Trouble in Tbilisi
by Whit Mason
The National Interest
2005 SPRING
On the eastern shore of the Black Sea, in the wine-soaked country
where Jason and his Argonauts sought the Golden Fleece and Stalin
felt his first dark impulses, a stark battle between the forces of
good and evil has entered its second year. On one side, a charismatic
young lawyer leads a government of idealistic young people committed
to ending their country’s age-old domination by an unholy alliance
of criminals and corrupt officials. On the other side, a cabal,
for whom their chosen ends justify any means, including violations
of virtually every precept of the rule of law, controls all levers
of power. It is a classically Manichean struggle in which both the
United States and Europe have committed enormous resources to help
the heroes prevail. But alas, there’s an unhappy catch: In this drama
the heroes and villains are the same people, and the forces of light
and of darkness are two sides of the same crusade.
Mikheil Saakashvili was lifted to the presidency of Georgia in
January 2004 on a tide of frustration with the status quo under
Eduard Shevardnadze. Since the country’s independence from the Soviet
Union in 1991, networks of crime and corruption permeating every
level of society had kept most of the country’s 5.4 million people
unhappily toeing the brink of penury. Saakashvili announced that his
administration would focus on two priorities: restoring Georgia’s
territorial integrity (by reasserting government control over three
break-away regions) and establishing the rule of law.
Both the United States and the European Union have responded
with millions of dollars in support of Georgia’s reform process,
particularly the rule-of-law effort, which both see as key not only
to Georgia’s stability but to the security of the wider region and the
vital pipelines that run through it. The U.S. Agency for International
Development invested $2.6 million in Saakashvili’s campaign in 2004
to support rule-of-law efforts and will spend the same amount again
this year. And for the first time in its history, the European Union
has sent a mission devoted solely to supporting reform of the criminal
justice system. Fourteen experts are now working alongside Georgian
officials to devise a strategic plan for reforming everything from
prisons to the education of lawyers to the management of judges. Yet
despite the lofty rhetoric and strong Western support, many legal
experts in Georgia, both local and foreign, say the level of justice
in Georgia has seriously deteriorated since the Rose Revolution.
A Culture of Crime?
It is difficult to do justice, so to speak, to the role of crime and
corruption in Georgian history. Ruled for more than 15 centuries
by a succession of imperial overlords–Byzantine, Persian and
Soviet–Georgians have traditionally viewed breaking the law as an
almost patriotic duty. Experts on organized crime say the Georgian
mafia is probably the best organized and most effective in the former
Soviet bloc. This culture was carried over into government as well.
Last October, Transparency International’s corruption index ranked
Georgia 139th out of 146 countries. Before the Rose Revolution,
police officers considered it beneath their dignity to collect the
pittance they received as a salary. Any self-respecting cop would
support himself and his family exclusively from what he could make in
bribes. In all spheres of state administration, lower-level officials
passed a portion of bribe earnings to their superiors and on up the
pyramid to the ministers themselves. Crime is not a parasite feeding
off Georgian society; it is part of its social DNA.
Western rule-of-law programs emphasize reforming the machinery of
justice: the police, lawyers, courts and prisons–the equivalent of
boosting the body’s immune system. Saakashvili has instead pursued
the political equivalent of gene therapy, focusing on the criminals
and corrupt officials themselves and the passive public support that
allows them to thrive.
Last summer the Georgian government summarily dismissed all police
patrolmen. For two weeks while a new force was being recruited,
there were no police on the streets at all. The new force received
just two weeks training and were equipped with 130 Volkswagen Passat
patrol cars. All of them gathered in Tbilisi’s Freedom Square, and the
president declared them ready for service, grandly dispatching them to
patrol the various districts of the capital. The new force includes few
veterans of the old force and many more women. They wear new uniforms
modeled on those of American police officers. They earn between 400
and 500 lari ($230-$300), a huge increase from the previous rate.
So far, most seem to be walking the straight and narrow. Drivers say
that in the old days, traveling between Batumi or the Armenian-Georgian
border and Tbilisi, one would be stopped by police and forced to
pay a small bribe 15 times or more. Now such petty shakedowns have
virtuallystopped. Driving some 200 miles back and forth between
Tbilisi and the Black Sea coast in December, my driver and I
were stopped just once by police–to insist that we put on snow
chains. Everyone agrees, however, that the new police need more
training, particularly to inculcate a new service-oriented ethic. A
human rights specialist working at the Ministry of Justice told me
that in the space of five minutes, he’d seen five incidents of the
new police beating demonstrators–at a celebration of the anniversary
of the Rose Revolution in Freedom Square! Despite the increase in
salaries, some of the new officers have already been dismissed for
corruption. And yet, the facts that a Justice Ministry official would
criticize the police and that some police officers would get dismissed
for corruption are hopeful signs.
