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Saakashvili says Tbilisi protests orchestrated from abroad

RIA Novosti

12:50 26/05/2011 TBILISI, May 26 (RIA Novosti) - Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili said on Thursday outside forces seeking revenge were behind protests in Tbilisi and the attempted disruption of an Independence Day parade.

"These events were an attempt to bring about a scenario written outside Georgia," Saakashvili said, addressing participants and guests at the beginning of the military parade hours after two people were killed and some 40 injured in clashes between police and opposition forces in the Georgian capital.

Foreign plotters had sought to disrupt the parade "in retaliation against the Georgian armed forces, who heroically stood up against superior numbers in 2008,” Saakashvili said referring to a war with Russia over the breakaway republic of South Ossetia in August that year. Georgia reportedly lost up to 3,000 servicemen and police in the conflict, although Tbilisi confirmed only about 70 deaths.

Riot police used water cannons, rubber bullets and teargas to disperse opposition activists who gathered overnight in front of the country’s Parliament in the city's main street where the parade was to take place, blocking the rostrum from which the president was expected to deliver a speech during the parade.

The opposition rally was sanctioned by the Tbilisi authorities to take place between May 21 and May 25, but the protesters refused to leave the streets after the deadline.

Ninety protesters have been detained over the unrest, a representative of the Georgian Interior Ministry said. Most of them have been put under two-month administrative arrests, and criminal cases have been initiated against several people, he added.

In an interview with Georgia’s Rustavi-2 TV channel, U.S. Ambassador John Bass expressed his indignation over the excessive use of force by police and security forces against protesters and called on the Georgian authorities to carry out a thorough investigation. He acknowledged, however, that those who were interested in the rally turning violent were among the protesters.

Saakashvili was elected president in a landslide in 2004 after the Rose Revolution, but his popularity has waned since a series of corruption scandals in 2007 and the war over South Ossetia, which along with another breakaway Georgian republic, Abkhazia, has now been recognized by Moscow as independent.