Georgia has finally decided to leave the CIS. Georgia is going to make an official announcement concerning this very soon. In his speecch at the school named after Zurab Jvania in the city of Kutasi, Mikhail Saakashvili announced that Georgia doesn’t need the CIS any more.
During his speech he criticized Russia, blamed it for terrorist plans it has up its sleeve, spoke about the mystical SMS writing “welcome to Russia” that he received when flying over the Georgian and Osyan conflict zone, said that it was pressure and concluded his speech with the following sentence, “There must be no “peace” of Russia in Georgia”. After that we learned about Saakashvili’s order to the Georgian government to discuss the economical benefits of Georgia from CIS.
The minister of economical development and reforms, Kakha Bendukidze, is probably the only member of the government who advises not to leave the CIS. “This issue should be discussed in detail. This is a very concrete issue and being part of the CIS gives privileges for Georgian economy and citizens”, said Bendukidze to journalists. He said that if Georgia leaves the CIS, Georgian citizens will have serious problems with entrance visas and other documents. “Today Georgian citizens can enter any CIS country without getting entrance visas, and upon leaving this institution we will have to make mutual contracts for providing entrance visas”, said Bendukidze. He also added that if Georgia was able to make mutual contracts with all CIS countries later, the capacity of economical losses would not be much.
In spite of this, his ideas can hardly play a serious role on the way out of the CIS. The opposition also wants to leave this institution. In regard to this, the head of “Democratic party”, Levan Berdzenishvili, announced on TV that, “The CIS doesn’t bring any benefits to Georgia. It wasn’t right to become a member of this institution; it prevented our growth and didn’t support the solutions to territorial problems. The former authorities hoped they could, but they failed”.
Other Georgian politicians agree with him. “If we have made a final decision to be integrated with NATO and Europe, we should go out of the CIS now, because it will take us much time to void the contract”, they say.
Even though this problem is still in the center of attention and the authorities are waiting for the conclusions of the government, anyway, it can hardly change anything. We understood this during the “General imaginations about general positive relations” conference in Vilnius, where Mikhail Saakashvili criticized their Northern neighbor so much that everyone was sure that their ways would not cross in the future, at least in this period. The announcements of the Ukrainian president Vladimir Youschenko prove that Ukraine wants to leave this institution too. As for Moscow, it announced that it were ready to revise all the privileges (social and economical) that it had given to the citizens of the mentioned countries.
According to Georgian politician Ramaz Sakvarelidze, if Georgia really takes certain steps to leave the CIS, Russia may stop its economical relations with Georgia overall. We may assume this too if we pay attention to the fact that Moscow has already applied embargo on Georgian wine and water products. In parallel to this, the Russian police (currently only in Moscow) have started “Vulcan” operation activities, which means that they stop Georgian citizens and check up all their activities and documentations. Famous Georgian singer Irakli Pirtskhavala and politician Jemal Gogitadze have been stopped and checked up on. According to some predictions, Georgian citizens living in radius of a half million kilometers from Moscow may leave Russia in the future.