Of course, the anti-corruption campaign is not limited to beat cops.
Arresting officials of the old regime and their cronies has been a
hallmark of Saakashvili’s tenure. So too has been the practice–which
the government refers to as “plea bargaining” and Transparency
International calls “ransom”–in which those arrested are offered an
opportunity to “buy” their freedom by paying some of their presumably
ill gotten gains into the state treasury. According to the Georgian
General Prosecutor’s Office, property worth a total of 55,703,573 lari
(approximately $30.9 million) was confiscated between January and
November 2004. The confiscated assets include about fifty apartments
and houses, shares in different companies, land, 27 cars and the
contents of various bank accounts.
Saakashvili has repeatedly responded to concerns about this practice
by saying that he’d rather see these ex-officials walking free
with some of their ill-gotten gains transferred to the state budget
than have them in prison with the money still in their private bank
accounts. While pleased to see corrupt former officials getting soaked,
the public recognizes this practice as a form of massive official
corruption in its own right. Whether because lawmakers had seen the
error of their ways or because they knew that all good things must
come to an end, the Georgian parliament approved a draft law on tax and
financial amnesty for those who evaded taxes and hid property and other
assets before January 1, 2004. All property must be declared by the
end of 2005 and will be legalized only after owners pay 1 percent of
its value to the state. The amnesty will not apply to those suspected
of terrorism, arms smuggling, or trafficking in drugs or human beings.
What may be even harder than persuading criminals to part with their
hard-stolen money is persuading ordinary Georgians to cooperate with
legal authorities in providing information against criminals. “Even
law-abiding citizens won’t cooperate with the police”, says Levan
Ramashvili, head of the Liberty Institute, a local think tank. The
public views the justice system as thoroughly corrupt and the police as
a legal mafia in competition with organized crime. Legislation creating
a witness protection program to encourage people to testify against
criminals is still pending in parliament. Ramashvili hopes that public
attitudes will change if a constitutional amendment to introduce jury
trials is adopted. Moreover, Saakashvili has promised to decentralize
the police and make them accountable to locally elected authorities.
But while the police still are viewed with suspicion by many
Georgians, the “thieves-in-law” can still count on the passive
loyalty of many others. Formed during the 1920s, thieves-in-law
evolved into a recognized caste in the 1930s and 1940s in Stalin’s
gulags and operated throughout the USSR. They were particularly
strong in Georgia. In the Soviet period, thieves-in-law controlled
prisons and penal camps. Outside of prison they acted as mediators
in their neighborhoods, and many law-abiding citizens looked to them
for protection. For many young people in Georgia, the thieves-in-law
became symbols of freedom and independence. Their popularity mirrored
the near-universal contemptfor state authorities.
In the early 1980s, thieves-in-law realized that they were missing
opportunities to make a lot more money in the burgeoning black
market. In 1982, according to Roman Gotsiridze of the Transnational
Corruption and Crime Center, one of them, Dzhaba Ioseliani, called
a meeting to suggest updating the thieves’ traditional code, which
prohibited “active work.” This opened the door for the thieves to
enter all aspects of black-market business and even to infiltrate the
government. By 1989, Ioseliani was able to create an organization
(Mxedrioni), with approximately 5,000 members. He even served as a
deputy in the Georgian parliament from 1991 to 1995, until he was
imprisoned for twelve years for organizing an attempt on Eduard
Shevardnadze’s life.
Saakashvili’s government has implemented a massive clamp-down on the
thieves-in-law, claiming that all of them are either in prison or
outside the country. The government is building two new prisons that
will contain special blocs for thieves-in-law in which their contact
with one another and the outside world will be severely curtailed.
The immediate result of taking the thieves-in-law out of circulation,
however, has been a rise in petty crime. They had ridden herd on
hoodlums for years, and the new police don’t yet have the experience
to take their place.
