The Geometry of a Dead End

A very interesting analysis of the opposition's assumptions and blunders this week:


http://www.apsny.ge/analytics/1239587363.php

The Geometry of a Dead End

April 12, 2009

Gela Besadze

Today, on the holiday celebrating Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, one can already made certain preliminary conclusions to the spring civil confrontation. There can be no doubt this is in fact a civil confrontation. Tens of thousands of people came to the demonstration in front of the parliament on April 9. It’s not important if there were twenty-five thousand as the government claims or two hundred thousand as the opposition states. By my count there were from sixty to eighty thousand, although I say again, it’s not the essential thing. In any country a demonstration of more than ten thousand people is considered significantly large. But now on to the essential thing.

The opposition in reality drove itself into a corner with its categorical demand for the president’s resignation. It is entirely obvious that the majority in Georgia today are dissatisfied with the government. The situation has been deepened by the economic crisis, which has resulted in job losses for many people, and many of those who work in the private sector have not received their salaries for months. Of course, this is a significantly volatile mass, and when these people hear from their televisions that supposedly the crisis has affected Russia, the US, Iceland and everybody else except Georgia, their annoyance swells. Yes, they are unhappy with the government. But there exists no clear demand from society for the immediate departure of Mikheil Saakashvili. To the contrary, the majority of Georgia’s citizens want stability as the essential condition for stabilizing the economic situation in the country, which depends entirely on foreign investment. The population has a clear desire for change, more oversight over the government’s actions, and the creation of an electoral system in which the possibilities for falsification are reduced to a minimum. There is a demand for an independent judiciary, the inviolability of private property, and in general all of those attributes of normal democracy that are so essential for the further development of the country.

But the opposition decided to go for broke and lost, and it lost regardless of the outcome of the civil confrontation. They lost because in the eyes of the electorate they came off looking like a gang of grasping, envious people thirsting for power, and even the respectable people among the ranks of the opposition leaders, and there are indeed such people, came off looking no better than the others. With no little surprise I discovered in the opposition certain individuals who not so long ago served the National Movement with the same enthusiasm, pretending to be more Catholic than the Pope, or more properly, more National than Mikheil Saakashvili. This category of people always fishes in richest waters, being professional intriguers and time-servers who say one thing in public while carrying out intrigues in the corridors of power until their new bosses get tired of them. But, may God help them.

Besides the radicalism of their demands, the opposition also made a series of technical errors. One of these was holding the demonstration on April 9, a date that for the majority of Georgians is a day of remembrance and unity and not at all a day for confrontation. The next mistake was that the formula “April 9 will be the final day of Mikheil Saakashvili’s rule” was not only advertised beforehand, but repeated ad infinitum like a Buddhist mantra. Part of the protest electorate simply got burned out, and many people got tired of waiting for Day X. Another serious mistake was holding the demonstrations during Lent. The years of hardship have returned many residents of Georgia to the fold of the Church, and if ten or fifteen years ago fasting and praying were only theoretical concepts to most Georgians, today a large part of the population of Georgia observes the fast, which in itself is a very good thing. Holding a political confrontation in the days preceding Passion Week was a very serious risk, although apparently there no genuinely religious people among the opposition leaders (I’m not speaking of religiosity for show) who could warn them of this obvious oversight. A no less serious problem for the opposition is the problem of communication with the masses. Essentially they have access only to residents of Tbilisi and to internet users. The opposition TV channels Maestro and Kavkasia only broadcast in the capital. Thus they were not able to create a real feeling of the inevitability of change in the regions. There were no convoys of cars and busses streaming in with supporters that would have given the impression of a remix of November 2003. Without this visible stream of headlights in the Tbilisi night sky it was impossible to give the feeling of a coming change of power for the average person. Back then the feeling of a change in power was a forceful and convincing motive to come to the demonstrations, not to receive any particular gain, but only from a feeling of taking part in an historical moment.

The problem of communication involved not only technical capabilities. More important is that the opposition did not present to the people a unified plan of action for removing Saakashvili from power. Instead, the opposition leaders puffed up their cheeks importantly and promised that they would deliver this plan to the people on April 9. But then on April 9 the opposition had nothing to offer except the standard choice of actions that the population of Georgia has already long become accustomed to over the course of the past twenty years.

The hopes of a large part of the protest electorate that Saakashvili would get a call from Washington and resign also went unfulfilled. This was perhaps the biggest disappointment for the oppositionally oriented citizenship, and precisely the reason why the number of demonstrators began to decline exponentially. By Saturday it became clear that only a huge act of stupidity on the part of the government could alter the alignment of forces in the opposition’s favor. Recalling the events of a year-and-a-half ago, one could easily imagine that the critical moment would take place not when Rustaveli is packed with people, but when the hard core of the frustrated opposition finds itself eyeball to eyeball with the state. There were no more than fifty people at the parliament building on the morning of November 7. What fright could possibly have caused the government to decide to violently disburse them on live television remains a mystery. But this was the step that turned out to be critical, leading to the breaking up of the demonstration that had already come to resemble a brawl, the closing of Imedi and the announcement of the emergency situation – this was nothing other than the consequences of one mindless step, the logic behind which is impossible to comprehend.

What happened on Saturday night is also hard to understand. Either a frustrated opposition decided to arrange a provocation, or someone from the government team decided to “teach the uppity oppositionists a lesson,” it is hard to say. Fortunately, in keeping with the rules of the genre, history has repeated itself as farce; although that does not mean that we should be indifferent to who actually did it.

Incidentally, it should be the government that is most interested in properly investigating the incident, and not only in an investigation, but in publicly punishing the guilty parties, whoever they should turn out to be. The issue of the government in Georgia in this case is the topic of a separate conversation. If somebody in the corridors of power really hopes that the failure of a largely marginalized Georgian opposition is a victory for the government and gives it carte-blanch to continue the same policies, then they are sadly mistaken. Over these past days the opposition has lost many of its supporters, but this does not at all mean that that the relationship of the people to the government has changed for the better. If today the governing elite of Georgia do not make energetic efforts to overcome the systemic crisis in the country, this would be a disaster, most of all for the government itself. One need not enumerate the things that the government should do. Everybody in Georgia knows these things, or almost everybody. Passion Week is coming up, and may God preserve us.