"I want to thank all of you for yesterday's operative and effective actions. We had to bring Devi Chankotatdze back to Tbilisi from Brussels yesterday.

I welcome the start of PFP trainings with the same agenda that was planned. This means that everything is going on in the normal regime. This means that there are no changes in the Joint Staff.

Yesterday's fact was very concerning, but the difference between yesterday's Mukhrovani battalion and the Mukhrovani battalion of several years ago is evident.

If the mutiny was organized by active officers they were initiators. In this case the same, dismissed officers tried to initiate the mutiny from outside. There is a great difference between these two.

The other difference is that if the government started to make concessions to the mutineers hold long discussions and the President himself visited them and gave them the guarantee of personal immunity and then gave them high positions among them in the diplomatic service. Yesterday I gave them the only guarantee that if they came out in an hour this would be considered, as a facilitating condition. If they did not come out you know pretty well what could have happened.

We distributed our forces all around and this would be abolished instantly.

The third difference is that the mutineers practically weren't punished and were almost considered heroes. Today each of them will be punished according to military and civil law.

Then Georgia didn't have statehood. Today we are a stable state as we proved yesterday. No one will be able to play tricks here, no one could admit that this happened because of the social conditions. They could have acted more rapidly, but as soon as they listened to the information on TV that they were acting against law the soldiers themselves started to resist. I spoke to them yesterday. This was a right reaction and most of the officers didn't act with dignity.

Georgia is a country that has big challenges but Georgia is a state where the Rule of Law is in action.

We will abolish all destabilization, where everyone is equal before the law.

Our economy needs stability, which Georgian state provides.

Armed Forces are the most important part of our statehood.

The prestige of serving in the Army is very high.

Today you represent respected part of our society. We are increasing our work in every direction.

It is very concerning that yesterday an active diplomat, the head of the NATO department of our Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was arrested yesterday.

A high-ranking official, as it seems, was recruited by the special service of our neighboring country. All these years he caused so much damage to the security of Georgia. It is enough to say that last year during August war every two hours he gave information to the enemy about the positions of the Georgian Army so that they could find our troops and better bomb them.

This man has an image of a serious scholar. I do not know how much immoral a person should be to not only work openly against his own people, but in the conditions of war does everything in order to destroy our Army, to give the enemy an opportunity to bomb Tbilisi, because he was sending the information from here, which later was used by the enemy to identify targets. He was doing all this, he himself confesses it, for money. Like those bandits yesterday who entered the territory of the military base. By offering money they went into an agreement with some people to act against Georgian statehood. We have a long way to go before the state mentality will be established in all the institutes.

We have to realize finally that this is our country and not someone else's. This country needs minimum from us not to cause damage for it.

It needs professionalism, devotion and even sacrifice of our lives. The state can not exist without it, Georgia couldn't be saved for centuries.

The history of Georgia is full of rebels, betrayals and Georgia survived because on every traitor there came many other people who sacrificed their lives to save their country.

There should be more people like us, who love their country and we are ready to live for it and to die for it. We have proved that we can react rapidly on such facts.

Artillerists reminded them what was awaiting them if they wouldn't obey my orders.

So the result was that the soldiers came out, afterwards these criminals who came from the back doors somehow ran away. Practically they left military personnel alone for forced actions.

It is very bad that such things happen, but when such incidents happen very few countries can be finish it so fast. You probably remember negotiations with Eliava and Gakhikidze, they were caressing these people, the Minister of Security yielded himself hostage. They were expecting from us that we would leave someone as hostage and they could achieve their goals.

Nothing like this could happen here, we are a different country now, now there are different officers, our statehood is more mature now and the President of this country as well. We have proved all of this yesterday very well.

We have showed that Armed Forces are united, not any single soldier from other unit supported them. They thought that it was enough to raise a flag of rebel and others would join them.

Not any single commander thought about joining them and everyone got united to finish all of this as soon as it was possible. This means that we are in a very good shape.

I want us to continue working as usual, we have huge challenges and missions and we will respond them sufficiently", stated the President of Georgia Mikheil Saakashvili.

Press Office
of the President of Georgia