Government control of key media outlets and interference in editorial decisions is diluting Georgian journalism’s democratic function, observers suggest. Democracy cannot exist without the kind of scrutiny and accountability that independent investigative journalism provides, says Sozar Subari, Georgia’s ombudsman for human rights.

President Mikheil Saakashvili’s government has come under fire for its opaque decision-making. Even after the recent government reshuffle, an event conspicuously under-reported on state media, “power is still confined to a small, closed circle,” notes an RFE-RL report.

“Praising your own team instead of holding them responsible is a long way from seeking to establish the truth,” it continues. “The media response — to omit from the main news programs one of the day’s most important developments — is tantamount to riding roughshod over the facts.”

“The reality is that the Saakashvili government is the fourth one-party state that Georgia has had during the last 20 years, going back to the Soviet period,” said Lincoln A. Mitchell, formerly with the National Democratic Institute. “And nowhere has this been more apparent than in the restrictions on media freedom.”

Journalistic TV investigations were one of the catalysts of the Rose Revolution. Investigative television programs are as necessary as news programs, says Vakho Komakhidze, a journalist and founder of the Reporter studio, financed by the National Endowment for Democracy.

“The focus of discussion on media in Georgia should not be what government channels will or will not broadcast but whether private ownership of national TV stations will be transparent and independent,” says Miriam Lanskoy, NED’s Senior Program Officer for Central Asia and the Caucasus. She cites two current cases in Georgian courts where former station owners allege that they were coerced by government agents to give up shares.

Saakashvili’s New Year resolution should perhaps be to curb his erratic behavior and focus on democratic reform. “The advice of people like me is: To whatever degree possible, forget about the Russians,” said Ronald D. Asmus, executive director of the Transatlantic Center at the German Marshall Fund. “Accelerate reform and regain the moral high ground you had, and lost.”

But his commitment to democratic institutions seems wobbly, judging by his recent record and comments. “If I had been in the opposition, I would have destroyed this government in three months,” especially given the economic crisis, he told the New York Times. “I know how to do it,” he said, “but I don’t want to teach them how to do it.”

Following Georgia’s 2003 Rose Revolution, Saakashvili took advantage of enhanced state capacity to promote economic development and counter-corruption initiatives. But the “laudable achievements of Saakashvili’s state-building program have come at the high price of a superpresidential political system,”, according to Lanskoy, and Giorgi Areshidze, director of the Partnership for Social Initiatives (PSI), a Tbilisi-based NGO, write in the Journal of Democracy.

Former NDI staffer Mitchell detects two competing personalities at work. “I’ve seen him do things right out of Giuliani’s playbook, and I’ve seen him do things that are right out of Putin’s,” he told the New Yorker.

Others suggest time is running out for him to recapture his credibility. “What is the future for Saakashvili?” said Sozar Subari, a longtime critic of the president. “He started the war, he lost the war, he lost the territories. There is a crisis. There is no investment in Georgia. The situation is getting worse and worse. If there is no change, he will leave Georgia as the president who lost everything.”

Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev yesterday signed a law extending presidential terms from four years to six, apparently expediting Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency. The move fed speculation that Putin, eager to act before the financial crisis further erodes his popularity, is unlikely to wait until scheduled elections in 2012 to return to the office.

The Kremlin acted unusually quickly, pushing the amendment through both houses of the Duma and all of the nation’s 83 regional assemblies in less than 50 days. The liberal Yabloko party objected, highlighting a clause in the 1998 law which requires that regions be given a year to consider proposed constitutional amendments.

“They’re completely ignoring the law,” said Sergei Mitrokhin, Yabloko’s chairman. “Unfortunately, this happens quite often, but this is the first time the process has been ignored for such a significant issue as a constitutional amendment.”

The amendment coincides with another proposal to expand the definition of treason, a move that democrats fear “could mean a return to Soviet-style prosecutions of government critics as traitors, making crimes even of conversations with foreign reporters and nongovernmental organizations.”

Activists and lawyers suggest that the law is being pushed through in anticipation of increased political dissent and social unrest prompted by the financial crisis and the Kremlin’s economic mismanagement.

The financial crisis is testing the viability of the Putin-Medvedev “tandemocracy,” notes one observer. “The two centers of power promised a gradual evolution of Russia’s political system toward more pluralism and public accountability,” Vladimir Frolov writes in the Moscow Times. But Medvedev’s modernization agenda has given way to crisis management and Putin’s White House is “the political center of gravity.”

