MOSCOW, Nov. 9 (UPI) -- Mikheil Saakashvili has shown his country and the world what he believes Georgian democracy should be: He dispersed the protesters with water cannon, rubber bullets and tear gas; introduced a state of emergency; and banned opposition television.
His traditional backers -- the European Union, the United States and Ukraine -- have joined Russia in calls against the violence.
Saakashvili has made a fatal blunder. The streets of Tbilisi are silent, and so is Imedi television, the principal opposition broadcast outlet. He will pay dearly for this Pyrrhic victory. Saakashvili's days in office are numbered. He will lose whatever turn events take.
He announced on Thursday that the presidential election will take place on Jan. 5, 2008. A referendum on whether to hold the parliamentary elections earlier will also happen at that time. But the last two months have robbed him of any chance to win the parliamentary and presidential polls fairly. And he will be in an even worse position if his regime stoops to ballot rigging, which is quite possible. The Rose Revolution, which overthrew Eduard Shevardnadze four years ago, started for just that reason.
Saakashvili flew into a panic even when things were not so bad for him -- when he could not be sure whether his opponents would re-enact Ukraine's Orange Revolution, and their camp near the Parliament House would hold on as long as its Kiev prototype in autumn 2004.
The president sees rallying the nation against a perceived threat from an external enemy as his only chance to consolidate his hold on power. He started with a television address blaming Russian oligarchs for the opposition ferment. Georgians did not swallow that, so the enemy mutated into Russian secret services and their alleged collaboration with opposition leaders.
Pro-presidential Rustavi 2 television showed surveillance footage of the meetings, but this was a misfire: Russian diplomats had made no secret of their contacts with Georgian political activists. Other Georgian government denunciations revealed that the phones at the Russian Embassy are bugged (which incidentally the Georgian Parliament deems legal) and that politicians are under surveillance.
The earliest footage dates back to May 2005, which means that Georgian secret services were ready to face public unrest long before it started. Saakashvili has kept the compromising information up his sleeve to use it -- his only trump -- now that things are heating up. He has expelled several Russian diplomats and is ready to recall the Georgian ambassador from Moscow, thus starting a diplomatic war with Russia in a vain attempt to settle his country's domestic problems.
What he is doing is no cure-all, and he is aware of it -- just as his opponents -- who are no fast friends of Moscow, either -- are.
The U.S. administration also sees the point. At any rate, the latest pronouncement of the State Department thwarted Saakashvili's hopes. Its spokesman Sean McCormack said that America insisted on citizens' right to peaceful protests, and that he could not say anything about alleged attempts to stir up unrest in Georgia from the outside.
Georgian opposition has been seeking to win Western not Russian support for several months. Whatever Russian politicians might be saying now about American influence on the violent suppression of the budding Georgian revolution, opposition has at least started the U.S. administration thinking whether or not democracy, Saakashvili-style, is as fine as it first appeared.
--
(Yelena Shesternina is a political commentator for RIA Novosti. The opinions expressed in this article are her own and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.)
--
(United Press International's "Outside View" commentaries are written by outside contributors who specialize in a variety of important issues. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of United Press International. In the interests of creating an open forum, original submissions are invited.)
