PART I: After Hubris, Comes Nemesis
The scene was downtown Tbilisi. The year 2005. And the 43rd President of the United States, George W. Bush proclaimed that before the winds of freedom blew from Baghdad to Beirut, it was Georgia’s Rose Revolution that inspired freedom-loving folks across the region. The president’s bouts of messianic fervor were imbued with religious and philosophical undertones. With a spirit of Christian militancy, Mr. Bush espoused a teleological determinism that freedom would one day guide Georgia to its emancipation from Russian captivity. However, what stuck in the collective psyche of Georgian society since the president’s visit, was not the ideological and philosophic underpinnings of his speech, but a more simplistic one-liner: “ Georgia is a beacon of liberty for this region and the world”.
Sharing the stage with the president, was of course his “golden boy” Mikheil Saakashvili (Misha, as he was popularly known). Young, energetic and western-educated, Saakashvili had become a useful idiot for the neoconservative elite in Washington. From Bush to Cheney, to the long line of usual suspects in the neoconservative and neoliberal think tank establishment, he was their lapdog whose purpose was to create a political environment in Georgia perpetually hostile to Russia. Anyone who questioned the wisdom of this radical and foolish policy was labeled pro-Russian, backward and anti-western in Misha’s political system.
In all fairness, Saakashvili and his United National Movement (UNM) did implement some effective and necessary reforms immediately after coming to power as a result of the Rose Revolution in 2003. Police reform was perhaps his most successful achievement, along with the fight against corruption. Importantly, Saakashvili implemented tax reform, which for the first since independence allowed the Georgian government to collect taxes from its citizens, filling the coffers of the treasury. Simply put, the UNM, backed by the west, and particularly Washington, was starting to look like a poster-boy for liberal internationalism. Yet, little did they know that the fanfare would be short-lived, and Georgian society would soon face the specter of state terror which would evoke memories of the Soviet past.
Nevertheless, what made Saakashvili’s government politically attractive during its first few years was the exhaustion and disenchantment that Georgians felt toward the previous government. That government, headed by the former Soviet Foreign Secretary, Eduard Shevardnadze, had fallen from grace. Once considered the savior of Georgia’s statehood in the aftermath of the Georgian civil war during the early nineties, by 2003 he had all but squandered his political capital. Shevardnadze’s enormous political talents and international reputation could not sustain his presidency, which oversaw a notoriously corrupt government. Even his close friend and fellow diplomat, James Baker, had to warnShevardnadze “in no uncertain terms” that Washington would not take well to “tampering” with elections.
Even so, Baker must have felt a sense of guilt in the recesses of his soul for abandoning his friend – “Silver Fox”, – as Shevardnadze was often called. After all this was the man who had played a key role in ending The Cold War. During my conversation with the former US Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Jack Matlock, Dr. Matlock alluded to what might be perceived as the intersubjective code of honor among older generation of statesmen, when he pointed out that Shevardnadze was not treated fairly, perhaps implying that Shevardnadze deserved more dignified treatment from his political counterparts after a lifetime of service.
And so, in 2003, a new era of politics in Georgia commenced. Having come to power as a result of the Rose Revolution, the brood of Young-Hegelians took over the project of social, cultural and economic engineering on a massive scale. To his credit, Shevardnadze did warn the public that Saakashvili was “dangerous.” His warning turned out to be prescient. Saakasvhili’s foot soldiers, the newly-minted, soulless technocrats would indeed pose a danger to the Georgian statehood. However, by that time it was already too late: the neo-bolshevism had arrived.
With the passage of time, nothing has encapsulated the shallowness of describing Saakashvili’s Georgia as a beacon of liberty, more in the minds of Georgian citizens than the political terror they had to endure under the government of Mikhail Saakashvili and his UNM. An inseparable part of this project was the draconian economic policy, which had to be brought into strict alignment with politics. A much harsher neoliberal economic policy had already been implemented in Russia and had played a key role in bringing post-Soviet Russia’s economy to its knees; Moscow was put at the mercy of Washington—something Russia’s elites have, quite understandably, yet to forget.
Once the UNM created its political and economic vision, it was time to sell it to Georgian society. With political sensationalism, the Orwellian assault on language and meaning followed. For example, the neoliberal economic project became replete with words and phrases such as “libertarianism,” “free markets,” and “Ayn Rand.” At the time, the majority of Georgians did not have a clear idea of the philosophic and intellectual origins of these words, let alone an understanding of the type of economic transformation they were meant to describe. In other words, the economy that was forced upon Georgian society had little to do with the principles of free markets, open competition or libertarianism. Instead, the directive was to simply shove democracy promotion and neoliberal economics down their throats.
