NOT EVEN PERVEZ Musharraf has the gall to invoke one of the most hackneyed excuses of the megalomaniacal tyrant who pounds his people into submission: “This hurts me just as much as it hurts you.” Yet when Georgia’s President Mikheil Saakashvili’s announced a state of emergency last Wednesday, after tens of thousands of citizens took to the streets in defiance of his rule and were tear gassed and shot with rubber bullets for their troubles, it was as if history itself were inviting comparison between the Caucasus and the subcontinent.
The situation in Georgia is symbolically worse than the one in Pakistan, however, because Saakashvili used to be known as exactly the kind of fresh new democrat the Bush Doctrine hoped to promote in the developing world. A New York-educated lawyer with strong pro-American leanings, he was elected in 2003 in the aftermath of Georgia’s Rose Revolution, which unhorsed the ossified ex-Soviet satrap Eduard Shevardnadze. In his brief tenure as president, Saakashvili has overseen an impressive decrease in state and industrial corruption–so much so that in 2006 the World Bank rated Georgia the top economic reformer in the world and 18th in terms of “ease of doing business.”
For centuries Georgia has been a rough-and-tumble Black Sea cosmopolis that boasts as many tribes as it does wine varietals. Its ancient place name was Colchis, site of Prometheus’ eternal punishment, home to Medea and the Golden Fleece sought by Jason and the Argonauts and the termination point, according to Hebrew legend, of Noah’s Ark. Not an easy territory to unify and govern. (It was in his native Georgia, after all, that Joseph Stalin learned the first rule of irredentism, namely that ethnicity is not only anathema to socialist internationalism but to bourgeois nationalism.) So it was a rare feat when Saakashvili managed a peaceful solution to the Ajarian separatist movement, which threatened at one point to balkanize the post-Soviet republic, although his handling of similar ethnic breakaway initiatives led by South Ossetia and Abkhazia has been dramatically less successful.
Though Georgia’s human rights record has improved since Saakashvili’s election, according to the U.S. State Department, “[l]aw enforcement officers reportedly tortured or abused detainees in their homes or in cars while taking them to a place of detention. There were also allegations that plainclothes security service agents attacked several people on the street or abused them in unpopulated places, such as cemeteries or forests.” Last year a prison riot resulted in the deaths of seven inmates and injuries to 17 more, and Saakashvili’s ruling center-left United National Movement party silenced loud parliamentary calls for an independent investigation into what transpired. But the biggest scandal yet to engulf the Saakashvili regime was the highly publicized 2006 murder of Sandro Girgvliani, the former head of United Georgian Bank’s Foreign Department.
The details of the case are too murky and complicated to go into here, but suffice it to say, last July, four low-ranking members of Georgia’s Interior Ministry were convicted of abducting and beating Girgvliani to death, and many more officials have resigned or been fired in the seemingly endless aftermath. For many Saakashvili opponents on both the right and the left, this has been the sharpest thorn of the Rose Revolution, and they’ve been immensely aided in their efforts to dislodge the reigning hierarchs by the existence of a free press (there are 200 independent newspapers in Georgia and internet access is totally unencumbered) and the often provocative broadcasts of the Imedi television station. Imedi TV is owned by the Georgian tycoon Badri Patarkatsishvili and–believe it or not–Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. And here’s where things get really interesting.
One of Saakashvili’s newfangled antagonists is his former Rose comrade and Defense Minister Irakli Okruashvili. Upon being reassigned as minister for Economic Development in November 2006, Okruashvili resigned. Slightly less than a year later he decided to do two things: create his own opposition party, the Movement for United Georgia, and publicly accused Saakashvili, whom he called a “fairy-tale man,” a “frustrated, vulgar patriot,” of planning to assassinate Patarkatsishvili. In September 2007, Okruashvili was, unsurprisingly, rung up on corruption charges that included extortion, money laundering and abuse of office. In a taped confession shot by the General Prosecutor’s Office, he pled guilty and recanted his allegation against his old boss in a distinctly show trial manner. He posted a $6 million bond and fled Georgia under the vaguely prophetic pretext of flagging health.
The Tiblisi protests commenced on November 3rd. Two days later, Okruashvili appeared on Imedi TV claiming, “All the facts I have said about Saakashvili are true. But I won’t be able to prove them in the current judiciary system of Georgia . . . But I will be able to confirm these accusations in any independent court in a week.” On November 7, Saakashvili declared his state of emergency, going so far as to pull the plug on Imedi at around 9 o’clock that evening. According to the Washington Post, “Before the screen went black, the anchor said police had entered the premises and had told employees to lie on the floor. He called on foreign governments to respond.” Georgian authorities claimed that Imedi TV was agitating for the “violent overthrow” of the government. Another act of lousy timing. A week before all this, News Corp. announced plans to increase its stake in the company to a majority share.
