GEORGIA HOLDS ITS BREATH
BY THOMAS DE WAAL
SEPTEMBER 26, 2012
ROCKED BY A PRISON SCANDAL AND ALLEGATIONS FROM ALL SIDES OVER ILLICIT
CAMPAIGNING, THIS TINY COUNTRY’S ELECTION HAS BECOME A BRAWL BETWEEN
POLITICAL HEAVYWEIGHTS.
TBILISI, Georgia – On a warm night last week, a crowd gathered in the
Georgian capital city of Tbilisi in front of the glass facade of the
Philharmonia building. The crowd members were young, oppositional,
and angry; disorganized but peaceful. A police car approached and
was met with a cacophony of whistles, more mocking than aggressive.
The crowd had been drawn onto the street by the release of shocking
videos by two opposition television channels showing systematic
abuse in one of Tbilisi’s prisons. One clip, showing the rape of a
male prisoner with a broom, was especially shocking for a socially
conservative society. Reports of the terrible conditions in the
country’s prisons had flickered through Georgian households for
years. Georgia now has the highest prison population per capita
in Europe, with 24,000 inmates, four times as many as when Mikheil
Saakashvili was first elected president in 2004. But Georgia’s leaders
had ignored reports of prison brutality, trumpeting instead police
reform and their successful “zero tolerance on crime” policy.
Now they were being proved spectacularly wrong and at the worst
possible moment, just 13 days before crucial parliamentary elections
on Oct. 1.
Saakashvili reacted quickly to contain the damage. The powerful
31-year-old interior minister, Bacho Akhalaia — who had been in
office only two months — resigned. The ombudsman who had long been
registering unheeded alarm about prison conditions was made the new
prisons minister. But the president then muddied his message. Clearly
someone close to the opposition had chosen to release the videos at
this moment to embarrass the government, but Saakashvili lashed out
with an improbable line of attack that harked back to the August
2008 war, telling a public meeting that the revelations were part
of a Moscow-orchestrated “conspiracy” against Georgia, ahead of
the election, with the goal of forcing Georgia “back into Russia’s
imperial space.”
The problem for the president is that when he said he was “shocked”
and “very angry” and knew nothing about the state of his prisons,
few believed him. The country’s highly punitive criminal-justice
system was built by a group of men who now hold the jobs of prime
minister, justice minister and defense minister. The general state of
Georgia’s prisons, if not the graphic details, was an open secret. Most
residents of Tbilisi know someone — a neighbor or a cousin — who
has been in prison, often for a relatively small offense, such as
marijuana possession or theft. A few months ago, I heard a terrible
account of life inside Georgia’s prisons from a businessman named
Lasha Shanidze who had ended up on the wrong side of the government
in a complex financial dispute and is now a fugitive in the United
States. Shanidze described a regime in which he and his fellow inmates
were forced to eat rotten food and subjected to nighttime beatings.
One Tbilisi taxi driver told me that his neighbor had done a four-year
sentence at age 18 for theft and that he had spent three months of it
in the Gldani prison, the facility at the center of the scandal. “He
told me that three months there was so awful it was like 10 years of
his life,” my driver said. “The guards would burst into the cells at
2 or 3 in the morning and beat people randomly.”
Even before the scandal, the governing party was facing a strong
challenge. Now its hopes of maintaining its monopoly of power are
under much greater threat.
The Oct. 1 election marks a turning point for Georgia. Besides being
a contest for Parliament, it is also a shadow leadership election. In
2013, after Saakashvili’s second and final term as president expires,
a new constitution will take effect, transferring key powers from
the president to the prime minister, who will be elected by Parliament.
Whoever controls the new Parliament will get to elect the prime
minister next year.
Greek scholar Ilia Roubanis has called Georgian politics “pluralistic
feudalism,” a competition between a patriarchal leader who enjoys
uncontested rule over the country and a leader of the opposition
bidding to unseat him and acquire the same. The current contest fits
that description. Put simply, it is a clash of two narratives about
Georgia set out by two big personalities: Saakashvili, and his main
challenger, billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili.
Saakashvili has been personally leading the election campaign for the
governing party, the United National Movement, even though he is not
running for Parliament himself. His main message is that, like the
medieval Georgian king David the Builder, he has been building a new
nation and he and his team deserve to be allowed to finish the job.
