11/09/07 – Mark Almond – The Scott Horton Show

All right, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio on Chaos Radio 92795.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest today is Mark Allman from the British Helsinki Human Rights Group.
Welcome to the show, sir.
Hello.
Well, my friend Dan McAdams recommended you as a great expert to help fill us in on what's happening in former Soviet Georgia, another American client state devolving into totalitarian anarchy.
I'm not certain those are opposites in this case.
Violence in the streets led by the state there, and just as is going on in Pakistan.
I don't know whether George is getting all the headlines, but anyway, Dan McAdams said you were the guy to go to to fill us in on what's going on there.
Yeah, well, I think I think your description is in a sense, right, you have often behind the scenes of an authoritarian regime, you actually do have chaos because what's really happened is your listeners will remember probably four years ago, there was great excitement that a new government of lots of people in their mid 30s coming to power who were going to make a big change, they were going to adopt Western style democracy, market reforms, they would join NATO, they would be a bulwark of the West against, you know, Putin's Russia or perhaps even against Iran to the south.
Oh, yes, the Rose Revolution.
Indeed, the Rose Revolution, well, the Rose turns out to have formed, and it scratched quite a few people.
And one of the background to this current crisis really is that the generation that came to power, like the Generation X of the Caucasus, fell out with each other.
And part of the tragedy of a place like Georgia is that it's a country that started out poor with the end of communism, communism didn't help, but it's got much poorer since 1991.
So the pie has shrunk and of course, the battle to control the pie, to keep your share of the size you think it should be has become all the more vicious over the last 17, 18 years.
And youthful, energetic politicians are perhaps even more ruthless and go getting when it comes to fighting for what they think should belong to them.
And unfortunately, ordinary Georgians have lost out in the process.
But also, I think many of our illusions that the West, like Washington, London, Brussels could pick winners, we could pick people who fitted our bill, would look and talk and act like good Western Democrats and so on, has fallen through yet again in Georgia.
Of course, in some ways, we've had this experience before, in 1991-92, we thought that Shevard Nadeze, Edward Shevard Nadeze, the old Soviet foreign minister, would be the ideal person to lead his native country, you know, into the uplands where the honey flows forever of the market economy and Western allegiance.
After that went sour in 2003, and we then found these new guys to come in, new guys to us, but in fact, people who had been junior officials under Shevard Nadeze, the new president then was his Minister of Justice.
He himself said the way to take power in a place like Georgia is to borrow from within.
And now when you say we, you mean Western governments?
Yeah, I think I was an election observer when Shevard Nadeze had come to power by a coup in 1992.
And he held an election in which he was the only candidate, and oddly enough, got 92% of the vote, and the official Western observers, the diplomats, the people that were sponsored by both the US government then and the West European governments, all were perfectly happy with this sham election.
I mean, what kind of election is it where you don't even have token opposition?
Later on, Shevard Nadeze allowed token opposition, he still won, but he had two or three token candidates against him.
And we backed this regime, we then tried to subsidize it, no doubt some people thought that we would be able to bring it to adopt what seemed to be the right wise policies.
And although Georgia was admitted to things like the World Trade Organization, it sort of ticked all the boxes on the form.
The reality has been tragically, that was what was once one of the richest of the Soviet republics where people had, by communist standards, quite an easy life, it's a very naturally fertile country, has got poorer and poorer, even as Western experts sitting in, you know, Washington and London have said, oh, but it passes laws that meet all our requirements, they seem to say all the right things, they want to join all the right clubs.
We've ignored the reality, there's this huge gulf between the poverty, the oppression, the corruption on the ground, and the public relations, if you will.
And now, this Rose Revolution, this was 2003, 2004?
Yeah.
What really happened was that Shevardnadze's government had become so unpopular and so corrupt and his family were really taking what was left of the pie, that he alienated some of his own supporters, ordinary Georgians were very angry.
And in some ways, he was perhaps beginning to drift back towards Russia.
And that's when I think Western governments decided that we should look somebody new, Shevardnadze was in his late 70s, he couldn't go on forever.
And also George Soros, ironically, who's often seen as the sort of big opponent of George W. Bush in the States.
But when it comes to abroad, the two Georgians, George W. Bush and George Soros often see eye to eye.
