Washington Post - 01.26.2004

Washington Post

Push for Democracy Has Authoritarians Unnerved

Events in Georgia Embolden Long-Frustrated Opposition Groups in Many Ex-Soviet Republics

By Peter Baker and Susan B. Glasser, Washington Post Foreign Service

MOSCOW -- When heads of state from around the former Soviet Union gathered for the funeral of Azerbaijan's longtime president, Heydar Aliyev, last month, the buzz behind the scenes was about the change in power not in the Azeri capital of Baku but in Georgia next door.

A revolution had just toppled the president of Georgia, Eduard Shevardnadze, and his peers in the Commonwealth of Independent States were nervously looking over their shoulders, worried about repeat performances in their countries. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, approached Georgia's acting president, Nino Burdzhanadze, and captured the mood with characteristic crudeness.

According to two Georgian sources, Putin said to Burdzhanadze, "All the leaders of the CIS are [expletive] in their pants." 

Georgia's bloodless "rose revolution" has set on edge much of the former Soviet empire, where authoritarian governments still dominate and genuine democratic systems have yet to take hold outside the three Baltic states, and now Georgia. As the revolution's leader, Mikheil Saakashvili, was inaugurated as Georgia's new president in the capital of Tbilisi on Sunday, many politicians, activists and analysts were wondering which former Soviet republic might be next.

Already Saakashvili's unexpected victory in overturning the old order in his homeland has emboldened long-frustrated opposition movements in places such as Ukraine and Belarus, where opponents of the current governments hope to emulate his success. At the same time, autocrats around the region, particularly in Central Asia and the Caucasus region, have moved to crack down on political dissent further in recent weeks, determined to smother any spread of the Georgian brush fire.

"There's no doubt the revolution in Georgia has had a great impact," said Pyotr Poroshenko, an opposition leader in Ukraine and friend of Saakashvili's from their days as students in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital. "We have a trend in republics of the former Soviet Union, such as Azerbaijan, Belarus and Ukraine, where the current authorities are acting in a very undemocratic manner to keep power. Saakashvili's example shows that they can lose."

The enthusiasm even reached Central Asia, home of the region's most entrenched governments. "When it comes to the opposition, there was, no question, a lot of euphoria after the Georgian events with the idea that, hey, it could happen here," said David Lewis, a Kyrgyzstan-based analyst for the International Crisis Group, a private research organization. "I'm not sure that's realistic, but there was a lot of interest in how it happened, how it was organized, logistics and all that."

Saakashvili, a 36-year-old U.S.-trained lawyer who lived in Washington and New York before returning home, traveled recently to Ukraine to meet with its leading opposition figure, Viktor Yushchenko, and to sign a mutual cooperation pact. Saakashvili's allies in the Georgian youth group Kmara have worked with their counterparts in the Belarusan youth group Zubr; both were trained by activists from Serbia who helped topple Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.

In the days after the Georgian upheaval, the Belarusan students celebrated by hanging a banner over one of Minsk's busiest intersections. "Gotov Je!" it read, using the Serbian slogan adopted by the Georgian youths and now aimed at Belarusan President Alexander Lukashenko. "He is finished!"

"There's a second European democratic revolution underway in countries like Belarus and Ukraine where we are facing the problem of getting rid of corrupt, bureaucratic dictatorships," said Vladimir Kobets, one of the Zubr coordinators, speaking by telephone from a protest in Minsk on Friday as several fellow activists were being arrested nearby. "What happened in Georgia is exactly the same." 

The Georgians played down suggestions that they will generate a wave of resistance around the region. "We're not pretending to export the Georgian revolution to other countries," newly installed State Minister Zurab Zhvania, the third member of the revolutionary troika along with Saakashvili and Burdzhanadze, said in an interview. "But if somebody wants to learn a lesson, that would be fine. I've been teasing Misha [Saakashvili] that we're going to export him as our Che Guevara."

The lesson learned by other governments, though, may be not to permit the sort of open dissent that fostered the Georgian revolt, analysts said. In Tbilisi, an independent television station effectively sided with the opposition and Shevardnadze did little to crack down on critics. Other countries around the former Soviet Union zealously control television and often do not tolerate rival political organizations.

"There are authoritarian regimes that clearly pay attention to what goes on in the neighborhood and they're clearly reacting to it," said an official from a Western nongovernmental organization that helps foster democratic institutions in the region, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. 

In Azerbaijan, where Aliyev's ruling circle installed his son, Ilham Aliyev, in the presidency shortly before the older man's death, the new government has unleashed a wave of repression, locking up at least 1,000 opposition activists and engaging in widespread torture, according to a report last week by Human Rights Watch.

In Uzbekistan, where thousands of people are in prison for what human rights groups call political or religious reasons, the government of President Islam Karimov recently decided to require foreign nongovernmental organizations to register with the Justice Ministry. The groups, calling it a direct reaction to events in Georgia, said they fear that they will be refused registration and ordered to close. Some groups report pressure in Kyrgyzstan as well.

"The perception of governments here is that a good part of the Georgian revolution was spread by Western governments or organizations and that's potential" for trouble elsewhere as well, Lewis said.

Much of the attention has focused on billionaire George Soros's Open Society Institute, which has offices in all but one of the 15 former Soviet republics and promotes civil society and democratic institutions by funding human rights organizations and independent newspapers. In Georgia, Open Society helped with voter education, and Shevardnadze singled it out as a major force behind his downfall on Nov. 23.

One lesson learned from Georgia is that change forced by mass protests must be focused around elections. Saakashvili brought tens of thousands of people into the streets to protest widespread fraud in Nov. 2 parliamentary elections. Now activists are focusing on the election calendar elsewhere in the region: parliamentary elections in Belarus and a presidential election in Ukraine in October; parliamentary elections late in the year in Uzbekistan; parliamentary and presidential elections in early 2005 in Kyrgyzstan.

Many analysts are looking particularly at Ukraine's election after years of political turmoil. President Leonid Kuchma had vowed to step down after two terms. But with the opposition leader Yushchenko viewed as a favorite, Kuchma and his allies are pushing a constitutional change to allow him to serve another term or cancel elections in favor of a president picked by the Kuchma-controlled parliament.

Opposition leaders such as Yulia Tymoshenko tout what they call the "Georgian scenario" as their best response and Yushchenko, a cautious former prime minister, recently warned Kuchma that unless he backed off, "people will solve this problem in the street," as his ally Poroshenko put it. 

Just days after his unlikely victory in Georgia, Saakashvili came to advise Yushchenko in Kiev. The leader of the "rose revolution" spent five hours over two days closeted with Ukraine's often feuding opposition leaders. "It was not how to do the revolution," said Poroshenko. "He simply gave us hope that it's possible to do."