On Friday, Saakashvili buckled to U.S. pressure to end his emergency rule and allow for new presidential elections as early as January. Key oppositionists–most notably Levan Gachechiladze of the New Right party, currently leading Saakashvili in the polls–have argued that returning Imedi’s unfettered access to the airwaves is the sine qua non of restoring peaceful conditions. Georgia’s Conflict Resolutions Minister has said he won’t lift Imedi’s ban until he is certain that is “no longer used as a tool for inciting mass disturbances and violence.” As the situation stands, the station’s broadcast license has been revoked for three months and all of its assets have been frozen. This means it won’t be able to cover the January election in which–to make matters even more complicated–Patarkatsishvili plans to run for president. (He is currently under investigation for attempting to create an “illegal army” in Georgia).
For all the banana republic intrigue and conspiracy now in revival in the Caucasus, there is still cause for guarded optimism. For one thing, the state has distinguished its factitious case against Patarkatsishvili from one against Imedi, which is now Western-owned and highly popular. Saakashvili, who has conceded that his emergency rule caused “certain damage” to the country, will have to placate public demand for it he is to stand any chance for re-election, much less renew Georgia’s comity with its most important and strategic ally (not to mention one of the West’s most prominent news organizations). The ten-party opposition coalition is rallying supporters to take to the streets again on November 25 if the Imedi blackout continues. Saakashvili can’t afford a repeat performance of thuggery–at least not this month.
A crucial aspect of this whole affair is that his pro-American orientation is not the will-o’-the-wisp that Musharraf’s is. Saakashvili wants badly for Georgia to join NATO and the European Union, and while he was busying cracking down on civil liberties last week, something progressive did occur in his country: Russia formally ended its military presence there. NATO had made this a prerequisite for further ratification of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe and thus any consideration Georgia’s inclusion. On November 8, Andrei Popov, the commander of Russian military forces in the Caucasus, made good on the Kremlin’s 1999 promise and signed the papers that officially transferred control to Georgia of the last of its Soviet era bases in Batumi. So its NATO Membership Action Plan can now technically move forward.
Remarkably, even Georgia’s EU prospects have not been irreparably damaged by the state of emergency. The EU Special Representative to the south Caucasus, Peter Semneby, told EurasiaNet, “[I]f Georgia is successful now in turning the agenda towards the presidential elections, if the presidential elections are carried out successfully, then there should not be any lasting damage to these relations.” Poland’s Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski has even announced on Polskie Radio that he will travel to Georgia soon to help resolve the Imedi impasse. He was solicited for this role by the United States and by the EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana.
Here is a fine example of how the United States and Europe can still resort to an effective carrot-and-stick diplomacy with iniquitous partners who still place high premiums on their military and economic ties to the West. The rumors of the Bush Doctrine’s death have been greatly exaggerated. It helps to compare Georgia not to Pakistan but to another often refractory and complicated ally: Turkey.
A likely reason that Turkey did not immediately invade Iraqi Kurdistan–despite the fact that the PKK’s kidnapping of eight Turkish soldiers last month far outpaced Hezbollah’s provocation against Israel two summers ago–has to do with its NATO membership. Although NATO formally did not participate in the liberation of Iraq, and Turkey famously blocked the Coalition’s northern point of ingress into Baghdad in 2003, Article 4 of the North Atlantic Treaty was interpreted to mean that the Alliance had an obligation to protect Turkey in the event that it was threatened or attacked during the war. It is this promise that has helped stay Ankara’s hand and kept even a frayed U.S.-Turkish relationship from deteriorating completely.
As for Turkey’s bid to join that other coveted supranational organization, the EU, Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn presented a report on November 6 declaring, “The infamous article 301 must be repealed or amended without delay.” This referred to Turkey’s stupid and repressive speech law, which has long held it a crime to “denigrate Turkishness” by even referring to the Ottoman Empire’s genocide of 1.5 million Armenians between 1915 and 1918. (Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk was put on trial for this charge, an international scandal that probably determined his Nobel laureateship a year later, and the brave Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was assassinated last January–with the probable collusion of the Istanbul police–for daring to suggest his nation confront its own terrible past.) Note that the EU report came just weeks after the House Committee on Foreign Relations approved a non-binding resolution recognizing the Armenian genocide, an act lamentably opposed by President Bush and which resulted in convulsions of self-righteousness and cant in Turkey. It, too, was said to have been the detonator on our alliance with the Kemalist state. Yet on the same day of the EU report’s release, Turkey’s Justice Minister Mehmet Ali Sahin announced that a bill would be introduced to the Turkish parliament that would amend or altogether scrap Article 301.
Of course, it is too soon to tell whether or not Sahin and Abdullah Gul, the Turkish president, mean business. But the mere fact that his moderate Islamist government is stumping for liberalization (the legally-binding kind) is encouraging. Indeed, if NATO/EU lures can move Turkey closer into the truly democratic fold, there’s a good chance they can do the same for Georgia.
Michael Weiss is associate editor of Jewcy magazine.