In that spirit, on Sept. 16, Saakashvili formally reopened a famous
medieval landmark, the 11th-century Bagrati Cathedral (rebuilt in
controversial fashion, overriding the objections of UNESCO that
the construction work interfered with the original medieval fabric
of the church). On Sept. 27, the new airport, named after David the
Builder, in Georgia’s second-largest city, Kutaisi, is due to open. A
new glass-and-steel sci-fi Parliament building in Kutaisi is also
scheduled to be completed in October.
The opposition says that this Georgia is a Potemkin village hiding
the miserable condition of large segments of the population, such
as the unemployed, rural farmers — and prisoners. Until last year,
Saakashvili was in control of the script, aided by the uncritical
news coverage of Georgia’s two main television channels. But
the countermessage now has a powerful figurehead in Ivanishvili,
Georgia’s wealthiest man, estimated by Forbes to be worth $6.4
billion. Ivanishvili, who built his fortune in the metals industry
during the heady privatization period in the 1990s, is an enigmatic
and colorful figure, best known for his lavish philanthropy, large
modern-art collection, and private zoo — before he unexpectedly
decided to enter Georgian politics in 2011, saying he planned to
become prime minister and turn around the economy. He has since built
a coalition of six very diverse parties named Georgian Dream after
a song by his rapper son.
Both the governing United National Movement, or UNM, and Georgian
Dream are loose coalitions, held together by their powerful patriarchal
leaders.
Saakashvili’s governing UNM combines a free market Westernizing
ideology with the bureaucratic machine of a typical post-Soviet
governing party. Georgian Dream is an even more diverse alliance
whose constituents’ only common connection is loyalty to Ivanishvili
and opposition to Saakashvili. It has support in Tbilisi from urban
democratic professionals who want to see the current governing party’s
monopoly on power broken. Outside the capital, it frequently plays on
economic populism and barely concealed xenophobia. A third group in the
alliance comprises former bureaucrats who evidently see Georgian Dream
as their route back to power. This makes for mixed messages: Georgian
Dream has attracted some of Georgia’s most pro-Western opposition
members and puts forward a foreign-policy platform that commits them
to EU and NATO membership, while its new television station, Channel
9, has lashed out at local Western-funded organizations such as the
National Democratic Institute and Transparency International for
alleged covert support of the Georgian government. I saw the clash of
narratives in bright colors in the Black Sea city of Batumi. Batumi
has been Georgia’s boomtown and Saakashvili’s pet project for the
past few years. The president spends as much time there as in Tbilisi
and has invited a stream of foreign visitors to visit, including
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in June.
It is an impressive sight. A forest of new skyscrapers has sprung up,
changing what used to be a shabby seaside resort into a modern city.
Batumi now has a Sheraton, a Radisson, and a string of new casinos.
Tens of thousands of tourists poured into the resort this summer.
On the other hand, I found locals much less enthusiastic than
I expected. Their complaints covered the spectrum from merely
disappointed (“local people aren’t getting jobs”) to the fully paranoid
and xenophobic (“the Turks are buying up the city,” “Turkey is working
with Saakashvili to recapture Batumi”). Batumi was part of the Ottoman
Empire until 1878, and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk almost reconquered it
in 1921.
Several buildings have become symbolic battlegrounds. The Georgian and
Turkish governments jointly agreed to plans to reconstruct a mosque,
built by the Ottomans in the mid-19th century and destroyed by the
Soviet regime in the 1930s. But the project appears to have been
halted after anti-Turkish protests supported by the Georgian Orthodox
Church and local opposition activists, several of them members of
Georgian Dream.
A less pious building project is Batumi’s Trump Tower. A massive
billboard stands on the seafront proclaiming the spot where it will be
constructed. The Donald himself has become friendly with Saakashvili
and visited Batumi this April. The opposition points out that he has
merely lent his name to the project, not invested any money, and calls
it an empty PR stunt designed to boost the image of the government,
rather than the Georgian economy.
The local parliamentary race pits Giorgi Baramidze, a long-standing
Saakashvili ally and deputy prime minister, against a local Georgian
Dream-affiliated populist named Murman Dumbadze. I went to see both
of them.
Like most of the current Georgian elite, Baramidze still looks
improbably young. (He is in fact 44.) He speaks excellent English,
having studied at Georgetown University. He ridiculed the local
opposition as xenophobic and made a robust defense of the mosque and
the Turkish presence in Batumi. “How can we isolate ourselves from
our biggest neighbor after Russia?” he asked. On the mosque issue he
said, “We internationally are not apologetic on this question.” The
current government can be faulted on many things but not on tolerance
to foreigners and other faiths.
