Salome Zourabichvili-The Way of Georgia: July 2009

Friday, July 31, 2009

Adress of the Georgian people

Adress of the Georgian people to the Vice President of the United States of America, Mr Joe Biden

Today is a historic day for Georgia. We are assembled again in Freedom Square, in order to once more reaffirm Georgia’s attachment to western and democratic values and to greet and welcome America’s Vice President, Mr Joe Biden.
It is more than a hundred days that we are demanding the very same changes that President Barak Obama’s new administration has set as a goal for itself and for the world. It can be said that Georgia today is the country which more than any other needs this change. It is time for change in Georgia.
On Freedom Square, We are again assembled today, political parties, nongovernemental organizations, Georgian society, pluralist and multifaceted, but united around the very same demand for which we stood here at the time of the Rose Revolution, during american President’s last visit, and before at the time when the Soviet Union was collapsing: “To be able to live in a free and democratic society”.
We are the same people, who in 2003 during the Rose Revolution, called for a governement elected through free and fair elections, for democratic state institutions, as a condition for the nation’s strengthening and for justice and freedom, as the only way leading to the development of the country.
Despite the unconditional support of the United States of America, to this day this aim has not been achieved. For the state institutions do not yet stand at the service of our citizens, because the democratic institutions – Media, Parliament, Judiciary, Private business are still usurpated by a corrupted and clanic governing team.
Over the years, instead of consolidating state institutions, the unconditional support given to a limited group of people has thrown Georgia back to the days of authoritarianism, which in itself was one of the main causes of destabilization. This authoritarian trend created a rift between the society and the governement, and left the country unguarded against foreign enemy while the emerging crisis became almost irreversible. The consolidation of personal ties at the expense of political principles raised questions as to american intent. It fostered among the governing few unchecked self confidence and assertiveness, among the consequences of which one can count the tragic 2008 august war.
Mikhail Saakashvili has failed the ideals of the Rose Revolution and has betrayed the course chosen by his own People. He has set himself on the path towards authoritarianism And with his aventuristic actions, he has lost for Georgia the prospects for real independence and short term integration in the Euroatlantic family. Instead of restoring as promised the territorial integrity of the country, he dragged Georgia into a war, which led to the loss of additional territories. Instead of the promised free economic development, the main assets of the Georgian economy have been handed over to Russia and its capital. Every day the Georgian state gets weaker and more fragile the trust in georgian institutions.

The help and support provided by the United States of America for Georgian independence and sovereignty have proven unvaluable and unprecedented .

It is only natural that Georgia expects from the new administration concrete measures in order to revive the democratic institutions: Army, that as a result of war and political repressions is on the verge of destruction; Police, which as a result of ultra politicization is terrorized and has lost its capacity to function; Judiciary, which as a result of political interferences has turned into a repressive machine in the hands of the governing team; Media, which is simply dying; Private property, which is totally undefended; free economy and business, which find themselves under the constraints of state racketeers.
Expectations are high!
Hope in Georgia remains alive!
Struggle for real democracy is going on!

We are awaiting your visit in Georgia with the greatest hope and we believe that the new posture of your administration is what we need in order to give back to our people the right to free choice and free elections and that will help to bring the country once and forever out of its dark past.
We express the hope that America will support the will of the People in order that in Georgia be restored a democratic system, be appointed early, free and fair elections, media be freed from governemental censorship, citizens be allowed to defend their elementary rights through a fair process of law, and in order for us to be able to reach our objective – free elections- not from the street, but through a normal political process.

Political parties, members of the April 9th organization,

Saakashvili clings on as talks fail

http://www.euronews.net/2009/05/12/saakashvili-clings-on-as-talks-fail/

'I Would Call Saakashvili Insane'

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,624807,00.html

Thursday, July 30, 2009

A Fresh Start in Georgia

By SALOMÉ ZOURABICHVILI
Published: April 3, 2009
Like many fellow Georgians, I once had such high hopes for my country, as did our friends in the West. It began with the optimism of the Rose Revolution, grew as Georgia was named a “beacon of democracy” by the Bush administration, and solidified as Georgia came to be seen as a strategic partner for stability in its neighborhood. Sadly, this dream has ended. Democracy itself is crumbling in Georgia.

