On June 18, People’s Power, an offshoot of the ruling Georgian Dream party, issued yet a lengthy statement, criticizing yesterday’s U.S. Congressional hearing on Georgia and claiming that NATO’s Article 5 does not guarantee military assistance to Allies in the event of an attack, and that the Georgian-language translation of this Article 5 of the Washington Treaty is “deliberately falsified,” leaving out the part that gives individual members of the Alliance the agency to decide “whether or not to use military assistance as they deem necessary.”
“In the Georgian version, it is presented in such a way that in case of an attack on a NATO member country, all countries are obliged to engage in military confrontation and protect the ally from military aggression,” the statement said, accusing the “Global War Party” of misleading the Georgian people for years.
The statement says that “until now, the Georgian society was constantly deceived that we should do everything to join NATO and that this is the only salvation for our country” and goes to state that “for dozens of years we have been hearing false promises that we have to do more, more work is needed, and so on.”
It then says: “As for the fifth article directly, the question of whether NATO is Membership one hundred percent security guarantee, the direct directly answer is no.”
According to the People Power, its version of the Georgian translation of the Article 5 reads as follows: “An attack on the Alliance is considered an attack on all NATO member states. And these other states have the right to help the object of aggression in the way and in the form they deem necessary, and to use their armed forces only if they deem it necessary”.
The statement also claims that the same “Global War Party” has been using the NATO and EU issues to manipulate Georgians. “And since they managed more or less successfully to make the public believe that our salvation lies only in joining these unions, they more or less successfully use this instrument, against the government, to manipulate people.”
In the statement, the People’s Power also attacks Ivane Chkhikvadze, EU Integration Program Manager at the Civil Society Foundation and Georgia Country Consultant at the European Endowment for Democracy and Natalie Sabanadze, Senior Fellow at Chatham House and former Georgian Ambassador to the EU for testifying before the United States Congress on supporting Georgia’s sovereignty and democracy, amid the Foreign Agents Law controversy. The statement calls those individuals “Georgians with no homeland.”
The People’s Power also lashes out at William Courtney, Adjunct Senior Fellow at the RAND Corporation and former U.S. Ambassador to Georgia, who testified before the Congress yesterday, accusing him of “threatening us with a revolution and with our country’s entanglement in the flames of war.”
Tornike Parulava, Director of the Department for Security Policy and Euro-Atlantic Integration at the MFA, reacted to the People’s Power statement on Facebook, saying that “the disinformation narrative presented is quite old” and has been repeated many times over the years. He drew parallels between the People’s Power statement and Russian propaganda about NATO’s Article 5.
In the same Facebook post, he also provided an “unofficial” but, in his opinion, correct translation of Article 5 into Georgian, adding that “in general, it seems that learning foreign language remains a challenge among us.”
The Information Center on NATO and EU – the Legal Entity of Public Law (LEPL) under the Foreign Ministry – declined to comment on the People’s Power statement when Civil.ge’s contacted it and referred us to the Foreign Ministry for comment. The Information Center was established in 2005 to raise awareness about the EU and NATO and the process of Georgia’s integration in these organizations, as well as to counter the anti-Western propaganda and narratives in the country.
Civil.ge approached MFA for an official comment but it has not responded at the time of publication.
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