The One Thing You Need to Know About the Georgian Parliamentary Elections

Famous Georgian puppeteer Rezo Gabriadze (L) and President Mikheil Saakashvili. Photo by Gaeser.

It's hard to think of anything good coming out of the hotly contested Georgian parliamentary elections on October 1. The Christian Science Monitor at least got it right in the headline: the elections pose an anti-Russian leader against a conciliatory challenger. What a choice if you want to be left alone to reform in peace! But being anti-Russian when Russia bears down on you like a ton of bricks isn't somehow indefensible, you know. And conciliation toward a country where you made your billions is, well, understandable but not a recipe for independence.

The elections are for parliament, not the president, but the prime minister, chosen by the parliament, is now to have more powers -- in reforms that Saakashvili presided over. If the controversial President Mikheil Saakashvili, loathed by American "progressives", is essentially the winner because his people have captured the 43 percent undecided (or the 43 percent who don't like to give their real answers to foreign pollsters), then he will be brutally harassed by  Russia, the American establishment (especially if Obama comes back in) and of course his own domestic opposition, and will continue to find it likely impossible to govern even if he controls the selection of the PM -- and that's not quite a given. If Ivanishvili's Georgian Dream party wins, he will be constantly under a cloud of suspicion that he is doing Moscow's bidding and a different kind of opposition will emerge.

Not for lack of trying by a considerable number of lobbyists in Washington, paid and unpaid. Today, Cory Welt writes for Center for American Progress four-square behind Ivanishvili, really, although packaging it with concern-trolling for Georgia's "democratic institutions" which he hopes will be "strengthened" by...a Russian-made oligarch being able to buy himself an election. Charles H. Fairbanks, Jr., in a turbulent piece about the appalling prison torture scandals in Georgia, gushes even more crediting Ivanishvili as willing "to make his vast fortune available for the creation of a genuine opposition movement; and he did this at great personal risk." Er, not risk in Russia.

Welt's pro-Ivanishvili piece which makes the preposterous claim among the "five things you need to know about the Georgian election" that "Russia has no stake in this election".

That's insane. Of course Russia has a stake in this election, both abstractly, in the sense of caring passionately about it, and in reality, in tacitly if not more forthrightly supporting Ivanishvili.

It's almost impossible to criticize any opponent of Saakashvili these days, because you are then immediately frog-marched off the forum and bundled on to a politically-correct train if not into a human rights van. How dare you! How can you be for Saakashvili, that clown, that travesty, that brutal arrester of demonstrators and closer of TVs and presider over prison rape, that volatile (i.e. Caucasian!) CIA plant!

The revelation in recent weeks that there is brutality and sexual abuse in Georgian prisons is hardly a revelation to the human rights movement, that has found these patterns of torture in every post-Soviet country as inherent in the remaining Soviet-style institutions, such as the prosecutor's office, which has traitionally been its own overseer and a "one-man grand jury".  Of course this is to be fiercely condemned, and Saakashvili's firing of a few officials isn't any solution -- I think nothing short of a full-bore UN inspection and report,l prosecution of those responsible for torture as well as the creation of an independent review and inspection board would be. But the timing of the expose (and its sponsorship) have to be questioned. Really, guys? Right before the elections? Given people's attention spans for human rights normally?

Pro-Kremlin "realist" Mark Adomanis has reliably chirped up against "morality-based" foreign policy in principle, along the way to roundly trashing Saakashvili once again, and Charles Fairbanks of the Hudson Institute in The Atlantic has reliably piled on against Georgia given the obvious reprehensible nature of the abuses, even extrapolating "what this tells us about the Rose revolution". Sigh. BTW, it's not "some trick" for the FSB or GRU to infiltrate a prison system that it historically owned (as Adomanis claims), but what's more the point, they have the considerable operational power to help anyone who took amateur videos out of genuine concern. How did that former Georgian prison guard get to Belgium?  Like former Uzbek police agents get to the UK? Prison rape and torture is a problem in Russia, too, but that has never held back Adomanis from his soft touch on Putin and Charles Fairbanks -- or Richard Weitz, who publishes at Eurasianet.org frequently -- have never taken that subject on. It's a marvel to me as well how the conservative Hudson gets these pro-Kremlin positions -- there's a strange tropism that some right-wingers and left-wingers have for power, I guess. And then that cold, realpolitik hatred of the underdog.

Make no mistake about it -- the thuggishness that fuels Fairbanks' indignation is real -- and real not only in Georgia but throughout the entire region as you can see from numerous UN, OSCE, and Council of Europe reports. Brutality in prisons, hazing in the army, mistreatment of inmates in any state facility -- these are rampant throughout the post-Soviet space. Fairbanks extrapolates from a Georgian prison sex case a hypothesis for how the entire country is run -- but if he can posit it for Georgia, he should find it far more evident in Russia. That Georgia is singled out for this hyperbole isn't an accident.

