Greetings!

I want to express my amazement and my deep pride at what all of Georgia is seeing today.

Despite the prognoses of our ill-wishers, Georgia is not some little gnome that can be stepped on and squashed.

Georgia is not a country that lacks self-respect and honour and does not have people who are capable of reaching consensus on key issues.

You are the first reservist conscripts. We are excited about the fact that students from Tbilisi and other cities are much more motivated, prepared and driven than anyone could have imagined.

As a society, we have passed a great test.

You are our primary hope - not simply because you wear uniforms or because you have learned how to shoot over these past few days, but rather because you are demonstrating that you are ready to take responsibility for protecting society, fighting for society and fighting for the country. This is lacking in many societies. They do not have such solidarity. Georgia has shown that it is capable not only of creating a professional army - we have created one and are currently making it much stronger - but also that each member of society is capable of standing with this army and performing the same function. There are other categories of people in Georgia - there is no sense trying to hide this.

You have probably seen the commercial where they say be like Bambucha and let's chill out together [reference to a soft drink commercial]. There are people who day and night behave like Bambuchas and stand around on the street chilling out and have no interest in doing anything else. And then there are people who are prepared to study and then receive training at reservist camp the next minute without sparing themselves.

There are people who, upon hearing the first growl of the opponent, stand on their back paws like a trained dog, start apologizing for God knows what and start pouring ash on their heads for the sins which our people truly have never committed in order to, according to their own logic, save themselves. All the while they do not realize that by doing this they are ruining themselves and ruining future generations.

And then there is you. It has turned out that you constitute the majority of society - the best part of society, which is ready to greet a friend in a friendly manner and put an enemy in his place, one who is ready to meet any attempt to put pressure on Georgia with three times as much preparation, much more mobilization and with a much greater sense of honour.

Some of our compatriots put their own personal ambitions above everything else in life. But we are the majority - we, who know that strength is truly in unity. The one thing that we must not show our enemies is that we are willing to turn our backs on one another.

We are representatives of a multiethnic Georgia, where Georgians, Ossetians, Azeris, Armenians and Ukrainians have lived together for centuries.

They are ready to protect their country and its future.

There is a minority of people on the one hand and there is the more numerous, united Georgian society on the other.

We Georgians have always held a hoe in one hand and a gun in the other.

We must study hard, we must become lawyers, economists, businessmen, artists, historians and philosophers. But if necessary we must all be ready to don military fatigues. Then if duty calls we will go down in history as true patriots and children of our homeland.

I want to point out once again that I am excited and thrilled with the quality of your training.

We are doubling the number of people in our training camps. Soon we will reach the goal we have set and Georgia will have 100,000 reservists.

Together with a professional army we will have a force capable of holding back aggression so that those people who seek to eat up pieces of Georgia with a knife and fork will get the first mouthful so stuck in their throats that they will lose all desire to even look in this direction.

As it is written in your oath, Georgia will be whole and strong. I want to thank you, your families and your girlfriends, who have been waiting for you for the past 18 days.

I am sure that after this short but important experience you will look on life from a different perspective.

Thank you very much, boys!

Includes BBC Monitoring material

Press Office
of the President of Georgia