Thousands Rally Against Georgia’s Once Popular President

(Friday) November 2, 2007   •   The Web Guy

protest_post.jpgOpposition demonstrators filled Rustaveli Avenue, the city’s main boulevard, and packed the entrance to Parliament, where they chanted anti-Saakashvili slogans and issued their demands.

Among them was a call for the government to set Parliamentary elections for next spring and enter into negotiations for other power-sharing changes.

Last year, Mr. Saakashvili and Parliament amended the Constitution to extend the Parliament’s term to next fall — officially, to align Parliament with the presidential election cycle — an act that the opposition said will make the legislature illegitimate when the term it was elected to expires in the spring.

“If we allow a sitting Parliament to extend its term for these months, this may happen again and again,” said Giorgi Khaindrava, a former government minister who is now in the opposition. “Changing their term while in office violates a fundamental principle of democratic systems.”

The demonstration signaled a significant degree of popular discontent with Mr. Saakashvili and his government, which inherited a country in near ruin four years ago and embarked upon an ambitious set of reforms.

Mr. Saakashvili, a lawyer educated at Columbia University, has steered his post-Soviet country sharply toward the West, seeking admission to NATO and the European Union, while moving against corruption at home, especially in the police.

He has often said he hoped to model his country’s development after the experience of the Eastern European countries that were once under the Kremlin’s yoke, and to bring democracy and free markets to the Caucasus, a region with a history of corrupt, brutal and autocratic governments.

He has set new standards for education, increased tax collection and revenue-generation, improved the readiness of the country’s once feeble army and repaired Soviet-era infrastructure to the degree that the country, once plagued by blackouts, now has a reliable electricity supply.

But some of the reforms have made him enemies, and he has alienated several prominent politicians, who find him domineering and abrasive. His opponents accuse him of hoarding and abusing power, and of running the nation through a clique that will neither tolerate dissent nor engage in dialogue with the opposition, which Mr. Saakashvili has repeatedly made clear he despises and considers weak.

“The biggest shortcoming for us,” he said in an interview on Wednesday, “is that that we failed to grow up a real, mature opposition. The problem with them is that they have no real national leaders.”

The arrest last month of a former defense minister who had criticized Mr. Saakashvili and accused him of crimes also galvanized the opposition. The former minister later recanted on national television and was freed on bail, and left Georgia this week under circumstances still in dispute.

The government insists that the former minister was guilty. But the case has raised questions about whether the police and prosecutors had received political instructions, which the government strongly denies.

The government also faces pressure from rising prices and lingering underemployment, and over complaints about a weak judiciary that many government officials concede lacks independence and which the opposition says remains corrupt. Economic conditions remain difficult enough that many Georgians travel abroad for work.

Western diplomats said their initial estimates put the crowd at 40,000 to 50,000 people; the opposition claimed to have assembled at least 100,000. Either number rivaled the size of the demonstrations that brought Mr. Saakashvili to power and vastly exceeded the government’s predictions.

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