Institution-Building
While the government employs draconian measures, Georgia’s friends
in the West are busy encouraging and assisting with more traditional
institutional reforms. In July 2004 the EU Commission dispatched a
mission devoted solely to reforming the criminal justice system. A
preliminary needs-assessment by the EU’s rule-of-law mission found
the judges poorly educated, underpaid, working in decrepit, often
windowless courtrooms and offices, subject to intimidation and totally
lacking in professional pride. Cases move through the court system
so slowly that most of those arrested spend some eight months in
pre-trial detention. Defense attorneys and prosecutors often agree on
payments in lieu of other punishments, and the judge rubber stamps the
deal–often without even knowing how much money has changed hands. The
Ministry of Justice now wants to purge judges and prosecutors from
the old regime, Jacobin-style; the EU mission is urging it instead to
subject them to regular disciplinary procedures under a High Council
of Justice. According to the head of the EU mission, Sylvie Pantz,
the government’s work on legal reform has been fitful. “When something
isn’t being done”, says Ms. Pantz, “it’s always hard to tell whether
a Georgian lacks political will or is just negligent.”
In the past, judges would receive a phone call telling them how
to decide, and the role of prosecutors was limited to choosing the
sentence. “Lately”, says one highly placed Western official, “we’re
seeing a return to telephone justice.” There are rumors that judges
are taking more bribes than ever because they sense that their time
is running out.
Last October a presidential decree created a nine-part working group
to overhaul the criminal justice system. Influenced by those educated
in the United States and anxious to raise the system’s credibility
in the public eye, the group introduced a constitutional amendment
creating the right to trial by jury.
The American Bar Association’s Central European and Eurasian Law
Initiative (ABA-CEELI), the NGO that administers the U.S. government’s
rule-of-law program, is wrestling with Plato’s famous conundrum,
“Who will guard the Guardians?” The law faculty, where Georgia’s
jurists are born, is considered perhaps the most corrupt institution
in the country. Generally, students just pay for degrees–and until
now, this has been the only qualification for practicing law. To
raise professional standards, ABA-CEELI has created a bar association
along with a challenging entrance exam. Beginning in June 2006, only
members of the bar will be allowed to practice. The first bar exam,
administered in November 2003, the day after Shevardnadze resigned,
was rife with cheating. Beating Georgians at cheating on exams is like
beating a grand master at chess. ABA-CEELI has created a data base
with 5,000 questions and a computer program to choose questions for
the exam at random. Future exams will also reorder questions so they
don’t match practice questions in the study guide, which exam-takers
used as a basis for quickly navigating through crib sheets.
The Georgian Dilemma
Despite these programs, Georgia’s foreign friends remain uneasy about
some of the extralegal methods the Saakashvili Administration uses
to establish the rule of law. “The government urgently needed to
consolidate power, real power–like ‘pick up the phone and tell an
official to get something done’ sort of power”, says a leading expert
on corruption in Georgia. “When this government has had to choose
between doing things legally and doing things quickly . . . it has
chosen to act quickly.”
Levan Ramashvili is concerned that the use of extralegal measures
has created a dangerous precedent. “Up to 1,000 cases of maltreatment
of prisoners were documented last year”, he says. Media exposure has
dramatically reduced the level of abuse–but by prompting police to
arrest fewer people, not to switch to legal methods. There are also
concerns that senior figures in the government are pushing police to
arrest political critics and rivals. Claude Zullo, deputy regional
director of ABA-CEELI, cites the case of a newspaper editor in
the town of Gori on whom police had allegedly planted drugs. “The
judge hearing that case received a lot of phone calls from people
in power telling him which way it should go”, says Zullo. Just after
the Rose Revolution, police arrested former Deputy Defense Minister
Gia Vashakidze and two associates. They allegedly took all three to
a cemetery and beat the two associates, then took them to Tbilisi’s
central police station where the abuse continued. Saakashvili, then
president-elect, held a press conference in which he praised the
“brilliant operation” and asserted the guilt of the accused. At
around the same time, approximately 200 peaceful demonstrators
blocked the main east-west highway in the center of the country to
protest the police having allegedly planted an illegal handgun on a
local official as a pretext for arresting him. The police beat the
demonstrators on national TV. Seven were arrested and spent three
months in pre-trial detention. Rather than criticize the police
department’s heavy-handedness, Saakashvili denounced the protesters as
“hooligans” and declared: “I want to tell everyone who is defending
crime bosses that they will be dealt a very hard blow to the teeth.”