The declining price of oil - from $140-plus to $40 a barrel - is hurting authoritarian “petrocrats” like Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, Hugo Chavez as well as Putin. The Wall Street Journal suggests that the Russian premier is particularly vulnerable, noting that the authorities have banned state media from using the word “crisis,” although the Public Opinion Foundation reports that 42% of Russians believe the country is in one.

The closure of political space and emasculation of democratic institutions may backfire against the regime as discontented citizens take to the streets:  

As the state is unable to tolerate or channel public anger into democratic debate, hostility can erupt in unpredictable ways. Earlier this month, some 30 Russian cities held demonstrations against a high new tariff on imported second-hand cars. … Riot police were sent from Moscow 3,750 miles east to Vladivostok, the epicenter of the movement. So far, the anti-tariff demonstrations aren’t overtly political, but the Kremlin seems to believe that can change and isn’t taking chances.

Robert Amsterdam’s blog features a rare document of dissent from within the security services, highlighting a posting on the Interior Ministry’s website from a disaffected police officer:  

The power knows that actions of people’s protest are possible, and that the consequences could be unpredictable. A question. On whom is the power relying? Who can save it from the people’s wrath? Who will help hold on to what has been pillaged? That would be you and me, colleagues. The Russian police. We are going to disperse the protesters, like we did on 1 May of 1993 and in October of that same year, like we dispersed the Russian March in 2008. So, in everything that has taken place with our Motherland since the year 1993, there is our guilt…. A question. Are we going to be the dogs-on-a-chain of this regime?

As RFE/RL’s excellent Power Vertical notes, the posting has since been removed and replaced with a message apologizing for the “inconvenience.”

While the European Union’s gravity model has been an incredibly successful engine of democratization within its borders, the EU is doing a poor job promoting democracy in its near neighborhood, a new report concludes. “Overall trends have been disappointing in most cases,” according to a report from FRIDE’s Richard Youngs.

“Democracy and human rights assistance remains extremely limited, although increased amounts have been allocated for broader governance reform,” Youngs notes. EU support through the European Neighbourhood Partnership “remains heavily state-centered” and even where it has supported media, civil society and opposition figures - as in Belarus - the aid has been has been small scale.

In Morocco, only 4 per cent of ENP funds go towards democracy and human rights, in Lebanon the focus is “overwhelmingly” on economic governance and capacity-building for state institutions, while EU assistance to Jordan stresses economic and poverty alleviation at the expense of public administration reform.

In the EU’s North African periphery, Moroccan modernization has failed to generate democratization; Jordan “remains essentially a ‘security state’”, having curtailed the countervailing powers of parliament, parties, the judiciary and civil society, and NGOs; while

Lebanese stability and confessional power-sharing have been secured at the cost of postponing essential democratic reforms.

To the EU’s east, Ukraine has failed to embed robust democratic institutions and culture; Azerbaijan continues to manipulate elections and restrict the opposition and civil society, although intra-regime divisions hint at prospects for future reform; and in Belarus, the release of political prisoners has yet to lead to meaningful political liberalization.

“The general trend has been towards increasing the share of aid given for direct budgetary support (that is, flowing directly into governments’ coffers) rather than investing significantly in democracy support,” the report states, concluding pessimistically:

In sum, our case studies do much to confirm a relatively pessimistic view of democracy

policies within the EU’s Neighbourhood. Democracy-related challenges are getting harder and political reform processes continue to disappoint despite partner countries having now been in structured partnership with the Union for many years. Within the EU there is an apparent absence of political will fundamentally to revise approaches to democracy support, even if the shortcomings of these policies have been apparent for some time.

Russia’s Duma is considering a new law that will expand the definition of treason, a move lawyers and activists fear portends a revival of the punitive Soviet approach to dissent. Activists and lawyers suggest that the law is being pushed through in anticipation of increased political dissent and social unrest prompted by the financial crisis and the Kremlin’s economic mismanagement.   

Russian law currently defines treason as “hostile actions intended to damage the security of the Russian Federation against foreign threats.” The amended definition would include “rendering financial, material, consultative, or other assistance to a foreign state, a foreign or international organization, or representatives thereof in activities directed against the security of the Russian Federation, including its constitutional system, its sovereignty, its territorial integrity and statehood.”

The proposed law “threatens to revive the Soviet-era habit of placing under suspicion anyone who has contact with foreigners“, the London Times suggests.

‘It is a hint for people to sit tight and keep quiet,’ said lawyer Anna Stavitskaya, who represents the family of murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Investigators would enjoy wide discretion in interpreting the new law, she said.

