Exiled Okruashvili slams Georgian Party members for 'betrayal'

Despite living in exile, former Defense minister and one of the leaders of opposition Georgian party, Irakli Okruashvili is still involved on the political stage, however he has now chosen to speak out against his party members. In his July 22nd interview with Maestro TV, Okruashvili named former ally, Levan Gachechiladze as his greatest traitor.

“There was a concrete plan for my arrival in Georgia and the plan did not include just my one-hour speech at the rally. We had a concrete plan about how to carry out an attack against the government. We had been devising the plan for months. However, the plan was handed over to the government. There were several betrayers, and the largest among them was Levan Gachechiladze. He betrayed us for the sake of his personal prosperity’, Okruashvili said and added that, “I will never say again I will arrive in Georgia, I will only say I am in Georgia’, Okruashvili said in his interview.

However, Gachechiladze was not the only person who Okruashvili mentioned in his interview. In the same interview he criticized ex-parliamentary speaker Nino Burjanadze, who led the street protests in May, which came to a violent end after riot police intervened. Okruashvili said of Burjanadze: “I’ve never held her in high regard; she has never had even 0.1 grams of brain. My mistake was that I hoped her husband’s pragmatism would prevail and we would achieve a consensus regarding May 25. You can ask Erosi Kitsmarishvili and Sozar Subari (leaders of the Georgian party together with Gachechiladze) how we tried to achieve unity," Okruashvili said.

According to him, ‘if Burjanadze had everything organized to finish the government on May 25, why did she need my arrival in Georgia. If she ended up in a fiasco because of my non-arrival, she is not a politician.”

Despite such criticism towards his party members and those forces, which are mainly talking about the replacement of the authorities through revolution, Okruashvili still backed the revolution idea, “the party is the regime of a renewal of forces. We are not going to stop and we will announce our plans to the society before the end of September.”

Koka Guntsadze, former representative of Georgian party claimed that there was no point in saying that Irakli Okruashvili was betrayed and that he was only interested in his own political gains.

"If he wished to arrive with the army, he would do it without talks. The only thing he could do what would be to arrive and to surrender to police. No talks are necessary; one should act or not act and be silent. He became worse than Igor Giorgadze (former Georgian official, in political asylum in Russia) is, "- Guntsadze said and labeled Ojruashvili’s statements as fairy tales, “to come here, one should be a man, such a man as Okruashvili would not come to Georgia. Statements that Gachechiladze or Burjanadze created obstacles for his coming back is a lie and nothing more.”

Okruashvili, has also been the subject of criticism from much of the Georgian opposition as well as political analysts. A significant number of Georgian experts consider Okruashvili as a regressive force and take his statements as provocative.