George Soros put a lot of his money from his so-called Open Society Foundations behind the opposition in Georgia, people that he had trained up already for the revolution in, or the coup, if you like, in Serbia in 2000 against Milosevic, people had been involved in various so-called democracy training programs, although very often how to organize a revolution in the streets.
They trained the people from Georgia, funded in part by George Soros's money, funded in part by USAID money and so on, part by European Union sponsorship.
And we were giving this money to the opposition, Shevardnadze, we were also taking away the foreign aid that he depended on, so he couldn't pay his police.
And when it came to it, the police weren't prepared to suppress demonstrators when they're badly paid or not paid at all.
If we come forward to what's been happening in the last few days in Georgia, we see a very different police from the police with primitive riot shields and so on under Shevardnadze, the robo-cock-style police that Mr. Fakashvili, his successor, has, are very impressively equipped with the latest US crowd control technology with riot gear provided by the Finns and the Turks.
And what is strange to many of us is if you see in Georgia the police, they all have signs saying in English, police, doesn't say it in Georgian, when they seal off radio and television stations to prevent access to them, they put up signs saying, police line don't cross.
Now can you imagine if we suddenly had to read the Georgian alphabet on our police lines or on our police equipment, we would feel that we were somewhat in an occupied country.
But certainly, Western taxpayers' money has gone to funding and equipping Mr. Fakashvili's army, but also his police, his crowd control, in a way that his predecessor lacked.
Okay, now, his defense minister has made these accusations of political murders and so forth, and then I guess the story was he recanted, but then he recanted his recantation and said, well, I was in jail when I recanted.
Well, Mr. Fakashvili was one of the big rose revolutionaries, and he comes from Stalin's hometown of Gori.
And that was a place where there had been a history of smuggling across the border to Russia into a breakaway area called South Ossetia.
And originally, Mr. Fakashvili was presented as the sort of Eliot Ness of Georgia.
He was a crime busting prosecutor who was really going to bring back law and order.
And a lot of the people who helped Mr. Fakashvili, his buddy, to power in 2003, were actually from Gori.
They assembled a Stalin statue, one of the big statues of Stalin that's still there, and they marched on Tbilisi.
But there also happened to be the smuggling mafia.
And in contrary to a lot of what we were told in the West, what we really got with the fall of Shevardnadze and the coming to power of these new guys was simply a change of generation within the mafia, in my view, rather than a fundamental political change.
In the last year or so, these two guys, Fakashvili and Okaashvili, have fallen out, and Mr. Okaashvili made very serious charges.
Yours is probably a family program, so I won't repeat all of them, but basically accused the president of murder, embezzlement, corruption, cronyism, and so on, demolishing churches in order to put up buildings for his own profit and this sort of thing.
And whatever the truth of this is, if, shall we say, for the sake of argument, Dick Cheney suddenly got up one day and said, George W. Bush is guilty of a whole host of crimes, even if it wasn't true, it would tell you there's something deeply rotten at the heart of the government.
I think part of the problem may be that all these people are accusing each other of things that are true, and that's how deeply corrupt the place has been, and what a gulf there is between the way it's been presented as a model, you know, people at the Cato Institute going on about it being a model of free market reform, and the practice, the reality.
Well, I remember right after September 11th, they said, well, this is going to be worldwide in 60 countries, and we're going to have to go to the Philippines, and we're going to have to go back to Somalia, and we're going to have to go to former Soviet Georgia.
There's a bunch of Al-Qaeda guys there, and I remember thinking, Al-Qaeda guys in former Soviet Georgia, well, that's the first I heard of that, and we've got to send in American soldiers, huh?
Now, there aren't still Americans in Georgia, American troops in Georgia, are there?
There are some American troops who are training the Georgian army whether to fight Al-Qaeda or to do it for a matter.
Ironically, the, you know, one problem, I met a couple of years ago an American soldier who was helping with the training of the Georgians, and he said it was very frustrating, because in the morning, a guy would turn up to be trained to use some sophisticated piece of NATO equipment, but the next day, his cousin would arrive, because it's very well paid to be in the Georgian army now, and so you have to divide it up amongst the family, because they don't have any work, and so a lot of the beefed up Georgian army is perhaps not as effectively trained as is often claimed, because, as I say, you're getting a rotation of people turning up for the training and getting the daily pay, but there is a risk that with the, the present government is very frightened by the opposition, its main call that it can play is to say, if you get rid of us, the wicked Russians will come back.
