Mikheil Saakashvili today return to his favourite message: that to oppose him is to be an agent of Russian domination of Georgia.

In a speech to ruling party MPs the president said the opposition parties who last year organised massive street protests against Mikheil Saakashvili were following Russian orders.

Georgia's highest profile campaigner for gay equality says that the recent hysteria over a supposed "gay pride" march in either Batumi or Tbilisi marked a kind of progress in Georgian society because opponents of equal rights were forced to talk about the issue.

Paata Sabelashivili (see our interview with him earlier this year below) told Matthew Collin of the Moscow Times:

"There is progress because it’s no longer a taboo; it’s being discussed. Even such negative things can be positive in the long run."
 

The recent controversy even saw daily "counter demonstrations" against the supposedly planned "Pride" event on the streets of Batumi - even though all the evidence suggests that the whole story was made up by conservative opposition politicians looking to exploit Georgia's conservative social mores to score points off the the government.

The first "Gay Pride" demonstration was held in June 1970 in New York to mark the previous year's riots in protest at a police raid on a gay bar in the city. Since then similar events and festivals have spread throughout the world and in western countries are increasingly seen as major cultural events.

The public broadcaster, which has recently been seen as taking a turn towards serious journalistic standards and ethics, looks as though it has returned to being nothing more than a propaganda tool of the Saakashvili regime after it failed to report yesterday's disturbances in central Tbilisi.

The two other national channels - Rustavi 2 and Imedi - also ignored the events: which saw large-scale scuffling outside the parliament, the arrest of opposition activists and the escape from cutody of one of the arrested. But no one seriously expects these channels to do anything than follow the orders of the regime.

The public broadcaster, however, has recently taken advice from the BBC on how to run a news room and has seen non-partisan figures commited to quality journalism join its governing board (which, however, has no editorial role). During the May elections it was the public broadcaster - as opposed to the two national commercial channels - that hosted a debate between mayoral candidates which for the first time put the ruling party on the same footing as the opposition.

Now the elections are over and many western observers have given the conclusion Saakashvili wanted - that he may not be perfect but he's cleaning up his act - the signs are that the regime is once more persuing a path of radicalisation: partly driven by its dire financial straits and the collapse of its libertarian vision of Georgia's future as the country depends on western grants and loans.

Business investors privately say that extortion in the form of raids bty the tax police have increased, refugees in Tbilis are being evicted and faced with a choice between destitution in the capital or merely poverty in the countryside as the regime looks to privatise their former homes and, as yesterday's events suggest, the screw of political repression is being once more slowly tightened.

The Saakashvili regime has repeatedly proved itself to be its own worst enemy and plainly hasn't even learnt the lesson that turning TV stations into propaganda outlets in the long term will only serve to undermine social trust and respect for democracy and the rule of law.

Georgia's economics minister Vera Kobalia appears to be seeking to brazen her way out of trouble caused by her official biography by saying the Vancouver Sun is controlled by a Russian black propaganda unit that is publishing "rumours" designed to throw her off her mission of making Georgia the new Singapore.

The evidence for this appears to be that the Sun had the timerity actually ask Global TV - where Kobalia claims to have worked as a producer between 2004 and 2006 - if they had ever heard of her. Presumably also a part of the Kremlin black propaganda unit, Global TV answered that they had not.

She maintains she did work for the British Columbia based Global.

Georgian deputy prime minister Temur Iakobishvili has followed in the footsteps of his president, Mikheil Saakashvili, who earlier this year labelled persistent international reports of attacks on media freedom as "total bullshit", by denying there was any harassment or intimation of journalists in Georgia.

The claim came on the day that the Swiss authorities announced they had granted political asylum to Vakhtang Komakhidze, an investigative journalist who made many enemies in the government after he exposed the inner workings of the state's propaganda machine (see video).

Harassment of journalists is far from rate in Georgia. Examples over the last year have included attempts at homophobic blackmail, an attack on Maestro TV's camera crew and the more recent physical attack on journalists filming the removal of Stalin's statute in Gori. Although all three of these incidents (and there are others) were well documented none ended in any sort of action being taken against the perpretrators.