Georgia: History Repeats Itself
It's open house at the White House for Georgia's new president, Mikheil Saakashvili, as he rounds up opponents, closes media outlets and threatens his neighbours, but then so it was for his disgraced predecessor, Eduard Shevardnadze
When President George W. Bush received Georgia's new president, Mikheil Saakashvili at the White House on 25th February 2004, the BBC News website reported: "US showers praise on Saakashvili: US President George Bush has given a strong boost to the new president of Georgia by praising his drive to expand democracy and fight corruption.
"I'm impressed by this leader, I'm impressed by his vision, I'm impressed by his courage," he said after meeting Mikhail Saakashvili.
A Georgian president has been to the White House before and received much the same rhetoric from his hosts about a "new beginning" and the "reforms" that America's guest is about to initiate in this strife-torn post-Soviet republic. Sadly, anyone with an interest in Georgia and a memory will recall how enthusiastically Saakashvili's ousted predecessor, Eduard Shevardnadze, was greeted by George H. Bush and his Secretary of State, James Baker, in 1992. On 1st September, 1999, Bill Clinton's Press Secretary informed the world: "The United States strongly supports the sovereignty, stability, and territorial integrity of Georgia, and recognizes in particular the critical role that President Shevardnadze plays in promoting prosperity and democratic development for all the people of Georgia."
Marx liked to say that history repeated itself, first as tragedy, then as comedy but observers of human rights in Georgia find little entertainment in the current state of affairs. Just as Shevardnadze's brutal and corrupt regime was lauded as a model democracy by US officials, the Council of Europe and the OSCE even as it launched a reign of terror against Georgian dissenters in 1992, so today Saakashvili has unleashed a wave of arrests against real and imagined opponents and, like Shevardnadze when he first came to power, his new regime has targeted any media outlet which steps out of line.
Despite being surrounded by officials from his father's presidency - men who literally embraced Shevardnadze - George W. Bush is unlikely to hear critical comments on his successor. The Washington establishment has turned the page on its own collusion with Shevardnadze and the crimes he committed between 1992 and 2003. As with Shevardnadze, Washington's assessment of the state of human rights and democracy in Georgia is likely to be determined by geo-strategic considerations in particular, the usefulness of the new regime in further undermining Russia and asserting U.S. domination over the access to oil and natural gas sources in the neighbouring Caspian and Central Asian states.
Already, the news from Georgia on the human rights front is bad. The rule of law, the rights of the individual and the freedom of the press are all under a massive attack. In his twilight years in power, the elderly Shevardnadze tolerated a growing degree of criticism, even free media of a sort although most "independent" media was in fact funded by NATO governments or Soros's Open Society and danced to their tune. However, by the time of his fall in November 2003 the former president had at least released from prison the surviving opponents from his seizure of power in 1992.
Since Saakashvili won the grotesque presidential election in January, 2004, when he was awarded an even higher percentage of the vote than Shevardnadze granted himself in 1992, waves of arrests and media closures have hit Georgia. The thorns of the so-called "rose revolution" praised by the Open Society, Human Rights Watch and the BBC are drawing blood ever more frequently. At the end of March, Georgians are summoned to the polls again for new parliamentary elections, this time to endorse the list of candidates composed of Saakashvili's backers. While the West lavishes finance on officials who staged the grotesquely one-sided presidential elections in January - money ostensibly to fund electoral arrangements but in practice to buy adherence by poll officials to the new regime's list of candidates - nothing will be left to chance in case the voters turn sour, or fail to turn out to vote.
The Arrest: From Solzhenitsyn to Saakashvili
Arrests are routinely staged like scenes from Hollywood gangster movies. Viewers of Georgian television news are treated to regular fare showing masked security officers pouncing on suspects accused of corruption or tax evasion. The bewilderment and dejection of yesterday's minister or business magnate is caught on camera live for all to see - and learn the lesson. For the people of Georgia, this has older undertones for this is the land which gave birth to Stalin and Beria and few need to be reminded of the message relayed by the nightly broadcasts of the day's arrests and detentions.