And they do have these two areas in the north of the country, Abkhazia and South Ossetia that broke away from Georgia, now back in 91, 92.
And there's a risk that Mr. Saakashvili in the run up to the elections that he's called for next January, might stage some kind of military adventure.
This happened under Shevardnadze in 1992, which could draw in the Russians, might draw in the U.S. troops who are doing the training, so there is a dangerous situation, it's not unknown in U.S. history for the U.S. to find that one of its little allies pulls it into a conflict that it hadn't planned.
Well now, the two regions attempting to break away Abkhazia and Ossetia, they are more friendly with the Russians then?
Yeah, there are complicated reasons to do with the local languages, the identities of people in the Caucasus, it's a very complex multi-ethnic tapestry, if you like, and those people feel more comfortable with Russia than with Georgia.
They also like to point out that they've been able to change their presidents by having elections whereas the Georgians, who are an internationally recognized state, have had no president since independence has lasted his term, they've had revolutions, we'll have to see whether Mr. Saakashvili gets to the end of his foreshortened term in January, let alone get re-elected.
To what degree has America armed the military?
You pointed out that the riot police, as Bush is celebrating the spread of freedom to Georgia, he's arming the domestic riot police to the teeth.
What about the military?
Are we giving these guys tanks and planes and everything under the sun?
Well there's some modern equipment, and for instance Israel has been updating some of the Soviet era leftover Sukhoi-25 aircraft and so on, and one of the charges against the president is that his mother's family, the Al-Asanis, are deeply involved in the arms trade and that one of these Al-Asanis, Niko Al-Asanis, is involved in the purchase of both US NATO equipment and Israeli equipment.
And what happens, it is alleged, is that the West helps to subsidize the Georgian budget more than a quarter of it goes on defense, but a lot of this money gets siphoned off somewhere between the buying of the new Israeli avionics, shall I say, for the Sukhoi-25 and what actually gets into the plane.
And so I think one of the dangers will be that on paper the Georgian army has been beefed up in the last four years, but I wouldn't trust it to be as powerful as it is on paper, and yet that image might lead President Saakashvili to do something foolish.
A lot of Georgian troops are in Iraq at the moment, when the British go, the Georgians will be the next biggest contingent after the US one, only about a thousand or so.
But again, that's a problem for Saakashvili that perhaps the thousand best trained of his troops are at the moment in the A600 miles from his country, which is quite close to Iraq, it's only across from Turkey, but nonetheless, they're not on the scene for him.
Okay, now, if America is not in Georgia to fight Al-Qaeda or to spread freedom, what's this all about?
Oil pipeline routes, I suspect?
Well, sadly, I think oil does play a big role.
I'm sure, in many ways, there was just the assumption that who we approved of must want to be good and democratic.
That's, I think, turned out to be an illusion, and we're left with the oil pipeline route from the Caspian Sea from Baku in Azerbaijan that runs through Georgia to the port of Batumi on the on the Black Sea and then into Turkey.
And this is an old route.
At the time of the Russian Revolution, 90 years ago, the British discussed whether we should help Georgia become democratic or not, and the British Forest Secretary both said, I'm only interested in the railway from Baku to Batumi and the oil trains that come between the two places.
We can leave the natives to sit at each other's throats if they want to.
We pretend to be more concerned about nation building and democracy building today.
But if there wasn't a pipeline route, if there wasn't a geo-strategic competition with Russia and Iran, just a few hundred miles away, I don't suppose we would have had the boosterism for Saqqashvili.
I don't suppose we'd have seen George W. Bush go to Tbilisi and make a speech about the progress towards democracy and so on, which in retrospect sounds over-optimistic.
Well, and it doesn't seem to be a very good policy to install these strongmen and back them.
It seems like if they actually pushed for democracy to some degree to let the people have at least the feeling of self-government that these puppet governments could last a little longer.
Instead, we'd prop them up as authoritarians and then they'd fall right over.
Yeah, I think there is a danger that many people in the old Soviet Union, not just in Georgia, 20 years ago, you would never meet anybody there who was anti-American, anti-Western.
There was great optimism about the end of the Cold War, there was great belief.
If only we could get rid of one party from this rule somehow or other, we would be very generous to them.
If you like the West in general would do for them what the United States did with the Marshall Plan for West Europe after the war, they would all be helped to have both prosperity and democracy.