Russia’s ruling elite appears jittery, anxious at the political implications of the financial crisis that is “sending tremors through Russia’s fragile social contract“. The proposed bill signals that the Kremlin is planning to tighten its grip on dissent, Cathy Young reports.

“Is it too much of a stretch to think that this law could be directed against an opposition newspaper or website,” Young asks, “or a human rights group critical of the government, which has received assistance from the USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, or the Soros Foundation?”

She quotes the following report in the Moscow Times:

In a rare example of grassroots political power, angry protests by drivers prompted lawmakers in the far eastern Primorye region on Monday to ask the country’s two leaders to delay raising import duties on foreign cars. The Primorye regional legislature, led by United Russia deputies, voted unanimously Monday to ask President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to postpone the tariffs, which take effect on Jan. 11, according to a decree signed by Putin. Thousands of drivers took to the streets in several far eastern cities and towns Sunday to protest the tariffs, blocking traffic, clashing with police, openly insulting Putin and Medvedev and even calling on Putin to resign.

She also links to reports in the Russian daily Kommersant about similar protests in Novosibirsk and Krasnoyarsk.

The byzantine politics of Ukraine’s dysfunctional elite may be undermining the country’s international reputation and playing into the hands of its Russian detractors. But it is still evolving in a democratic direction, albeit toward “Italian-style politics…with systemic snags and never-ending elite zigzags,” argues Rutgers University’s Alexander J. Motyl.

Assuming it can escape the unwelcome attentions of its resurgent authoritarian neighbor, he argues, the country’s healthy civil society and vibrant youth augur well for Ukraine’s political evolution:

Civil institutions such as churches, synagogues, non-governmental organizations, are also booming in the absence of state intervention. Younger generations of Ukrainians, especially students, are developing the healthy skepticism, entrepreneurial spirit, and cocky self-confidence that characterize many young people in the West. …

The main threat to Ukraine’s continued democratic development would come-if it comes at all-from Russia. Its turn to a fascist-like authoritarianism and aggressive foreign policy under Putin, and the inherent instability of one-man rule of a corrupt energy-rich state, brings to mind interwar Europe, with Russia as Germany and Ukraine as Czechoslovakia.

Masked law enforcement officers today sealed and searched the offices of Memorial, one of Russia’s leading human rights organization, RFE-RL reports. Telephone lines were cut and the hard discs extracted from the group’s computers.

The incident is the latest of a series of infringements of associational rights. A spike in independent labor action recently prompted violent attacks on Alexei Etmanov, the leader of the Ford-Vsevelozhsk union and co-chairman of the Interregional Trade Union of Autoworkers (ITUA). A strike in Yekaterinburg by 250 migrant workers from Tajikistan, notes analysts Paul Goble, “raises the specter in the minds of many Russians of more such moves but could in the current environment easily lead to violent clashes.” He quotes one union leader’s remark that it cannot be “excluded that the action [of the Tajik workers] will become the start of mass actions” by migrants in other Russian cities. 

The country’s leaders seem aware of the threat and are seeking to dodge responsibility. “The Kremlin’s chief ideologist is worried about threats to Russia’s middle class”, RFE-RL suggests. It quotes a speech last Friday by Vladislav Surkov, the first deputy Kremlin chief of staff, which identified the source of the threats as — the West:

“If the 1980s were the times of the intellectuals and the 1990s were the times of the oligarchs then the 00s can be seen as the epoch of the middle classes. The main task of the state during the slump must become the preservation of the middle class, the defense of the middle class from the waves of poverty and confusion that are coming from the West.”

Kremlin ideologist Vladislav Surkov

But a former adviser to President Vladimir Putin argues otherwise. “Russia’s crisis has nothing to do with the U.S. or global recession,” Yevgeni Gontmakher told Eurasia Daily Monitor. “Assertions that the U.S. has crippled us are pure propaganda. Whatever is happening over here, we have done with our own hands.” Gontmakher insists that “Russia’s systemic crisis resulted from the state’s polices adopted as of 1999,” when Putin rose to power, which “unhinged Russia’s economy long before global recession started.”

Putin’s former associate is one of several analysts warning that further economic disintegration could generate social unrest and political upheaval. As Eurasia Daily Monitor notes:

Gontmakher’s story ….. was pointedly titled “Novocherkassk-2009,” in an allusion to the major workers riots on June 1 and 2, 1962, in the city of Novocherkassk, which were suppressed by the Soviet Army; 23 people were killed and dozens jailed in the unrest. The article raised quite a commotion by drawing a picture of a shaky social peace collapsing once the 1962 situation starts repeating itself with prices and tariffs increasing drastically, wages dropping, workers laid off in droves, and food disappearing from the shelves because of collapsing imports and inadequate domestic production.

