Georgia: Tough Days Ahead for Saakashvili?
While support for Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili was understandably strong during the war with Russia over South Ossetia and in its immediate aftermath, that situation was not going to remain the case for long. At the beginning of the month, a telephone poll perhaps indicated that society was roughly divided in two and even before then some political forces started to show the first sign of dissent. Shaping opinion at both home and abroad was crucial for Saakashvili, especially in light of Moscow terming him a political corpse, but some are now searching for his possible successor.
Now EurasiaNet publishes three articles indicating that some tough questions are starting to be asked not only in Georgia, but also in the United States. In the first, the online publication says that the effective truce between the authorities and opposition might be coming to an end.
After weeks of unity following the war with Russia, the truce between Georgia’s opposition and the government has finally ended. Opposition leaders are now scrambling to define their position against President Mikheil Saakashvili and his role in the war.
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In recent weeks, a string of opposition leaders have tried to distance themselves from the government after publicly standing by Saakashvili during the height of the conflict with Russia.
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Earlier in September, the New Rights Party — a former member of the United Opposition Movement — broke ranks with the majority of the country’s opposition parties and demanded Saakashvili’s resignation and early presidential elections. “[S]omebody should be responsible for everything that happened. ? The highest ranked person should be held responsible,” said Giorgi Mosidze, the international secretary of the New Rights.
“For the development of Georgian society, the development of Georgian statehood — democratic development and economic development — it would be better to elect a new president and parliament,” Mosidze asserted.
Russian road block, Gori, Republic of Georgia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 2008
After what one German newspaper termed a Caucasian Tragedy which saw parts of Georgia proper occupied by Russian troops and a significant humanitarian crisis, support from the West remains crucial for the embattled leader. However, faced with its own financial crisis, there are even those in the U.S. Congress who are questioning Washington’s support for Saakashvili.
Several members of Congress are rebelling against the United States’ strong support of Georgia, including a proposed $1 billion aid package. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive]. In three committee hearings in early September, officials from the Bush administration faced tough questioning from members of Congress not happy that taxpayers were being asked to bail out a country that, in their telling, started a disastrous war with reckless support from the United States.
Criticism came from both parties and covered a wide array of US policies.
Dana Rohrbacher, a Republican from California, said the United States lost credibility when it helped liberate Kosovo from Serbia, and then insisted on the principle of territorial integrity in the case of Georgia. “The Russians were right and we were wrong,” he said at a September 9 hearing of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.
It was an indicator of the broad dissatisfaction with the US policy toward Russia that Rohrbacher, a pro-defense hawk, was on the same page as Ron Paul, the isolationist libertarian, who said, “We’re not there [in Georgia] for democracy, we’re there for a pipeline, and that’s tragic.”
Several representatives criticized the Bush administration for sending senior officials to Georgia, including Vice President Dick Cheney, while doing little to engage Russia diplomatically. “Administration policy toward Russia seems to be: Speak loudly, and carry a small stick,” said Howard Berman, a Democrat from California and the chair of the House Foreign Relations Committee.
While some criticism of Georgia was heard during the hearings, Tbilisi also had many stout defenders. Even so, the resistance to the Bush administration’s strongly pro-Georgia stance was striking, and could endanger assistance efforts.
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At one early September hearing, after Fried insisted that Washington told Georgia “loudly, unequivocally and repeatedly” that they should not attack South Ossetia, Representative Brad Sherman, a Democrat from California, asked: “Then why is ? Georgia going to get a huge amount of funding from the United States for damage it suffered by ignoring the loudest and most specific warnings from the United States?”
The situation is made even more sensitive and uncertain by the need to retain Russian support for Washington’s attempts to curtail Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Indeed, at the start of the conflict some observers and analysts questioned whether the U.S. would be prepared to sacrifice Russian support over Iran to support or protect Georgia. However, EurasiaNet says that Tehran is also concerned by other implications of the war between Russia and Georgia.
Linkage is the time honored practice of getting another party’s cooperation on an issue of importance to oneself by promising to help or threatening to hinder that other party on another issue of importance to it. Moscow is clearly trying to get American and European acquiescence (if not approval) for the gains it has made in Georgia by threatening to increase Russian cooperation with Iran if this is not forthcoming.
The Kremlin’s diplomatic aims became clearer on September 23, when Russian officials announced that they would not participate in talks at the United Nations that were intended to explore new sanctions against Iran. Russian officials cited the “intensity” of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s schedule during the UN General Assembly as the main reason that Russia could not participate in a meeting about Iran, the official RIA-Novosti news agency reported.
For almost a month, Moscow has been dropping not-so-subtle hints that it wants a geopolitical deal in order to continue cooperation with Western states on the Iranian nuclear issue. In his interview with CNN broadcast on August 29, for example, Russian Prime Minister Putin said that if the West did not want Russia’s cooperation on the Iranian nuclear (as well as other) issues, “God bless, do this work yourself.”
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But will this happen? Not necessarily. Iranian media commentary since the outbreak of the Georgian-Russian conflict indicates that Tehran is uneasy about that conflict’s implications for Iran. […]
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Iran has good reason to be nervous. Already a difficult partner for Tehran, a Russia with an increased sense of its own power and importance could well become even more undependable. Of particular concern to officials in Tehran, Russian recognition of Abkhaz and South Ossetian secession from Georgia could stoke separatist sentiment inside Iran, especially among the large Azeri minority.
Photo: Mikhail Saakashvili, Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 2008
- Published:
- 09.26.08 / 3pm by Onnik
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