Arnon Grunberg

Law

Protests

On Georgia - Andrew Cockburn in LRB:

“One evening in early March, I stood on Rustaveli Avenue in front of the floodlit Georgian parliament in the midst of a crowd that was swelling rapidly as ever more people, including families with children and dogs, joined the protest. The demonstration had originally been scheduled for two days later, when a new law backed by the ruling party, Georgian Dream, was due to be voted on: any organisation receiving more than 20 per cent of its money from abroad would be forced to register as an ‘agent of foreign influence’. Although its supporters claimed the law was modelled on the Foreign Agents Registration Act that the US introduced in 1938, the people around me were more conscious of a similar measure enacted by Vladimir Putin in 2019, which led to the debilitation of civil society in Russia. Word had spread that the authorities had quietly moved forward the vote on the new law.”

(…)

“The crowd was overwhelmingly young. Many of them had been alerted to the protests through the nexus of Tbilisi’s flourishing nightclubs, which feature entertainment ranging from heavy metal drag to the Georgian National Ballet. Acting as communal centres for the generation born after independence, the clubs exert a significant political influence: they are places, one protester told me, ‘for seeing how many we are, and how strong we can be together’. As the March protests gathered force, the clubs closed to encourage patrons to demonstrate instead. Andro Eradze, founder of the LeftBank club, was careful to stress that there was no central co-ordination. ‘It happens naturally, without too much thinking.’ He said a defining moment was the massively destructive flash flood of June 2015, which killed twenty and left the city deep in mud. Lions, tigers and other dangerous animals escaped from the zoo and stalked the streets for days. While the ill-prepared government struggled to cope with the devastation, thousands of young people spontaneously mobilised to clean up the mess. ‘I was part of that,’ Eradze told me. ‘It was phenomenally important for the growth of communal consciousness.’ This was the generation, uninterested in and even contemptuous of established political structures, that stood around me now. Few seemed to have read the draft law, but all of them thought it would destroy any connection they might have to liberal freedoms, because it would involve the removal of foreign funding from the civil society NGOs on which many depend.”

(…)

“On the international stage, that opposition is symbolised by Mikheil ‘Misha’ Saakashvili, Georgia’s former president, who was arrested on his return to the country in 2021, having been charged in absentia with multiple abuses of power during his rule. Saakashvili is the subject of heartfelt appeals from Western politicians and media outlets demanding his release from prison on health grounds. (He has been on intermittent hunger strike since 2021, claims that he has been poisoned and is serially reported to be ‘near death’. He is, according to the Observer, being held in a hospital in Tbilisi and is ‘gaunt and confused’.) But the only Georgian public figure I saw depicted on protest signs, shown in a torrid embrace with Putin, was Bidzina Ivanishvili, the billionaire oligarch universally assumed to be the true ruler of the country, but who has no official post and never appears in public. Nor were there any politicians among the speakers denouncing the ‘Russian law’ from the steps of parliament. Later in the week, when a former minister who now leads a small opposition party seized a microphone, the crowd chanted ‘Leave’ until the microphone was torn from his grasp by a well-known local artist who declared that ‘this is a time for art and love.’ The general atmosphere reminded me of the anti-Wall Street Occupy movement a dozen years ago, which was eventually clubbed into submission by Mike Bloomberg’s police. Here in Tbilisi the persistent and increasingly angry crowds achieved a better result. After three days of escalating protests, the government withdrew the law.”

(…)

“Just over a decade later, with Soviet power beginning to crumble, Georgians gathered again, demanding the right to secede from the USSR. On 9 April 1989, the crowd was beaten back by troops wielding shovels – twenty were killed. It was a turning point. ‘Before the massacre of 9 April, maybe some people were for independence but most were not,’ according to Tedo Japaridze, who would later become foreign minister. ‘The next morning, everyone in the country woke up a patriot.’ After independence in 1991 Georgia descended into chaos. ‘Everyone who lived through the 1990s is still traumatised by those years,’ one of this year’s protesters told me, and he counted off the various civil wars and insurrections of the period – ‘at least four’ – on his fingers. Parliament itself was the site of pitched battles, with one post-independence leader making a last stand in the cellars. Shevardnadze, politically recast, became president in 1995 and began rebuilding a country now shorn of the breakaway provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.”

(…)

“Among those fervently invested in change were the growing number of foreign-funded NGOs engaged in the promotion of ‘civil society’. There may also have been more shadowy forces at work. The late Greg Stephens, an operative with the US political consultancy Black, Manafort and Stone, exclaimed proudly at a meeting in London: ‘I did Georgia. $30 million. So cheap!’”