In the first chapter of his Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn gave many examples of the modes of arrest perfected by Stalin's secret police. In the 1930s as seventy years later, many of the most prominent detainees were hardly innocent as lambs. Leading Soviet bureaucrats were the forerunners of those in Shevardnadze's entourage guilty of peculation and abuse of office. Under Stalin the purge was a political process not a moral one. His victims were seized, tried, deported to the Gulag or shot because they were on the wrong side in the power struggle which gripped the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Is it really so different in Georgia today?
According to Solzhenitsyn, one method used for luring an unsuspecting victim into custody was to summon him for a routine office meeting. According to AP (21st February, 2004) this is what happened to the minister of transport in Shevardnadze's government: "Every day brings word of new arrests. The former transport and communications minister, Mereab Adeishvili, was called to the state chancery, supposedly for a meeting, and arrested by masked men wearing camouflage uniforms." The masks are presumably to disguise the identity of security agents who served yesterday's regime as diligently as today's.
The AP report continued, "Other suspects have been arrested at home in the middle of the night - drawing uncomfortable comparisons with Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's purges, when people kept suitcases packed and lived in fear of a knock on the door."
Another model arrest from Stalin's time according to Solzhenitsyn was to allow the suspect to purchase a ticket to travel and even to get to the railway station (after the war to an airport) thus lulling him into a sense of security. The shock was even worse when he was pounced upon and taken into custody. Shevardnadze's son-in-law, Gia Djkhtaberidze was subjected to this 'textbook' experience at Tbilisi airport on 20th February 2004 when television cameras recorded him being dragged from an aircraft by black jacketed security officials on charges of tax evasion despite the fact that he had been interviewed several times by prosecutors and not charged.
As in all the best purges, the process begins at the bottom and works upwards - with each level hoping against hope that the machine of investigation will stop beneath them. Already, on the 18th January 2004, the BBC reported "Georgia: Prosecution looks into business activities of ex-president's family" carrying an excerpt from Imedi TV:
"[Presenter] It is very likely to expect that the arrests of the former minister of fuel and energy, the former chairman of the Railways Department, the president of the Football Federation and the manager of the Sadakhlo retail market will be followed by the arrest of the head of the Chamber of Commerce. Having launched a legal attack on members of President Shevardnadze's government and other officials, the new authorities began to show interest in the activities of the former president's family. In an exclusive interview granted to the [Imedi TV] Kronika programme, the Georgian prosecutor-general said that investigators would look into the business activities of Eduard Shevardnadze's brothers-in-law in the port of Poti and draw conclusions on the expediency of instituting a criminal case against them.
[Irakli Okruashvili, Georgian prosecutor-general, interviewed] There is a great deal of evidence confirming corrupt deals carried out by the family of Shevardnadze's brother-in-law, the Akhvlediani family, in the port of Poti [Chairman of the Chamber of Commerce and businessman Guram Akhvlediani is the father-in-law of Shevardnadze's son]. We are beginning an inquiry in their activities shortly and will make a lot of interesting material available to you.
[Correspondent] Does it mean that the Prosecutor-General's Office possesses definite evidence?
[Okruashvili] Yes, there is concrete evidence concerning, I would cite as an example, the illegal letting of quays.
[Correspondent] Is a criminal case against Guram Akhvlediani expected to be launched shortly?
[Okruashvili] Let us wait and see. It will be decided after investigators have completed the inquiry. First, the people involved will be questioned, then we will sum up the evidence and take the final decision.