Though the anti-corruption drive has violated Western notions of
civil liberties, Georgians generally rank it as the government’s
greatest success so far. Most Georgians seem convinced that the ends
justify the means. At the same time, the practice of “plea bargaining”
is widely seen as a form of legalized corruption that may undermine
public confidence in law enforcement officials.
Sources say the most important change is that there are no longer
pyramids of corruption reaching to the top of the administration. One
expert told me that the government is “99 percent cleaner at
the top.” Perhaps more importantly, this impression is shared by
the Georgian public. In a recent poll conducted by Transparency
International, 23 percent of Georgians say they expect corruption to
be far less in three years time. (Just before the Rose Revolution,
only 1 percent expected an improvement in three years, while 55
percent expected it to get worse.)
Perhaps the young crusaders will clean house and then trade in their
draconian methods for Western approaches to governance. Or could
Georgia be morphing into what Fareed Zakaria calls an “illiberal
democracy”, one of those proliferating “democratically elected regimes
. . . [that] are routinely ignoring constitutional limits on their
power and depriving citizens of their basic rights”? For now the
question remains open.
One test case is how the Saakashvili Administration handles Ajaria.
>>From the collapse of the Soviet Union until last May, this
autonomous region was the personal fiefdom of a local autocrat,
Aslan Abashidze. Ajaria paid no taxes to the central government,
while Abashidze personally pocketed a fee for every shipment of oil
that passed through the region’s oil terminal at Batumi. After a tense
stand-off last spring, Saakashvili succeeded in ousting Abashidze
and reasserting Tbilisi’s control over Ajaria.
Today, Ajaria remains autonomous in name only. All officials in
Ajaria are now wholly subordinate to the administration in Tbilisi.
The new head of the region’s government as of July 30, 2004 is
Levan Varshalomidze, a lawyer who studied with Saakashvili in Kiev.
Although Varshalomidze was confirmed by Ajaria’s assembly, he was
effectively imposed by Saakashvili. The head of the Ajaria branch
of the Interior Ministry, Giorgi Papuashvili, another official sent
from Tbilisi, seems to be universally loathed in Ajaria. Rumor has
it that he was appointed to the position because he is willing to
use draconian or unethical methods that his predecessor was not.
In Ajaria, detained officials and their cronies are supposed to pay
into something called “The Ajaria Development Fund.” Authorities
have refused to divulge any information about this fund, such as how
much money it contains, how it’s managed or what it will be used
for. They say that they will reveal all once they have collected
enough money–without saying how much “enough” is. The Transnational
Crime Center offered to help Ajaria’s regional government set up a
body to monitor the fund, in order to bolster public confidence. The
offer was rejected.
Western governments still hesitate to gainsay a smart, popular
president who is a lawyer and is unshakable in his faith that he
knows how to ensure the success of reform in Georgia. After all,
Saakashvili entered office with an ambitious and praiseworthy goal:
“In establishing a model of good governance, we have the ability
to bring positive change to an entire region. Not through exporting
revolutions, but rather by providing an example that democracy and
stability, prosperity and respect for human dignity are possible in
our region of the world.” No one is prepared–yet–to write him off,
but many are looking at his government’s actions with an increasingly
wary eye.
But what constitutes real reform? Beating crime once and for all? Or
merely replacing one criminal elite with another? This question gains
particular urgency in light of Georgia declaring itself a model for
newly democratized Ukraine–itself coping with questions of official
corruption. Given President Bush’s second-inaugural pledge to promote
liberty around the world, it is important to assess whether liberty
can be promoted against fierce opposition without betraying the very
values it purports to advance. Now that the Rose Revolution has faded,
Georgia reminds us that the best intentions in the world can’t dismiss
such hard questions.
Georgia’s Prime minister, Zurab Zhvania, was found dead on February 3,
2005. Though many Georgians are skeptical about the official cause of
death–carbon monoxide poisoning due to a faulty heater–a team sent
by the FBI has confirmed this preliminary conclusion. “The system
of government of Georgia was specifically (and hastily) designed for
Zura and Misha to rule”, says Mark Mullen, the head of Transparency
International Georgia. “With the great and sad loss of Zura, some
might say it doesn’t make much sense anymore.”
Even before Zhvania’s death, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council
of Europe had criticized the constitution for concentrating too much
power in the hands of the president. Without Zhvania, Saakashvili has
become even more powerful. There are also concerns about his proposals
to allow judges on the Supreme Court to serve two terms and to give
the exclusive right to nominate them to–you guessed it–the president.