Hollow Victory

Saakashvili's ally and head of the parliament's defense committee Givi Targamadze claimed last night that the government was defending democracy against a "coup attempt" organized by powerful business interests and backed by Russia. "Imedi TV is a tool that [Georgian businessman] Badri Patarkatsishvili is using to plot a coup in Georgia to please the Kremlin," Targamadze told state television.

It's hard to know if there is any truth to those allegations. But, in fact, it's now irrelevant. Despite the semblance of order on Tbilisi's streets, Saakashvili has decisively lost the first round to the opposition. He's ordered the use of force against peaceful demonstrators—with 360 people ending up in the hospital. Opposition leaders Konstantin Gamsakhurdia, son of Georgia's late president, and Labor Party leader Shalva Natelashvili have both disappeared after warrants were issued for their arrest, while another, Koba Davitashvili, head of the opposition People's Party, claims that he was "kidnapped and beaten" by police on the afternoon of Nov. 7.

Tbilisi, in true cold war style, has also expelled three employees of the Russian embassy who were accused of "contacts with the opposition with an aim of a coup d'état." But whether Moscow was really planning a coup has become irrelevant. Saakashvili was tested, and his instincts were those of a post-Soviet strongman, not those of a true democrat.

"Yesterday we saw President Saakashvili commit political suicide," said Tinatin Khidasheli, one of the leaders of the opposition Republican Party, the largest of a 10-party opposition coalition that staged the Nov. 2-7 demonstrations in Tbilisi. If the aim of asymmetric warfare is to provoke one's stronger foe into an act of self-destructive overreaction, then the opposition have succeeded handsomely.

Saakashvili, after a barrage of criticism from the European Union and NATO, addressed his nation on television Thursday night to declare early presidential elections, on Jan. 5. It will be a crucial test. He's pleased the West by hosting George Bush and sending troops to Iraq. But that may not be enough for his own people, stuck in grinding poverty and plagued by systemic corruption. And even if rumors of Russian interference in last week's demonstrations were exaggerated or even false, it now looks certain that the Kremlin will do everything in its power to make sure that Saakashvili, the West's darling, takes a hard fall at the polls.

© 2007