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(foreignpolicy.com) Or, after two years of bitter political feuds, maybe there's more trouble brewing in the Caucasus.
TBILISI, Georgia — October 27 marked a major turning point in Georgia as people calmly elected an obscure philosopher, Giorgi Margvelashvili, president with a conclusive 62 percent of the vote. It was the first time in Georgia's history an incumbent was replaced by the ballot and not by revolt.
The election of Margvelashvili, representing the ruling Georgian Dream (GD) party, has effectively closed the chapter on the Saakashvili era, a decade of lightning-speed reform and economic progress at the cost of an increasing authoritarianism that applied justice selectively and harshly. This change could not have been possible without the intervention of the enigmatic Georgian billionaire, Bidzina Ivanishvili, and his GD party.
In October 2011, Ivanishvili held his very first press conference in his $50 million Tbilisi mansion after announcing his decision to enter politics and challenge President Mikheil Saakashvili's monopoly on power. I had hoped to learn how the former recluse was different from every other Georgian messiah who promised to save the country only to get deposed in the end, but I never got the chance. The event instantly digressed into a ludicrous fracas of 200 journalists fighting over a microphone and shouting caustic questions about the billionaire's Russian connections and his pet penguin.
My chance came the day before parliamentary elections in 2012 at a private home in an east Georgian village, at a dinner table overflowing with food, sitting across from Ivanishvili, who had just finished his last round of campaigns. Between bites of sumptuous Kakhetian fare, he spoke obliquely of judicial reform and ethnic tolerance and sounded off bluntly about Saakashvili's failures. In the end, I didn't learn much about the man, except that he intended to build democratic institutions without a concrete plan. For Georgians, that breath of fresh air was enough: his party won.
For Saakashvili and his United National Movement (UNM), it was a shocking loss. Misha (as Saakashvili is commonly known) swallowed his pride and acknowledged defeat, marking Georgia's first ever democratic transfer of power. But with a year left in his term, the lame duck president was forced to share an uneasy period of cohabitation with Ivanishvili and the GD, a loose coalition of individuals bent on destroying Misha's legacy.
The tumult of the past year was underscored by the indictments of some three dozen UNM officials, including several former ministers, most notably Vano Merabishvili, former interior minister and prime minister. Meanwhile, some ministers have escaped abroad, like former justice minister Zurab Adeishvili. Many of Georgia's Western partners criticized the political nature of these arrests, yet Ivanishvili maintained he wasn't settling scores -- he was restoring justice and bringing democracy to the country.
Back in Ivanishvili's futuristic mansion, one month before this year's presidential elections, I asked him if he wasn't trying to destroy Misha.
"Why should I destroy? I'm not a sick person. They are destroying themselves. I like to build," he replied.
In 2010, the Saakashvili government amended the constitution to increase the prime minister's authority and decrease the president's. Because the constitution prohibits the president from serving more than two terms, most people here thought Misha would simply change chairs to remain in power. But GD crushed such speculation when they took over parliament and elected Ivanishvili prime minister in 2013. But it's a position the billionaire apparently doesn't want.
In September, Ivanishvili reiterated a campaign promise to leave politics and enter civil society after elections. Next week, he will name his successor. This will leave the country in the hands of his party, a loose coalition of liberals, conservatives, and ethnic nationalists. Georgia will become the first former Soviet nation governed by a parliament and not ruled by a strong executive. And it's a move most Georgians were against.
"That's because when people look at things they like to hang all the responsibility on one person," Ivanishvili said. "But every single person needs to share the responsibility in order for society to evolve. Having a messiah is detrimental to a society. The longer I stay, the worse it will be."
Critics worry that parliament will fall into chaos upon Ivanishvili's departure or, conversely, that he will simply keep pulling the strings from behind the curtain. Others, like Lincoln Mitchell, a scholar at Columbia University's Harriman Institute and former unofficial advisor to the prime minister, believes that Ivanishvili is betting that institutions are stronger than people. However, he has no doubts that the billionaire will continue to be involved behind the scenes.
"I think most Georgians know that and are OK with that. It is extremely difficult for the political class in Georgia to understand that things are not as volatile as they were a year or two ago. The institutions are stable," he says.