Under Mikhail Saakashvili Georgia has become an authoritarian state, buoyed by unbalanced power and millions of dollars in aid. Institutions that should be the very foundations of democracy have been undermined. Our Parliament, with a two-thirds majority for Saakashvili’s party, is unable to provide checks and balances. Elections are fraudulent and discredited, as illustrated in reports by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe on ballot-box stuffing and intimidation during the last presidential elections.
With the seizure of news outlets and the censorship of journalists, there is no longer a free media. The penal system is rife with abuse, not just with political interference in the judiciary, but also with torture in our prisons, as documented by the U.S. State Department. Georgia is now a country where everything — from business to sports to culture — falls under government control.
The Bush administration must bear some responsibility for giving priority to stability and turning a blind eye to the Saakashvili government’s increasingly authoritarian tendencies.
We hope the Obama administration will take a stand that reflects America’s principles in aiding the development of truly democratic institutions in Georgia rather than simply supporting individual leaders. We hope much-needed financial aid will be conditioned on adherence to principles of democracy, civil society and human rights.
Since the Rose Revolution there have been reversals in three key democratic pillars — increasing restrictions on media freedom, political interference in the judiciary and the erosion of private property rights. All of these should be reason enough for the United States and the European Union to push Georgia — a country of major strategic importance given its bearing on relations with Russia — back on the path toward democracy.
An ideal starting point involves the case of the TV channel Imedi, Georgia’s only independent national television station until it was seized and ransacked by security forces and then expropriated from its legal owners to silence criticism of the government.
The seizure is symbolic of government attacks on private property. A recent court judgment upholding Imedi’s confiscation, despite clear evidence of fraud and forgery, is widely seen as illustrating the total lack of independence of the judicial system. The intimidation of Imedi’s journalists is evidence of the violation of human rights. Imedi has become the symbol of a free press that has ceased to exist.
This is not an isolated case: On March 12, one of Georgia’s most prominent journalists, Inga Grigolia, resigned her position at Georgia’s public broadcaster when the station refused to air an interview with a former government minister who is in exile for fear of his life. The editor of the Georgian Times, a popular weekly newspaper, last week suspended publication after his son was threatened by police officers at gunpoint. Imedi itself, which the government claims is independent, has been taken over by a Ministry of Defense official.
In Georgian, the word Imedi means “hope,” and that hope has been shattered. But by taking action on this one issue, the United States and its allies can demonstrate their commitment to democracy in Georgia. Demanding that the Georgian leadership returns Imedi to its rightful owners, thus restoring its independence and permitting a voice of balanced journalism to again be heard, would be a clear signal that U.S. policy in Georgia will insist on development of the basic democratic institutions we so fervently seek. Furthermore, restoration of media freedom will give Georgia a crucial instrument it needs to rebuild its civil society.
I have called for new elections in Georgia that would be free and fair so that the people can begin to rebuild a truly democratic society. What we need, however, is uncompromising international commitment to the basic institutions of democracy, not simply foreign support for individual leaders. Democracy must have a fresh start in Georgia — and a fresh stance from our genuine friends abroad.
Salomé Zourabichvili is a former foreign minister of Georgia.

The messenger

messenger
The opposition will greet Biden with “welcome rally”
By Temuri Kiguradze
Tuesday, July 21

Salome Zourabichvili, leader of The Way of Georgia and one of the leaders of the opposition coalition the 9 April Movement, has announced that after the visit of US Vice President Joe Biden to Tbilisi on July 22 the non-Parliamentary opposition will suspend the protest rallies which have been conducted in the Georgian capital for over three months. However before that the opposition plans to “greet” Vice President Biden with a massive rally on Freedom Square on the evening of July 22.

Zourabichvili, who served as Foreign Affairs Minister before joining the opposition, kindly agreed to talk to The Messenger about the details of the upcoming events on July 20.

“The April 9 Movement plans to meet and greet Vice President Biden and therefore we are calling on people to come to a large rally in Freedom Square. Many pro-Government media outlets are trying to portray this rally as a protest which it is not; we have nothing to protest against when it comes to America and its Vice President,” stated Zourabichvili. She said the main purpose of the rally will be to express the gratitude of the Georgian people for “the constant support of Georgia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity by the US” and their hope for “even stronger support from America’s new administration for the building of democracy in Georgia.”

The opposition politician noted that “despite the possible allegations of the [Georgian] Government” the people coming to Freedom Square Rally will not just be those hurt by the reforms of the current authorities. “They will be those who were standing in front of Parliament at the Rose Revolution and the same people who were standing there during the visit of [US President] George W. Bush to Georgia.”

“We were very attentively listening to the statements of the new American administration and President Obama, especially during his visit to Moscow. We appreciate his [Obama’s] reiteration of America’s support for Georgia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, as that is very important in this difficult period for Georgia. But from his speeches we can also hear his statements about the will of people and the Government needing to be based on it and his support for free elections, and that is what we want. We want Georgia to change, we want to convey to Vice President Biden that the Georgian people feel a little bit disappointed that after a while the previous American administration give less support for [Georgian] democratic institutions and more for a particular group of people [in Georgian government]. We hope that the new administration will return to supporting those institutions rather than supporting the regime.” Salome Zourabichvili added that White House officials may have been led to believe that “only one” group of people, those currently holding the top positions in the Government, represent pro-reform and Western-oriented movements in Georgia, and she considers that Obama’s administration has “already recognised” that taking this kind of attitude was one of the “errors of the previous [Bush] policy.” “We and the people gathering on Freedom Square will show that there are more reform-oriented groups in society than the Government and underline the fact that the authorities are reform-oriented and pro-democratic only in words, their deeds being completely different.”

