ArmeniaNow Early this week the Assembly of Tbilisi Armenians addressed Georgian authorities with a demand to recognize the Armenian Genocide. They have sent official letters to the Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili, chairman of the Georgian Parliament, each parliamentarian personally, as well as leaders of a number of political parties.

A few days earlier Azeri parliamentarians of Georgia made a statement that they'd take all measures in order to prevent the parliament from considering the address of the Armenian community.

“Parliament is not the kind of structure in Georgia where a question of that kind can be considered,” said Ramin Baimarov, Azeri member of Georgian parliament, on April 13. “Armenians are raising that issue everywhere in the world. Now the Armenians of Georgia have taken up the matter, but it’s pointless. Georgia will never make such a decision, because Turkey is Georgia’s friend and strategic partner. The Turkish government has repeatedly suggested that the issue should be discussed with participation of historians and the archives should be opened. Armenian’s do not agree. My personal opinion is that that dispute has first of all to be solved by historians and then only by politicians.”

Georgian political analyst Paata Zakareishvili says that the Georgian parliament is quite unlikely to discuss the recognition of the genocide of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey.

According to him, Georgia borders with both Armenia and Turkey and is in good neighborly relations with both countries: “Georgia will most probably refrain from discussing controversial issues fraught with worsening bilateral relations as well as bringing tensions into the region in general”.

The analyst also pointed out that Armenians shouldn't take offense at Georgia for this, as “US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton publicly stated the inexpediency of discussing the issue in Congress, and Armenia did not take offense”.

Georgia, with more than 100,000 Armenians, has never discussed the Genocide issue in the parliament despite the numerous addresses of Georgia’s Armenian citizens.

In 2000, Turkish Ambassador to Georgia Burak Gursel responded with an angry letter to the editor-in-chief of Svobodnaya Gruzia (Free Georgia) newspaper (his letter was published in the same paper on August 12, 2000) for an article, titled The Bell of Grief (Issue #24), in which one of the reporters talked about the Armenian Genocide. .

“There is a tendency on the part of certain people who are trying to distort history and this time their efforts are aimed at spreading propaganda against Turkey in a friendly and brother country Georgia. We want to believe the Georgian society having historically been neighbors, living in the same geographic region and sharing the same cultural values with the Turkish people, will pay no attention to the above mentioned propaganda,” said the ambassador in his letter.

Apparently, the Turkish ambassador, in fact, deprives Georgia of the right to decide on its own where the historic truth is and where it is distorted, and puts a veto on any sympathetic reference to the Armenian Genocide.

And he works in a fertile soil in a sense that Georgia is the only country the parliament of which has never had to face the challenge of discussing the issue of the Genocide recognition.

All these factors make the chances of the Georgian parliament discussing the issue very thin.