Well, stable of a sort. Lawmakers have raised eyebrows by discussing laws to ban the sale of ribbed condoms and fine officials who don't speak Georgian well enough. But they have also passed laws to protect the independence of the judiciary and to ensure more transparency in media ownership.
When it comes to minority rights, however, the disparate parliament has seen some internal conflict. When several dozen Georgian Orthodox Christian priests led a mob of thousands to attack a handful of gay rights activists demonstrating against homophobia, GD Chairman David Saganelidze blamed the activists for the violence that ensued and demanded they be punished. GD coalition member and parliamentary speaker Davit Usupashvili of the Republican Party, however, condemned the attack.
Usupashvili also spoke out against the forced removal of a minaret in a southern Georgian village in August, while much of the government kept silent. This was the latest in a series of anti-Muslim crusades that have occurred across the country since the deputy head of parliament, the GD's Murman Dumbadze, lead a protest against the construction of a mosque in the western port city of Batumi last year before parliamentary elections. Yet, Ivanishvili, the first politician to say "sexual minorities are equal members of society," asserts that Georgia is an inherently tolerant country.
"This [intolerance] is all artificially amplified by Saakashvili," he said abstrusely. "When the cohabitation is finished, there won't be a problem."
That might be so, but there will still be xenophobes and homophobes in parliament, like in every other country in the world. What remains to be seen is how well Georgia will be able to protect minority rights. In his report, Thomas Hammarberg, the European Union special adviser on constitutional and legal reform and human rights in Georgia, noted the country's shortcomings in protecting the rights of religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities.
But the issue that will really determine parliament's future is jobs. Officially, Georgia's unemployment rate hovers around 16 percent. Realistically, it is double that. In a September 2013 National Democratic Institute (NDI) poll carried out by the Caucasus Research Resource Centers (CRRC), jobs were the top national concern; some 46 percent of the population consider themselves unemployed and looking for a job.
Ivanishvili offers no answers here, only that he spends most of his time working on the "challenges" of job creation and the economy.
Under Saakashvili, the economy soared to an average GDP growth rate of 6.1 percent between 2004-2012. But in the first half of 2013, it plummeted to 1.8 percent. Critics were quick to blame this plunge on the government's wobbly transition process, yet foreign direct investment didn't just drop in Georgia, it fell across the entire region in 2012. Moreover, local business leaders are worried the government's recent policies like liberalizing the labor code and forbidding foreigners from buying agriculture land are keeping investors away.
On the bright side, in June, Russia lifted its 7-year embargo on wine, mineral water, and fruits. This is particularly good news for winegrowers in eastern Georgia, who are reporting the most successful season in years. According to the Georgian Wine Agency, July exports were 43 percent higher than last year, a spike almost wholly attributed to Russia. But establishing economic ties with Russia, which occupies roughly 20 percent of Georgian territory poses some existential problems, particularly when it is putting up barbed-wire fences through Georgian villages. To this thaw in relations with Moscow, Ivanishvili shrugs his shoulders, saying it's not his fault Saakashvili got suckered into war.
"It's important for any small country to not provoke a big neighbor," Ivanishvili advises. "We can't attempt to change Russia, but we can save our state by taking the correct steps, which we are doing."
Meanwhile, Saakashvili argues publicly that you cannot "normalize relations" with an occupier and is livid that Ivanishvili would even consider joining the Kremlin's Eurasian Union project, in reference to comments the prime minister made on the initiative in September. In a televised statement, the president accused Ivanishvili of "breaking the main taboo of Georgian politics."
Ivanishvili retorts that it's plain nonsense. "As a state, our strategy remains European and NATO integration. That is very clear. Who knows what the Eurasian Union is? I don't think the Russians even know," says Ivanishvili. "All I said was that we are closely watching this formation process. I stress, if it does not come into conflict with our strategy, why shouldn't we discuss it?"
And, perhaps, time for more sober discussions on all things have arrived. With Saakashvili packing his bags and returning to his apartment in central Tbilisi and Ivanishvili preparing to step down, we may see an end to a bitter rivalry between two forces of Georgian politics that polarized the political landscape since Ivanishvili first announced his challenge in 2011. On Sunday, David Bakradze, the UNM's unobtrusive presidential candidate, gracefully congratulated his opponent Giorgi Margvelashvili's victory -- a mature gesture we are unaccustomed to seeing in Georgia, a country now putting the era of larger-than-life leaders behind them.
