Category: 2020

Jacobin Magazine
Georgia’s Clownish Mikheil Saakashvili is the Perfect Embodiment of
Post-Soviet Capitalism
By  Sopiko Japaridze
Oct. 14, 2020
The United States isn’t the only country facing terrible options in
its elections this fall. Georgia, in the Caucasus region south of
Russia, is again looking at the usual lineup of right-wing parties to
choose between — something typical of its politics in recent years.
But there are also dozens of new vanity-project parties that have
formed in order to take advantage of the low barrier to get into
parliament — and hence access state funding.
The low barrier was itself a victory won by the opposition, after
protests last summer prompted by an MP for European Georgia (a
splinter from former president Mikheil Saakashvili’s United National
Movement). He rushed into the parliamentary auditorium draped in the
Georgian flag and threw Russian MP Sergei Gavrilov out of the chamber.
If Gavrilov was chairing a routine meeting — a barely political event
connected to the Orthodox Church — the optics couldn’t have been worse
for the dominant Russophobic mood: a Russian politician sat in the
most powerful seat in the Georgian parliament, and so he had to be
chased out.
Such histrionics have been the norm in Georgian politics over the last
three decades — a blend of farce and tragedy perfectly symbolized by
Saakashvili himself. After his election defeat in late 2012, he was
ousted as president by the then-new Georgian Dream coalition,
bankrolled by billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili. Forced to flee the
country, Saakashvili curiously pursued his political career abroad —
becoming a Ukrainian citizen and governor of that country’s Odessa
oblast. His time as governor was short-lived, as he turned on Petro
Poroshenko — the president who appointed him in the first place — with
accusations of corruption.  Ukraine’s new leader, Volodymyr Zelensky,
has since appointed Saakashvili to chair the executive committee of
its National Reforms Council. But in recent weeks, the well-traveled
Saakashvili has announced his return to Georgian politics.
This story of one country’s former president becoming another
country’s governor seems bizarre. But it isn’t quite so odd if one
considers the former Soviet space as one entity. Twenty-seven new
countries were “born” again into capitalism after the destruction of
the Eastern Bloc, and they were all prescribed the exact same shock
therapy by international organizations. These latter would also use
one country’s radical liberal reforms to pressure another unwilling
government to follow the same line, thus forcing the whole region to
swallow neoliberalism and compete for foreign direct investment. This
— combined with the anti-Russian politics that hold sway in much of
the region — gives “Misha” Saakashvili huge sway, not least given the
legendary status drawn from the August 2008 war with Russia. There was
even a tasteless Hollywood film about the conflict, with Andy Garcia
playing Misha.
Saakashvili is particularly important because he has the Western
connections vital to any burgeoning government’s success (John McCain
and Hillary Clinton nominated him for a Nobel Prize). Added to this is
the lack of other experienced personnel locally. But also key are the
limits on democracy in postcommunist countries. Neoliberalism gets
voted out by the people again and again, only for the same policies to
be recycled through international and regional organizations. The
neoliberal reformers ousted by the electorate often get jobs in these
international bodies and think tanks, which then preach these same
measures to other governments in the region.
Now Misha — whose Georgian citizenship was revoked in 2015 and faces
charges for various counts of abuse of power — is not only vying to
return to office in his homeland, but convinced that he is the right
man to lead the country through the storms of the COVID-19 pandemic.
But it’s also worth noting that he remains popular in Georgia. With
each passing day under Georgian Dream’s lackluster rule, Misha’s
period in charge seems better and better for most people — especially
if one takes into account the fact that the economic policies have
stayed the same.
This forgiveness takes many forms. Back in 2012, Saakashvili’s
presidency was undone by revelations of “excessive” police brutality
in prisons, as videos circulated showing shocking scenes of torture
and rape of inmates. Yet with the current government proving feeble in
the face of COVID-19, it seems as if such footage has been relegated
to a distant and blurred memory. Today, a repentant Saakashvili admits
that “mistakes were made” and claims to be a new man — while also
playing down these “errors” by insisting that “only those who don’t do
anything, never make mistakes.” This barely apologetic attitude also
shone through in an interview where it was suggested that many of his
opponents doubted the realism of his current plans; he retorted that
his record on criminal justice had proven his sincerity. As he put it,
“I said zero tolerance towards criminals and everyone would be jailed
— and it happened, no?”
