Category: UNM

Inga Grigolia to abandon journalistic career?

March 10, 2010 by georgiamedia

Inga Grigolia appears to have abandoned her career as one of Georgia's most prominent journalists and hopes instead to be elected chair of Tbilisi's city council (sakrebulo) on behalf of the Christian Democrats.

Formerly a presenter of a wide variety of political interview shows, Grigolia left Georgia last autumn to study English and journalism in London. Reportedly she now plans to return to Georgia on 25 March.

The Christian Democrat's candidate for mayor - Gia Chanturia - emphasised his chase for the votes of previous supporters of the ruling United National Movement yesterday when he said he is "neither n opposition, nor a pro-government figure and not a politician at all". His campaign slogan - "Employment and Low Tariffs [utility bills]" - also firmly puts him on the UNM's turf. Perhaps as a consequence he has received less TV coverage of late than fringe no-hope candidates such as Nika Ivanishvili.

The Jacobins of the Caucasus: the revolutionary mentality of the UNM

February 28, 2010 by georgiamedia

Gela Vasadze's long, and still incomplete, essay on the Rose Revolution and its aftermath, "Misha and his team" - written in Russian as Миша И Его Команда and serialised on Gruzia Online - and then translated brilliantly by Timothy Blauvelt and republished on Gregory Levonian's blog - have been recommended here before and anyone wanting to understand the complex web of personal relations and motivations behind the Rose Revolution and its creators would do well to read them.

The latest part - part X - has just been published, and in dealing with the events up to and on 7 November 2007 it provides a fascinating insight into the mentality of the United National Movement (UNM) and its supporters (Vasadze clearly was a party member, and may still be, and remains a critical supporter of Saakashvili) as they unleashed repression.

The media were absolutely central to the Rose Revolution: in Georgia the revolution really was televised by Rustavi 2. The revolution having succeeded, the government have not sought Thermidor, however. The Jacobins of the Caucasus were and are happy to see wealth buy an outlet for propaganda.

There was not and there still has not been any serious attempt to create a commercial, never mind objective, media environment: the three national TV stations are all clients of the regime and all dependent on state cash.

The problem, as the government saw it in 2007, was not that the media were paid propagandists, but that the wrong people were paying them:

If we look at the mass media, even taking into account the relativity of viewer ratings, a situation in which an opposition TV channel is in the first place with three times higher ratings than its closest competitor can hardly be considered normal. The TV station Imedi was a powerful informational weapon, able to smash the hopes of Georgian society to the ground and leave no stone standing.

Indeed Vasadze's narrative as a whole exposes the fundamental contradiction of Saakashvili's project. The president repeatedly states that his aim is the creation of a modern European state in Georgia - Switzerland seems to be his favourite model. But he persists in using the methods of a revolutionary committee of public safety in his attempts to get there and then does not understand why he alienates both his own people - unable to exercise any effective dissent through elective means when the rules have been bent to ensure that every local council, the parliament and the executive are all in the hands of the one party - as well as an international community increasingly fed up with the lies and distortions and the general failure to take responsibility.

So while Vasadze criticises the ruling party for its inflexible belief in its moral superiority, he also goes on to justify the torture of Irakli Okruashvili as a necessity to show "the masses" that the former defence minister was just another man who could be broken.

And - in any case - we are told that Okruashvili and Badri Patarkatsishvili were preparing a coup. The evidence? The hostility of Imedi. So the dissent itself becomes the thing that must be suppressed.

One did not need to possess any exclusive information to understand that Okruashvili and Patarkatsishvili were preparing a blow – to understand this one only had to watch the news broadcasts on Imedi TV. The interests of Okruashvili and Patarkatsishvili intersected, and these interests were composed not so much of hatred for the existing authorities as of the desire to return the power that they had once possessed, but now without any limitations. As concerns Okruashvili everything is clear: the once all-powerful minister had lost out in the “Byzantine” struggle with his alter-ego, Vano Merabishvili. Not so long before “Iron” Irakli had considered himself Saakashvili’s heir to the presidency after the latter’s two terms were up. And as for Patarkatsishvili, after the Rose Revolution he had used his proximity to Prime Minister Zurab Zhvania to decide many “political-economic” issues, which gave the oligarch power that was no less, if not more, than that of Irakli Okruashvili.

But, of course, media hostility is just what elected governments in mature democracies have to deal with. Imagine if Barrack Obama took this attitude to Fox News, or Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown thought the same about the Sun newspaper? Both outlets are hugely hostile to their respective governments, but neither man would even dream of sending in special forces to smash them up.