Shortly after coming to power, Saakashvili invited Kakha Bendukidze, who had made his fortune in Moscow, to head Georgia’s economy. Bendukidze embarked on an indoctrination campaign to force the ideas of market fundamentalism and privatization on Georgia. His mantra was ‘everything is for sale’, except Georgia’s consciousness. Under his leadership, major strategic economic assets were sold off to none other than Russia. This was a deeply disturbing and a puzzling economic policy, which Georgian society staunchly resisted, but ultimately was no match for the combination of terror and western support deployed by the government. Here was a government whose political image was ostentatiously pro-western, which on a daily basis, stirred up hatred against Russia. Yet, ironically, it was perfectly willing to sell off economic assets of strategic importance to Moscow. All this was done under the banner of libertarianism and free markets.
This ideology descended into its inevitable absurdity when Bendukidze and Saaksvhili proposed the sale of the strategic energy pipeline to Gazprom—the Russian energy giant. Recognizing that such a move would potentially jeopardizethe decades-long political and economic investment in Georgia’s energy transport projects from Washington, it took the US State Department’s involvement to stop the proposal from moving forward. Michael Mann, who was in charge of the Caspian Sea energy issues at the time, had to publicly warn against such moves on part of Saakashvili’s government. In addition to this highly questionable economic policy, there was another foolish proposal to sell off Georgia’s strategic railway system to Russian companies, which also failed to materialize.
In the final analyses, it has become clear that the neoliberal and laissez-faire economic gospel produced very little, if any, long-term sustainable industrialization and/or modernization of the Georgian state. In one of his many criticisms of this plan, a well-known scholar on the region, Stephen Jones, recalls that this period in Georgia was marked by “political schizophrenia” instead of economic prosperity.
From the ‘Freedom Agenda’ to the Imposition of Sanctions.
The extraordinary damage to Georgia did not occur solely because of the failure of neoliberal economics. It was primarily a failure of politics, of the so-called “freedom agenda” that was packaged up and sold to Georgia under false pretenses. The “beacon of liberty” soon turned into a state terror that Saakashvili unleashed on his own people.
The first documented signs of state terror started to appear when the current ruling party, The Georgian Dream (GD), defeated the UNM in the 2012 elections. Recognized by the west as a “democratic moment”, a peaceful transfer of power occurred in Tbilisi. However, almost immediately after the elections, illusions of peaceful coexistence between the UNM and GD started to shatter. Georgia faced a fundamental question: Would the GD government mount a successful political and legal campaign to prosecute the members of the UNM for allegations of egregious violations of human rights, property rights and economic crimes? It was understood, however, that the challenge was how to persuade Washington that not only did these crimes occur, but that the GD was morally obligated to deliver justice to the families of the victims. It became clear soon after the elections that forming a statewide, “truth commission” would be categorically opposed in Washington. When Bidzina Ivanishvili, the founder of the GD, met with the US Assistant Secretary of State Philip Gordon, Gordon warnedhim against “selective prosecutions” unless Ivanishvili wanted to see Georgia’s prospects of joining Euro-Atlantic institutions dwindle.
And yet, a few years later , Washington did show a certain flexibility to GD, when it acquiesced to eventual arrests of the most well-known and notorious ministers of Saakashvili’s regime for abuses of power. For example, Mr. Bacho Akhalia, who held the positions of the minister of defense and state intelligence chief, was sentenced to over seven years in prison. Another feared minister of the interior, Mr. Ivane Merabishvili was also sentenced to over four years for abuse of power and financial crimes.
But perhaps most shockingly, the Georgian court arrested and sentenced Saakashvili himself for abuse of power, for ordering a beating of a Georgian citizen, businessman and opposition figure. What made this perplexing for Georgian citizens was that GD had repeatedly tried to extraditeSaakashvili from Kiev, Ukraine, but had failed. However, Saakashvili returned on his own volition, only for GD to arrest him. So far, this strange incident has been explained in Georgia as yet another in a series of erratic behaviors by the former president who is determined to cause another revolution and make a comeback. If so, this turned out to be a major miscalculation on Saakashvili’s part. He and his supporters must have forgotten that UNM’s crimes were still fresh in collective memory of the Georgian society, and they could not fathom the idea of Saakashvili’s return to power, which in their minds would certainly mean the return of terror.
In any event, he sneaked back into the country in the back of a truck.
Saakashvili is currently serving his time in a “jail cell” (house arrest) with nurses hovering over him to make sure the GD does not face trumped up accusations from extremist parties in Europe that they are slowly killing the former president under appalling conditions. In other words, the GD does not want to turn Saakashvili into another “pro-western martyr” like Sergei Magnitsky.
Eventually, when the European Court of Human Rights, “confirming that the trial was fair”, ruled that “there were no human rights or health grounds to release Saakashvili”, the extremist opposition parties along with their European counterparts had no choice but to acquiesce to the hard facts about their one-time hero.
Under Saakashvili’s reign there was a structure of systemic abuse. Shortly after winning the election in 2012, GD revealed hundreds, if not thousands of secret, illegal tapes that contained compromising materials on Georgian citizens,including horrific videos of rape and physical abuse, which the previous government used in Soviet-style interrogations against its opponents.