Eating His Tie, Breaking up Old Ties
Why Saakashvili remains popular is a troubling lesson for the Left,
which often considers him simply as the pro-Western father of Georgian
neoliberalism and a madman who ate his own tie on national television.
For despite his neoliberal and radical-libertarian policies, most
Georgians remember him not for being laissez-faire, but for being a
statist and interventionist who disregards cultural norms.
This especially owes to the fact that Georgian politics and society
has a tendency to inertia, due to elaborate friendship and familial
ties that perpetuate patron-client relationships and an inflexible
hyper-patriarchal culture. Such relationships have been disrupted to
some extent by capitalism, internal migration, and emigration, but
among men, these strict behavior codes often persist. Such
relationships also fuel corruption, in the absence of strong
institutions.
Misha was forever willing to disrupt all this. He has always been
absolutely shameless — never backing down from situations that could
be humiliating for other men afraid of losing their standing. This is
the source of both his popularity and the hatred he attracts. Polite
(elite) society finds him embarrassing and insane, while others look
at him as a fighter who risks his personal comfort and reputation for
the greater good: “Misha isn’t loyal to patrons,” “Misha will bite the
hand that feeds him,” they say. This makes him a liability for many
elites.
At the same time, all those who have been typically on the losing end
of patron-client relationships — and in relatively poorer areas of
Georgia — have provided Misha’s electoral base. In general, he
projects the image of doing whatever is necessary to implement his
ideas. As compared to the stereotype of the lethargic Georgian
politician with a huge belly (their size was even the object of an
academic study), the energetic Saakashvili seems like an obsessive
workaholic. If some pundits claim it’s a disaster for the united
opposition to put him up as a candidate — since this is somehow
playing into Georgian Dream’s hands — they underestimate his
popularity.
In fact, Saakashvili’s prospects benefit from much deeper weaknesses
in Georgian Dream. This broad coalition was founded in the run-up to
the 2012 election for the sole purpose of defeating Saakashvili and
started out with promises of social programs and reindustrialization.
Yet such ideas were quickly abandoned in favor of rightfully vilifying
Misha for his eight years in office as a monster who jailed everyone.
Unfortunately, once it reached power the following year, Georgian
Dream didn’t even undermine his legacy effectively. First, in its 2016
constitutional reform, it kept Saakashvili’s egregious Liberty Act,
which outlawed progressive taxation and tightly capped social
spending, even though the coalition had a supermajority that would
have allowed it to revoke this measure. Then — in a  more blatant act
of insincerity and hypocrisy — Georgian Dream kept and handed lifetime
appointments to the very judges who had 99 percent conviction rates
under Saakashvili. This became such a scandal in early 2019 that many
MPs quit Georgian Dream.
In a remarkable illustration of its fecklessness, Georgian Dream’s
leader Bidzina Ivanishvili publicly stated late last year that
Georgians should go and look for work abroad — declaring himself
surprised that anyone demanded jobs be created at home. Startlingly,
he deemed this an unrealistic prospect for the coming decades. His
government has mostly worked to secure legal jobs for the Georgian
workforce in Europe, negotiating with each government. Bidzina, who
once promised dozens of factories would be built in Georgia, was
surprised to learn Georgians expected to be gainfully employed,
without having to leave for other shores.
Further, Georgian Dream abolished the profit tax and forced a
state-sponsored private pension scheme upon the population. Before
COVID-19, the current minister said that she wouldn’t mind if the
Ministry of Economy and Sustainable Development would be renamed the
“Ministry of Tourism.” The current government has thus failed to break
with any of Saakashvili’s own purported failings. As one United
National Movement activist stated, “I loved some things Misha did, and
I hated some things Misha did, but I just hate GD, I haven’t found
anything to love or like.”
