Saakashvili Calls Early Election
// The Georgian president restores control over the country and backs down in a row with opposition
Georgia lived through Thursday under the wartime law after the president declared emergency rule banning broadcasting and demonstrations. The crisis in Georgia caused another rift in relations with Russia. Moscow expelled three employees of the Georgian Embassy from the country and urged the European Union to condemn the violence of Georgian authorities. Meanwhile, the West and the NATO have lambasted the actions of the Georgian president forcing him to back down. Mikhail Saakashvili made a surprise appearance on television Thursday night to declare the presidential election on January 5 next year.
Dead silence fell on Tbilisi Thursday morning. The city seems empty. Only groups of soldiers and policemen are patrolling the streets. They are in particular in large numbers on roads and outside government buildings. All underground stations in the city center are closed. The square in front of the parliament and nearby parks where oppositions gathered on Wednesday are spick and span. Janitors took away all garbage and cleaned the streets.
The last center of resistance on Wednesday night was in the Holy Trinity Cathedral which is considered the main church of Georgia and residence of the Georgian patriarch. Riot police did not dare to enter the church even though they had been ordered not to let the demonstrators to gather in one place. Georgian Patriarch Ilia II surprisingly threw his support behind the opposition saying that the use of force against peaceful citizens is unacceptable, and called on the parties to enter talks. The Catholicos was the only person in Georgia on Wednesday night able to reconcile the shocked society and the authorities. Opposition welcomed the statement saying that it was ready to hold talks with authorities only in the Catholicos’s residence and in his presence. Georgian officials, however, turned down the offer. Apparently, a strong patriarch was not in their plans. All the more, he has recently acted as an independent figure and enjoyed more respect than the president.
On Thursday, Georgia was trying to live under new laws which were announced the president’s ally, Economic Development Minister Georgy Arveladze. He said that the society in the next two weeks was going to live under two documents – a decree on the state of emergency and a paper clarifying the essence of the decree. According to the decree, Georgia temporarily lifts articles of the constitution on freedom of speech and information transmission and freedom of gathering, rallies and manifestations. “Information gathering and transmission is banned for all digital and print media apart from public television,” Mr. Arveladze said.
The president signed the decree and submitted it on Thursday to the Georgian parliament which has to make a decision within 48 hours. The decision, however, is quite predictable as the majority in the chamber supports the president.
Thus, Georgian television in the next two weeks is going to be full of cartoons and TV series. Rustavi 2 channel said goodbye to its viewers last night promising to go back in two weeks’ time. News web-sites have also been closed.
“Our radio station was also forced to come off air,” Koba Liklikadze, renowned journalist from Georgian Radio Freedom, told Kommersant. “We did not have a frequency of our own. We were on air on the frequency of Imedi and Greenway radio station, and now our management is looking for ways to switch to short waves. Information blackout is the stupidest thing to do. The information hunger has hit the country. There are only cartoons and soap operas on the TV. Everything that’s going on now is reminiscent of the Soviet era when they would televise the Swan Lake ballet when something important was happening.”
Imedi and Kavkasiya TV stations went off air as they called on the people to defy, according to authorities. Riot police stormed into the TV channel’s buildings late Wednesday night, forced all the employees to leave the offices and sealed up the buildings.
“The situation was very stressful,” Imedi TV Director General Bidzina Baratashvili told Kommersant. “Well, most of the riot policemen were fine, but some of them were quite aggressive. One of them promised to make a hole in my head. My employees were shocked. Luckily, no one was hurt. It’s still unclear what’s gong to be to our company in future.”
But soon after the closure of Imedi, the Georgian president’s ally and head of the parliament’s defense committee Givi Targamadze claimed that “the Imedi TV channel is Badri Patarkatsishvili’s tool that he uses to plot a coup in Georgia to please the Kremlin.” “I heard on Imedi a reporter who was filming the unrest on Rustaveli Avenue calling on the protesters: ‘Now is the right time to go and storm the parliament’,” Mr. Targamadze said.
Emergency rule allows information broadcasting only on the pro-governmental Public Television which was showing on Thursday official news bulletins with excerpts from President Saakashvili’s Wednesday night address to the nation where he urged people to be calm and attributed tough measures against opposition to fears for the country’s security threatened by Russia.
Georgian Prime Minister Zurab Nogaideli also justified the president’s steps on Thursday. He said the state of emergency was the only way to “protect the country from a coup”. The prime minister believes that Mr. Saakashvili did not breach the Georgian constitution since the law enables the president to declare emergency rule “during wars or massive disorders, encroachments on the territorial integrity of the country, a military coup or a military uprising, an economic collapse and epidemics or in any other cases when state bodies are unable to perform their duties properly.”
Authorities’ extraordinary steps silenced opposition which lost its information resources. The last opposition leader to speak on television was leader of the New Right David Gamkrelidze. He asked the nation “not to put up resistance to authorities, not to put their lives at stake and stay home”. This was obviously what the Georgian president wanted.
The Russian Foreign Minister issued blistering comments in a reaction to developments in Georgia as it called the country’s charge d’affairs and handed him a note which announced three employees of the Georgia embassy personae non grata. On Wednesday, Georgia said it would expel three employees of the Russian embassy who were accused of “contacts with the opposition with an aim of a coup d’etat”.
“All statements of Georgian leadership on the alleged interference of Russia into Georgia’s internal affairs are not true,” said Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin. “Georgian authorities are trying to hide their inability to tackle the situation.”
The Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Thursday that developments in Georgia were the start “of an acute human rights crisis” which threatens “peace and stability in the whole region”. Moscow also called on the UN, OSCE and the Council of Europe to “give an adequate evaluation to Georgian leadership’s hostility towards the peaceful expression of thought, forceful suppression of political opposition and unprecedented escalation of pressure on civil society.”
The West was indeed shocked by the violence against the opposition, and Georgian authorities were surely informed of that. The NATO openly condemned Wednesday’s developments. “The imposition of emergency rule, and the closure of media outlets in Georgia, a partner with which the alliance has an intensified dialogue, are of particular concern and not in line with Euro-Atlantic values,” said NATO Secretary General, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said and called on Georgian leadership to restrain from violence.
Apparently the West’s reaction contributed to a surprise decision that the Georgian president announced last night. After meeting with the parliament’s majority Mr. Saakashvili made a televised address to the nation to order an early presidential election on January 5, 2008. He also promised to lift emergency rule within the next few days and hold a referendum for “the people to decide for themselves when the parliamentary election should be held – in spring or fall 2008.”
Olga Allenova, Moscow, and Vladimir Novikov, Tbilisi
All the Article in Russian as of Nov. 09, 2007
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