Extrajudicial attacks on opposition activists belie Saakshvili’s commitment to democracy

By Carl Thomson

This post is part of the FPC's ongoing Spotlight on Georgia project that seeks to gather different view points on human rights and democracy in Georgia.

While the world’s attention was distracted by events in Iran, another country with a record of human rights abuses and rigged elections sent in the riot police to beat and arrest democracy protestors. Masked policemen attacked dozens of demonstrators in Georgia early in the summer as they held a rally calling for the release of six opposition activists who had been detained on charges of spying for Russia. The police arrested 39 demonstrators and warned of further reprisals should the protests that have swept the Georgian capital in recent months continue.

The violence has followed similar attacks against opponents of Mikheil Saakashvili over the last few months. Other critics of the Georgian president have been arrested or found their families on the receiving end of state harassment. A recent report by the Organisation for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights into last year’s parliamentary elections in Georgia found “widespread and significant” irregularities, including ballot-box stuffing, the kidnapping and beating of opposition activists, biased news coverage from the state media, and government officials campaigning openly for Saakashvili’s United National Movement.
A common refrain used to justify this repression is that the opposition is working in league with Russia to foment a coup. The crackdown on Georgia’s independent media, which has seen television stations that carry reports critical of the president shut down or nationalised, has likewise been justified on the basis that Georgia does not have a “culture of democracy” to support a free press. This is a far cry from what we were told last autumn, when popular opinion held that the war between Russia and Georgia was nothing more than an attempt by the Kremlin to snuff out a fledgling democracy on Russia’s borders.

It is now apparent that Saakashvili has interpreted the sympathy he garnered in the aftermath of last year’s conflict and the growing concern over Russia’s intentions towards her neighbours as a green light to tighten his grip on power, rather than strengthen Georgia’s democratic institutions. At the beginning of August, a supporter of Burdzhanadze’s Democratic Movement for a United Georgia was kidnapped by men dressed in military uniform, assaulted and threatened with execution. A number of other party members were arrested that same weekend. The most serious incident involved Amiran Bitsadze, a refugee from Abkhazia, who was hospitalised after his assailants dragged him from his vehicle, shot him with rubber bullets, broke his leg and ran over him his arm. According to Burdzhanadze’s supporters, one of the men who attacked Bitsadze drove a car belonging to Georgia’s Special Operations Department.
Of course, democracy is a spectrum and Georgia is far away from other post-Soviet republics like Belarus or Tajikistan both in terms of the rights available to individual citizens and its integration into the international community. We know enough, however, to realise that we should no longer view Saakashvili’s Georgia through rose-tinted glasses. While Saakashvili talks the talk on subjects like human rights and dialogue with the opposition, the ongoing assault on Georgia’s independent media – Freedom House has again ranked Georgia down in terms of press freedom – along with the extrajudicial attacks on opposition activists belie his spoken commitment to democracy.

One year after war broke out in South Ossetia, the Conservative shadow defence secretary Liam Fox called on British politicians to show their support for the people of Georgia. Much of the world accepted Saakashvili’s version of events into how the war started, but many are now asking whether we can trust the word of a regime which is showing itself increasingly detached from Western standards of behaviour. If we really wish to see democracy flourish in Georgia, then our support would be best demonstrated by asking Saakashvili why the West still feels obliged to accept his opponents as political refugees.

Carl Thomson is a commentator on Russian and East European affairs and was the Conservative Party’s candidate for Glasgow East at the 2005 General Election.