Misha’s Legacy
In his day, Saakashvili’s politics were developmentalist and went
beyond other postcommunist reformers who were more or less technocrats
— indeed, he compares himself to state builders like Mustafa Kemal
Ataturk and David Ben-Gurion. Obsessed with his legacy as a national
icon, he is conspicuously ideologically flexible. Hence, while he
started out damning his predecessor Eduard Shevardnadze for blaming
Russia for all his problems — thus distracting Georgians from domestic
failings — now, in both Georgia and Ukraine, he has cast himself as an
anti-Putin hero. He went from criticizing British Petroleum’s poor
environmental and social practices and the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan
pipeline — “We won’t be bullied by BP,” he insisted — to
wholeheartedly supporting it.
But an opportunist like Misha couldn’t have ended up as anything else
but right-wing in substance. The difference between left and right on
the political spectrum is weakest in postcommunist countries,
especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union — indeed, such a
split is often unhelpful in understanding what is happening in the
region. Since socialism was discredited among elites (if not among the
population), and there was no alternative to neoliberalism, no
mainstream political party or political figure could emerge to
challenge capitalist hegemony. The main differences instead revolve
around the implementation of neoliberal reforms — how quickly and how
efficiently.
Such political differences as do exist between the so-called Left and
Right never dent a wholesale acceptance of neoliberalism as prescribed
through the Washington consensus and European Union. At times, there
were disputes over selling foreigners land in postcommunist countries
— but even this ended up as a difference over the time frame of
implementation, rather than of stopping the reform completely. After
all, the EU made land liberalization a deal-breaker for countries to
earn associate membership. Indeed, according to one study, left-wing
governments in postcommunist countries were more effective in
implementing neoliberal reforms than right-wing ones. Even when
left-wing governments could have undone reforms, in fact, they
continued them. It’s no surprise that most of the criticism of
capitalism, the EU, and liberalism in postcommunist countries has come
from the Right, presented as a cultural critique.
In his spell living in the United States, Misha claims to have
observed the limits of liberal democracy when he saw the road leading
to the White House in DC. “You get a sense what different governments
are,” he recounted. “The road was really very bad, worse than roads
[in Georgia] in Shevardnadze’s time. But because local D.C. government
was broke — even if it was leading to the White House, who cares?
There he sits, the most powerful President in the world, but he cannot
fix the road!” He went on, “They call it separation of powers. Some
people would call it democracy. I would call it inefficient.”
As president from 2004 to 2013, Saakashvili thus needed a strong
state. But to this end, he had to manipulate the dominant
international and regional organizations peddling structural
adjustment programs. He learned that it was easiest to placate the
international community by adopting their reforms on paper, while
relying on more informal practices to continue implementing his own
“successful” brand of postcommunist capitalism. This approach was
characterized by mafia-type extortions of businesses, which were then
channeled to certain development funds. If Georgia was rife with
corruption and informal patron-client networks, Misha followed the
Mussolini/Rudy Giuliani practice of jailing everyone for petty
violations in order to break the larger racket leaders and fund the
state budget through bail. Such primitive accumulation through
dispossession and violence was, indeed, fundamental to the transition
to capitalism. Far from the rosy story liberals tell themselves of
rising capitalism bringing democracy and “human rights,” we had what
Karl Marx called “expropriation, written in the annals of mankind in
letters of blood and fire.”
Harry Cleaver’s use of the concepts “devalorization” and
“disvalorization” is very helpful in understanding what happened in
post-Soviet Georgia (and elsewhere in the region). A “devalorization”
happened after the fall of the Soviet Union, which is a loss of
skills, abilities, and knowledge, including their passing down over
the generations. The entire political economy of the USSR was erased
in one fell swoop — and so, too, the professionals and bureaucrats
that went with it. The higher skill sets which the Soviet Union had
relied on — for example, occupational disease specialists — were no
longer needed in post-Soviet Georgia, since the new regime no longer
tracked occupational diseases. Similarly, Georgian silk production was
completely destroyed, as part of an abrupt deindustrialization.
