[This article was first published by The London Times]
Regime’s stifling of opposition spells victory for Russian imperialism — and for China and Iran
Our guest was remarkably sanguine in the circumstances. She had skipped a day in court to make our dinner party. The oral hearing, in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, was the start of an investigation that could end with a seven-year jail sentence. The charges: publicly criticising her government and running an economic-policy think tank that has accepted some foreign funding.
Another guest offered her a spare room: perhaps preferable to a prison cell. Nino Evgenidze laughed. These troubles ran in the family, she explained. The Soviets had executed her great-grandfather and deported two grandparents to Kazakhstan with their five children, including her mother then aged six months. “Now it’s my turn,” she said.
Her plight, as founder of one of eight non-governmental organisations facing prosecution, is part of an accelerating crackdown in Georgia, imposed by the Kremlin-backed regime after last year’s rigged election. Six opposition leaders are in prison or facing charges. The latest target is think tanks and pressure groups. The remains of the independent media will most likely be next. The Georgian authorities say they are acting within the law to forestall attempts by political losers and their foreign backers to foster chaos, while investigating past governments’ “crimes” and avoiding war with Russia.
A successful crackdown not only spells calamity for the overwhelmingly pro-western Georgians. It also means victory for Russian imperialism, and for China and Iran, both heavily present in Georgia. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps, a mafia militia, already uses the country as a playground for sanctions-busting and other mischief. With Ukraine in retreat, the Black Sea region is up for grabs and Russia intends to grab it. Yet elsewhere in the Caucasus, Russia has overreached and is on the back foot, with Armenia and Azerbaijan, once sworn enemies, both now taking an anti-Kremlin stance. We should press home that advantage.
“UK sanctions are what the regime fears the most,” says Marika Mikiashvili, of the pro-democracy Coalition for Change. Evgenidze and her colleagues were in London to urge our decision-makers to target the reclusive oligarch behind the regime, Bidzina Ivanishvili, and his enablers, who shelter behind London’s finest PR smoothies and priciest libel lawyers.
This week the British Foreign Office summoned Georgia’s acting ambassador to complain about the crackdown. The Europe minister, Stephen Doughty, issued a strong joint statement with his French counterpart. But other European leaders are dithering: they fear that pressure on the regime in Tbilisi will push it even closer to Russia. Britain is trying to stiffen their spines. It should lead by example, with more sanctions, including visa bans and asset freezes.
But we should also reflect on the lessons for our own behaviour. Since the “Rose Revolution” of 2003, Georgia has been a free country, where people like the readers of this column could go about daily and professional life without worrying about politics. Not any more. The choices facing our counterparts in Georgia now are exile, humiliation or resistance. It is worth pondering what we would do in their shoes.
Resistance comes at an increasing cost. If you join the daily demonstrations against October’s rigged election, you risk a hefty fine, followed by a frozen bank account and — announced this week — jail for non-payment. This is not Stalinist repression of the kind experienced by past generations, with knocks on the door in the small hours followed by a bullet in the head or a cattle-truck to exile. Instead, the regime traps and paralyses its critics and competitors in a bureaucratic and legal web. Think tanks and campaign groups are told to produce, within impossibly short deadlines, every bit of financial and other documentation involving their activities and contacts, or face prosecution.
Government service requires particular obeisance. More than 800 civil servants have been dismissed in recent months. Others have resigned, most recently Shalva Tsiskarashvili, a senior foreign ministry official. He was a co-author of a declaration last year in which diplomats pledged to uphold the clause in the constitution that cements Georgia’s aspiration to join the European Union and Nato. Tsiskarashvili tells me he walked out of his office this week, ending a 28-year diplomatic career, feeling empty, disappointed and betrayed, but also with “the joy of knowing I am on the right side in this difficult time for my country”. How many of us would do the same?
It is all too easy to see how our own rules, be they on foreign influence, campaign finance, public health, hate speech or professional standards could also be misused Georgian-style, whether at the hands of freelance zealots and bigots (enforcing wokery at universities or in the arts) or the authorities. For umpteen good reasons (ensuring probity in public life, national security, countering the pandemic) we have constrained individual freedoms in a way that past generations would find astonishing. That is placing a big bet on our rulers’ trustworthiness, and on the power and integrity of our legal system to keep them honest. Yet our courts are for the rich, and criticising the powerful is only for the brave.
Donald Trump’s America shows how flimsy even the strongest safeguards can be. Georgia may be 3,000 miles away. But events there are closer to us than we think.
Photo Credit: Sheldon Kennedy on Unsplash