Baramidze’s democratic tolerance did not extend to the opposition,
however. One of the legitimate complaints of the Georgian opposition
for years is that no television channel that criticizes the government
is allowed to broadcast nationwide. Under much international pressure,
the Georgian Parliament in July passed a law known as “Must Carry,”
obliging cable operators to carry all television channels, including
the Ivanishvili-affiliated station, Channel 9. But despite the calls
of many outside actors, including the U.S. government, the legislation
expires on Election Day. “Why not continue it?” I asked Baramidze.
“We have to bear in mind that Channel 9 might serve as a catalyst to
give Russia a free hand to act against Georgia [after the election],”
Baramidze told me implausibly, spinning the idea that to allow
the opposition channel airtime might be a prelude to the rumble of
Russian tanks.
Dumbadze, the Georgian Dream candidate, is as gaunt as Baramidze is
chubby. He has a reputation for old-fashioned Georgian nationalism
and was expelled this March from the liberal-leaning Republican Party
after insulting an ethnic Russian colleague.
Dumbadze has trimmed his xenophobic rhetoric, or rather repackaged
it as economic nationalism. He told me that he had opposed the mosque
reconstruction and that “Batumi was behind me,” but that he would now
favor it if local Muslims wanted it. The problem, Dumbadze claimed,
was that the government was discriminating against Georgians in favor
of Turks, who were getting the jobs and investment opportunities the
locals were being denied. As a result, Georgians are being forced to
travel to Turkey as guest workers (something others confirmed for me
in Batumi). “I think that a Turkish passport and a Georgian passport
are not equal here,” he said. “A Turkish passport is stronger.”
During the protests against the mosque, he promised that he would
“raze it to the ground with bulldozers.”
This anti-foreigner pitch may well win him votes. Throughout Georgia,
I noticed the paradox that the governing party is doing badly in
areas where foreign investment has been strongest, perhaps because
it failed to make its case to the local population.
At Batumi’s Press Cafe, my host and guide to the city, Aslan Chanidze,
helped me understand why. A journalist and nongovernmental activist,
he was fielding telephone calls from his home village. A Turkish
company, assisted by the Georgian government, is planning to build a
new hydroelectric power station nearby. According to Chanidze’s telling
of it, in classic post-Soviet style, neither of them appeared to have
explained to the local population what they were doing, and villagers
were being told to sell their land at deflated prices.
All this fits with what many nongovernmental reports have been
saying for years: that modern Georgia’s biggest problem is the
absence of rule of law. In its enthusiasm to build a new Georgia,
Saakashvili’s government has been cavalier in its regard for people’s
property rights.
Georgia is a land of regions, each one fighting its own election. I
traveled north along the Black Sea coast to Zugdidi, a small,
bustling town on the border with the Russian-supported breakaway
region of Abkhazia.
Nothing in this election is straightforward. In terms of the outlook
of its candidates, Zugdidi is the mirror image of Batumi. Here,
the Georgian Dream candidate is Irakli Alasania, a Westernized,
English-speaking politician who split from the government after the
2008 war. He had served as Georgia’s envoy for talks with Abkhazia,
when he was then ambassador to the United Nations — and is now
talked about as a presidential candidate for 2013. The governing
party’s candidate here is Roland Akhalaia, the chief prosecutor and
Soviet-style strongman of the region.
Akhalaia is also the father of two fierce and powerful sons, Rata,
the deputy defense minister, and Bacho, the interior minister who
resigned over the prisons scandal. He did not want to see me, so I
spent most of the day with Alasania and his supporters.
As we drove out to a village named Orsantia to see an opposition rally,
we spotted Akhalaia, the government candidate, talking to a crowd of
100 or so voters on the road, but my driver was contemptuous of this as
an exercise in democracy. “Look at the minibuses, one, two, three,” he
said, pointing to the vehicles parked behind the crowd. “They’ve bussed
people in.” (Although I was not able to substantiate the claim, it’s
one I heard frequently from opposition supporters around the country.)
Orsantia is a large village dotted with fruit trees and palms.
Talking to some of the locals waiting to hear Alasania speak, I was
struck by the fact that they didn’t mention the conflict in Abkhazia
on their doorstep at all. In fact, the only time anyone mentioned
Abkhazia was to say something I hadn’t expected at all: that young
men from the village were going to work in the breakaway region’s
resorts of Pitsunda and Gagra for the summer.