[Presenter] Interest shown by the Prosecutor-General's Office in the activities of the Akhvlediani family is deemed expedient by the member of parliament representing the Poti single-seat constituency, Roman Melia. The former mayor of the town of Poti [Melia] has said that an investigation into the private interests in the port of Poti will obviously reveal many interesting details. The general manager of the port of Poti, Jemal Inaishvili, has not commented on the prosecutor-general's statement yet. The incumbent mayor of Poti [Vakhtang Alania] is also in favour of an investigation in the port affairs."
On 20th February 2004, Saakashvili told the media that Djokhtaberidze had US $70 m. in unexplained wealth. Since he is married to Shevardnadze's daughter, Manana, the threat to her father is clear although repeatedly denied by the new president. Saakashvili has told CNN that he did not want to see Shevardnadze prosecuted but his Prosecutor General has not ruled it out. On 3rd February 2004, Reuters reported that , "A day after acting Transport Minister Merab Adeishvili's arrest on charges of financial wrongdoing and abuse of power, Okruashvili told Mze television the investigation could widen to include his immediate bosses. 'Adeishvili reported directly to Shevardnadze,' he said. Asked whether Shevardnadze could be detained if suspected of wrongdoing, Okruashvili said: 'Nothing is ruled out.' Okruashvili told the media that Adeishvili had been charged with embezzling US$ 245,000 but the real figure could be up to US $ 5m. He has routinely mentioned huge sums of money by Georgian standards while detailing the crimes of the accused whose guilt is taken for granted on television.
While the Prosecutor-General Okruashvili's wave of arrests and threats to extend his investigations has got to the stage that Georgians joke that they have not yet been arrested when answering the phone to anxious interlocutors, the President himself makes blood curdling threats. At a press conference on 12th January 2004, Saakashvili made a typically demagogic statement: "I want to tell criminal bosses and their defenders that they will get it in the teeth." Adding that "Anyone who disturbs the sleep of an ordinary citizen will be ruthlessly punished and exterminated." [Reuters] This is hardly the language of civil society, yet none of the Soros-funded open society or anti-death penalty NGOs have piped up to express concern. Is it by chance that Saakashvili's new finance minister, the 28-year-old, Irakli Rekhviashvili worked at Soros's Open Society Institute in Budapest and only returned to Georgia on 13th January 2004? It seems that the Open Society might be putting the interests of its cadres before the ideals of its founder.
Even if all of those accused of heinous offences were guilty, what of the turncoats who profited under Shevardnadze's "reformist" regime only to become "reformist" leaders under Saakashvili? An anti-corruption campaign that only targets yesterday's culprits leaves the field open to a fresh crop of racketeers. Hasn't that happened too often before in Georgia in recent history?
In a typically un-questioning interview broadcast on 24th February 2004, CNN's Jonathan Mann allowed Saakashvili to present his purge as an anti-corruption drive against cronies of former President Shevardnadze. But what the viewers of CNN never learned is that Shevardnadze's ex-Justice Minister, Saakashvili, had appointed Shevardnadze's former Number Two, Zurab Zhvania, to be his own Number Two! Neither does CNN ever draw attention to the fact that the current Speaker of the Georgian Parliament, Nina Burdjandadze served in that position under Shevardnadze, nor that her husband, Badri Bitsadze, was Deputy Prosecutor-General under the old regime (he is now in charge of the sensitive border guards and their - lucrative - customs enforcement role) and that her father was a close ally of Shevardnadze during and after the Soviet period. The new Minister of Finance, Zurab Nogaideli, was finance minister until 2001, and so on. The new regime is very much the next generation of the old regime minus Shevardnadze's family and those who fell out with the Saakashvili clan while it was in the ascendent.
Whiter than white?
The politics of envy play a key role in Georgia. While the new president insists he lives in a modest three-roomed flat, his allies excoriate the ousted president, his family and his cronies for living in luxury. By focusing attention on the ousted elite's embezzlements, the new order can cement its political and economic control over this impoverished society.
