Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Cattive nuove per Saakashvili lacchè georgiano degli usa nonchè mafioso

http://www.warnews.it/index.php/content/view/717/37/

 
http://www.warnews.it/index.php/content/view/717/37/
Per la Georgia le cattive nuove sono nella politica interna non nello
scontro, cercato e voluto da Saakashvili, con l'Ajaria:
Georgia: History Repeats Itself
BRITISH HELSINKI HUMAN RIGHTS GROUP
http://www.bhhrg.org/LatestNews.asp?ArticleID=31
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, Merab
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 Djokhtaberidze, 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 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 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 “[a]nyone 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, Nino Burdjanadze, 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 Indjia.
[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 Iveria, 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 Burdjanadze’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. Burdjanadze 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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