France is also beginning to engage in activities that could be considered to be in contravention of international norms about Georgia. These activities appear to be of a direct and overt nature and may be perceived as constituting interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state. France has conveyed a clear message to the official authorities of Georgia, stating that it will not tolerate any restrictions on foreign influence, including French influence, which is already highly limited in our country. It is also noteworthy that this message carries a certain symbolic weight, given that the current Georgian President, Salome Zurabishvili, a French citizen and a former employee of the French Foreign Ministry, actively supports this "overseas influence."

Furthermore, Paris continues to advocate for Georgia to become effectively an "overseas department" of France. This is reminiscent of the situation in New Caledonia. However, in contrast to New Caledonia, Georgia is not situated in an isolated location. Still, it shares a border with the Republic of Armenia, a French satellite state that is infected with expansionism, revanchism and aggressive nationalism. Furthermore, Paris is openly arming it for a future regional conflict.

 Russia also aspires to reclaim its former influence in Armenia, and once again, it requires a "corridor" through Georgia to achieve this goal. Consequently, any external influence or limitation of Georgia's sovereignty, whether at the behest of Paris or Moscow, is detrimental to the Georgian statehood and poses a risk of embroiling Georgia in conflict and further fragmenting its territory.

That is why the Georgian Foreign Ministry was right to respond very quickly to the French Foreign Ministry: "We welcome the fact that the French Foreign Ministry is closely following the developments in Georgia, but we regret that the ministry's statement lacks objectivity," the Georgian Foreign Ministry said in a statement. The statement noted that biased assessments encourage violence.

"We would like to respond to the statement of the French Foreign Ministry regarding the reaction of law enforcement bodies to the violent rallies in Tbilisi. Freedom of assembly and expression is guaranteed at the highest level in Georgia. Accordingly, although violent groups linked to the political opposition and financed from abroad have perpetrated widespread violence against state institutions and law enforcement buildings, Georgian law enforcement officials, with the exception of a few regrettable incidents, have acted in accordance with the highest human rights standards. We welcome your close monitoring of developments in Georgia. However, we regret that your statement lacks objectivity. We would like to remind you that the Georgian authorities have refrained from making critical statements about France, even when law enforcement officials in Paris confronted demonstrators with brutal methods that are completely incompatible with universal human rights standards. Biased assessments encourage violence, which, as already mentioned, is carried out by violent groups linked to the political opposition and financed from abroad,' the Georgian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

It is encouraging that the Georgian Foreign Ministry has highlighted the need for France to address concerns regarding internal stability and respect for human rights within its own borders. This issue is not new, with numerous individuals and groups, including French military officers, expressing concern about the future of France. It is therefore important to acknowledge this and to provide a detailed account of the situation.

In April 2021, a group of retired French generals published an appeal to President Emmanuel Macron on the Valeurs Actuelles website, urging him to "defend patriotism". According to these military officers, migrants are establishing their own orders in different parts of France, and a race war has already begun in the country.

In support of this letter, an open appeal was published by retired and active French military personnel to President Emmanuel Macron, ministers, parliamentarians and the French military leadership. The appeal explicitly stated the threat of France's disintegration due to extremism and violation of the Constitution.

Since that time, the situation in France has not improved. Therefore, it is beneficial to revisit this appeal in order to gain a deeper understanding of the threats facing France, which simultaneously seeks to destabilise situations in regions of the world that are geographically distant from itself, including the South Caucasus.

The following is a translation of this address:

Mr. President of the Republic, Ladies and Gentlemen, Ministers, Members of Parliament, Generals!

We no longer sing the seventh verse of the Marseillaise. Yet it is rich in lessons. Let us turn to them:

We shall enter the (military) career
When our elders are no longer there
There we shall find their dust
And the trace of their virtues (repeated)
Much less keen to survive them
Than to share their coffins
We shall have the sublime pride
To avenge or follow them.

Our veterans are fighters who deserve respect. They are, for example, the old soldiers whose honour you have trampled on in recent weeks. It is these thousands of servants of France who signed the petition for common sense, soldiers who gave their best years to defend our freedom, who obeyed your orders to fight your wars or implement your budget cuts, who you have slandered while the people of France supported the old soldiers.