One of the reasons given for summoning Djokhtaberidze to the Prosecutor-General's office in late January was to question him about suspected financial irregularities in the mobile phone company, Magticom, which he founded in 1996. Simultaneously, the Prosecutor-General, Irakli Okruashvili, stepped up pressure on Pridon Indjia who was then Minister of Communications and who had fallen out with Saakashvili as early as 1998 over allegations regarding the privatization of Georgia's telecommunications network. According to Radio Free Europe's Liz Fuller, the daily "Alia" claimed that Okruashvili used to defend the interests of Magticom's main rival, Geocell. If that is so, Saakashvili's key ally in his anti-corruption drive may have personal motives for pursuing Indijia. [RFE/RL 27th January 2004]
RFE has also reported serious allegations made against Saakasvili's Number Two, Zurab Zhvania: "The Prosecutor-General's Office suspects the Omega Group, which is owned by parliamentarian Zaza Okuashvili and is Georgia's largest cigarette importer, of failing to pay excise taxes totalling some 12 million laris ($5.8 million)… Zaza Okuashvili alleges he is being pressured for his refusal to pay an undisclosed sum into a foreign bank account controlled by Prime Minister Zurab Zhvania." It would seem that whiter-than-white is not the colour of the rose revolutionaries.
On the day before President Saakashvili visited the White House, Georgian television failed to broadcast in its live coverage of parliament a statement by Nato Chkheidze, Zaza Okuashvili's wife, in which in her capacity as a deputy she intended to reply to the accusations made on television against Omega by the prosecutor-general Irakli Okruashvili.
While television censors Saakashvili's critics, those channels which favour the new regime prosper. The so-called "independent" television station, Rustavi 2, was a major propaganda weapon in Saakashvili's rise to power and it has been rewarded by becoming the main media outlet for presidential announcements and patronage. On 23rd January 2004, it was revealed that Rustavi 2 had been granted the airwaves taken from the Russian channel, ORT after the "rose revolution." Radio Free Europe reported the bland but telling statement, "The only other bidder, Technomedia, withdrew its application earlier that day."
Media harassed
CNN can usually be counted on to defend "independent" media under attack from regimes that do not have Washington's seal of approval, but when the State Department's new pin up shuts down television stations and newspapers and replaces political debate with children's puppet shows, not a peep is heard from the media watchdogs and global news channels. For example, on 21st February 2004, AP reported that "Journalists from the Iveria television station marched down Tbilisi's main avenue carrying a coffin symbolizing what they said was the demise of the free press. Earlier that day, masked men had raided the TV company's office, forcing the station to go off the air for several hours." Yet Western media failed to pick up on this development.
On 24th February 2004, Radio Free Europe reported protests by Georgian journalists at the closure of media outlets by the state prosecutor: "Journalists working for the independent television company Iberia, the monthly journal "Omega," the newspaper "Akhali epokha," and the Media New news agency staged a protest on 21 February against the closure two days earlier of the publishing house owned by their parent company, the Omega Group, on orders from the Prosecutor-General's Office…. Police dispersed the protesters, firing shots into the air"!
For a president with 96% of the poll only weeks ago, Mr Saakashvili is no slouch at offending the voters. For instance at the end of January, 700 street vendors demonstrated outside the state chancellery to protest a newly introduced ban on street trading in the capital. This will deprive them of their livelihood. The president (presumably voted for by 672 of them on average) refused to meet them nor would agree to a year long moratorium to give them a chance of finding new work. Only when the scale of opposition became apparent did the government beat a tactical retreat.
Anti-Corruption: Who is innocent?
Anti-corruption is the populist legitimising message of Saakashvili's regime but it is an old tune which wearies with repetition even in as corrupt a society as Georgia. On 1st February 2004, AP quoted Georgian political analyst, Ramaz Sakvarelidze saying: "Shevardnadze also began his career with a fight against corruption.'' But, he added that police methods aren't enough. ``There must also be changes in the economic system that make corruption unnecessary,'' he said. For all the euphoria of the past two months, ``So far, there are only slogans.''
