Prague Property

Georgia’s protests

People power

Nov 8th 2007 | TBILISI
From The Economist print edition

The president tries to face down protests from the opposition

IT WAS exactly four years ago that Mikheil Saakashvili, then a youthful firebrand leader of the opposition to President Eduard Shevardnadze, brought his supporters out into the streets of Tbilisi. The protesters were complaining that Mr Shevardnadze had staged and won a rigged parliamentary election. The demonstrations were peaceful but, because they went on day after day, also intimidating. Within days, Georgia’s “rose revolution” had driven Mr Shevardnadze out of power and installed Mr Saakashvili in his place.

Four years on it is Mr Saakashvili who has been confronted by the biggest protests since the rose revolution. The most recent ones, in central Tbilisi and in front of the parliament building, have attracted crowds at least 50,000 strong. The protesters object to Mr Saakashvili’s forceful, hands-on style, complain that the benefits of the boom (annual GDP growth is close to 10%) have been too narrowly shared, and demand fresh elections.

Yet unlike Mr Shevardnadze four years ago, Mr Saakashvili seems determined to hang on. He claims the demonstrations are part of a Kremlin-backed putsch against him. “High-ranking officials in Russian special services are behind this,” he said, adding that several Russian diplomats would be expelled. Georgia’s ambassador to Moscow has been recalled.

Certainly Russia has systematically provoked Georgia, with trade and energy sanctions, harassment of Georgian migrants in Russia, and—most recently—mysterious air raids. But Mr Saakashvili’s response will do little to help his country’s reputation as a shop window for the West in the former Soviet Union.

On November 7th police forcefully dispersed the protesters, using tear-gas and water cannon. Scores of people were reported injured. Among those beaten was Georgia’s human-rights ombudsman, Sozar Subari. The government then declared a 15-day state of emergency. Riot police stormed the main opposition television station, Imedi, and took it off the air.

Countries that normally support Georgia against Russian bullying are aghast. Many have been worried privately for some time about cronyism in Mr Saakashvili’s inner circle. Last month the secretary-general of NATO, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, underlined the need for greater political transparency and a stricter rule of law if Georgia wants to progress towards membership. Outsiders worry that state influence on the media is too strong. Many think that the government mishandled a spectacular bust-up last month with the firebrand former defence minister, Irakli Okruashvili, now in exile.

Yet the opposition’s stance can sound hysterical and sometimes outlandish (hanging the president in effigy and demanding the restoration of the monarchy after a 200-year interregnum). Given the shambles that Mr Saakashvili took over in 2003, the obstacles he has faced and the progress he has made, criticisms of him may seem harsh. The opposition’s motives are open to question too. Badri Patarkatsishvili, a tycoon who fled from Russia, openly bankrolls some of the protesters, no doubt for admirable reasons. That raises questions about the influence of big money in poor countries’ politics. An adviser to Mr Saakashvili says those backing the opposition want Georgia to be a weak state that big business can manipulate.

Western countries will be urging Mr Saakashvili to return political life to normal as soon as possible. If he cannot produce proof of Russian involvement, many will feel that he has cried wolf, using his country’s geopolitical significance for narrow domestic advantage. Ketevan Tsikhelashvili, a Tbilisi-based analyst, comments that Mr Saakashvili and his government have survived, but adds that “in the longer term I cannot say his perspectives look very good.” At the very least this week’s events have shown how disillusioned many Georgians now are with Mr Saakashvili’s commitment to the rose revolution’s ideals: freedom, legality and international respectability.

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Over a barrel
Nov 8th 2007
From Economist.com

The oily politics of silence

TIME was when a word from Washington, DC made wheels turn on the other side of the world. Not any more, as shown by the case of Enayat Fatullayev, a jailed Azeri journalist.

The authorities in Baku have just tried and sentenced him to a further eight-and-a-half years for terrorism, incitement to ethnic hatred and tax evasion; Mr Fatullayev, one of Azerbaijan’s best-known journalists, was already serving a two-and-a-half year sentence for defamation, stemming from an internet posting he says he didn’t write.

His swashbuckling style of journalism had made him plenty of enemies, but what seems really to have annoyed the authorities was his investigation into the still unsolved murder in 2005 of his former editor, Elmar Huseynov.

The case has been taken up by all the main international press watchdogs. Jo Glanville of the London-based Index on Censorship says his prosecution is “transparently political”. She and others want America to intervene.

And indeed it has. America’s top diplomat dealing with the region, Dan Fried, raised Mr Fatullayev’s case during a visit to Azerbaijan earlier this month.

America can say all the right things. The point is that Azerbaijan does not take them seriously. Just like the Kazakh authorities across the Caspian Sea, the leaders of Azerbaijan have the West pinioned.

One rope is energy security: the only hope for independent gas supplies for Europe from central Asia and the Caspian is the Nabucco pipeline through the Caucasus. A row with Azerbaijan would harm the already flimsy chances of that, leaving Europe even more dependent on Russian gas exports, with all the attendant political risks.

Secondly, Azerbaijan is a dependable western listening post and operations base in a region where America is dismally short of such things. When America objected to Uzbekistan’s grossly disproportionate attack on demonstrators in Andijan in May 2005, the dictatorship of Islam Karimov moved sharply closer to the Kremlin and closed an important American air base. Not much gain for the West there.

If America wanted to, it could pick fights over human rights with every Western ally from the Balkans to the Indian Ocean. It is hard to argue that such a policy improves anybody’s chances of promotion or re-election.

In the short term, these manoeuvrings can be justified. Gains in realpolitik and hard cash are tangible; betraying principles bears little immediate cost. If the main aim is to counter Russian imperialism, then tolerating the imprisonment of a few journalists in Azerbaijan (between seven and 11, in fact) may be the price paid.

In the long term, it makes it all the harder to differentiate the West’s supposedly law-governed multilateralism, based on respect for political freedom and individual rights, from the “sovereign democracy” promoted by the Kremlin.

This approach stresses non-intervention and moral equivalence. But the decline in credibility compounds itself: the weaker and more selective the West’s protests seem to be, the less seriously anybody takes them.

Moreover, when dictators do fall, the people who replace them tend to remember who their backers were. The opponents of the Azeri regime may look pretty marginal now; one day, perhaps, they won’t be.

The best hope for Mr Fatullayev is not official Western protests but the desire for international respectability. For all the Azeri leadership’s billions, that is something that they cannot buy. International rankings for good government and judicial integrity give the country a dismally low standing. The only way to improve that is better government—a trend not in evidence in Azerbaijan.

The shamefully onesided and heavy-handed treatment of Mr Fatullayev will simply underline outside perceptions that Azerbaijan is a corrupt petro-state run solely for the benefit of its proprietors.

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