If Russia is “poised” in a “twilight” between “authoritarianism and freedom“, the current trajectory looks ominous.

The Uzbek government’s decision to withdraw from the pro-Russian Eurasian Economic Community (EAEC) is not only a signal of Tashkent’s commitment to the “Uzbek Path.” It also suggests “a new openness to the West” that may eventually generate openings for reform, says Uzbek reformer Gulam Umarov.

Umarov cited the case of his father Sanjar Umarov, the former head of the Sunshine Uzbekistan Opposition Alliance, amongst others, to insist that  it is “extremely important” that human rights be on the agenda of any dialog with one of the world’s most repressive regimes, he told a recent Washington meeting co-hosted by the National Endowment for Democracy and the Center for International Private Enterprise. His father’s condition remains a cause for grave concern after 13 months in solitary confinement.

“Those classified as political prisoners, such as practicing Muslims or government critics, face ill-treatment and torture” while in Uzbek prisons, says human rights activist Mutabar Tojibaeva, herself a political prisoner for several years. “They are subject to verbal abuse, as well as physical and psychological pressure. Prison workers treat them like animals.”

Uzbek dissidents are limited by the realities in Uzbekistan today. Despite these limitations, they seek a dialog that will be effective in assisting with processes that ”open, reform and democratize” the country, such as the programs to improve transparency and minimize corruption on which he had worked with CIPE.

The country had experienced a cycle of tentative openings to the West followed by repression, said Miriam Lanskoy, NED’s senior program officer for Central Asia and the Caucasus. But the strategic partnership agreement with the U.S. was short-lived and the regime had stifled domestic civil society and pressured foreign NGOs to leave even before the Andijon massacre.

Civil society activists had been jailed and exiled, NGOs subsumed into GONGOs, and the few remaining independent actors were limited to “pushing the envelope” of incremental political reform. Youth activism was one sign of hope, said Lanskoy, a welcome contrast to the graying of the human rights community elsewhere in Eurasia.

The regime has a dedicated Center for Monitoring Mass Communications for violations of Uzbek laws and cultural norms. Since 2002, over 10,000 political prisoners have been held on charges such as “encroachment on the constitutional order,” “anti-state activities,” and “infringing the honor and dignity of the president”. In one of his “more comic attempts to disguise his regime from the prying eyes of the west, Karimov once established his own human rights organization, but when its president went to Bishkek for a conference, had him abducted and charged with sedition.”

Engaging such authoritarian regimes is a delicate business. Human rights groups condemned as “a disgrace” the visit of the head of the Uzbek Security Service to Germany in October on the same day that an Uzbek court sentenced a prominent dissident to 10 years in prison on politically motivated charges.  Azam Turgunov, the head of an unregistered rights group called Mazlum was sentenced days after the European Union praised Uzbekistan for its “improving rights record.”

But German officials respond to such criticisms by insisting that long term engagement with Uzbek officials and the Uzbek military is a far more fruitful strategy for promoting reforms than publicly criticizing Tashkent, notes analyst Alexander Cooley. In dealing with Uzbekistan, as with other authoritarian Central Asian states, the West must maintain a “precarious balance” between strategic access and democratic values, he argues.

Maintaining such a balance is further complicated by Russia’s “pushback against the democracy promotion agenda of the West”, contesting the spread of transatlantic democratic institutions, and the Central Asian states’ alternative regional mechanism in the form of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Cooley advocates “a more coordinated and reinvigorated transatlantic” approach on the part of the West “to promote both its interests and its democratic values throughout this changing and now critically important part of the world.”

Authoritarian petro-states were riding high earlier this year, enjoying record receipts from oil revenues which provided the basis for securing domestic political support through rising living standards, as in Russia, or subsidies and patronage, as in Iran and Venezuela. The surplus also provided resources for growing soft power initiatives and for funding international allies and proxies.

But the downturn in oil prices, which could yet plummet further in the face of the global economic and financial crisis, has chastened at least some members of the axis of diesel, as this report suggests:

Venezuela’s Chavez, who blustered and spread the wealth, has become more contrite as oil income shrinks; Iran spent a lot on crowd pleasing measures that did not manage to throw off the dead weight of sanctions. For now, only Russia seems able to have it both ways, pushing against the U.S. when oil was expensive, and now that it is cheap, cutting a deal with China that could change the game for everyone.