(foreignpolicyjournal.com) During the 1990s, post-Soviet Georgia initially struggled to foster democracy. Its government was marked by former Soviet bureaucrats and widespread corruption. However, after the largely peaceful, pro-democratic Rose Revolution of 2003, Western educated Mikhail Saakashvili became President and rekindled hopes for democracy in post-Soviet Georgia. Since his inception, the new President has initiated a wave of reforms in order to bring Georgia out of Russia’s shadow and into the Western spotlight. Saakashvili’s reforms included restructuring of Georgia’s police forces, streamlining the bureaucracy, and facilitating economic growth, but also crackdowns on the separatist regions of Svaneti, South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Though the latter endeavor eventually failed, Georgia under the tenure of Saakashvili accomplished a substantial rapprochement with the United States and Europe in a bid to include his country into NATO and the European Union.
Notwithstanding these successes, on October 1, 2012, Georgian billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili of the Georgian Dream party claimed victory over Saakashvili’s party in parliamentary elections. Georgia’s most wealthy man with a net worth of 6.4 billion dollars, Ivanishvili entered the political sphere after spending significant time in Russia, where he had accumulated his wealth during Russia’s privatization era after the collapse of the Soviet Union. And while President Mikhail Saaskashvili does not formally leave office until 2013, the freshman Prime-Minister Ivanishvili has not hesitated to distinguish himself as both a Georgian reformer, as well as a potential threat to democratic development.
In the first few months following his victory, Ivanishvili passed amnesty to around 3,000 “unfairly” incarcerated prisoners, conducted arrests amongst the opposition, and has begun to buy-out Georgian media outlets. Apart from these overt potential threats to Georgian democracy, there are, moreover, also more subtle developments under Ivanishvili’s young regime. They, for instance, take the form of two monuments to Georgia-born Soviet leader Joseph Stalin that have recently been restored in Zemo Alvani for the anniversary of Stalin’s birthday on December 21st and Akura in eastern Georgia. A third monument will be replaced in the central Georgian town of Gori after the town’s residents successfully gathered 5,000 signatures in a petition to return Stalin to his former place on town square. While at first glance Georgia’s restoration of Stalin monuments may seem innocuous in the shadow of Ivanishvili’s more aggressive policies, the implications of such developments are too significant to brush aside.
Joseph Stalin was a key figure in the 20th century whose specter still looms over the countries of the former Soviet bloc, Georgia, and Russia in particular. The mustachioed leader has enjoyed a moderate rehabilitation in Russia, and it appears that his home country of Georgia may be following in Russian footsteps, if not more so. However, Stalin’s rehabilitation is more than nostalgia for a by-gone era. It presents significant concern for the future of democracy in Georgia. Stalin is a dubious figure. His resume is highlighted by the Soviet Union’s victory over German fascism in World War Two and modernization via rapid industrialization, juxtaposed against a legacy of immeasurable human suffering and multiple genocides.
Stalin, whose nom de guerre means “man of steel”, was born as Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili in the small village of Gori, Georgia in 1879. Though he later shaped his appearance and took up Russian in order to russify himself and fit in with Russia’s Bolsheviks, he is arguably Georgia’s most famous figure, regardless of having to share a place with Russian history. And as one of history’s globally recognizable persons, Georgia understandably has a tough balance to strike on how to address him. But when it comes to Stalin, his native Georgia is unique in that vehemence for its home town hero was received in a hushed tone under Saakashvili, especially when one looks at the 2010 removal of Gori’s Stalin statue and the recently redacted plans to change the town’s Stalin Museum into the Museum of Russian Aggression.