While devalorization was occurring throughout the Shevardnadze period,
with Misha we saw a much more powerful “disvalorization” — meaning, a
recasting of skills and abilities and knowledge in service of whatever
can make most profits. Georgia is known to be hospitable, so let’s
turn every home into a guesthouse; Georgia has great food and wine, so
open up restaurants. Misha did accelerate the development of
capitalism in Georgia, but a peculiarly Western-sanctioned one. Our
neoliberal comparative advantage in a province hidden in the Caucasus
didn’t require highly trained and highly skilled people, but a
low-skilled service economy heavily composed of hosts, drivers, sales
associates, restaurateurs, and servers for tourism. This kind of
political economy evidently limits the economic and social development
of the Georgian people — and has additionally proven vulnerable and
volatile through crises like the 2008 war and the current COVID-19
pandemic.
Comeback King?
Saakashvili remains widely credited for tearing down the post-Soviet
purgatory capitalism of Eduard Shevardnadze’s rule and implementing
capitalism as prescribed by neoliberal institutions. He used the heavy
hand of state power as well as informal power to force these reforms
onto the population. He also used big infrastructure plans, colorfully
painted buildings, and many other shiny-looking projects to coax the
population into his vision of Georgia. But though his is a legacy of
liberal economic policies that limit the state’s formal responsibility
toward its people and sends them to sell their labor on a market
defined by precarity, most Georgians remember him as a “big
government” man — and that is precisely why many want him back.
Despite his horrendous human rights record, he retains his reputation
as a capable — or at least, ever-present — leader.
Georgian Dream’s unabashed laissez-faire attitude seems to have made
Georgians nostalgic for a time when the government acted like they
cared about them — even if that meant disciplining them. It’s
unimaginable that anyone from the current government would run into
the Liberty Bank office and scream at management for mistreating the
elderly, like Misha did when he saw a long line of pensioners waiting
to get their measly pensions. Today, the pension lines are still
extremely long, but no one in power protests about it even for PR
reasons.
In a country where remittances from abroad make up three times the
amount salaries do, where people are systematically beaten down every
day, where employers are not held accountable for their oppression and
exploitation, and where huge sections of the population are addicted
to gambling and debt, it’s easy to understand why many Georgians want
“big government” back. So long as we don’t have a Left willing to
promote a state interventionism that actually gives Georgians public
services they can rely on — finally reversing the post-Soviet
destruction of the social fabric — it seems Georgians will continue to
look to a “madman” like Saakashvili as their defender.
 

                                        Thursday, 
Russia, Turkey Hold More Talks On Karabakh De-Escalation
TURKEY -- Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (L) and Turkish Foreign 
Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu meet in Antalya, March 29, 2019
The foreign ministers of Russia and Turkey again spoke by phone on Thursday as 
the two countries continued high-level consultations on ways of stopping 
hostilities in Nagorno-Karabakh.
The phone call came one day after a conversation between Russian President 
Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan that also 
focused on the Karabakh conflict. The Kremlin said the two leaders “confirmed 
the importance” of the conflicting parties’ compliance with the 
Armenian-Azerbaijani humanitarian ceasefire agreement brokered by Moscow on 
October 10.
The Russian Foreign Ministry issued a similar statement on Foreign Minister 
Sergei Lavrov’s talks with Turkey’s Mevlut Cavusoglu. It said Lavrov and 
Cavusoglu agreed on the need for an immediate halt to the ongoing hostilities 
and the launch of a “ceasefire verification mechanism.”
“We hope that such a mechanism will be launched soon,” Maria Zakharova, the 
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, told reporters in Moscow. She said 
military officials should meet and discuss it “without delay.”
Lavrov’s talks with Cavusoglu came amid continued heavy fighting along the 
Karabakh “line of contact.” Armenia has accused Turkey of encouraging Azerbaijan 
to continue its military offensive.
For its part, the Turkish Foreign Ministry claimed on Thursday that Armenia 
“continues to disregard the humanitarian ceasefire declared on October 10.”
