NCSJ - 03.13.2008

Trouble in the Caucasus

By Ben Sack, Program Assistant

At the beginning of this year, both Armenians and Georgians went to the polls and voted in presidential elections. In both instances, the incumbent party maintained power by a slim margin; and in both cases, the opposition is denouncing the election results as flawed, and are demonstrating in the streets.

In early January, Mikheil Saakashvili won the Georgian presidential race over the main opposition candidate Levan Gachechiladze. The election was hailed by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) as “the first genuinely competitive presidential election in the country, enabling the Georgian people to express their political choice.”

Despite this, thousands of members of the opposition protested in took to the streets in the capital city of Tbilisi in protest immediately after the election results were posted. This week, the protests have begun a new tactic, a hunger strike. Koba Davitashvili, an opposition leader and head of the People’s Party, said, “Our demands remain free elections – both parliamentary and new presidential elections – and the release of political prisoners. We’ll sit here until they meet our demands.”

It was similar protesting that ended Saakashvili’s presidency in November 2007. Those protests ended in violence when the protestors clashed with police. Saakashvili defused the situation by calling a state of emergency and a snap presidential election.

On February 19, Georgia’s southern neighbor Armenia held their elections. Current Prime Minister Serge Sarkisian won 53 percent of the vote over the main opposition candidate, past president Levon Ter-Petrossian. The first assessment of the election by the OSCE called it “flawed but sufficient for Armenia to fulfill its international obligations.” In a recent review of this assessment, the OSCE has take a step back and said that a number of voting stations had an “implausibly high voter turnout” and that 17 percent of the voting stations had “significant procedural errors.”

After the results were announced, the opposition began its protests. These demonstrations, led by Ter-Petrossian, remained peaceful for 10 days until riot police deployed to keep order. Police and the protestors clashed on March 1. After a day’s worth of fighting, outgoing President Robert Kocharian declared a state of emergency until March 20.

To this point, clashes between the opposition and the police have resulted in eight people dead and just under 200 injured. Police are using rubber bullets and tear gas, and protestors are igniting cars with Molotov cocktails, as well as throwing bricks and swinging metal rods. Ter-Petrossian has questioned the use of force saying, “Why did the regime headed by outgoing President Robert Kocharian and ‘president-elect’ Sarkisian think it could get away with using force against its own people?”

The OSCE has called on the Armenian government to show “maximum restraint” and release detained opposition members, and has asked both sides to open up a dialogue with the other.

Almost every government of Armenia in its 16 years since independence has been accused of abusing its power. In 1996, Ter-Petrossian became the country’s first elected president, and ordered tanks into the street to quell similar protests.

We will keep you informed of any new developments related to this issue. For more information on Georgian and Armenian politics and the rest of the former Soviet Union, please visit our web site www.ncsj.org.