President Saakashvili said on October 23, that the last year’s August war “changed” the entire post-Soviet space with Georgia gaining a reputation not seen before because its government managed to survive invasion of “a brutal force.”

“Commonwealth of Independent States, which Georgia has already quit, is actually disintegrated. They [apparently referring to the Russian authorities] hardly manage to gather only three or four leaders on CIS summits; no one wants to attend those summits anymore,” Saakashvili said.

“If you take a look at [the region] starting from Central Asian states and our neighboring countries to the countries in the west of Russia, Eastern Europe, Georgia has never had such a high reputation and authority like it has today. A year ago everyone betted on Georgia’s disintegration and destruction; a year ago one of my friendly Eastern European country’s leader of government was telling me that the Georgian government was given only 20% of chance to survive, because the invader swore that this government would not survive,” Saakashvili said.

He was speaking at a ceremony of handing over 800 houses to families displaced from their villages as a result of the August war. 800 houses were built in Gori with EUR 8 million assistance from the German government.

During the ceremony, also attended by German Foreign Ministry official and German ambassador to Georgia, President Saakashvili expressed for number of times during his speech appreciation to the German government for the assistance.

“We will never forget it and we will always express our appreciation to our friends in Europe’s strongest and the most influential country,” he said.

“Our major task – like it was for West Germany – is now to win the peace. It is impossible for Georgia to compete in violence and brutality with those forces, which are based on the other side of barbed wire [in breakaway regions],” Saakashvili said.

He also said that Georgia had an option to either follow Afghanistan’s path of many years of resistance to invaders or to chose what, as he said, Germany and other eastern European states did by focusing on “development and strengthening.”

“They are building checkpoints… and we are building highways with the use of the modern technologies; they care about their imperialistic pride and we take care of each of our citizen,” Saakashvili said.

“They won’t get away with what they have temporarily seized [in occupied territories],” he added.