According to an AP report on 21st February 2004, "Kote Gvetadze, a 33-year-old doctor, said he supported the new authorities and was glad they had thrown out Shevardnadze. Still, he said, he was unsettled by the atmosphere. 'You know, corruption reached so deep that just about every inhabitant of the country could be put in prison for this or that infraction' … 'So we're going to put at least half of Georgia in prison? People are afraid.'"
Even the language used by Saakashvili's "reformist" ministers is redolent of Stalinist rhetoric. For instance, announcing the appointment of a reformist State Security minister, Zurab Zhvania declared on 17th February, "The last traditions of the Soviet KGB (secret police) should be extirpated in a new State Security Ministry and it should become a civilized agency of European style." The vocabulary of "extirpation", "liquidation", etc. is very Old European, circa 1934 rather than 2004.
Any purge needs informers and Georgia's new anti-crime wave is recruiting them busily. Even the new anti-corruption legislation proposed by Saakashvili and Okruashvili has ominous special privileges for informers among the ranks of the alleged corrupt who can avoid prosecution if they denounce others.
Democracy = All Power to the President
During Shevardnadze's rule a few human rights groups and constitutional lawyers suggested that the 1995 constitution gave the Georgian president too wide-reaching powers and patronage. However, Saakashvili has widened them still further. On 9th January, only days after his inauguration as president, he made clear that the quasi-dictatorial powers whose misuse he denounced in November, 2003, would be strengthened: "The people of Georgia have entrusted me with the presidential powers. I think that the country must have a strong presidency, and I will not raise with parliament the question of limiting or reducing the presidential powers." The next day, according to Radio Free Europe, Georgia's leading political scientist and one-time apologist for the Shevardnadze regime, Gia Nodia of the Caucasian Institute for Peace, Democracy and Development announced his support for Saakashvili's model of a strong presidency: "There is only one politician who currently enjoys enormous popularity among people and people empower him to govern the state. The current presidential system meets today's challenges, but this system needs to be
strengthened and improved."
Others were less convinced. Some suggested that Saakashvili was moving towards the Turkmen model of an all-powerful president and father-of-the-nation. Even one of his own supporters in the National Movement, the MP Koba Davitashvili, left the party in protest after refusing the post of Defence Minister, saying, "I see the threat of dictatorship in these amendments."
The Georgian parliament, whose legitimacy must be severely in doubt precisely because of Saakashvili's charges of electoral fraud in November 2003, dutifully passed the proposed constitutional changes which, among other things, created the new post of prime minister - immediately bestowed upon Zurab Zhvania. At the same time, Speaker Burdjunadze's role was downgraded as she would now no longer be acting president in the event of a vacancy at the top. The amendments also made it more difficult to impeach the president in future.
Mrs. Burdjunadze may be worried that her faction of rose revolutionaries might lose out in the forthcoming parliamentary elections. The United Democrats with the best prospects for election who made it onto the joint list of candidates with the National Movement are Zhvania's men rather than her friends. Even allowing for a likely landslide some of them will be too far down the party list to be elected. Friction within the regime could turn ugly at the end of March, just as rivalry among Shevardnadze's henchmen in the mid-1990s led to assassination attempts and other acts of violence.
Despite requests from the Council of Europe and the OSCE to lower the hurdle for entering the Georgian parliament from 7% to the standard European level of 5%, Saakashvili has insisted on the higher figure as a way of keeping corrupt small parties out of the legislature and denying them immunity from arrest. Despite the improbability of getting elected, 5 blocs and 37 parties met the deadline for registration for the elections at the end of March. It looks likely that the absurd situation common under Shevardnadze when most parties had many more signatories (at least 50,000) backing their candidacy than actual voters will be repeated this year too. Bogus pluralism beset Georgia in the 1990s, it does not need to carry on that tradition in the new century.
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