Georgian democracy smashed to pieces

The draft report made by international observers on the results of the forthcoming early elections of the Georgian President (on January 5, 2008) was distributed in Moscow. The report will be exposed on January 7, but a certain part of it has already surfaced. Officials from Europe’s leading countries and organizations criticized the events that took place in Georgia during the election campaign. To all appearance, Europe decided not to support USA’s protégé, Mikhail Saakashvili.

	Georgian democracy smashed to pieces
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“The unprecedented pressure which the authorities put on the opposition is especially conspicuous. The arrest of the former Minister of Defense, Irakly Okruashvili, who dared to stand up against the president, was a blatant decision to make. Instead of presenting the evidence proving the president’s innocence, the oppositionist was put into prison where he was forced to disavow his previous statements,” the draft report says.

International observers set out their concerns about the dispersal of the opposition rally in Georgia’s capital Tbilisi on November 7. “The coercive dispersal of the opposition meeting totally contradicts to the norms of the freedom of meetings. Georgia has done nothing to give clear explanations of events that happened in the center of Tbilisi on November 7,” the draft report runs.

The document did not leave the story with the Georgian TV channel out of its attention either. “The Georgian authorities roughly violated democratic norms guaranteeing freedom of speech. The country’s largest oppositionist channel stopped its broadcasts as a result of the coercive seizure. When the channel resumed its programs under the pressure of the international community, they started to intimidate its staff, which eventually made people flee. The opposition was virtually deprived of the opportunity to access television and radio broadcasts,” observers wrote.

“The elections could not correspond to many criteria that are commonly used in Europe. These are not elections, but a referendum in president’s support. The presidential administration and the president himself exerted an immense influence on the process of the past elections. The abuse of the so-called administrative resource was definitely a part of it. If this can be referred to as administered democracy then these were administered elections,” the report of the OSCE mission said.

“According to the conclusion made by the mission of the parliamentary elections of the OSCE and the Council of Europe observers, the elections are considered unfair. They do not correspond to many obligations of the OSCE and the Council of Europe, nor do they match any standards of democratic elections,” observers said in their preliminary conclusion.

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