Georgia’s disownment of her bittersweet national figure can be seen as a desire to depart from a bygone era of cultural repression under the Soviet Union. It is also as an attempt to return to traditional Georgian values of individualism and cultural richness while establishing a new Georgia that is oriented to the West. Even as Georgian desire to be close to the United States remains high, at an approval rating of 71 percent according to a 2011 survey by the Caucuses Research Resource Center, there is no guarantee that this will stay static in light of Ivanishvili’s reforms. Despite Saakashvili’s best efforts to create a new Georgia, a post-Rose Revolution Georgia was haunted by only partially met promises that came in the form of continued widespread poverty, high unemployment, setbacks in potential European Union membership, and a failure to completely reform the judicial system. All of these realities were exacerbated by the repercussions of the global economic crisis, the 2008 territorial loses of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and magnified disappointment after the Rose Revolution caused by media overexposure and overexcitement.
In the face of crippling realities and under the threat of a resurgent Russia, Ivanishvili’s influence on replacing statues of Joseph Stalin speaks as an appeal to captivate Georgian imagination and even national pride. The danger with this form of soft power is that younger generations of Georgians may be unaware of the extent of Stalin’s crimes. Stalin’s symbolic strength may even become appealing to a citizenry that is witnessing aspirations to become Western slowly diminish. In light of economic hardship and the ambitious Ivanishvili, reigniting admiration of an idealized Stalin will provide dangerous comfort. And even if the Stalin statues remain a demonstration of Ivanishvili’s soft power, they serve as a reminder that even though the original Stalin has long since passed, Georgia is still in his grip in the 21st century.
(foreignpolicy.com) Georgia's president-elect is putting the country in strong danger of losing its hard won democracy.
When Georgian President Mikheil Saakasvhili conceded defeat in parliamentary elections last month, he set an admirable and important precedent. Never before in the Caucasus, and only rarely in the post-Soviet space as a whole, had a leader transferred power peacefully following a democratic election. Long derided as an authoritarian by his domestic opponents, the Kremlin, and cynical naysayers in the West, Saakashvili put his country before his political career when he made way for the Georgian Dream coalition of billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili to assume control of parliament. But, as they say, no good deed ever goes unpunished, and it appears that Saakashvili's political adversaries are not holding up their end of the democratic bargain.
The problems started the day after the election, when the surprise victor Ivanishvili -- until recently a recluse who had made his fortune in Russia -- hosted a contentious press conference at his party headquarters. There he insisted that Saakashvili, whose presidential term does not expire until October 2013, resign immediately. When asked by a Bloomberg News correspondent whether his electoral triumph signaled the return of organized crime to Georgia, Ivanishvili snapped at her in a way more befitting a tin-pot tyrant than a democrat. The overall performance did not inspire confidence. It was that of a man used to getting his way, and for whom answering questions by pesky journalists is a tiresome nuisance, not an obligation. And though Ivanishvili later put aside his call for Saakashvili's resignation following an international outcry, he has sounded it again in recent weeks, emboldened by a series of politicized arrests.
Earlier this month, police detained a former Defense Minister from the Saakasvhili administration and the military's current chief of staff, only a day after the investigations into their alleged wrongdoing had been opened. Both men have been charged on spurious grounds of having "insulted verbally and physically" military personnel in 2011. In the weeks since, over 15 other individuals -- all of them either members of Saakashvili's United National Movement (UNM), including Tbilisi's Deputy Mayor, or civil servants who worked for the Interior Ministry -- have been detained. Over the weekend, the Ministry of Internal Affairs announced that it has uncovered a case of abuse of power by former Prime Minister Vano Merabishvili, whom the Chief Prosecutor promised would be questioned without specifying a date. On a visit to Tbilisi Monday, European Union Foreign Policy and Security Chief Catherine Ashton offered a rote complaint about the fraught political situation: "There should be no selective justice, no retribution against political rivals." When Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Secretary General of NATO (which Ivanishvili insists he wants Georgia to join), stated that he was "extremely concerned" about the arrest of a Georgian military officer, an Ivanishvili ally criticized the former Danish Prime Minister over his refusal to condemn cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed seven years ago.
Ivanishvili has tacitly threatened the opposition that their continued criticism of the new government will result in further arrests and that only by shutting up will the political witch hunt cease. "Once I told [President] Saakashvili that it would be easier for him to come out, say he feels sorry and resign. This is the key to everything that is happening now," Ivanishvili saidlast week. "But they are still presenting themselves as angels. They are lying to us. This will not reduce the probability of the arrests." According to sources around Saakashvili, Ivanishvili has long been privately threatening what he is only now saying publicly. Raphael Glucksmann, a Saakashvili advisor, says that, during their first meeting after the election, Ivanishvili told Saakashvili that, "he should resign or his aides would face juridical consequences."
