Former Georgian prime minister Bidzina Ivanishvili has accused the country’s United National Movement (UNM) party founded by ex-president Mikhail Saakashvili of inciting the 2008 war in South Ossetia.
The country will find the strength to apologize to the Ossetians for the “bloody conflict” and strive to restore trust and unity between the two brotherly nations, he added.
The US-educated Saakashvili formed the pro-Western UNM party in 2001 and served as president of Georgia from 2004 to 2013. In August 2008, he ordered troops into the breakaway region of Ossetia, shelling a Russian peacekeeper base used by Moscow’s troops since the first conflict on the territory in 1990.
Moscow responded with a “peace enforcement” operation, defeating Georgian forces and recognizing the independence of South Ossetia and another breakaway region, Abkhazia, as a result.
Saakashvili was voted out of office in 2013 and eventually pursued a political career in post-Maidan Ukraine, becoming governor of Odessa. He is now serving a six-year prison sentence on charges related to abuse of power, among other offenses.
Speaking at an election campaign event in the city of Gori on Saturday, Ivanishvili, who leads the ruling Georgian Dream party, claimed that a 12-year investigation concluded the 2008 conflict was “provoked by Saakashvili’s criminal regime” with “outside” assistance, and was aimed at disrupting national unity and dividing the two brotherly nations.
Numerous pieces of evidence compiled by the Georgian government have implicated the National Movement party in starting the war and committing “the worst crime,” he added.
“We were well aware that all this was a well-planned provocation from the outside against the Georgian and Ossetian people, the purpose of which was to split our unity, destroy relations, and make us exist in conditions of endless, artificial confrontation,” Ivanishvili said.
He stressed the importance of recognizing past mistakes and restoring territorial integrity, as well as “the centuries-old brotherhood and friendship between Georgians and Ossetians.”
