Europe's Georgian challenge

Europe's leaders need to start dictating terms to President Mikheil Saakashvili

By Nino Burjanadze

If, in 2008, saving Georgia seemed to be the great success of Europe's foreign policy, in the year ahead this country will provide a test of how serious Europe's collective strength in international affairs really is.

Last August the swift action of Europe's president, France's Nicolas Sarkozy, prevented the disaster of war in South Ossetia from becoming a tragedy on a continental scale. Through personal commitment and effort, he got the Russians to pull back from the brink.
But, in reality, the ceasefire agreed has only frozen the conflict. It was a sticking plaster, not a solution. As an immediate priority the EU needs to insist that the Russians honour the commitments they made last year – anything else will be and is being seen as weakness by the Kremlin.

For Georgian patriots the idea of a permanent division of their country is unthinkable. But, in the opposition at least, we also recognise that there can be no return to force as a solution to our divisions.

Instead we now have to follow the advice of US Vice-President Joe Biden, delivered in Tbilisi this July, that “only a peaceful and prosperous Georgia” offers the prospect of reunification. And the only way that will be achieved is if the European Union acts to insist our president, Mikheil Saakashvili, enacts the democratic reform he keeps promising but never seems willing to deliver.

Last September, just weeks after President Sarkozy saved him and our country from catastrophe, our president gave the first of many speeches to an international audience, in this case the UN general assembly, promising democratic reform.

Meanwhile, at home, he was intensifying the repression, jailing and beating political opponents: our human-rights ombudsman estimates we have between 30 and 40 political prisoners here; we in the opposition think the total higher still.

In July this year, on the very eve of Joe Biden's visit, President Saakashvili made more or less the same speech as that delivered in New York. The lack of progress in the intervening ten months – in fact we have gone backwards – was not remarked on by Western observers desperate to see progress here.

Yet, within days of Joe Biden leaving Georgia, uniformed thugs were kidnapping and torturing opposition activists once again. We have played this game of ‘cat and mouse' for too long in Tbilisi, and wishful thinking is no longer an option.

Better times tomorrow?

The endless recycling of a promise of ‘better times tomorrow' might work with the Western media, but in Georgia it only encourages cynicism. And the longer the governments of Europe allow this to go on, the less credible the European promise of democracy, free markets, tolerance and human rights becomes.

That is why it is now time for Europe's leaders to tackle this issue head on and start, bluntly, dictating the terms to President Saakashvili. He clearly wants to be part of the European democratic club, and he certainly wants Europe's money, which has helped our economy survive both the global downturn and the Russian blockade.

But he seems to think he does not have to follow the rules laid out for club members. And if he thinks that it is partly because he has been allowed to get away with doing that.

It is not as though Europe needs to impose some new plan or obligations on him. It simply needs to tell him that now he actually has to deliver on what he has repeatedly promised.

Simply taking him at his word does not work and has led to the absolute outrage that is the way the US and the EU are effectively bankrolling a repressive government that hampers the media, persecutes the opposition and holds elections that are neither free nor fair. Is that really what the hard-pressed tax-payers of Britain, Germany and France expect to see done with their money? I very much doubt it.

What Georgia needs from Europe

So, we need two things from Europe now. Firstly a set of benchmarks against which President Saakashvili will have to work if his administration is to continue getting Europe's aid and, secondly, a high-level group of senior European statesmen, backed by a permanent secretariat here in Tbilisi, who would apply constant pressure on him to act.

We know this works, because it has been done before. In November 2007 President Saakashvili closed down the Imedi TV station at gunpoint and tried to keep it off the air permanently. Europe intervened with a high-level group and the station was restored – but as soon as the Europeans turned their backs, President Saakashvili was up to his old tricks and engineered the sale of the station to his cronies.

This time round, Europe will have to insist that the job is followed through to completion.
In a matter of weeks the Lisbon treaty could come into force. Supposedly, it will give Europe the structures it needs to function for the 21st century and a union of many more states than the original community of six. But without the political will to make Europe deliver, it will not matter what the structures are.

Georgia is a test of whether that will exists. The democratic states of this continent can demonstrate they are a global force for peace and freedom. Or they can cower as a new cold war erupts around them. The prize for getting it right is big. A truly democratic Georgia would be more at peace with its neighbours as well as with its own people.

Georgia is a small country. But how Europe handles its future will be a big sign, one way or the other, of whether the Union can continue to punch its weight.

Nino Burjanadze is the chairman of the Democratic Movement-United Georgia, a former speaker of the Georgian parliament and was twice acting president of Georgia.