Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: L'attenzione ai diritti umani nell'Ex-URSS

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/07/hbc-90000482
Guess which Eastern European country will soon have the third largest
military force in Iraq? That same country is strongly pro-NATO and has
on retainer a Washington lobbyist who was a leading advocate for the
war in Iraq? Now guess which country is getting a free ride from the
Bush Administration-and the media-on human rights and democracy?
The answer is Georgia. Ever since the "Rose Revolution" of 2003 that
toppled Eduard Shevardnadze, the former Soviet official, the Bush
Administration has maintained close ties to the government in Georgia.
The media, too, has been sympathetic to President Mikhail Saakashvili,
who is generally portrayed as a spunky leader who is creating a
Western-style state bound by the rule of law.
That portrait, though, is far from accurate. In 2005, Human Rights
Watch released a report that described "the ongoing impunity for
torture, a problem that persists despite some government measures
taken to combat it." In another report last year, "Undue Punishment:
Abuses against Prisoners in Georgia"," Human Rights Watch found that
many prisoners "live in severely overcrowded, filthy, and poorly-
ventilated cells. In the last two years, the prison population has
nearly doubled due to the routine use of pretrial detention, even for
nonviolent offences." (Incidentally, there were 16,911 convictions in
Georgia last year and just 37 acquittals, a rate that even an old
Soviet-era prosecutor would have had a hard time matching.)
This year, the U.S. State Department's own human rights report says of
Georgia, "The government's human rights record improved in some areas
during the year, although serious problems remained . . . [T]here were
some reports of deaths due to excessive use of force by law
enforcement officers, cases of torture and mistreatment of detainees,
increased abuse of prisoners, impunity, [and] continued overuse of
pretrial detention for less serious offenses."
Consider court proceedings now under way against Maia Topuria, a 41-
year-old mother of three who along with 12 other defendants is now on
trial for allegedly attempting to overthrow the government. In an echo
of the Communist era, the judge has closed the courtroom to the
public, the media and foreign observers. The defendants, who are
members of the political opposition, are held in cages in the
courtroom (except for one, who was released after providing an
incriminating statement against the others).
The evidence, to put it mildly, is weak. When they were originally
arrested, the defendants were accused of participating in a May 24,
2006 meeting where they were said to have plotted the government's
overthrow. When one of the defendants proved that he was out of the
country on that day, the government changed the date of the alleged
plot to May 4. When another defendant proved he was at a cardiac
clinic on that day, the government suggested he sneaked out to attend
the coup meeting, though four doctors at the clinic have said it that
would have been impossible for him to have done so unnoticed.
The government has offered as evidence a handwritten statement
implicating the defendants from a witness who claimed he provided it
in September of 2006 after he heard of the plot. But when questioned
by a defense attorney in court, the witness could not even define
numerous words from his original statement. (He defined "dispute" as
"a TV debate," "imitation" as an "attempt," and said that he no longer
knew what "spontaneous" meant but he did when he wrote his original
statement.)
"The government doesn't want any public scrutiny of the case because
there is no case," Melinda Sarafa, an American lawyer who is
representing Topuria, told me. "Every day I'm in court I wish the
media were there because the situation is so preposterous." Sarafa
says that Georgia is moving towards a "super-executive" style of
government with no meaningful checks and balances, and charges that
other than the State Department report, she can find "no other
affirmative efforts by the Bush Administration to express concerns
about identifiable instances of human rights violations."
The Bush Administration could probably stop the farcical trial if it
complained to the government, but since Saakashvili is "pro-Western"
it doesn't utter a peep of protest. Its silence might have something
to do with the fact that Georgia recently announced it would increase
its troops in Iraq from 850 to 2,000. After South Korea pulls its
troops out, as it has announced, that will leave Georgia, a nation of
about 4.5 million people, with the third largest contingent in Iraq
after the United States and Great Britain.
Georgia's cause in Washington is probably also helped by its lobbyist,
Randy Scheunemann, a former advisor to Donald Rumsfeld who helped
draft the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998. A week after the 9/11 attacks
Scheunemann joined with a group of conservatives who sent a letter to
President Bush calling for Saddam Hussein's overthrow, and in 2002 he
became the founding president of the Committee for the Liberation of
Iraq; now he's helping former Soviet Bloc states win business there.
It's ironic that the Bush Administration criticizes Russia for
backsliding on democracy but says nothing about similar types of
problems in Georgia and other former Soviet states that have undergone
pro-Western revolutions. The media faithfully echoes the charges on
Russia but has generally failed to explore the situation elsewhere in
Eastern Europe.


L' amico presidente di Georgia mi ha sempre interessato.
E' salito al potere con un colpo di stato violento.
E' stato sponsorizzato da Soros.
Con l'aiuto delle forze di sicurezza addestrate dagli USA che il coglione di
Shevrnadze si era tirato in casa.
Lo sguardo del giovane dittatorello ricorda quello di un'altro dittatorello
salito al potere vendendo il culo agli stranieri, un certo Mussolini.
Sguardo torvo.
Sono morti parecchi esponenti della opposizione in modo strano, e sono stati
incarcerati molti altri con retate in stile argentino.
Il sud america dei regimi made in USA si e' spostato tra europa e asia ve ne
siete accorti?
Saluti
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