Has Georgia abandoned secret informants?

The Georgian parliament adopted the Law on the National Security Service (NSS) in three readings, which requires the withdrawal of all departments responsible for national security from the system of the Interior Ministry (including the Secret Service Department, special ops units, and so on) and the establishment of an absolutely different structure. Its head will be appointed for six years, so that he wouldn’t depend on the president or the prime minister, who are elected for five and four years. The head of the NSS can be changed only by parliament’s decision; and he or she can be dismissed by the parliament without the prime minister’s consent.  All these changes are aimed at de-politicization of the special services, after decades of their serving not the country, but certain officials and the regime.

The most important decision was the elimination of the institution of “officers of the acting reserve” (OAR), which was founded in Soviet times. An OAR was a secret informant – seksot (“sekretny sotrudnik” – in Russian) who worked in almost all labor collectives – from major enterprises to research and development establishments. He or she informed the agencies about attitudes in a collective.

Interestingly, the practice of integration of OAR not only into public, but also private enterprises was common till 2015 – the authorities explained it was due to interests of national security, even though the country declared a course to building a democratic state, according to the European model, right after the declaration of independence in 1991.

Why did this happen? Vestnik Kavkaza asked the former head of the Stationary Office, Petre Mamradze, about it. Mamradze is an outstanding expert on not only the post-Soviet, but also the Soviet history of Georgia. He is rather pessimistic about the issue and doesn’t believe that the authorities are abandoning OAR in reality, as the social mentality in Georgia hasn’t become a European one in the last 25 years.

Petre Mamradze: At the moment we know only that the authorities declared the elimination of the institution of OAR. In reality, it would be difficult to abandon it, as the majority of society is thinking in the old way. I’m not sure the authorities will eliminate OAR in practice. It is too useful for the self-preservation of any regime. In the last 25 years, at first sight everything has changed in Georgia, but OAR has stayed unchanged. It is a product of the social mentality.

Vestnik Kavkaza: Why didn’t Mikheil Saakashvili, who has sworn loyalty to the pro-Western course, reject it?

Petre Mamradze: Once I described Saakashvili and his team as “neo-Komsomol members.” They revived the KGB as an instrument of preservation of power and strengthened the OAR.

Vestnik Kavkaza: What was the position of the second president of the country Edward Shevardnadze? You worked with him for many years.

Petre Mamradze: Shevardnadze viewed the KGB negatively. Everybody knew about this in his team from Soviet times. He had bad relations with the head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov. When Shevardnadze became President, he weakened the institution of the OAR, which began to be strengthened under Mikheil Saakashvili, when an officer of national security worked in all the universities and had more rights than their rectors.

During almost 10 years of Saakashvili’s regime, the OAR institution was significantly strengthened. Wiretaps were everywhere. They were organized by the “modern Beria” – the Interior Minister Vano Merabishvili, who was nicknamed “the regime’s spine.” He openly praised the creation of such an atmosphere where every citizen thinks that he or she is being watched and wiretapped. Western journalists wrote that in Georgia, where in Soviet times people told each other anti-Soviet stories in queues, buses, and everybody laughed at them, in this Georgia which called itself “a free democratic country” people were afraid of speaking by mobile phone, while friends who met on the street switched off their mobile phones to show that their talk wasn’t wiretapped.

Vestnik Kavkaza: Is the disease incurable?

Petre Mamradze: Today the authorities (if they are able to do it) and the non-governmental sector have faced the task of changing the situation. Unfortunately, after 2012 when Georgian Dream came in power, not much was done to dismantle the system which served to preserve Mikheil Saakashvili’s power.

It is good that today at least they are making statements and implementing some reforms. But not only the non-governmental sector, but also citizens should always check and see that the OAR institution is really destroyed.

However, if Georgian society fails to build a system of democratic control through the mass media and NGOs, words about the elimination of the OAR will remain empty, and the “cancer” will turn into a new form.