Friday, 29 03 2024
Friday, 29 03 2024
11:00
The humanitarian aid sent by Armenia to Gaza is in Egypt
USA
10:41
The USA informed Russia about the terrorist threat on March 7
10:22
Russians are losing interest in Dubai
10:03
The EU will present the plan for the supply of weapons to Ukraine by April
16:04
Israel liquidated 200 Hamas militants in Ash-Shifa hospital
15:45
“The special services of Germany did not know about the terrorism being prepared near Moscow.” Scholz
15:26
“The question of leaving the EAEU is not being discussed now.” Maria Karapetyan
15:07
Clinton lobbied to swap Navalny with Krasikov
14:48
Georgian parliamentarians visited Tsitsernakaberd
14:29
“Russia knew about the preparation of terrorism for more than a month.” Budanov
14:10
Vasquez and Nacho will also extend the contract with “Real.”
13:51
The new Ukrainian law discriminates against Russian speakers, Armenian speakers, and Roma
13:32
“It’s hard for me to stay in the football world.” Mkhitaryan gave a briefing
13:13
The Foreign Ministry of Latvia declared the Russian diplomat persona non grata
12:54
Armenia will send humanitarian aid to Gaza
12:35
Kroos will spend another year in Madrid
12:16
Weather without precipitation is expected
11:57
Georgia will receive 9.25 million euros from UEFA
11:38
Alen Simonyan presented the current security situation in the South Caucasus to his French colleagues
USA
11:19
“The main point of the US-Armenia-EU meeting is economic stability.” Miller
The Armenia-EU-USA meeting is not related to third countries
Nikol Pashinyan’s interview was published in The New York Times
10:22
Banks in Turkey, UAE, and China are delaying payments for Russian oil
“NATO member Turkey will not create problems in this case.” Edgar Vardanyan
18:55
The Prime Minister received the delegation led by the president of France-Armenia Inter-Paranial Friendship Group
18:36
Azerbaijan’s Sambo team refused to come to Yerevan
Mirzoyan visited the Argentine Council of International Relations
17:58
The number of victims of the “Crocus” terrorist attack has reached 140
17:39
I strongly doubt that if Turkey decides to attack Armenia, the Russian border guards will protect it
17:20
The Israeli army is attacking the “Nasser” hospital complex in southern Gaza

Justice and Revenge in Georgia

Regis Gente,Caucasus and Central Asia correspondent for Le Figaro, Radio France Internationale and France 24, touched upon new developments in Georgia. Find the article below.

Commentators have been asking whether the recent wave of arrests by Georgia’s new government of former political rivals is about justice or revenge. The crackdown is about both. At the same time, the question is probably the wrong one. The issue is not the wrongdoing of Saakashvili’s former ministers, which only an independent investigation can assess. The focus should be on consolidating democracy and strengthening political institutions.

By making the transition a question of justice, many have tried, as they have done since the “Rose revolution” in 2003, to depict President Saakashvili and his team as white as doves. These unconditional supporters of Saakashvili, should have criticized him earlier to push him to really act as a democrat. It was the best way to protect Saakashvili from himself. But today those supporters, as well as Saakashvili’s former ministers, ask for justice, protection from the opposition and a balanced media. They would be more credible today if they had spoken this language for the last eight years.

Saakashvili should be praised for the very difficult—but often successful—reforms he initiated in a number of areas. Corruption has disappeared from daily life. Judges and police don’t take bribes anymore. Criminality has diminished significantly. Public services have been modernized. But there is another side, as shown in videos released two weeks prior to the October 1 parliamentary election. For the first time, Georgians saw abuses against inmates in prisons. That scandal, whose timing was no coincidence, probably handed victory to the “Georgian Dream” coalition led by the oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili.

Saakashvili’s mistakes lay in two areas. First, he was convinced that statebuilding had to come before democratization. In his view, it was more important to fight criminality, even with tough instruments, than establish a solid rule-of-law system. Second, he and his team made a liberal revolution without abandoning the illiberal Soviet heritage: they accused critical voices of being enemies of the “Rose Revolution” or pro-Russian. Even if there was some truth to this, they failed to create a genuinely liberal atmosphere in the country. This is why they nipped some opposition moves in the bud. Despite some distrust towards Ivanishvili and his “Russian” oligarch past, critical voices were prompted to join him after he entered in politics in October 2011 with his promises to topple Saakashvili.

Today, dyed-in-the-wool Saakashvili supporters believe that the more than 20 officials, including a former head of the penitentiary system and former minister of defense Bacho Akhalaia, are jailed only because of political retribution. Is this helpful for Georgia? Certainly not.

At the moment, former prisoners are testifying against Akhalaia, for example, because of the torture they say Akhalaia inflicted on them in the fight against criminality. Some soldiers also allege torture while he was trying to make the army more loyal after the 2008 defeat in the Russian-Georgian War. “It is not because you are a high official that you don’t have to face justice. We’re putting an end to the sense of impunity that prevailed under Saakashvili,” said Thea Tsulukiani, 37, the new Georgian minister of justice.

But many cases are not “political” at all. “Since I’ve become minister [October 25th], I have received more than five thousand demands from people asking for their case to be reviewed, because they were abused in jail, because their property was illegally stripped away,” says Tsulukiani. For years, human rights watchdogs have denounced property-rights violations, unfair justice (the acquittal rate was less than 0.1 percent), control over media (even if they remain much freer than in most of former Soviet republics) and nontransparent use of public money.

This doesn’t mean that the current wave of arrests is not also “selective justice,” motivated by revanchism. Most of the former officials arrested were charged for minor crimes. But it’s not clear, for example, why there was a rush to sue a dozen Interior Ministry officers who illegally wiretapped Georgian Dream members during the election campaign.

Tsulukiani explained why she came back to her country from France, where she had been working at the European Court of Human Rights: “One of my biggest goals has been attained. It was to defeat the [Saakashvili-led] National Movement so that it has no political future as a ruling party, and this makes me very happy.” The new government is about to make the same mistake Saakashvili made with his opposition. Now we understand why there is fierce pressure exerted on several local governments from the United National Movement (UNM); why some MPs say they are pressured to leave UNM to give Georgian Dream coalition a potential constitutional majority and eventually start an impeachment trial against Saakashvili; why there is judicial harassment of the former minister of internal affairs Vano Merabishvili or the current Tbilisi mayor Gigi Ugulava.

The worst mistake would be to repeat the Ukrainian scenario, where President Yanukovych jailed his strongest opponent, Yulia Timoshenko. She also is not white as a dove. But Yanukovych’s political motivation was so obvious that it led to Kiev’s isolation, especially from the EU. All the new government’s moves should be about strengthening Georgian political institutions. There will be no democracy without a real opposition. And for almost the first time, a former Soviet republic has a strong one, with a clear ideology (pro-Western and economically liberal), very experienced people, a strong television presence and some money. Killing this would be killing a historic chance to consolidate democracy in Georgia.

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