Georgia not so Rosy Anymore

By BJ

Way back in August when the major fighting between Russia and Georgia died down, I had this to say about Georgian president Saakashvili:

How much Saakashvili will pay personally for his blunder is as yet hard to say. The people of Georgia followed the old pattern of "rally 'round the flag" while the bombs were dropping, but once the war starts to recede, so does the rationale for rallying around the guy who started it. At a guess, his remaining in power "democratically" seems rather unlikely.

As I expected, now that the Russian Bear is no longer mauling the Georgian military infrastructure, the internal divisions that the West has done its best to ignore in favour of the narrative of, "Saakashvili the freedom-loving democrat", have started to show signs of opening up again.

An influential group of Georgian opposition leaders has mounted a blistering political campaign against U.S.-backed President Mikheil Saakashvili, accusing his government of running an autocratic regime that tramples human rights and stifles democracy.

The timing could embarrass the Bush administration, which is pressing NATO members to approve an action plan for Georgia — a key step toward full membership — at the organization's meeting in December.

The claims by many in the opposition, some of which have been affirmed by a top Georgian human-rights official, go to the heart of Washington's rationale for backing Saakashvili as a democratic force in a region where Russia is trying to re-establish dominance.

And proving just how well they've learned from their mentors, the Georgian government is quick to claim that any dissenters in their "democracy" are agents of the enemy, whether knowingly or not.

Shota Utiashvili, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, warned that the dissenters could give Russia the opening to try to depose Saakashvili and destabilize Georgia, which it failed to achieve during the war. Utiashvili said the opposition leaders appeared to be acting on their own domestic agendas, but that there was a risk that Russian intelligence services could try to manipulate them.

"It's part of a broader campaign. For us it's clear that the FSB" — the successor to the KGB — "in Russia is handling the Georgia issues," Utiashvili said. "They are trying to start things by pulling these different strings."

It is important to note that Saakashvili's problems with the opposition and democratic principles far pre-date his recent rash actions in South Ossetia. The McClatchy article notes that the date of Nov. 7, 2007 kept coming up in their interviews with people in the capital of Tbilisi. That is the date that Saakashvili's government crushed an opposition protest by beating unarmed protestors, shooting them with rubber bullets and fire hoses. They also shut down a TV station critical of the government. Our researcher Kat sent us an article examining the situation then from the New York Times.

Educated in America, fluent in four languages and in the values of free-market democracies, Mikheil Saakashvili was supposed to have been different. When he was elected president of Georgia after a bloodless revolution in 2003, he was deemed a savior for the post-Soviet landscape, as if he had been conjured by a committee of Washington think tanks and European human rights groups.

Yet this week, with Georgia under a state of emergency after his government quashed a large demonstration and violently shut an opposition television station, Mr. Saakashvili seemed, even in the eyes of some steadfast supporters, to be ruling with the willfulness of the very autocrats that he once so disdained. Was his true temperament showing, or had the burdens and realities of office somehow changed him?

Georgia has in recent years taken on a prominence far greater than its small size would otherwise merit, in large part because under Mr. Saakashvili, it had been considered a model for countries trying to shed decades of despotism and decay.

Now, Mr. Saakashvili has begun to draw comparisons to a leader who has chosen a different path to lift his nation: President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Georgia’s neighbor, former overlord and, these days, frequent adversary. The Georgian government’s announcement on Wednesday that it would cancel the state of emergency on Friday appeared unlikely to wipe away the stain on the reputation of Mr. Saakashvili, who is only 39 and is known as Misha.

Shifting back to McClatchy.

Human Rights Watch released a report on the incident in which it said that the West previously had ignored "warning signs that the government was not only failing to live up to the principles of the rule of law and human rights it espoused during the Rose Revolution, but taking many serious steps to undermine these principles."

That included "quick resort to use of force by law enforcement agents," the report said.

Sozar Subari, the Georgian government's human-rights ombudsman, has documented what he terms severe human-rights abuses by government forces as well as elections in which police intimidated voters on a widespread basis and a corrupt elite that's allowed to use state offices to its own ends.

In several cases, Subari said in a report to parliament, armed men in ski masks beat up the administration's political enemies. He named two high-profile cases in 2005 and 2007. Subari said it was clear that the attackers were being protected from prosecution in such a way "that implies the involvement of several high-rank(ing) officials."

So how does this all play out with the preferred Washington storyline that Saakashvili is a champion of democracy and freedom? I think the best explanation is this telling quote:

"I think the big confusion in the American policy . . . is to confuse support for a country and its democracy with the support for a small group of people," Zurabishvili said of Saakashvili, a U.S.-educated lawyer, and his allies.

That has been the case all too often during the last eight years of, "withus or against us", policy. Saakashvili is a democrat, therefore any opposition to him is anti-democratic, and whatever methods he uses to hold on to power are therefore in the service of democracy. The same dynamic has played out in several other countries and territories, with the ultimate result being a loss of legitimacy for the US-backed government, and a great deal of anti-American backlash from the populations.

It remains to be seen whether or not the same result will plague American relations with Georgia in the not-so-distant future.

Comments

[Steve Hynd]

Great post BJ. I've a post I wrote on much the same thing going up at C&L some time today, but you did a far better job so I've just edited the post to include a link to this one.

Regards, C