Russia's UN Delegation Walks Out During Saakashvili's 'Crazy' Speech
Saakashvili addressing the 68th United Nations General Assembly in New York on Wednesday.
Outgoing Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili assailed Russia as "the last authoritarian empire in the world" during a speech to the UN General Assembly, and predicted that President Vladimir Putin would disappear from Russian politics, prompting the Russian delegation to walk out in protest.
Russia's ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Churkin, decried Saakashvili's remarks as "crazy fabrications" and even "anti-Christian," and said the Georgian leader needed psychological help.
Saakashvili, whose second and final term ends next month, warned that the Kremlin was using "constant pressures and threats" to establish a new Russian empire through the proposed Eurasian Union, a political and economic bloc of former Soviet republics.
"It makes me sick when KGB agent Vladimir Putin lectures the World about freedom values and democracy. This is least of the things he can do to the world being a dictatorial leader of one of the last empires left," Saakashvili said. "But this new project [the Eurasian Union] is much more dangerous than his lectures.
"The Eurasian Union has been shaped as an alternative to the European Union and unveiled by Vladimir Putin as the main project of his new presidency," he said in his 30-minute address.
Putin first floated the idea of the Eurasian Union in October 2011, saying it would build upon the "best values of the Soviet Union," and Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan subsequently signed an agreement to establish the grouping by 2015. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have expressed interest in joining, and in a victory for the Kremlin, Armenia's president agreed to sign up after holding talks with Putin in Moscow earlier this month.
But Saakashvili, who has waged a battle of words with Russia for much of his nine years in office, said the Kremlin was playing dirty by strong-arming countries intent on joining the European Union into enlisting with the Eurasian Union instead.
"As I speak, the Eastern European countries aspiring to join the European family of free and democratic nations are facing constant pressures and threats," he said, according to a transcript of the speech on his official website.
"Armenia has been cornered and forced to sign a customs union which is not in this nation's interest or in the interest of our region. Moldova is being blockaded, Ukraine is under attack, Azerbaijan faces extraordinary pressure, and Georgia is occupied. Why? Because an old empire is trying to reclaim its bygone borders," he said.
Churkin, pictured in a file photo, said that Saakashvili's "mental state needs a professional evaluation." (un.org)
Saakashvili predicted, however, that the Eurasian Union would fail and Russia would become a "normal nation state" once Putin left office.
"A few years from now, Vladimir Putin will have left the Kremlin and vanished from the Russian politics, even if he says that he will be [around] for another 20 years," he said. "Russian citizens will remember him as a ghost from the old times, the times of the empire, the times of corruption and oppression.
"Nobody knows whether this process will be calm or violent, whether his successor will be nationalistic or liberal, or both together. But what matters is something else: Russian will no longer be an empire; it will become finally a normal nation state."
Also in the speech, Saakashvili accused Russia of destabilizing neighboring countries, including Georgia by supporting its breakaway republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and lashed out at the Russian Orthodox Church, whose clout has grown under Putin.
"When we hear the fake music of the Orthodox brotherhood sung by Russian imperialists, can't we hear the true voice of the Patriarch Kirion, who was assassinated, or the eternal voice of the Patriarch Ambrosi Khelaya, who was tortured for days and weeks only because he appealed to the Geneva Conference against the invasion of his country? And he told his Russian interrogators: "You can have my body, my flesh, but you will never have my soul,'" Saakashvili said.
"Are we so deaf as not to hear the voices of the killed bishops and priests? Are we so uneducated that we do not recall who has repainted our churches and erased our sacred frescos? Are we so blind today not to see the destruction of our churches in the occupied territories?"
The Russian delegation listened to the first 20 minutes of the speech before walking out, according to Georgian news reports.
A Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman confirmed the demarche. "As a token of disagreement with the assessments voiced by Mr. Saakashvili from the General Assembly rostrum, Russian representatives walked out of the hall," spokesman Alexander Lukashevich told reporters.
Churkin, Russia's ambassador, was blunt in his assessment of the speech, the longest of the nine addresses that Saakashvili has delivered at the UN every year since being elected in 2004.
"This time it wasn't even a speech but a set of crazy fabrications that are in nature not just anti-Russian, but also Russophobic and anti-Christian," Churkin said in a statement. "Luckily for the Georgian people, this man — whose mental state needs a professional evaluation — is in the twilight of his political career."
The Russians were the second delegation to walk out at the UN General Assembly this week. The Israeli delegation left during a speech by new Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on Tuesday in what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called a protest against Rouhani's refusal last week to recognize the Holocaust as a historical fact. Curiously, Rouhani publicly acknowledged the Holocaust as a historical fact during an interview with CNN later Tuesday.
A video of Saakashvili delivering his 30-minute speech to the United Nations General Assembly.
| Reply via web post | Reply to sender | Reply to group | Start a New Topic | Messages in this topic (1) |
to Subscribe via email :
batavia-news-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
----------------------------------------
VISIT Batavia News Blog
http://batavia-news-networks.blogspot.com/
----------------------------
You could be Earning Instant Cash Deposits
in the Next 30 Minutes
No harm to try - Please Click
http://tinyurl.com/bimagroup
--------------
No comments:
Post a Comment