As if jailing political opponents were not enough, the new government is simultaneously attempting to free individuals whom it has dubiously labeled "political prisoners," including those found guilty of involvement in acts of terrorism. On November 19, the Georgian Parliament's Human Rights Committee granted political prisoner status to over 180 individuals. Seven of them include Georgian citizens found guilty of acting as accomplices to a series of terrorist acts that transpired in the fall of 2010, ranging from a bomb attack near the American Embassy in Tbilisi to an explosion near a supermarket. According to the Georgian Ministry of Internal Affairs, all of the attacks were orchestrated by a Russian intelligence officer stationed in Abkhazia, one of two breakaway territories inside Georgia. An additional seven names on the list are Russian citizens arrested in 2010 as part of a spy ring, 19 are members of a tank battalion that attempted to mutiny in 2009, and 24 were arrested during riots, also in 2009, orchestrated by Nino Burjanadze, the pro-Putin former speaker of the Georgian parliament.What Ivanishvili cannot accomplish through political use of the police and judiciary, he can attempt via other means. Already, the Ivanishvili-controlled cabinet has cut funding for the maintenance of Saakashvili's presidential plane in 2013. Seven UNM MPs have defected to parties in the Georgian Dream coalition; the UNM says they were coerced into doing so. Ivanishvili's allies only need 13 more seats in order to achieve a constitutional majority of 101, something which Ivanishvili, with his unlimited cash, has the ability to influence should he choose. On top of this, Ivanishvili has launched an audit of the public broadcaster (praised by the European Union Monitoring Mission as the most objective news source in the country) which he has also said he wishes to merge with his own Channel 9, (technically owned by his wife) via the "donation" of the latter's television equipment and personnel. Meanwhile, the private Imedi Television, formerly owned by a mogul close to Saakashvili, has been acquired by a mogul close to Ivanishvili, and has ceased broadcasting news.
Ironically, Ivanishvili's political shenanigans have been partly enabled by one of the weak points of Saakashvili's legacy, namely his failure to adequately reform the country's justice system. One of the most pertinent criticisms of the Saakasvhili government has centered on the lack of judicial independence, a charge that some Saakashvili confidantes now reluctantly admit. "The judiciary was not independent enough for sure during the 10 years of our government," says presidential advisor Glucksmann. "Contrary to the reform of the police, we partly failed to reform the judiciary." Now that there's a new crowd running the country, the opportunists in the judicial system appear to have made an about face in their loyalty. While admitting these faults, however, Glucksmann insists that, while the UNM ran the country, "we had a fundamental rule: No leader of the opposition should be sent to jail, whatever crime he was suspected to have committed."
Turnover and transformation is to be expected in any political transition, but jailing one's political opponents on spurious charges would risk everything Georgia has overcome in the two decades since it won independence from the Soviet Union. That such a scenario has followed so swiftly after the October 1 elections, however, comes as little surprise. Many of Ivanishvili's supporters are members of the old guard -- former police officers sacked during Saakashvili's restructuring of the corrupt force, ossified bureaucrats from the Eduard Shevardnadze era -- who supported Ivanishvili not because of any specific policy changes he offered, but as a form of revenge against the man responsible for their downsizing. Add to this Ivanishvili's authoritarian personality, his ties to Russia, the crudely nationalistic and xenophobic makeup of his coalition, and you have a recipe for retribution, and worse.
Georgia has enough problems on its hands -- high poverty and unemployment being the two biggest -- that the last thing it needs is a political witch hunt. Fortunately, the pro-Western desires of most Georgians should be enough to prevent a full reversion back to Soviet or post-Soviet levels of repression, the sort of setback that would shutter Georgia's Western integration. 71 percent of Georgians, according to a 2011 survey by the Caucuses Research Resource Center, said that the country should be closest diplomatically to the United States. In a speech last week, Saakashvili told his people that, "You wanted, we all wanted to bring back Georgia to the European family of free and prosperous nations it should never have been separated from." The coming months will test whether Georgia's young democracy is strong enough that no amount of political shenanigans can undo it.
