TBILISI, March 17 (RIA Novosti) - The Georgian parliament did not receive an official denial of accreditation from Belarusian election authorities barring its members from participating in the OSCE mission to monitor the March 19 presidential elections, the vice speaker said Friday.
"We submitted all the documents on time and all the lists were made," Mikhail Machavariani said. "That is why they [the parliamentarians] went to Belarus."
A group of Georgian parliamentarians, who arrived in the Belarusian capital of Minsk Thursday as members of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) mission, were not allowed to leave the airport. Belarusian border authorities said, "Their presence on Belarusian territory is undesirable."
Machavariani said that another member of parliament, Georgy Bokeria, had been denied accreditation as an observer from the CIS, a loose union of ex-Soviet republics, and therefore did not go to Belarus.
The Novosti-Georgia agency quoted Kakha Getsadze, a member of the delegation, as saying that the parliamentarians would be deported Saturday.
The Georgian Foreign Ministry has already made a statement condemning the incident and sent a note of protest to Belarusian diplomats.
Machavariani said Speaker Nino Burdzhanadze had requested assistance from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe to organize the quick and smooth return of the parliamentarians to Georgia.
In response to comments by some Belarusian officials that Georgian representatives were planning a coup in Belarus, Machavariani said: "Let the Belarusian people decide what they want to do."
"Georgia, like many Western nations, does not believe the current regime in Belarus to be democratic," he said. "If people doubt the results of the elections, then the Belarusians, themselves, can organize this ['revolution'] if they want."
Relations between Georgia and Belarus deteriorated after pro-Western President Mikheil Saakashvili came to power in the South Caucasus republic in 2003 as a result of a popular uprising called the "rose revolution," which some politicians in Belarus and Russia suspected was funded by the U.S.
The Georgian president's spokesman, Gela Charkviani, said Georgia, as a democratic country, insisted that Belarus allow the Georgian observers in to monitor the elections or ensure their safe return home.
Charkviani called the arrest absurd and said that Belarus had given unclear reasons for the incident.
"I do not understand the statement that Georgian legislators are undesirable guests in Belarus," he said.
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, dubbed "Europe's last dictator" by the U.S. State Department, has come under fire from the West for alleged human rights violations and stifling democratic freedoms.
Senior Belarusian officials said Thursday they had evidence of an American-backed plot to overthrow the country's current regime during Sunday's presidential elections, and said any attempts at disruption would be classified as terrorism.
Security service head Stepan Sukhorenko showed a press conference in Minsk a video of an interview with a man he said was one of those involved in the plot. The man said he had been at a training camp in Georgia at which training was provided by "four Arabs [and] officers of the former Soviet army".
The man also said a colonel from the Georgian security services and U.S. instructors had conducted examinations, and that the Americans had told them to bomb four polling stations at schools in Minsk during the vote on Sunday.