There's a definite meme-mining going on here. Maybe people who haven't followed this region closely for years don't realize: the stereotype of the Georgian male as a homosexual (in countries with little tolerance for gays), as a pathetic character subject to rape by other males in prison, or doing the raping himself, goes very, very deep. It's an old staple of Soviet-era jokes. It's an image constantly mined by Russians in popular culture today. There is nothing that acts more strongly on the Soviet male consciousness than prison rape, given the fear and loathing he experiences at the thought of being raped by another male in prison -- in a country where an enormous percentage of the population has had to go through the prison system, and where many have experienced just this victimization.

Fairbanks recounts a case of tax police intimidation in Georgia. Say, we missed him on the Magnitsky case in Russia all about the same thing. Fairbanks says Saakashvili's calls for dismissal of a few officials is like Beria under Stalin. You know what else it's like? Putin. The Rose Revolution hasn't had a "punitive spirit," but the fashionable global left has had a punitive spirit to the Rose Revolution ever since it appeared. Why?

And one wonders why Ivanishvili, even if he has nothing to do with this prison scandal, given all his millions, never funded a film about the same type of problem in Russia, where it is far more widespread (more people and prisons) with far less independent media. The independent oligarchs, such as they are, usually contribute to human rights causes in Russia in some form.

Speaking of the media, Saakashvili has lost the support of intellectuals at home and abroad precisely because of his suppression of the free media, but even so, the media under his rein is far more free than in Russia and has even recently improved -- see Freedom House's rating.

There has been quite the struggle for TV in particular, with Ivanishvili figuring out that to compete in the election, he had to buy himself a TV station, as most TV was pro-government.

Ivanishvili and his supporters -- including handsomely paid PR agencies in Washington -- have worked extremely hard to convert the American intelligentsia on this question.

CAP is like part of the soft money of the pro-Russian lobby because it is Soros-funded. For reasons that continue to baffle me, the Soros universe has turned more and more pro-Russian in recent years. Why? In part, it's a function of George Soros first leaving Russia, after he found he couldn't influence policy there sufficiently, then getting burned on the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and retreating from funding so much in these countries because they seem to lose, even after they win (and BTW, I'm more than fine with foreign funds helping like-minded democrats abroad, and the amounts are insignificant in the scheme of things, including the scheming of the Kremlin, which puts way more resources into things like throwing Ukrainian elections -- which is why it wins).

That is, in part, the pro-Russian stance is the result of drift, a refusal to stand up to Russia any longer, and therefore, a default to letting it win.

But it's more than that, in some of the passions of the writers in the Soros-verse like CAP and particularly on EurasiaNet, where I worked for some years, where pieces on Georgia and Russia appear which are inevitably tilted toward the Kremlin (and truly, you don't have to be a "neocon" blogger like Jennifer Rubin to get this -- it's visible to the naked eye and anyone who cares about balanced news coverage should call it out).

Joshua Kucera, a Washington-based freelance writer on security issues, is particularly nasty in constantly calling anyone who supports Georgian democracy or more specifically Saakashvili as a "Russophobe". I find that sort of thing unconscionable. What does that make him, a Russophile? These terms are blunt, over-the-top weapons that people use in blog wars, not reasoned political debate. You can back Georgian democracy against a predatory Russia backsliding on its reforms without being a "Russophobe" -- in fact, it is part of true love of Russia.

Over and over again, it's said on forums and blogs and news sites that there is "no proof" that Ivanishvili is in the Kremlin's pocket.

Well, of course there's no proof, idiots. How would you get proof of such a thing?! Investigative journalism in Russia is paid for by murder. You could never get far in researching a story like that in earnest.

Ivanishvili has obliged his critics by selling off his assets in Russia for hundreds of millions of dollars. OK, great, but it's a good time to be selling in Russia anyway, even if you aren't running for election, because things are not going to get better for Russia under Putin, and oil prices are not likely to go up with more and more fracking being done abroad, particularly in the US in Nebraska. The days are over when Putin can seemingly work economic miracles with his worn-out Soviet-ravaged country because the price on the barrel is up. The EU, which gets 25% of its gas from Gazprom, has a probe on Gazprom's monopoly. Good!

So how can you tell if Ivanishvili is doing Putin's bidding or simply not willing to challenge him substantively and therefore a good candidate for Putin passively to support?

Answer: because he's not indicted in Russia.

That's the one thing you need to know about the Georgian parliamentary elections.

That's the backward way you tell somebody's independence in Russia these days, unfortunately: see Khodorkovsky, see Lebedev. These cases of billionaires that took independent political stances from the Kremlin are illustrative and educational. You can get rich in Russia, including from state factories sold off for a song, but you can't challenge the powers that be politically.

