Articles with the Tag Saakashvili

More news from freedom loving Georgia

Autoritarianism, War on south Ossetia
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Saakashvili may still be popular with Decents and other wingnuts abroad, but his own people are sick and tired of him:

In recent weeks, anti-Saakashvili posters have appeared all over the capital, while the opposition has also been boosted by a television show featuring a popular singer conducting interviews with opposition activists and local celebrities from a specially constructed “prison cell”. The protest singer Giorgi Gachechiladze – known as Utsnobi, or “The Unknown” – has said that he will remain in self-imposed incarceration until Saakashvili steps down.

Earlier this month, Utsnobi held a protest concert near the president’s residence, drawing several thousand. The 9 April demonstrations are hoped to draw far greater numbers.

The Georgian authorities have accused the opposition of accepting money from Russia to fund its anti-government campaign, although no proof has yet been offered. They have also raised fears that mass protests next month could turn violent after several activists were detained last week on charges of illegally buying weapons and plotting a coup.

[…]

The mood in Tbilisi has become increasingly tense in recent days after the authorities released covertly recorded police videos of opposition activists allegedly buying automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.

“These tapes show there is a group of people who were thinking of toppling the government by violence, and using the demonstration as the place to do it,” said Yakobashvili.

it all sounds remarkable like the warnings the English police has been spewing about a possible “Summer of Discontent” in general and the G-20 protests in particular…

War is over (if Putin wants it)

Manufacturing Consent, War on south Ossetia
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And for the moment it seems he wants it, as long as Georgia agrees to his terms:

The key demands are that the Georgian leader pledges, in an agreement that is signed and legally binding, to abjure all use of force to resolve Georgia’s territorial disputes with the two breakaway pro-Russian provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia; and that Georgian forces withdraw entirely from South Ossetia and are no longer part of the joint “peacekeeping” contingent there with Russian and local Ossetian forces.

Medvedev also insisted the populations of the two regions had to be allowed to vote on whether they wanted to join Russia, prefiguring a possible annexation that would enfeeble Georgia and leave Saakashvili looking crushed. If he balked at the terms, said Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister: “We will be forced to take other measures to prevent any repetition of the situation that emerged because of the outrageous Georgian aggression.”

Saakashvili wanted a quick blitzkrieg war to forcibly rejoin South Ossetia with Georgia, confident in his army’s ability to defeat the Ossetian militia after all the financial support and training it had gotten from the Americans. He never prepared for the worst case scenario, but that’s what he got. Even now he’s belligerent, despite the loss of not just South Ossetia, but also Abkhazia and with the Russians having crushed his army, when it actually fought and not ran away that is. He’s the perfect example of how infectious the neocon/Bushite mentality is, in that he seems to think that bellowing loudly about how evil the Russians are and dodgy metaphors about Munich 1938 can change the reality of the crushing, unnecessary defeat his country has suffered.

The Russians on the other hand must be nearly as happy as The War Nerd –who was just happy to see a proper war for once– with this war. At last they got to humiliate one of the upstart breakaway republics that used to be theirs, not to mention the yanks by proxy, got Abkhazia and South Ossetia handed them on a platter and an opportunity how magnanimous they are by not overrunning Georgia entirely.

Fair point to Saakashvili though, he does seem to have won the media war, as most western media seem to either accept that Russia was the outright agressor, or that it somehow “forced” Saakashvili to invade South Ossetia, despite all evidence to the contrary. As The Exile calls it, Georgia made full use of “the CNN effect”, by quickly getting its talking points about the war across to the opinion makers, as well as having Saakashvili looking all western and decent and talking English, contrasting well with the much less western looking, odd talking Russians. Even the Russian spokespeople speaking English did so with thick accents and saying loony things; one I heard threatened nuclear war if the Ukraine made good on its threat to deny Russia’s Black Sea fleet a return to harbour. Moreover, the Georgians were better at getting moral support by showing footage of Russian atrocities, as I wrote on Monday. This went so far that CNN used footage of Tskhinvali ruins caused during the Georgian offensive when talking about the Russian attack on Gori! Well played Saakashvili, but it didn’t matter in the end.