Salome Zourabichvili confirmed that the mass protest rallies on Rustaveli Avenue in Tbilisi will finish just after Biden’s visit to Georgia. The opposition parties plan to remove the improvised cells, which they say were used to show that Georgia has become a police state, from the streets of the city. “After one hundred days of the peaceful protests we think that this stage should end. From September we will implement a new strategy for achieving free elections, which I think is the only way to overcome the crisis and restart the political and economic machine in Georgia,” stated Salome Zourabichvili. She considers that the rallies have already played their role in the political process. “The peaceful protests have shown that society exists in Georgia and it wants just what it wanted during the protest action in 2003 [Rose Revolution], democracy, a free judiciary, a strong Parliament – nothing has changed.” According to Zourabichvili the protest rallies that began on April 9 showed the fragility of the Georgian state and that’s why the opposition parties chose the method of peaceful demonstrations which are “the only means of achieving our goals.”

The fact that the street rallies are cooling down doesn’t mean that the opposition has given up its struggle, Zourabichvili said. “There is no betrayal” of the people sitting in the cells on Rustaveli Avenue she said. “Now we stand for the same objectives we did before. We demand free elections, and these can only happen after the dismissal of Saakashvili. We are simply changing the means of the struggle; nobody said that we would keep the cells on Rustaveli Avenue forever. Now those cells, in the middle of summer, can be in a way negative PR for the protest actions and we need to think of some new ways of protest and combine these with intensive action with our foreign partners, because a lot depends on them. Achieving all of this requires a new complex strategy that cannot be limited to the cells on Rustaveli Avenue. But of course those people [the participants of the current protest actions] should be considered and they should play their parts in the future strategy,” she said. Speaking about this “new strategy,” Salome Zourabichvili noted that now it is in the process of being worked out, but the “welcome” rally for Vice President Biden is part of that strategy and the protest rallies will be renewed in September. “It’s not because we like it, but in the existing situation this is the only way for the opposition to express its ideas,” she said.

The opposition doesn’t reject the idea of holding dialogue with the Government, Zourabichvili said, but she explained that this dialogue should be “real and serious” and not just “talks for the sake of PR, as have been preferred by the Georgian authorities.” She also commented on the proposition of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili that he is ready to give Government positions to members of the non-Parliamentary opposition. When this statement was made Zourabichvili had announced that she was ready to accept the position of Deputy Interior Minister to gain the opposition “access to real power in the country,” however her offer was not accepted and she even didn’t receive an official refusal or explanation of this decision from the Government. She noted that this may confirm that Georgia is not now governed by Saakashvili alone but by “clans that have taken power around him.” She also expressed her hope that Vice President Biden may make Saakashvili change his mind and turn his refusal into an acceptance. “That would be a very interesting step towards building trust between sides which today don’t talk to each other [the Government and the non-Parliamentary opposition].

Continuing the topic of dialogue with the authorities, Zourabichvili said that a compromise proposal from the Government may be accepted if it leads to the serious improvement of democratic processes in the country. “We are not the radical opposition we are often portrayed as by the Government’s media, if this has been so we would have followed the same revolutionary path Saakashvili once did. We support the political processes of the country, but we have to see that these processes can be allowed to work with these authorities in charge, as they haven’t seen that in the two elections of 2008 – Presidential and Parliamentary, we were not totally duped,” she stated, adding that the latest changes in legislation and policy show that the Government is moving in the direction of taking “even more repressive” actions. However Zourabichvili conceded that the resignation of Saakashvili may not be the key to making the democratic processes work if he agreed to allow the opposition parties to participate in government. “Anything can be accepted if it has the trust of the population, if the people can see and trust that the President’s powers are effectively reduced so that Parliamentary elections can take place in a free environment, one not controlled by [Interior Minister] Merabishvili’s police and by the media totally in the hands [of the Government]. This situation can be accepted as a compromise by the population,” stated Zourabichvili, noting that this kind of the compromise will nevertheless require the reestablishment of trust between the population and the authorities which could be achieved only with the assistance of Western partners, including the USA, who may become “guarantors” of that trust.

Summing up three months of protests in Georgia, Zourabichvili noted that the rallies had served as a sort of “electoral campaign” at which the oppositional parties got the chance to present themselves directly to the population. Salome Zourabichvili noted that her party was successful in that campaign. “If we look back on what we have gained or lost; we can say that we didn’t deliver what we promised the population, the free elections that would help us overcome this crisis. However, from the very first days of the protest actions we stated that we had a long way to go and would be a battle of nerves needing patience and self-confidence. In fact in this battle of nerves, the authorities lost their nerve more often than the opposition. It has become clear inside and outside the country through the rallies that without using their usual instruments – propaganda and repression - the authorities aren’t able to effectively govern anymore, they are not able to protect the borders and the country’s interests.

“Despite the fact that these protests have not removed Saakashvili and forced new elections, they have been able to show that the emperor is naked, even if he has a new and very expensive palace,” concluded Salome Zourabichvili, referring to the new Presidential residence opened recently in Tbilisi.