By recognizing 19th century mass killings of the Circassians as genocide, Georgia aimed at “antagonizing Russia”, MP Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the international affairs committee in Russia’s lower house of parliament, State Duma, said.
“I regret that the politicians in Georgia failed to withstand a temptation to materialize their own nationalistic complexes at the expense of other nations,” Kosachev told Interfax Russian news agency on May 20.
The Georgian lawmakers do not at all care about “really tragic fate of the Circassian people,” he said.
“By doing so they were pursuing their political goals aimed at maximally antagonizing Russia and portraying it [Russia] as a source of all the troubles of the Georgian and other peoples, who were residing in the Russian Empire and later in the Soviet Union,” Kosachev said.
The Georgian Parliament voted to recognize the 19th-century killings and deportations of ethnic Circassians by czarist Russia as genocide. The statement passed on a vote of 95 to 0. Only one lawmaker spoke against it in debate, arguing that the resolution risked offending Georgia’s ethnic Armenians, who have never won Georgia’s support for the recognition of Genocide against Armenians under the Ottoman Empire.
