Hollow Victory

Is this the end of Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili's brave new democracy? Thursday night the streets of Tbilisi, Georgia's capital, were eerily silent as riot police patrolled and an army of janitors cleaned up the trash left after six days of street protests which erupted in violence on Tuesday. Friday, Georgia's opposition announced that there would be no more protests after Saakashvili called for snap elections in January. But the image of Georgia as a free, if chaotic, model of post-Soviet democracy lies in tatters.

"I could never imagine such violence and madness could happen in Tbilisi, even in my worst dreams," says Sozar Tsubari, 43, Georgia's human rights ombudsman, who was elected by parliament in 2004. "I witnessed three or four policemen beating a protester who was lying the ground. I ran to them, yelling, 'Please don't kill him.' But the police began to beat me instead. Someone shouted, 'Do not beat him; he is the ombudsman.' But the police said, 'Then he is a dog and a traitor'."

Saakashvili overthrew a corrupt, pro-Moscow government in the popular "Rose Revolution" of November 2003. Four years later, on the same square where his supporters once gathered, Saakashvili on Tuesday ordered riot police dressed in black and wearing balaclavas to disperse protesting crowds with tear gas, water cannons, batons and fists. David Vakhtadze, 71, a retired hydrogeologist, was walking down Rustaveli Prospect, Tbilisi's main street, when a group of young people ran past him. "One shouted, 'Old man, get off the streets. They'll shoot at you!'" says Vakhtadze. "But I could not believe that somebody would shoot at a lonely man like me with gray hair and a tie." Moments later, police fired tear gas canisters towards Vakhtadze, which left him blinded for hours. Justina Melnikiewicz, a freelance photographer, was pushed to the ground by masked police who smashed her camera. Lawyer Gela Nikolaishvili, 52, found himself caught in a crowd marching toward the center of the city just as it was attacked by riot police. "I was sitting in the car, not able to drive away because of the crush of people, not believing my eyes," he recalls. "Right in front of me Georgian policemen were beating young and old people; some were on the ground badly injured. It was the scariest thing I have ever seen."

What went wrong? Saakashvili has always styled himself a democrat—as well as one of the United States's few allies in the region, ready to stand up to Kremlin bullying and to push through radical economic reforms designed to reshape his country as a liberal, democratic free market.

That hardly squares with this week's violence—or with 15 days of martial law imposed by Saakashvili yesterday and expected to be ratified by parliament by the end of the week. All demonstrations are banned; all media is under temporary state censorship. The opposition-supporting Imedi TV station was forced off the air as riot police stormed into the channel's buildings late Wednesday night. News Web sites have also been closed.

"Its like the Soviet era, when they would televise the Swan Lake ballet when something important was happening," complains Georgian Radio Freedom journalist Koba Liklikadze. He says that the station's management is "looking for ways to switch to shortwave broadcasting" in order to defy restrictions on FM radio. "An information blackout is the stupidest thing [for the state] to do. There's a hunger for information."