Arguably, the most damaging incident, and the one which is believed to have sealed the fate of Saakashvili and his UNM during the 2012 elections, was the prison abuse video taken in a notorious prison on the outskirts of Tbilisi: Gldani Prison,which has earned a coveted place on the list of the worst prisons in the world–a list which also includes the prison at Guantanamo Bay.
The horrific scenes of institutionalized abuse of power would also regularly manifest in the streets of Tbilisi. The death of a young bank employee, Sandro Girgvliani, is still remembered in Georgia as a symbol of state terror under UNM. After a verbal altercation with high officials from the Ministry of the Interior in a local restaurant, Girgviliani was taken outside of Tbilisi and killed. There were also said to be signs of torture on Girgvliani’s body. This event galvanized the population with protesters demanding the arrest of those responsible for the crime. However, after arresting those who were directly responsible for the killing, Saakashvili pardoned them with an early release. They had also been given “extremely favorable treatment” while in prison.
Eventually, the family of Girgvliani mounted a legal case in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. The court issued a scathing report and expressed shock on “how the different branches of state power…acted in concert in preventing justice from being done”, It determined that the government “failed to consider credible allegations of complicity”. This tragic incident has become a permanent reminder to Georgian society of the hypocrisies of Washington’s “Freedom agenda” during the Saakasvili era.
Yet, Saakashvili’s regime continued to present to the Georgian public and to its western partners a façade-the reality, however, was quite different. For example, while administrative, law enforcement, or “technical institutions”functioned effectively, the WEF’s Global Competitiveness Report consistently showed that in terms of “judicial independence,” Georgia was “in the 95th place, a lowly 131st place when it comes to “property rights,” and in 141st place with regard to “effectiveness of anti-monopoly policy.” The UNM’s program of state extended to the business community and private sector. According to the transparency international report, owners of businesses were constantly terrorized by the government which used the federal prosecutor’s office as a tool of extortion.
Neither did the Western ideology of limited government trickle down to the populace under Saakashvili. Saakashvili’s intellectually unimpressive admiration of Reagan might have been expected, given his government’s promotion of John Galt, or Margaret Thatcher as exemplars of freedom and personal responsibility. However, here, too, Saakashvili, along with his patrons in Washington, thought the abuse and betrayal of these ideas was an insignificant matter in the grand scheme of things; a small nation, in a primitive state of admiration for all things American, could be used as a laboratory of experiments for these ideas, with little to no concern for failed methods of delivering and putting them into practice.
And fail they did. Misha’s infamous “zero tolerance” policy was eerily similar to that of Reagan’s war on drugs policy. Even worse, it was heavily based on 1984 Soviet law which allowed the state to keep alleged criminals in jail for ninety days on the sole basis of police testimony. When enacted in 2006 , almost overnight the entire population of Georgia became guilty on the basis of the state’s say-so: “with more than 99 percent of criminal cases brought to court ending with a conviction. “ The following quote describes accurately disturbing signs of autocracy at work: “transforming the public’s attitude towards crime, decreasing the crime rate to a minimum, and eradicating impunity by reacting to every single crime, including minor [ones].”
In order to maintain control of this draconian system, a creative legal mechanism was concocted, which introduced the practice of “plea bargaining” which was used to generate revenue for the state, letting alleged criminals off the hook with a fine and an admission of guilt. Plea bargaining generated over fifty million dollars in the first nine months of 2009 alone. As predicted, this new law led to excessive use of force, which in turn resulted in increased deaths in police custody.
According to a Carnegie Endowment report, 73 arrests between 2005-2006 resulted in 25 deaths—and the majority of the victims were unarmed. According to Gevin Slade, an expert on criminal justice, Saakashvili’s government borrowed heavily from both the US and Russian prison systems and adopted some of the worst aspects of each state’s penal law. As a result of these policies, the population of Georgia saw drastic increases in the number of prisoners between 2004 and 2012. Georgia became the country with “the highest per capita prison population in Europe, with 514 prisoners per 100,000 citizens, and the sixth highest out of 221 prison systems in the world”. For a small country of just about 4 million people, this was a shocking statistic. Still more, during the last 6 years of UNM’s rule, 653 prisoners died in Georgian jails. By comparison, “in 2009 the average prison mortality rate in Europe was 28.9 to 10,000 inmates, while Georgia’s rate was 71.6 the third highest in Europe”.
Part II will be published tomorrow.
About the author:
Giorgi (Lasha) Kasradze is an international relations analyst with a focus on the states of the former Soviet Union. He concentrates on the South Caucasus and the Black Sea regional affairs. As a keen observer of regional affairs, he has discussed conflicting geopolitical interests between the West and regional powers. Lasha has shared his analyses on the geopolitical podcast of the Stratfor/Rene company- a geopolitical analysis firm as well on YouTube platforms.
His articles have appeared in the National Interest, The New Eastern Europe and Neutrality Studies.
He holds degrees in international relations from Rollins College and The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.