And, again, Vasadze also demonstrates the reluctance of the UNM and its supporters to take responsibility for its actions. Having, rather more fairly than is often the case, examined the popular anger that put people in the streets in November 2007, and then the damage done to the country by what he clearly regards as an over-reaction, to what were already fading protests, on 7 November 2007 (a mistake which he suggests was Gigi Ugulava's fault and not Vano Merabishvili's - whom, he suggests, was arguing for patience), he then discusses at length - and without the slightest piece of evidence - the idea that it was all a Russian plot afterall.

Conspiracy theories are beloved of those who are unwilling to examine their own failings (which is why, sadly, they are all too prevalent in some parts of the Georgian opposition). But they are useless as a guide to action. The only evidence that authorities have ever been able to offer to the public of Russian involvement in the events of 7 November is an intercepted phone call from a fringe figure, albeit one with a powerful surname - Tsotne Gamsakhurdia. And the fact that it was rushed out on 7 November 2007 itself and the authorities declined to press ahead with a prosecution at the time points to the regime's need to find a fig leaf to cover physical attacks on the demonstrators than a serious belief that Gamsakhurdia was a spy or coup leader.

President's party refuses to contemplate debate

February 23, 2010 by georgiamedia

Georgia's president Mikheil Saakashvili will address parliament on Friday but the ruling United National Movement (UNM) are refusing to contemplate the idea that his speech - the Georgian equivalent of the "State of the Union" address - should be open to question and debate.

The UNM frequently tell the world (Mikheil Saakashvili was doing this in London last week) they want to see Parliament strengthened but when pressed by the opposition Christian Democrats to allow the president's speech to be immediately followed by a debate - something that would essentially have to be broadcast on TV alongside the president's speech, they rejected the idea outright, bizarely arguing that a debate would inhibit political pluralism: "For the political pluralism and the transparency it is necessary that these different actions would be conducted separately," said Petre Tsiskarishvili, leader of the UNM's parliamentary fraction.

Medical manoeuvre shows ruling party's continued slide to corruption

February 15, 2010 by georgiamedia

Mikheil Saakashvili's United National Movement (UNM) has been in power for over six years now and despite the continual boasts about how economic performance has strengthened the state and improved public services, Georgia's still has the worst funded health system in Europe, riddled with corruption and still in decline.

So what is the UNM's solution? To apoligise and try to do better? To radically reform the system and tackle corruption, kick backs and waste? No, it seems its immediate priority is to offer "medical services" of its own.

Yesterday in the Zugdidi region they did just that. Either paying or cojoling doctors and pharamcists to offer free medical help to villagers on the border with Abkhazia.

Of course this stunt was also given uncritical national television coverage (see picture) by the supposed  "journallsts" of the public TV channel just to ram home the point that, like the Czar before them, while the UNM may be the source of the rotteness, the people should be thankful for their charity.

Missing Givi Targamadze faces the sack

February 9, 2010 by georgiamedia

Leading ruling party parliamentarian Givi Targamadze, who nominally chairs the parliamentary security committee, has again apparently gone missing and faces losing his prestigous post, reports InterPressNews.

Targamadze was most recently in the news for his involvement in the Ukrainian election "observers" fiasco, when two calls - one with interior minister Vano Merabishvili and another (in which he was alleged to have discussed putting pressure on gangsters) with an unidentified "Konstantine" were evesdropped and leaked in Ukraine.

Targamadze was apparently in charge of deploying Georgian election "observers" in Ukraine but the operation was such a shambles - with the Georgians being presented as thugs come to menance the voters - that the supposed observers had to return home and there was no attempt to send a similar mission to the second round on Sunday.

The whole affair undoubtedly damaged both Georgia's image and its strategic interests: as it made it clear that the authorities in Tbilisi would not stint from actively interfering in the democratic operations of friendly states in an effort to secure the result hoped for. The anger in the interior ministry at the scale of the fiasco was such that there were unconfirmed reports of violent fall outs amongst the ministry's senior staff.

Before that, though, Targamadze had apparently been missing from Tbilisi or from parliament for some time. And even though he had claimed to have knowledge of key facts about the so-called "Mukhrovani mutiny" he was not called as a witness and nor was he seen in public.

Now it appears he might be a public casualty of the Ukranian mess, getting stripped of his committee chairmanship in parliament.

Committee chairs are given special speaking rights in parliament and have access to more staff support and resources, so losing the position is not without consequences.

However, the poor standard of much Georgian journalism (not a commentary on IPN), the willingness of some reporters to treat rumour as fact (ditto) and the lack of a true culture of political accountability that results means that UNM politicians have developed a habit of trying to settle internal scores not through open debate but through backstage briefings against colleagues - so this report needs to be taken in that context.