The Georgian Dream opposition movement is well organized in the
region. A score of volunteers in blue T-shirts had brought people
out of their houses and had set up a microphone on what passed for
Orsantia’s village green. Alasania arrived in a four-wheel-drive car
and stood under a couple of pine trees talking to a large crowd. He
talked fast and people listened mainly in silence, frowning.
On the fringe of the rally, I talked to two well-dressed elderly
men, a former policeman and a former factory manager. Neither had
a job anymore; both were hoping for a Georgian Dream victory in the
election. When I mentioned the word “progress,” one of them shot back
at me, “Any progress is thanks to the West. It’s because you are here.”
Back in Zugdidi, I talked to Alasania in the Pizza Diadem cafe,
along with two more Iraklis (confirming my long-held view that Georgia
could do with a few more first names) — one his spokesman, the other
a young businessman and the candidate in the nearby town of Abasha.
Alasania said he had faced a lot of harassment and obstruction earlier
in the summer, but in the last three weeks things had gotten much
easier and he could campaign freely, a change he attributed to the
arrival of long-term election observers from the Organization for
Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). He said he was confident of
victory but was worried that people in the villages were conservative
and might be afraid to come out and vote.
What were the main issues in the election? Jobs. When I mentioned that
U.S. President Barack Obama’s biggest problem was an “8-point-something
unemployment rate,” Irakli the businessman laughed and said, “In
Abasha, it’s 98-point-something.” (Officially Georgia’s national
jobless rate is 16 percent, but a recent poll found that 34 percent
of respondents were unemployed and looking for work.)
To be a voter in this election in Georgia is to be caught in an almost
mythical battle between clashing titans: a government with a strong
record that is widely felt to have grown arrogant and lost touch with
ordinary people, and an opposition, led by the country’s richest man,
that has lots of energy but lacks a well-articulated program apart from
“Georgia Without Misha [as in President Saakashvili].”
Traveling around Georgia I sensed a mood that was palpably more
sympathetic to the opposition and the idea of change. Polls that had
given the governing party a wide lead were probably misleading — they
also recorded a large number of “don’t-knows” and “refuse-to-answers”
— voters more likely to cast their ballots for Georgian Dream. Yet
many had given up hope in the government while not being fully
convinced by Ivanishvili. I also saw that the governing party was much
better mobilized. On Election Day, the UNM will be able to count on
most of the support of public employees and also of the country’s
ethnic minorities, Armenians and Azeris, who tend to vote for the
government in Georgian elections so as to prove their loyalty to the
state and also because the current government has a better record
when it comes to protecting minority groups.
Another important factor is that the electoral system is severely
weighted in favor of the government. Almost half — 73 of the 150
seats being contested — are in local constituencies where the UNM is
fielding official candidates who can get out the vote and many of the
opposition challengers are little-known outsiders. It is theoretically
possible that the governing party could emulate George W. Bush in 2000,
by winning a majority despite losing the popular vote.
Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream coalition has spent much of its
time campaigning with one hand tied behind its back, hit by
multimillion-dollar punitive fines for alleged improper use of funds
and with much more restricted access to television than the governing
party. International observers have slapped the government’s wrists
for this, with a team from the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly saying that
“the fines levied are disproportionate and apparently being levied
in a selective manner mainly targeting one political subject.”
If the opposition does worse on Election Day than it expects, this
could be a recipe for trouble, as Georgian Dream contests the results
and the government defends its victory. The opposition wants to evoke
the parallel of the Rose Revolution that followed 2003’s disputed
election, while the government summons up fears of the civil war that
wracked Georgia in the early 1990s. Plenty of people I met in Georgia
were bracing themselves for confrontation. Most were worried that it
would be hard to mediate between the two warring sides.
In Zugdidi, an old friend and yet another Irakli, journalist Irakli
Lagvilava, argued that Georgia has come a long way in the last 20
years, allowing him to put a positive spin on this election. “After
the era of [nationalist President Zviad] Gamsakhurdia, we learned
that we shouldn’t shoot each other; after the Rose Revolution we
learned that next time we have to choose our leaders by elections,”
he said. “We are making progress.”
Progress, so long as the polarized forces fighting this election
reconcile themselves to the idea that outright victory is unlikely
and they may have to share the political space, not dominate it.
VANO SHLAMOV/AFP/Getty Images
[arr-indent.gif] SUBJECTS: POLITICS, GEORGIA, EASTERN EUROPE
Thomas de Waal is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/09/26/georgia_holds_its_breath