TBILISI, Feb 5 (Reuters) - Georgia's prime minister said on Tuesday
he would skip President Mikheil Saakashvili's annual address to
parliament this week, snubbing a rival he eclipsed by leading an
opposition coalition to victory in an October election.
Bidzina
Ivanishvili's blunt promise to stay away from Saakashvili's speech on
Friday reflects tension between the ascendant billionaire premier and
the long-ruling president who is barred from seeking re-election in
October.
"What new he is going to say? He will probably be
telling us lies again," Ivanishvili told a news conference.
"Saakashvili's era is over. Era of lies is over in Georgia."
Saakashvili's
acceptance last year of his party going into opposition to
Ivanishvili's Georgian Dream coalition marked the country's first
peaceful transfer of power between rival parties in Georgia since the
Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
Saakashvili will address the
parliament for the last time before his term ends. It will also be his
first address to a parliament dominated by his adversaries.
Critics
of Saakashvili, who has dominated the South Caucasus republic for nine
years, say he has centralised too much power in his hands, flouted human
rights and stifled dissent.
Reports of prisoner abuses led to
protests in the country of 4.5 million just before the parliamentary
election, eventually helping Ivanishvili to win.
The new
authorities have arrested dozens of former senior officials they say
were involved in rights violations and other crimes in the country,
which serves as a conduit for Caspian Sea energy supplies to Europe.
Since
taking office, Ivanishvili, who made his fortune in Russia, has pledged
to work to improve relations with Moscow severed over a 2008 war that
left Georgia's Soviet-era overlord recognising two breakaway regions as
independent states.
But Moscow on Monday agreed to lift an
embargo on Georgian wine and salty mineral water Borjomi, which should
soon begin flowing back to Russia. (Reporting by Margarita Antidze,
editing by Gabriela Baczynska and Mark Heinrich)
http://www.trust.org/alertnet/news/georgias-new-prime-minister-says-saakashvili-era-is-over
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