New National Security Concept

Parliament discussed and hastily adopted Georgia’s new National Security Concept which has been prepared by the Security Council and submitted to the parliament by its secretary Giga Bokeria. The document reflects the new reality the country has been facing since the war in 2008 and different analysts and experts worked on it.

During the Shevardnadze period a group of officials were working on the security concept for years, different variants were created, however the document as such was not adopted. The major reason for that was the fact that such a concept would have established a definite foreign policy for the country and President Shevardnadze was always balancing between the west and Russia.

Only after the Rose Revolution did the Georgian parliament create a security concept which clearly identified the country’s western orientation and Russia as a partner country. The National Security Concept of 2005 concluded that there was almost no threat of high scale military intervention in the country, however the 2008 August war proved different and a new concept had to be elaborated which would establish new challenges and threats. Initially, such a new concept had been planned to be adopted a couple of months after the war however it took almost three years to finalize this document.

The major feature of the security concept is the identification of Russia no longer as a partner country but as an occupier, and the priority of the process of de-occupation. Opposition representatives think that the concept has to identify all the challenges openly which create threats to the country. There are also some internal challenges as well which should be clearly recognized. The new document highlights the fact that the Russian Federation uses Abkhazia and Tskhinvali Regions to train terrorists who proliferate in Georgian territory for terrorist activities there. The document also underlines the possibility of repeated military aggression against Georgia. It says that the 2008 August aggression from the Russian side was targeted not only at occupying Georgian territories but at international recognition of the breakaway regimes, change to Georgia’s foreign policy orientation and forceful removal of the legal government of the country.

The major area for Georgia’s security policy is the presence of planning based on the total defense principle which envisages the implementation of a system of civil defense, the creation of appropriate infrastructure and the preparation for an effective system of military reserves. The document had no problems in being adopted in parliament.