Nobody who has made a bundle in Russia has done so without keeping the voracious Kremlin hawks happy, either passively or actively. It's just not possible. Numerous court cases tell us this.

Now, maybe Ivanishvili is the exception, and maybe in the scheme of Forbes rich people from Russia, he is small fry at only 153 or something.

Even so, it's the apt question to ask: if you're independent, why haven't you challenged Putin, and/or why aren't you in jail?

Now it may be that the majority of voters in Georgia are cool with this, and tired of the corruption, scandals and vilification of their leader from all sides, and they may just want stability, and maybe Ivanishvili can give it to them, in which case, I wish them the best. The world will watch closely to see how much of the store is given up to Russia, however. A leader who says he wants to restore cultural and economic ties with Russia could be a lot like, oh, like Ukraine's Viktor Yanukovych, under whom civil and political liberties have taken a nosedive. Very similar model, eh? The previous president, Viktor Yushchenko, also came to power on the tide of a people's revolution that was way more legitimate than RTV and its friends will ever admit, and then he, too, became the target of endless Kremlin counterpropaganda, so that fashionable sorts in the West chimed in.

That's what happens with Georgia and CAP, I think, although I often wonder if the problem with the Soros-funded CAP is that it is merely recycling the old pro-Soviet socialist positions of the 1980s, that there's something faintly "progressive" about the enemy of the West -- Russia -- or that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" or something like that. I don't get it. "Progressives' who care about human rights everywhere else should care way more about it than they do in Russia, and shouldn't be carrying water for Putin. What gives?!

I've always said about the Russian/Georgia war something like this: Russia is responsible, Georgia is to blame, America is at fault. But again: Russia is responsible for this war.

I also blame the Security Council, hamstrung by Russia. Georgia tried to get action, and had some helpers, but Russia blocked progress -- while it was busy sending airplanes to buzz over Georgian territory in the weaks leading up to the Georgian invasion.

Of course, Georgia created its own problems in Southern Ossetia and Abkhazia by never giving rights to refugees/displaced persons and recognizing them as their own. And then Russia created problems for everyone else by stepping in and giving Russian passports to all these people, making them orient to Russia and making Russia able to then say it was "protecting its citizens" by any military action. In this part of the world, you can't get food, health care, education, and housing without identity papers -- they are Soviet in nature and the propiska internal passport system essentially still obtains. So they are all victims of the Soviet institutions, but Russia as the more mature state shouldn't have meddled -- and it ignored the admonishments of the UN and OSCE which repeatedly called them out for their provocations. Russia will also not allow observers into this area where its "peacekeepers" are deployed, so it has no credibility. I don't buy the version of forums-mongers supporting the Kremlin that the US somehow incited Georgia to think it could make war on Russia. Russia shouldn't have given the passports or encroached with planes.

In Eurasia, Georgia is kind of like Israel, surrounded by hostile Arab states that are always calling for it to be wiped off the map and offering "solutions" for Palestinian statehood that involve demographically wiping out Israel. Russia and its allies are like those hostile Arab states that can't stand democracy and freedom in Israel as its a model that spreads (and in fact did spread in the Arab Spring, in part). Russia spends enormous amounts of political, intellectual and financial capital hating on this little Caucasian country that doesn't threaten it militarily or economically. Cynics say pipelines that could run through Georgia are the real issue. Mkay, where are those pipelines? And where are the real pipelines running through now, anyway? Through Russia.

In arguments about Georgia and Russia, the Kremlin supporters endlessly try to bedevil the Kremlin critics by trying to associate them with the reprehensible that goes against their own morals -- hence the propaganda ploys around the legitimate issue of prison abuse. If you question Ivanishvili at this point, why, you're for people being gang raped in Georgian prisons. If you question his relationship to the Kremlin, direct or indirect, why, you're for arresting dissidents and closing down television stations. There are no nuances here.

I'm not afraid of forums-snipers and the endless anonymous types like Mr. X, who is growing more and more incoherent and zany with his conspiracy theories. I just call it as I see it:

Georgians, a vote for Ivanishvili is not a vote for your country. Saakashvili may be a bastard, but he's your bastard and more fixable then passivity to the Kremlin will be. Ivanishvili made his millions in a country at war with you on many levels, and he was never arrested or forced to leave, like other billionaires who took independent political positions. What does that tell you?

It does look like Ivanishvili will win, with his millions to buy the elections, especially through PR firms in Washington, and through the kind ministrations of indignant CAP and The Atlantic writers, who don't need to be paid to believe as they do. Then I guess we'll see the Ukrainianization of Georgia. Don't say I didn't warn you.