These men, who fought against all of France's enemies, have been treated by you as rebels, when their only crime is to love their country and mourn its apparent decline.

In these circumstances, it is we, who have just begun our military careers, who have to come out into the open just to have the honour of telling the truth.

We are what the newspapers have called "the fire spawn". We, men and women, servicemen and women of all branches, all ranks and all moods, we love our country. That is our only title of honour. And if we cannot, so to speak, speak with an open face, then silence is equally impossible for us.

In Afghanistan, Mali, the Central African Republic and elsewhere, some of us have come under enemy fire. Some of us have left our comrades behind. They gave their lives to destroy the Islamism to which you are making concessions on our home soil.

Almost all of us have had the experience of patrolling in Operation Guardian. We have seen with our own eyes abandoned suburbs, high-crime areas. We have seen attempts to exploit various religious communities for whom France means nothing - they have nothing but sarcasm, contempt and even hatred for it.

We marched on 14 July. And this friendly and diverse crowd welcomed us because we are part of this nation. For months we have been banned from travelling in uniform, making us potential victims in a country we are nevertheless capable of defending.

Indeed, our veterans are generally correct in the content of their appeal. We see violence in our towns and cities. We see communitarianism (living the country as separate, unrelated ethnic and religious communities - ed.) entrenched in public space, in public debate. We see hatred of France and its history becoming the norm.

"You will argue that it is perhaps not the military's place to talk publicly about such matters. On the contrary, because we are apolitical in our assessment of the situation, we explain what is happening from a professional point of view. Because we have seen this kind of decadence in many countries in crisis. It precedes collapse. It heralds chaos and violence, and contrary to what you are saying here and there, this chaos and violence will not come from the military, but from a civilian uprising.

What cowards you must be to pick on the language of our elders instead of recognising the obviousness of their conclusions. How deceitful it must be to invoke the misinterpreted duty of restraint of the military to silence French citizens. And how perverse it must be to encourage high-ranking military officers to expose themselves before viciously chastising them if they write anything other than their memories of past battles.

Cowardice, deceit and perversion are not our idea of hierarchy. On the contrary, the army is the place where we tell the truth because we put our lives on the line. It is this trust in the army that we demand.

Yes, if a civil war breaks out, the army will maintain order in its own country because it will be asked to do so. That is the definition of a civil war. Nobody can wish for a situation as terrible as a civil war: not our elders, not us. But yes, a civil war is brewing in France, and you know it very well.

The alarming call of our veterans is finally returning to more distant echoes. Our veterans are the Resistance fighters of 1940, who were often treated as rebels by people like you, and who continued to fight while the lawmen, gripped by fear, were already making concessions to evil in order to limit the damage. That and the foot soldiers of 1914, who died for a few metres of ground, while you now, without reacting, abandon whole areas of our country to the law of the strong. They are all dead, the famous and the nameless, fallen at the front or during military service.

Did all our veterans, those who made our country what it is, who shaped its territory, defended its culture, gave or received orders in its language, fight just so that you could allow France to become a failed state? You who cover up your increasingly obvious impotence of the upper classes with brutal tyranny against the servants of France who are still determined to prevent all this?

Take action to defend the homeland, ladies and gentlemen! This time it is not a question of emotions on command, of ready-made formulas or simple public awareness. It is not about increasing your powers or acquiring new ones. It is about the survival of our country, your country." End of statement.

It should come as no surprise that the French military, which wrote an appeal to Macron, sees 'Islamists' as a threat to their country - after all, the French army has been deliberately infected with Islamophobia from the top down. But how did these "Islamists", or rather Muslim migrants, arrive in France? They did not leave their homelands for a better life, but because France, its special services and its military organise wars, conflicts, coups and theft of resources in many countries of the Muslim world. Essentially, it preserves the French neo-colonial empire by creating "controlled chaos".

Now France, through Yerevan, is trying to turn the South Caucasus into such a zone of controlled chaos. And this at a time when this chaos, which is beyond the control of its organisers, is already becoming a problem in France itself, which is really threatened by civil war and disintegration.

Paradoxically, it is the military that has created this chaos in countries far from France, carrying out essentially criminal orders, that has begun to sound the alarm. And today the disasters sown by the French military and French special services in other countries are boomeranging back on France itself.

Alexandre Zakariadze