor’s Office statement. The prosecutor said that no evidence of executions had been established - that is the key point. The investigation gathered the relevant materials, and no such fact was established.

The main danger posed by Baramidze’s statement was that he said executions had taken place. In his initial statement, he said that our army had carried them out. He later said, no, it was not the army, but civilians who had carried them out arbitrarily. In either case, this statement was extremely dangerous because it could have led to such accusations being made against Georgia - that war crimes had been committed on a mass scale and that a former defense and interior minister was admitting to them.

Now, the so-called opposition representatives are banging their heads against the wall. They should have thought about this when their representative was making a statement that was highly damaging to Georgia, and when some opposition representatives were saying that the issue of our territorial integrity supposedly obstructs European integration and that we needed to get rid of this problem.

He will appear before the justice system and will be held accountable for what he has done. Before the court, he has every right to defend himself and prove his innocence during the trial.

It is absolutely disgraceful for those men who shed blood for Georgia’s territorial integrity and our national interests to be labeled as dishonorable people by these dishonorable individuals. It is unimaginable that people who have never lifted a finger for Georgia’s territorial integrity should turn against those who shed their blood...

We cannot speak on behalf of those who are no longer with us, who shed their blood and are not by our side. But the people making these statements are among those who shed blood - they simply survived by the grace of God. These are not people who fired two bullets, then returned to Tbilisi and started calling themselves veterans.

These are veterans who fought in Abkhazia and around Tskhinvali from the very first moment to the very last, defending Georgia’s interests and its territorial integrity,” Sharmanashvili said.

For reference, United National Movement leader Giorgi Baramidze was detained on charges of treason against the homeland, specifically sabotage. The case concerns statements Baramidze made about the war in Abkhazia, namely that “at the initial stage of the 1992-1993 armed conflict in Abkhazia, members of the Georgian armed forces did not take prisoners and instead shot them on the spot.”

According to the Prosecutor’s Office, his statement damaged the reputation of Georgia’s Defense Forces and undermined the honor and dignity of veterans who participated in the Abkhazia war, as well as fallen military service members.

At the same time, the Prosecutor’s Office says Baramidze’s actions threatened the process of reconciliation and confidence-building with populations affected by the conflict, damaged Georgia’s peacebuilding and de-occupation policy, and obstructed the normal functioning of state institutions, including the activities of the Office of the State Minister for Reconciliation and Civic Equality and the effective operation of mechanisms established by the office to promote confidence-building and cooperation.

The charge carries a sentence of up to four years in prison.