Kobakhidze says ‘Saakashvili regime’ started August 2008 War on ‘orders’ from abroad

In lengthy interview given to pro-government media outlet Rustavi-2 on Thursday, Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze said that the ‘regime’ of former President Mikheil Saakashvili had started the August 2008 War, further claiming that Saakashvili was acting on ‘orders’ from abroad.

Kobakhidze clarified that his statements should not be construed as casting the blame for starting the war on the Georgian nation as a whole.

‘Just as no one can say that Georgia killed Sandro Girgvliani or Buta Robakidze, likewise no one can say that Georgia started the war. The war was started by Saakashvili’s regime — a bloody regime’, Kobakhidze said.

‘[In] exactly the same way, the Saakashvili regime is responsible for the deaths of Sandro Girgvliani, Buta Robakidze, and many others’.

Both Girgvliani and Robakidze were killed by police during Saakashvili’s tenure —  he was subsequently accused of covering up Girgvliani’s murder. In 2009, Saakashvili pardoned the four Interior Ministry employees convicted of Girgvliani’s murder.

‘When such an illegitimate, criminal regime launches large-scale military operations, that does not mean that Georgia started the war’, Kobakhidze continued.

Kobakhidze and other Georgian Dream officials have routinely blamed Saakashvili and his United National Movement (UNM) party, which ruled from 2003-2012, for starting the war.

Georgian Dream’s rhetoric against Saakashvili and the UNM related to the war has continued to ratchet up in recent months, especially after the government launched a committee to investigate the alleged crimes the UNM committed both during its tenure in power and up to the present day.

Nonetheless, Kobakhidze added a new nuance to the attacks against the UNM in his interview on Thursday, further claiming that ‘Saakashvili’s criminal regime, agents [...] that was assigned, ordered to start the war in this country’. It was unclear who Kobakhidze was saying Saakashvili’s government were agents for, nor did he specify who allegedly had given the ‘order’ to start the war.

Kobakhidze’s statements aligned with a number of other conspiracy theories espoused by Georgian Dream officials, namely that shadowy outside forces — typically referred to as either the ‘deep state’ or the ‘global war party’ — have tried to force Georgia into opening a third front to fight against Russia.

Georgian Dream officials have also claimed that the deep state and global war party caused Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Elsewhere in the interview, Kobakhidze referenced the deep state directly in connection with the August 2008 War.

Recently, Georgian Dream MP Tea Tsulukiani said that Georgian soldier Giorgi Antsukhelidze — who was captured by South Ossetian forces and tortured to death during the war — was ‘a senseless victim of someone’s PR’, referring to Saakashvili and the UNM.

When asked about Tsulukiani’s controversial statement, which had sparked outrage, Kobakhidze said in Thursday’s interview that he ‘would not call it PR. I would call it the execution of an assignment given by the Agentura, to which our heroes fell victim — among them, Giorgi Antsukhelidze’.

He went on to say that ‘the point here is not to downplay the valour of the heroes — the point is what these people died for. These people [referring to Antsukhelidze] died because the agents, the spies in Georgia, received an order to start a war — a war that was lost in two days’.

He also proposed a hypothetical situation — ‘Imagine that we are the agents, and the deep state instructs us to start a war, to launch an artillery strike on [the South Ossetian capital] Tskhinvali (Tskhinval) and [the Abkhazian capital] Sukhumi (Sukhum). Of course, within a few days, Georgia will have hundreds of heroes. And of course, neither our [reckless] venture nor our betrayal will diminish the heroism of a single one of those heroes’.

For ease of reading, we choose not to use qualifiers such as ‘de facto’, ‘unrecognised’, or ‘partially recognised’ when discussing institutions or political positions within Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and South Ossetia. This does not imply a position on their status.

Georgian Dream imposes grant restrictions on civil society and media organisations

In Georgia, many civil society and media organisations rely on foreign grants for their operations.

OC MediaMikheil Gvadzabia