Clinton touched by dark Georgian
satire By Nicholas Clayton
TBILISI, Georgia - Hillary Clinton's tour
of the South Caucasus last week was met with a
series of surprises as violence spiked along the
Armenian-Azerbaijani ceasefire lines and Russia
accused the US secretary of state of encouraging
Georgia to launch a new offensive against its
separatist provinces. But, nothing seemed to catch
Clinton off guard so much as the unexpected gift
of a Georgian passport.
In what has become
an a common gimmick by the proudly reformist
government, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili
handed the stunned diplomat the replica passport
made for her as an illustration of how fast the
state's once-ineffectual public services now work
under his watch.
As Clinton laughed
nervously before the cameras, Saakashvili
said, "You see, now you
can participate in Georgian elections, no
problem." US Ambassador to Georgia John Bass
looked on uncomfortably.
Intentional or
not, the stunt ran like a dark satire of a real
passport drama that has captivated Georgian
politics over the last year and that holds serious
ramifications for Georgian-US relations.
In October, billionaire philanthropist
Bidzina Ivanishvili announced his intention to
form an opposition coalition to challenge
Saakashvili's government in parliamentary
elections this year. Almost instantly, the
government stripped Ivanishvili of his citizenship
on a technicality because he had obtained French
citizenship abroad. The parliament then passed a
flurry of amendments to political party funding
regulations, limiting his ability to finance
opposition activities as a non-citizen.
After an unsuccessful legal challenge,
Ivanishvili applied to regain citizenship through
naturalization but was rejected in April because
he still technically held French citizenship,
although he had already renounced it. The French
embassy in Tbilisi said it would have annulled his
citizenship simultaneously as he was naturalized,
but not before, because doing so would make him
stateless. The Georgian Young Lawyer's Association
called the rejection "illegal," and Ambassador
Bass urged the government to apply its citizenship
laws in ways that reinforce "equality before the
law" and to resolve the dispute "fairly and
expeditiously."
Therefore, when
Saakashvili handed Clinton a passport last week
and told her she could run for office in Georgia,
the joke was more than just playful banter, said
Lincoln Mitchell, professor of political
development at Columbia University. Mitchell, who
has authored two books on the Saakashvili regime,
said that the Georgian president was "thumbing his
nose at the Georgian opposition and the American
government" with the gesture.
"I would
hope that hope that whoever came up with that idea
in the Saakashvili [government] is being fired,
because the message is: In this country, passports
are toys. It's an insult to the Americans who have
been asking quietly behind the scenes to resolve
this [Ivanishvili] citizenship issue
appropriately, and if Saakashvili thinks it's a
joke, he's really misreading what's going on in
the United States right now," Mitchell said.
Parallel to the growing anxiety about
Georgia's democratic backslide has been a
concerted lobbying effort on Ivanishvili's behalf
on Capitol Hill. The Washington Post reported in
May that Ivanishvili had spent $850,000 on the
services of three lobbying firms in Washington in
the first quarter of 2012 alone. The Georgian
government spent $375,000 lobbying congress during
the same period. On the day Saakashvili met with
US President Barack Obama in February, Ivanishvili
bought full-page ads in both the New York Times
and the Washington Post decrying Georgia's
"super-centralized, almost neo-Bolshevik style of
governance, which exhausted itself long ago."
"It's a battle for legitimacy in
Washington," Caucasus expert Thomas de Waal told
the Washington Post last month. "You have two
election campaigns - one in Georgia for the
Georgian vote and one in the US for the leadership
in Washington."
So far, the only concrete
victory of the Ivanishvili lobby in Washington was
a bill proposed by Democratic Congressman Jim
McDermott requiring the US government to cut off
all aid to Georgia until the State Department
certifies the upcoming elections were held in a
"free, fair, and competitive manner."
Though unlikely to pass, this would be
tough pill for Tbilisi to swallow as the Georgian
budget has been propped up by billions of dollars
in US development grants, post-war reconstruction
loans and direct training and assistance over the
last decade. With a population of 4.5 million,
Georgia was the 5th largest recipient of US
foreign assistance per capita in 2010, raking in
$420 million in US aid obligations, according to
USAID data.
During her visit, Clinton met
with Georgian opposition leaders and said she
expects Georgia to hold "free and fair elections
this fall, and then complete a democratic transfer
of power in 2013" when Saakashvili's term limit is
up and the country holds presidential elections.
Furthermore, during confirmation hearings
before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in
March, US Ambassador-Designate to Georgia Richard
Norland said the elections would be a "litmus
test" for Georgia to determine it meets the
criteria of a NATO member-state - a status
Saakashvili has pursued as the jewel of his
foreign policy ambitions.
"The US-Georgia
strategic partnership remains a rather unique
animal in the post-Soviet space," said Cory Welt,
associate director of the Institute for European,
Russian and Eurasian Studies at George
Washington University. "For the US, Georgia is
still a kind of Euro-Atlantic country-in-waiting,
more than any other country in the neighborhood.
At the same time, […] how this election cycle is
perceived could be a crucial factor in determining
the course of US-Georgian relations down the
road."
However, despite the fact that so
much is at stake, the Georgian government has not
taken the pressure off of Ivanishvili or his
coalition. Although the parliament passed a
constitutional amendment allowing Ivanishvili to
stand for election as a French citizen with some
limitations, human rights organizations have
decried numerous incidents of pressure and
intimidation against Georgian Dream activists.
On June 11, Tbilisi City Court fined
Ivanishvili $90.9 million for allegedly offering
free or preferential services to the Georgian
Dream coalition through his various businesses in
the country. The fine sum is equal to 2.1 percent
of Georgia's total budget revenues for this year,
and 1.4 percent of Ivanisvhili's $6.4-billion
personal fortune, according to Civil.ge.
On the heels of campaign rallies that
attracted tens of thousands of participants in
Georgia's two largest cities, Ivanishvili says the
moves reveal the government's increasing
desperation.
"[The authorities] are in
agony. [President Saakashvili] is in hysteria,
because he understands very well that everything
is going towards its logical end," Ivanishvili
told local media June 13. For now, Ivanishvili
says he will not participate the in elections as a
foreign citizen and insists the government
reinstate his citizenship. The widely popular
patriarch of the Georgian Orthodox Church, Ilia
II, has also advocated for him to be given back
his Georgian passport and a survey released in
March by the Caucasus Research Resource Centers
showed 70% of Georgians agree.
Meanwhile,
the government continues to hand out Georgian
passports - both real and symbolic - to visiting
journalists, exiled Russian dissidents and South
African farmers brought in to revitalize Georgia's
moribund agriculture sector.
Anastasia
Belausova, a journalist with the Ukrainian daily
Segodnya, came to the Georgia's port city of
Batumi as a part of a press tour arranged by the
Georgian government earlier this year. At the end,
she said all the journalists were given "gift
passports" at the House of Justice as a surprise.
"I'm not sure how I would feel about it as
a Georgian from a national pride standpoint, but I
thought it was nice. The idea of having a Georgian
passport makes you want to come back to Georgia,
to 'your country,' " she said.
Georgia's
future may depend on the hope that, regardless of
how October's elections go, Clinton and the USAID
will feel the same.
Nicholas
Clayton is a Tbilisi-based journalist and
blogger covering the Caucasus and the world. His
blog can be found at
http://www.threekingsblog.com/
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