In a show of solidarity with demonstrators, the minister called for talking openly about the possible adverse impact of the Georgian government’s current course on the country’s European future “before it is too late.”
“Moscow has little interest in seeking a happy ending to this story. And there is constant work being done to divide us (&) We stand together because we share a common direction and a purpose. The people of Georgia, just like people of Lithuania, believe in Europe all free and at peace, and in democracy,” Landsbergis said.
“We will never leave you alone, yet each of us has to forge our own nation into the one that cannot take [away] the future we dream of,” he said.
Some 30,000 demonstrators gathered outside the Georgian parliament, according to an AFP reporter on the scene.
“Not so long ago, we all – Georgians, Ukrainians, Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians – left the Iron Curtain behind us and realized that the doors of the EU and NATO were still quite far away. We had just taken ourselves out of the Soviet ruins. We took our history, our cultures, our languages – and we brought the conviction that we already had enough of oppression, deportation, torture, and detention. We have brought our conviction that the rules-based order with human rights at its heart was where we wanted to be,” Landsbergis is cited as saying by the Foreign Ministry.
According to the foreign minister, although we have taken a different path over the past 30 years, we all hate the label “post-Soviet.” The countries share a common history and aspirations, he said. When the 2003 Rose Revolution broke out in Georgia, the Baltic States became members of NATO and the EU in 2004, and Ukrainians started the Orange Revolution, it seemed that the formerly enslaved nations had defined themselves and their freedom once and for all.
In a democratic state, the government must follow the direction shown by the nation’s moral compass; otherwise, it deprives itself of the hope of escaping from the past, according to Landsbergis.
“The Ukrainians die every day for their right to be free Europeans. The Belarusians, who dared to dream and speak loudly about freedom, were silenced by police and KGB terror. I don’t want that to be the future of Georgia. I do not want the fundamental division between the will of the people – to ensure their security and the European future – and the government’s policy to divide this country so that there will be even more cracks in the foundations of Georgia that the Kremlin could use,” he said.