Why did the French and US Ambassadors criticize the Georgian authorities?
The political pre-March lull in Georgia was broken by a public statement by the French Ambassador, who doubted the suitability of any Western support for Georgia for the first time. This statement opened a whole new political season, which is unlikely to be easy for the current Georgian authorities.
The main opponent of the current President, opposition leader and vice-speaker Nino Burdjanadze, claims that Georgia is on the verge of a peaceful revolution that will start with mass actions of civil disobedience on March 2. Mrs Burdjanadze pointed out that the Egyptian experience demonstrated that the Western powers are ready to support democratic movements in other countries, calling Saakashvili’s authority ‘neo-bolshevist’.
The opposition has been planning to attempt a revolution ever since the events of November 7, 2007, but this time the claim was supported by the French Ambassador, Eric Fournier, who said that all previous efforts by the EU in Georgia had been fruitless. He also claimed that over the past years Georgia had lost all democratic values, including freedom of speech. The ambassador summed up that the whole “Eastern Partnership” program should be revised.
Diplomats do not usually make such harsh speeches. Such statements are often a prelude to major events, such as wars or breaking off diplomatic relations. It was immediately noted that the US ambassador had also made some critical remarks recently on the transparency of the Georgian media.
After the press published Fourier’s speech, the French Embassy in Georgia accused it of disinformation and taking the ambassador’s phrases out of context, thus disclaiming the most radical of his alleged statements. Formally, the ambassador only recited the points of the Georgian opposition, but it could be seen that he concurs with them.
So why have two influential Western states decided to criticize the Georgian government at this point? During the ‘five-day war’ Eric Fournier did his best to stop Russian troops from entering Imeretia, while the US ambassador, John Bass, was only recently promoting new grants for Georgia . Neither of these figures made any statements of the sort during opposition rallies in 2009. Mr Fournier even criticized the radical opposition back then, praising the authorities for their liberal attitude.
What has happened in these two years that has utterly changed the attitude of the two diplomats, i.e. the two governments, towards Georgia? There are no repressions, no rallies in Georgia now, freedom of speech is reasonably practised. The French ambassador mentioned the severe economic crisis, but the economic growth this year was 6%, and that’s good, taking the global economic depression into account. So it would seem that there exists a very specific question, which has become the apple of discord between Georgia and the West, and this issue is most likely to be the critical question of Russia’s entrance to the World Trade Organisation.
Some experts say that the West is interested in Russia’s entrance to the WTO even more than Russia itself. So Georgia appears to be in the way of a globally-required process. The West can’t tell Georgia to make peace with the new situation in South Ossetia and Abkhazia after all the efforts to support country’s ‘territorial integrity’, but it can show that its support is neither limitless nor gratuitous.
Georgy Kalatozishvili. Exclusively to VK.
