Translated material
Strike at the colonels
Serious changes await the Georgian army
On January 26, NATO headquarters in Brussels will host the first negotiations this year with Georgia, the delegation of which will be headed by Deputy State Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration Elena Khoshtaria. The State Minister's Office told Vremya Novostey that a few days after this, a delegation of the North Atlantic Alliance will visit Tbilisi with its ideas, after which a cooperation plan for the current year 2010 will be approved. After Georgia, as well as Ukraine, did not receive a “Membership Action Plan” in the alliance in 2008, Brussels approves annual programs for Tbilisi and Kyiv. They describe in detail what needs to be done for better integration into NATO.Georgia recently sent its proposals for this year to Brussels. In addition to military reforms, they speak of readiness for democratic changes. For example, Georgia promises to hold high-level local elections in May, during which the mayor of Tbilisi will be directly elected for the first time. The current mayor, Georgiy Ugulava, who will run again for the ruling United National Movement, recently told Russian media that if Russia begins to withdraw troops from Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Georgia may abandon its course towards NATO. But after the remarks were published, the mayor's aides said journalists had misinterpreted his words.
Georgians are now radically reconsidering the situation in the military sphere, starting with the basics of education. Starting from the new school year, military-patriotic education will be introduced in schools. Or rather, it is returning - according to the type of the “Basic Military Training” subject that existed in the USSR. The initiator was Supreme Commander-in-Chief President Mikheil Saakashvili. At a meeting with teachers in the city of Batumi, he stated that “not only soldiers should defend their homeland, everyone should be included in this matter.” High school students will be taught how to use weapons. An important place will be occupied by the study of the military history of Georgia.
No less serious will be the changes among the military personnel. As our newspaper has already reported, in December, 180 colonels and vice-colonels (the equivalent of a lieutenant colonel) were dismissed from the ranks of almost 30,000 armed forces at once under the pretext that they had not passed physical training standards. Many of those dismissed declared that the command considered them politically unreliable. But the Ministry of Defense told VN about “planned certification and optimization.” VN sources close to the military department say that cuts will continue. For example, the Department of Defense and the Joint Staff each have approximately 700 military and civilian employees, and the cuts will affect at least a third of them. The released personnel will be transferred to the troops to strengthen the segment of junior command personnel.
Apparently, the authorities learned such lessons from the conflict around South Ossetia in August 2008. However, Georgian military expert Irakli Sesiashvili called such “mechanical rearrangements” “erroneous” in an interview with VN: “You shouldn’t so abruptly remove experienced military senior officers from the army.” According to him, “the Minister of Defense simply does not understand the language of the military.” According to the leading Tbilisi newspapers “All News”, “Resonance” and “Alia”, in the near future, after the completion of “optimization”, we can expect the resignation of the current Minister of Defense, 29-year-old Bachana Akhalaia, who has held this post since August 2009. In 2005-2007, Akhalaia headed the Department of the Ministry of Justice for the Execution of Punishments and, before transferring to the Ministry of Defense (first as Deputy Minister), gained the image of an overly tough and even odious leader. His appointment as Minister of Defense was negatively assessed by the Georgian opposition, as well as, according to local media, by Georgia’s Western partners, including NATO. Newspapers write that under pressure from outside, Mikheil Saakashvili will either transfer Akhalaia to the Security Council or send her abroad to study.