The “For Georgia” party does not support the creation of a parliamentary investigative commission regarding the Shovi tragedy and declares that this request of the opposition National Movement Party is to turn the process into a political confrontation, which will not help to establish the truth and will help the Georgian Dream of waging a hybrid information war against its own citizens. According to their own statement, if the UN does not stop its harmful policy, together with the “Dream,” it will equally share the responsibility for disrupting the process of establishing the truth surrounding the Shovi tragedy:
“We respond to the information war and discrediting campaign launched by the government against the victims of the Shovi tragedy, the purpose of which is to avoid responsibility and which proves that for the current government, people are no longer the main value, the main value for them has become the preservation of power at any cost.
The goal of our political team is to establish the truth about the Shovi tragedy, objectively assess the state’s response, identify the responsible persons and avoid similar tragedies in the future.
For this purpose, even before raising the question of creating an investigative commission, we started the pre-investigation process using parliamentary levers and addressed dozens of questions to the Prime Minister and the Minister of Internal Affairs.
As for the investigative commission, in order to establish the truth through the commission, it should be equally in everyone’s interest, which unfortunately we cannot see today. Today, the National Movement is using the creation of the commission to get another political benefit from the human tragedy, while the “Dream” is using this harmful policy of the National Movement to discredit the truth, the commission itself, and the victims, thereby avoiding any moral responsibility in the first place.
It should be noted that the National Movement raised the issue of creating the commission long before the beginning of the parliamentary sessions, without requesting an extraordinary session, when the dead had not been buried and all the missing persons had not yet been found.
We believe that at this stage, discussing the issue of creating an investigative commission means turning the process into a political confrontation, which will not serve to establish the truth, but will help the “Dream” of waging a hybrid information war against its own citizens, confronting the opposition and even the people affected by the disaster with an absurd narrative, and finally removing any responsibility.
The public today is interested in the truth, not another political farce staged by the National Movement and “Dream.” The goal of our political team is to establish the truth, and we believe that providing complete answers to the questions we ask should be in the interest of the normal government. Otherwise, the government’s culpability and the attempt to hide from responsibility will become clear, which can logically become one of the grounds for substantive discussion on the creation of the investigative commission.
At the same time, if the National Movement does not stop its harmful policy and once again appears as a lifeline for the “Dream,” as a result of which the “Dream” will manage to avoid responsibility, the National Movement together with the “Dream” will equally share the responsibility for disrupting the process of establishing the truth and drawing a lesson around the Shovi tragedy, and both forces will have to pay a political price for using the tragedy of the people for political purposes,” reads the Gakharia team’s statement.
For the record, the death toll in the landslide-ravaged Shovi resort of the Oni Municipality rose to 25.
A deadly landslide struck the resort on August 3.
According to the opposition UNM Party, after listening to the statements of the highest officials, it is easy to conclude that it is necessary to create a temporary investigative commission in the parliament on the Shovi tragedy.
