Appathurai’s Visit: ‘More NATO in Georgia’ and ‘Polarized Elections’ on Agenda
By Gvantsa Gabekhadze
Thursday, December 13
NATO Secretary General's Special Representative for the Caucasus and Central Asia James Appathurai arrived in Georgia yesterday and told Georgian top figures that “more NATO to Georgia and more Georgia to NATO” will be ensured from the next year.
He also stated that many high-level visits from Brussels will take place to Georgia in 2019.
Speaking about the Georgian presidential elections Appathurai mentioned the word “polarized” and told the media that the Georgian PM also shared his view.
“I had an excellent meeting with the PM. We talked about a wide range of issues. First of all, we discussed the sustainable reforms of Georgia and the sustainable progress towards the North Atlantic Alliance.
“The Prime Minister said that the government's firm intention is to carry out the will of the Georgian people, which implies the country's Euro-Atlantic future. I have, of course, underlined our commitment to provide full support in the process of achieving all these goals. We discussed specific ways for achieving this and touched upon more security in the Black Sea basin, more support for reforms in Georgia - which is already being done,” Appathurai said.
He said that he congratulated the PM on holding the elections, but expressed some concerns about the polarization of political dialogue.
“The Prime Minister realizes this and says that the Georgian people want a quiet and less polarized discussion in the future. In NATO, we want an inclusive political process. The Prime Minister says that the Georgian people want it too. So his words were very promising. We both want more NATO in Georgia and more Georgia in NATO next year," Appathurai said.
The same day Appathurai met with Georgian president-elect Salome Zurabishvili.
"Our talks touched upon the Georgia-NATO cooperation, as well as NATO's constant support for all the issues that are the main challenges of our country, territorial integrity, conflicts, occupation line and security of our population. We also talked about Black Sea security, which is a very important problem for Europe and NATO today.
We agreed on that there are a lot of common concerns about security, including cybersecurity and spread of false information, which is largely used by Russia. We also spoke about Georgia’s participation in peacekeeping operations,” Zurabishvili said.