According to the Russian Foreign Ministry statement, Lavrov and Cavusoglu also 
stressed the importance of coordinating “efforts to resume the negotiating 
process” which would aim to achieve “real results.”
In his phone call with Erdogan, Putin also reiterated Russian concerns about the 
reported deployment of Turkish-backed Syrian mercenaries in the Karabakh 
conflict zone. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu likewise raised the matter 
with his Turkish counterpart Hulusi Akar when they spoke by phone on Monday.
Speaking in Ankara earlier on Wednesday, Erdogan denied reports that Turkey has 
recruited and sent allied Syrian fighters to fight in Karabakh on the 
Azerbaijani side.
Armenian Schools Again Closed Amid Coronavirus Spike
        • Ruzanna Stepanian
Armenia -- A teacher measures a first grader's temperature at the entrance to a 
school in Yerevan, September 14, 2020.
Schools and universities across Armenia were again temporarily shut down on 
Thursday due to a sharp rise in coronavirus infections in the country.
A resurgence in officially registered COVID-19 cases began in mid-September and 
accelerated after the outbreak on September 27 of a war in Nagorno-Karabakh 
which led the Armenian government to declare martial law.
The Armenian Ministry of Health has reported record-high higher numbers of new 
cases in recent days. It said on Thursday morning that as many as 1,371 people 
have tested positive for COVID-19 in the past day alone, up from about 850 
single-day cases recorded during the previous peak of the epidemic in late June.
Gayane Sahakian, the deputy director of the ministry’s National Center for 
Disease Control and Prevention, said the health authorities now have to again 
increase Armenia’s hospital capacity to cope with the growing number of COVID-19 
patients.
Sahakian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service that around 1,600 infected people are 
currently treated in hospitals. The total number of active coronavirus cases in 
the country of about 3 million surpassed 11,500 on Thursday.
The number of new cases averaged roughly 150 in early September. The government 
reopened schools, universities and other educational establishments on September 
15.
Commenting on the reasons for the drastic increase in cases, Sahakian singled 
out the war in Karabakh which she said has completely overshadowed the 
coronavirus pandemic. She said that many Armenians have stopped wearing masks 
and following other safety rules set by the government.
Education Minister Arayik Harutiunian said on Wednesday that the country’s 
secondary and high schools as well as kindergartens will be closed for what he 
described as a two-week autumn holiday. As for the universities and vocational 
training colleges, he said they will switch back to online courses on Thursday.
Sahakian said that over the past month there have been major outbreaks of 
COVID-19 in many schools. The official revealed that 72 of them were shut down 
and ordered to revert to distance learning even before the government’s decision 
announced by Harutiunian.
France Again Criticizes Turkey Over Karabakh Fighting
        • Armen Koloyan
France - French Foreign Affairs Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian (L) and German 
Foreign Affairs Minister Heiko Maas adress a press conference at the Elysee 
presidential palace on June 19, 2019..
French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian criticized Turkey’s role in the 
Nagorno-Karabakh conflict on Thursday, saying that Ankara is not trying to stop 
the ongoing fighting between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces.
“There will not be a military victory on this issue so the ceasefire must be 
implemented,” he said, according to Reuters. “What we can see today is the only 
country which isn’t calling for respect of the ceasefire is Turkey and that’s 
damaging.”
Le Drian referred to an Armenian-Azerbaijani ceasefire agreement that was 
brokered by Russia on October 10. Hostilities in the conflict zone have 
continued since then, with the warring sides accusing each other of violating 
the agreement.
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian charged on Tuesday that Azerbaijan is 
continuing military operations along the Karabakh “line of contact” under 
Turkish pressure. He again accused Turkey of instigating the war and deploying 
Turkish military personnel and Syrian mercenaries to Azerbaijan for that purpose.
The Turkish government has strongly backed Azerbaijan’s military operations in 
Karabakh. But both Ankara and Baku deny Turkish involvement in them.
In a phone call on Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin urged his Turkish 
counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan to “make a constructive contribution to the 
de-escalation of the conflict.”