Ukraine’s squabbling political elite is undermining the country’s international reputation, jeopardizing prospects of NATO membership and playing into the hands of its Russian detractors. Despite the political stasis, the European Commission plans to recognize the “European aspirations” of Ukraine and five other post-Soviet neighbors, drawing them closer to the West through a new “European Economic Area.”

The good news, said the National Endowment for Democracy’s Nadia Diuk, is that the country’s democracy is secure. Current political schisms reflect personal ambitions and resentments rather than disagreement on fundamental issues, she told this morning’s Brookings Institution discussion on Ukraine’s twin challenges - feuding politicians and sharpening financial crisis. The bad news, however, is that the elite has failed to resolve the tensions between the presidential and prime ministerial axes of power which remains a source of political paralysis.

Ukraine has been “hit very dramatically” by the global financial crisis, said Anders Aslund of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. The economy has also been hit by declining demand for steel, which accounts for 42% of Ukraine’s exports, and the credit squeeze. But international financial markets are also very wary of political turmoil. Only a move towards a parliamentary model will resolve the “fundamental problem” that Ukraine’s presidency has largely negative prerogatives that Viktor Yuschenko has used to veto virtually every decision by premier Yulia Tymoshenko.

Democracy makes for “messy politics”, said Steven Pifer of the Brookings Institution and former U.S. ambassador in Kyiv, but Ukraine’s “political incoherence” is having a negative impact on its international image with potentially significant foreign policy consequences. European proponents for granting Kyiv of a NATO Membership Action Plan needed to see great political consistency and evidence of public support for NATO membership. Instead, the continual deadlock has given Germany – largely motivated by Russian opposition to the MAP - a pretext to justify its continued opposition. 

The EU is proposing “Association Agreements” with Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan which “acknowledge the European identity and aspirations of these countries.”, but without offering any promise of future accession. The proposal offers equal benefits and incentives to the post-Soviet states, apparently without regard for their democratic credentials, as the EU Observer notes:

“Partner countries continue to face similar challenges in developing their democratic institutions,” the commission text says, in phrasing that could cause offence to the post-revolutionary administrations in Tbilisi and Kiev.

The hardline administrations of President Aliyev of Azerbaijan and President Sargsyan of Armenia - where police shot 10 people during post-election protests in March - will make strange bedfellows for the more democratic governments in Georgia and Ukraine.

With free media, “probably too many” free and fair elections, and genuine political competition, Ukraine is the only state currently aspiring to EU membership that is considered free by Freedom House criteria, analyst Taras Kuzio recently observed. But serious problems with rule of law and corruption remain, and the byzantine politics does little for demonstrating the virtues of pluralism, seemingly justifying the Kremlin’s portrayal of Ukrainian democracy as chaos.

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili faces a challenge from former ally Nino Burjanadze

A former ally of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili founded a new opposition party yesterday on the fifth anniversary of the Rose Revolution. Several thousand attended the founding congress of the new party, Democratic Movement-United Georgi, led by Nino Burjanadze, although many democracy and civil society activists are suspicious and critical of her.

The opposition has been demanding early elections since August’s war with Russia. More Georgians think the country is headed in the right direction than before the war according to a recent opinion poll from the International Republican Institute. But the opposition believes it can capitalize on the government’s mishandling of the conflict and concern about its authoritarian drift. “Five years ago the Georgian people entrusted power to today’s authorities, but instead of democratic development and territorial integrity we have today the opposite,” said Ms. Burjanadze.

A picture of the war more complicated than either side’s caricature has emerged, writes Georgetown University’s Charles King. Saakashvili has “overseen important reforms and has inched his country closer toward becoming a genuine European democracy”, but…

Western governments would do well to heed the voices of Georgians themselves. They should realize that support for President Saakashvili, support for Georgia’s de jure borders, and support for Georgian democracy are no longer synonymous positions and might even be mutually exclusive. Georgia’s friends should take heed of how Georgian citizens have come to define their national interests-in ways that are more sophisticated, varied, and pragmatic than their leader would prefer.

The bloom started to fade from the Rose Revolution after Saakashvili secured constitutional amendments strengthening presidential powers, says Lincoln Mitchell, the author of the upcoming book “Uncertain Democracy: U.S. Foreign Policy and Georgia’s Rose Revolution“. “From that moment on, they set a tone that state-building was going to be more important than democracy,” says Mitchell, formerly active in Georgia with the National Democratic Institute.

“But the problem was if you try to do only one, you’re not going to get either. So Georgia in January 2004 had to rebuild the Georgian state and they had to become democratic and they had to do those things together,” he says. “They didn’t. And that’s been their biggest mistake.”