(…)

“But Saakashvili soon provoked Russia by adding military police to the unarmed peacekeeping patrols in South Ossetia, sparking unease in Washington, where officials fretted that their hyperactive protégé might get everyone into trouble. ‘Can you ask Misha something for me?’ Colin Powell said to Georgia’s foreign minister. ‘Does he have to poke the bear in the eye every day? Maybe just once a week!’ By 2006, the Russians had decided that Saakashvili was both untrustworthy and a pawn of Washington. ‘They used a Russian phrase: “You can’t have a handshake with this guy,”’ Zurab Abashidze, a former Georgian ambassador to Moscow and currently the government’s senior adviser on relations with Russia, told me.
It was dangerous to provoke this mood in the Kremlin, especially since various events were bolstering Putin’s suspicions that he faced an irredeemably hostile West. Georgia and Ukraine were accepted as prospective members at the Nato summit in Bucharest in April 2008. Earlier that year the US and its allies recognised Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia, a precedent that had ominous implications for Georgia. Encouraged by ambiguous messages from the White House, which he chose to interpret as promises of support, Saakashvili sent the Georgian army into South Ossetia in August 2008, where they rained indiscriminate artillery fire on civilian neighbourhoods. The Russians counterattacked, advancing to within an hour’s drive of Tbilisi. After Georgia’s defeat, Russia established military bases in both South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and recognised them as independent states. But the consequences of Saakashvili’s rash initiative weren’t all bad: copious aid soon began flowing from the USand EU to Georgia, now a certified victim of Russian aggression.”

(…)

“As Saakashvili’s expropriations gathered force after 2008, Ivanishvili came to believe that he too was under threat. He took decisive action by founding a political movement, Georgian Dream, to contest the elections due to be held in 2012, and deftly assembled a coalition of opposition parties under its auspices. Running on a platform of reform and lavish welfare promises, including free healthcare for serious operations and free washing machines for all (every house in his home village got a new roof), Ivanishvili transformed himself into an effective stump speaker and politician. ‘He actually listened to what you had to say,’ Stefan Tolz, a Tbilisi-based filmmaker who covered the race told me. ‘Saakashvili, on the other hand, was only interested in what he had to say. He reminded me of Donald Trump.’ Two weeks before the elections, a TV station owned by Ivanishvili broadcast a dramatic video of police officers beating prisoners. Despite Saakashvili’s protests that it had been staged, Georgian Dream swept the polls and Ivanishvili became prime minister. Emissaries from Washington, where faith in Saakashvili still ran high, asked him nervously how he intended to rule Georgia. ‘I am not going to rule Georgia,’ he said, winningly. ‘I am going to govern an institutionalised democracy with a full-scale engagement of civil society.’ Reassured, the visiting US senators instructed Saakashvili to accept his defeat.”

(…)

“Curiously, Ivanishvili’s continued rule, via the Georgian Dream party he controls, is in part dependent on the man he displaced. After his rejection by Georgian voters and a spell of comfortable unemployment in an upscale Brooklyn neighbourhood, Saakashvili found a new home: in 2015, Petro Poroshenko, then president of Ukraine and a friend from university, made him a Ukrainian citizen and appointed him governor of Odesa. But the pair soon fell out. Saakashvili began campaigning against his former ally, denouncing him as the font of Ukrainian corruption. Stripped of his new citizenship by an irate Poroshenko and accused of corrupt dealings with Russian ‘criminal elements’, he was dragged by the police from a rooftop where he was threatening to commit suicide. When Volodymyr Zelensky replaced Poroshenko as president in 2019, Saakashvili saw the chance of a return to power in Georgia. Zelensky’s administration includes associates of Saakashvili’s from his Georgian government, and in October 2021, with their support, he smuggled himself back into Georgia in a refrigerator truck. He clearly expected to be greeted by a flood of popular support, but he was arrested within days, then tried and sentenced on charges stemming from scandals involving beatings and deaths during his years in power. He has been incarcerated ever since, but a well-financed campaign in Washington portrays him as the victim of a plot orchestrated by Putin.”

(…)

“As an American resident in Tbilisi pointed out, the government ‘is panicked that if Putin wins in Ukraine, they’re next. And if he loses, he’ll need a quick win somewhere, so they’d be next.’”

Read the article here.

I was in June 2022 for the second time in Tblisi. This time for a book on refugees, that will be published in the Netherlands in July.
Even though Amnesty has officially protested the incarceration of Saakashvili, see here, in Tblisi he was highly unpopular.

My guide, a clever young artist, suggested that he was personally involved in torture and depraved sex acts, well I’m not sure, but the disgust he managed to provoke was much higher than the disgust heaped on the oligarch in charge, Bidzina Ivanishvili.

It’s clear that Saakashvili became unhinged, how this happened is something we might find out later.

Nobody in Georgia told me that the war in 2008 was provoked by Saakashvili. And I’m not sure why he would still have defendants in Washington.

Also, Putin is in charge already of two parts of Georgia, South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Maybe he wants more. Maybe.
After Ukraine, a war in Georgia? Or because the war in Ukraine was so successful or because the war was such a disaster.
I’m doubtful.
And Shevardnadze was a ruthless communist before he became Gorbachev’s Foreign Minister and a respected figure in the West.

Whatever happens, I don’t see Georgia becoming a beacon of liberal democracy in the next decade.

But a rather cheap and slightly adventurous tourist destination, yes. Absolutely.

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