Russia has long led international efforts to end the Karabakh conflict together 
with France and the United States. The three countries co-chair the OSCE Minsk 
Group.
Shortly after the outbreak of the Karabakh war on September 27 President 
Emmanuel Macron accused Turkey of recruiting jihadist fighters in Syria and 
sending them to Azerbaijan.
"A red line has been crossed, which is unacceptable," Macron said on October 1. 
"I urge all NATO partners to face up to the behavior of a NATO member.”
The Turkish and Azerbaijani governments rejected the French accusations backed 
by Armenia. Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev has accused Macron of 
pro-Armenian bias.
Le Drian criticized the Turkish role in the Karabakh conflict after talks held 
in Paris with the German and Polish foreign ministers. Speaking at a joint news 
conference, Le Drian and German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas accused Ankara of 
continuing to provoke the European Union with its actions in the eastern 
Mediterranean and gave it a week to clarify its positions.
Karabakh Truce Still Not Holding, Says Yerevan
Nagorno-Karabakh - An ethnic Armenian soldier fires an artillery piece, October 
5, 2020.
Armenia accused Azerbaijan on Thursday of continuing offensive military 
operations in Nagorno-Karabakh in breach of a Russian-mediated ceasefire 
agreement reached by the two countries on October 10.
“Five days into the Moscow Joint Statement of October 10 on cessation of fire, 
and Azerbaijan continues to torpedo its implementation,” tweeted Foreign 
Minister Zohrab Mnatsakanian. “With the support and direct involvement of Turkey 
and terrorist fighters they continue large-scale war against 
Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh.”
The Armenian Defense Ministry said Azerbaijani forces resumed in the morning 
“intense artillery fire” at sections of the “line of contact” in northeastern 
and southeastern Karabakh. “Heavy fighting is now underway at the same 
sections,” a ministry spokesman wrote on Facebook at 11 a.m. local time.
NAGORNO-KARABAKH -- Paramedics and volunteers work in the basement of a medical 
center outside the city of Stepanakert, 
The Azerbaijani Defense Ministry said Armenian forces “attempted to attack 
Azerbaijani army positions at some sections of the frontline” overnight. It 
accused them of again shelling Azerbaijani districts north and east of Karabakh 
in the following hours.
The ministry insisted that the Azerbaijani side is observing the “humanitarian 
ceasefire” agreed by the Armenian, Azerbaijani and Russian foreign ministers on 
October 10.
In an interview with the Turkish NTV channel aired later in the day, Azerbaijani 
President Ilham Aliyev acknowledged that his army is continuing its offensive 
but blamed the Armenian side for it.
“We will keep advancing,” Aliyev said in remarks cited by the TASS news agency. 
They [the Armenians] must observe the ceasefire because they violated it.”
“We are now in the process of a military resolution of the problem,” he said. 
“We want to finish this process as soon as possible so that it is followed by a 
diplomatic process.”
Russia and the two other mediating powers, the United States and France, have 
repeatedly urged the conflicting parties to honor the agreement.
Russia has also called on Turkey, Azerbaijan’s staunch ally, to help stop the 
hostilities. Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep 
Tayyip Erdogan discussed the issue by phone on Wednesday.
AZERBAIJAN --- People stand in front of a house destroyed by shellings in the 
village of Bakharly, near Agdam, .
Ankara continues to strongly support Azerbaijani military operations in and 
around Karabakh. Yerevan claims that the Turks are encouraging Baku to continue 
the hostilities.
Karabakh’s Armenian-backed army says that 604 of its soldiers have been killed 
since the start of the war on September 27. Authorities in Stepanakert have also 
reported the deaths of 32 civilian residents of Karabakh caused by shelling and 
drone attacks.
RFE/RL correspondent Susan Badalian reported from Stepanakert on Thursday 
morning that the Karabakh capital was not shelled for a third consecutive night.
Baku has so far refused to disclose the number of Azerbaijani soldiers killed in 
action. It has only reported 43 civilian deaths.
Reprinted on ANN/Armenian News with permission from RFE/RL
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