Speaker Papuashvili to young Georgians: peace is responsibility, not weakness

Georgia's Parliament Speaker Shalva Papuashvili has urged young Georgians to preserve peace and work towards reconciliation with Abkhazians and Ossetians, saying the country's most valuable legacy to future generations should be a peaceful, united and free Georgia.

Speaking at an event titled Youth for Peace, Papuashvili said his generation had experienced civil conflict, wars, displacement and the occupation of Georgian territories since the restoration of independence.

“For our generation, peace is not an abstract word,” Papuashvili said. “Peace is a way of life - a commitment to finding acceptable ways of living together and coexisting, without violence and confrontation.”

He said a new generation was emerging that had not personally experienced the reality of Georgia's first two decades after independence.

“We are working precisely for this - so that the new generation does not have the experience of war,” he said.

Papuashvili added, however, that young people should inherit not only the experience of peace but also the ability to preserve it.

“Peace requires responsibility, knowledge and ability,” he said, listing the ability not to act on emotion during difficult moments, not to turn disagreement into hostility and not to put the country at risk for someone else's interests.

He also said that maintaining peace could require greater strength than confrontation.

“Peace is not inaction and, even more so, it is not weakness,” Papuashvili said. “Sometimes peace requires more strength than confrontation.”

Addressing Georgia's territorial conflicts, the Parliament Speaker said the country's territorial integrity remained disrupted and its “historic regions” were occupied.

He said decades of mistrust, pain and estrangement had accumulated between people living on different sides of the occupation lines.

“We are still in a state of war in this sense. But we cannot overcome war with war,” Papuashvili said.

He argued that Georgia's goal should go beyond restoring territorial integrity and returning internally displaced people to their homes, saying reconciliation between Georgians, Abkhazians and Ossetians would also require rebuilding relationships between people.

“True reconciliation will begin when people can once again see each other as people who shared a common past and may have a common future,” he said.

Papuashvili told young people that they were not obliged to inherit the hostility of previous generations.

“You should know the past, but you should not become its prisoners,” he said. “You should remember injustice, but that memory should not lead you towards new injustice.”

He also said that patriotism did not require hatred of others.

“You should love your country in such a way that defending its interests does not require hatred of someone else,” Papuashvili said.

Parliament's First Deputy Speaker Giorgi Volski, who chairs the Temporary Commission on Restoration of Territorial Integrity and Issues of De-occupation, also addressed the event.

The event was attended by members of parliament, representatives of the executive branch, diplomatic missions and international organisations accredited in Georgia, as well as young people.