ეს სტატია ერთ-ერთ ინტერნეტ ფორუმზე ვნახე და საკმაოდ საინტერესოა, იმედია სხვებსაც დაგაინტერესებთ
Inside Track: Georgia's Path to Authoritarianism
by Ana Dolidze
08.24.2007
In
2001, in the pages of this journal, Charles King ("Potemkin Democracy")
spoke of Georgia as a sham democracy, with a democratic image in the
West contradicted by the reality on the ground. That was when the
country was under the leadership of Eduard Shevardnadze. Shevardnadze
was an internationally acclaimed statesman, a former Soviet foreign
minister who was a key player in the peaceful reunification of Germany.
Struggling to maintain his democratic image in the West, Shevardnadze
had turned into an impotent and corrupt leader; his country devolved
into a failed state with two frozen conflicts, massive corruption and
extreme poverty. Unfortunately, King’s assertions in his six-year-old
article still hold true today. Under the leadership of U.S.-educated
lawyer Mikhail Saakashvili, Georgia has become an authoritarian state
with kangaroo courts, with a Parliament that does the bidding of the
executive who flagrantly disregards basic civil liberties.
How
is it, then, that Saakashvili’s reputation within the U.S. government
appears to be untarnished? Like Shevardnadze, Saakashvili knows that
his strongest cards are Georgia’s Western orientation and his
friendship with the United States. Saakashvili is a canny and shrewd
politician who understands there is a price for U.S. support. So, as he
makes eloquent speeches to Western audiences about political reforms
and successful democratization initiatives undertaken in Georgia, he
adroitly increases Georgia’s military participation in Iraq, and he
welcomes a proposal to station the new U.S. missile-defense shield in
Georgia.
Saakashvili was considered by many as the "great hope"
for Georgia’s transformation into a democratic and free-market society.
But soon after the Rose Revolution of November 2003, he began to
concentrate power in presidential hands.
Saakashvili
accomplished his campaign to increase executive authority and restrict
civil rights by targeting the Parliament, the media and the judiciary.
The methods used to undermine each democratic institution are similar:
legislative restrictions, political arm-twisting, blackmail and
persecution.
In February 2004, he sponsored amendments to the
constitution that violated the balance of powers, expanding the
president’s authority at the Parliament’s expense. The Parliament was
stripped of important powers that served as a check on the executive
branch and ensured the government’s accountability to its legislature.
The amendments granted the president the right to disband the
Parliament and disregard a parliamentary no-confidence vote on the
cabinet of ministers. Moreover, the Parliament lost its power to amend
the budget or question the government’s annual report on budgetary
obligations
Next, Saakashvili concentrated government power by
stifling political expression, pressuring influential media and
targeting vocal critics and opposition leaders. Despite constitutional
guarantees of freedom of expression, official intimidation of
opposition groups and media figures critical of the government
continues on a daily basis.
Several media outlets were closed
down in the first half of 2004: TV companies (Channel IX, Iberia),
newspapers (Mtavari Gatzeti, Dilis Gazeti, Akhali Epoka, Tribune),
Omega magazine and Media-News Information Agency. In February 2004, the
largest TV companies ended their evening political talk shows.
Giga
Bokeria, Deputy Chair of the Legal Issues Committee of the Parliament,
strongly criticized Irakli Imnaishvili, the anchor of a daily political
talk, for making comments critical of police action at a public
demonstration that turned into a violent skirmish with the police.
Bokeria stressed that in any other country such a journalist would have
been fired. The next day, the channel stopped airing the program and
fired the Imnaishvili. In December 2006, he was publicly assaulted by a
regional governor. The governor was never questioned in the
investigation into Imnashvili’s beating, which was soon closed because
of a lack of evidence.
Georgian law enforcement has also gone
after the government’s civil society critics. In late June of last
year, members of the Egalitarian Institute were imprisoned for thirty
days for staging a demonstration in support of a beleaguered government
critic. They were not given a hearing, the right to appeal the sentence
or the right to consult their lawyers. In June 2007, members of the
institute were put behind bars for twenty days for simply writing "No
to Violence" on asphalt.
Even members of government are not
immune to reprisals. In June 2005, a group of thugs dragged Republican
Party MP Valeri Gelashvili out of his car and severely beat him. The
assault on Gelashvili followed his public criticisms of Saakashvili’s
administration and private life. No one was punished for this brutal
attack. Irakli Batiashvili, an opposition leader who exposed the
current government’s corruption and ties with paramilitary units, was
arrested on trumped-up charges. He was later put on trial—and the
evidence presented against him was both weak and fabricated.
The
attack on political opponents was ratcheted up in September 2006 when
the Ministry of Interior began to persecute political opponents en
masse. Georgian police arrested 29 supporters and alleged associates of
fugitive former National Security Minister Igor Giorgadze. Eventually,
13 people were charged with high treason, namely conspiracy to
overthrow the government. So far, the treason trial has been
characterized by a host of due process and human rights abuses,
including witness intimidation and manufactured evidence. To conceal
deficiencies in the prosecution’s case, the judge took the
unprecedented decision to close the entire trial to the media, the
public, and even outside impartial observers.
Having exerted
control, more or less, over the media and curbed the free expression of
political ideas, the Georgian government turned to reducing the
judiciary’s independence. Under the pretext of court unification, a
majority of judges with guaranteed ten-year tenures were forced to
leave their offices. And without using any objective criteria to
measure eligibility, the judges most loyal to the government were
permitted to stay in their positions. Notably, a parliamentary majority
dismissed five so-called "Rebel Judges" on the Supreme Court, who had
been outspoken about threats they had received from the executive
branch.
According to Freedom House’s 2007 Nations in Transit
report on Georgia, "a lack of competence and independence among
judges", is a reality. "There are widespread allegations", the report
notes, "that political leadership exerts hidden pressure on judges who,
at least in politically sensitive cases, hardly dare to disappoint the
demands of the prosecution." The dispositions of all criminal cases in
2006 attest to this concern: 16,911 convictions and only 37 acquittals.
The
situation in Georgia today is far from the promise of the U.S.-backed
Rose Revolution. Instead of becoming a fully functioning democracy, the
country is moving toward autocracy—a kind of "super-presidentialism",
as Dr. Taras Kuzio of George Washington University calls it. Parliament
rubber stamps initiatives from the executive; there is no independent
judiciary; economic gains have not translated into a better standard of
living for anyone but government employees; and individual rights and
freedoms are being quashed. According to a poll conducted by the
International Republican Institute in February 2007, 76 percent of
Georgian citizens are afraid to voice their political opinions.
The
success or failure of democracy in Georgia must be a real concern for
the United States. The legitimacy of this regime will ultimately be
determined by its democratic and economic reforms. If the United States
continues to accept at face value the democratic, political, economic,
social and judicial reforms the government says it is making, yet turns
a blind eye to the realities on the ground in Georgia, then the United
States will be complicit in reinforcing, if not permitting,
Saakashvili’s march towards Putin-style autocracy. Legitimacy in
Georgia today depends on timely interventions from the West, providing
constructive, critical engagement to encourage Georgia to demonstrate
through results—not just words—that Georgia’s commitment to democracy
is firm.
Ana Dolidze is a lawyer and former chair of the Georgian Young Lawyers Association.
http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=15274