Almost 20 years on, people get poorer and people are much poorer than they were under communism when they weren't rich to begin with, and they also see themselves in some way less free than they were 20 years ago because you have much more hands-on brutal violence in order to control societies than you had in the late period of the Soviet Union.
Obviously under Stalin, it was a terrible violence, but by the end of the Soviet Union, it was not nearly as repressive as it had been.
But in order now to create new regimes that want to hold power, they very often use very extreme violence, torture is commonplace in Georgia and not only in Georgia, the prison conditions are terrible.
The prisons are terribly overcrowded, and things like TV are rife.
In some prisons, every prisoner has tuberculosis.
Now, this is a terrible state of affairs.
You have a situation so desperate where the state doesn't pay anything for food or medicine for the prisoners, but you meet prisoners who say, bring back forced labor, and they're not joking.
It was better in the old days when you were forced to work in the Gulag, but at least you received some pay for the work you did, minimal pay, but it paid for basic provisionals.
Now, if your family doesn't help you, you are dependent on the charity of your fellow prisoners.
It's a very grim situation in that prison.
Well, that's what we call spreading free markets and democracy.
That's what our politicians call it.
My daily state expenditure is on warfare, not welfare.
All right.
To wrap up here, I know you need to go, can you just tell us real quickly about the British Helsinki Human Rights Group and maybe where people can find some good reading materials about the Rose Revolution and its consequences?
On our website, which is www.bhhrg.org, or put in British Helsinki Human Rights Group, Georgia, you will find a wealth material going back to 1992, covering elections, election fraud, covering prison conditions, covering the civil conflicts.
You get no prizes for being accurate, as it were.
We often suffer from being prematurely correct, so that people who love Shevardnadze denounced as being critical of Shevardnadze, then people who decided to shift into saying that Saakashvili was going to make life heaven on earth, Georgian said, how can you possibly convey him with that wicked Shevardnadze?
Sadly, the regimes in Georgia, and not just in Georgia, we cover the whole of Eurasia, if you like, have often not lived up to their promises or their commitments.
Obviously our group is there to monitor the so-called Helsinki agreements, that's why we call it Helsinki.
We look at the agreements made after 1975, committing the member states of the OSCE, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, to uphold basic human rights like freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of movement, freedom of opinion, freedom of religion.
And we look at, for instance, how people are treated in prison, whether they're political prisoners, how people are treated in psychiatric hospitals, and obviously whether elections are fairly and honestly conducted.
I really appreciate that, keeping track of the prisons, I think that I forgot who was quoted on this show recently saying that that's really the measure of a society, is how the prisons are treated.
Yeah, I think even living aside political prisoners, basically a civilized society treats even bad people in a civilized way, and equally, elections are very important, because actually the rest of the political country is not a huge problem, you can be poor and still be accurate.
Ironically, the only two countries that don't allow election observing in this 58-member international body are the United States and Britain.
Maybe the Russians try to control it and limit it, but they do at least allow people in to observe the voting and the counting, whereas in Britain, we don't even allow anybody in, because we're the mother of parliament, but maybe also the mother of election folks.
The idea of international inspectors coming to monitor our votes really gives me the creeps.
I really think that the American people need to do a great job of monitoring elections.
Absolutely, the only guarantee of people's freedom is the people of an individual country sticking up for their own freedom, ensuring that the law is properly maintained.
I'm very suspicious of many of the international monitors who, as I say, taking the Georgian example, very often are simply following official policy, but after all, they're mainly diplomats.
They are people, as we know, who are sent to lie abroad for their country.
I don't think one should take too seriously the international election observers, because all too often, they are simply mouthing what official policy is.
There is a problem, if you watch CNN or the official mainstream media.
They tend to talk about election observers as if they're physicists in a laboratory or something, and so they're scientific men in white coats, utterly objective, whereas unfortunately, all too often, they are employees of a state department or foreign ministry who wouldn't keep their jobs very long if they departed from the minister's policy.
Well, I would think that private groups doing election monitoring at least would have some more accountability as to your accuracy, is that right?
Well, certainly, and also, thankfully, we don't have a political effect in the sense that we are not suddenly turning on or off international aid, turning on or off the guns.
As we see very often, condemnations of election fraud, which may not always be entirely accurate, are often used as a precedent for dramatic policy and for military intervention or quasi-CIA type of intervention where the government is delegitimized.
Maybe the government is elected illegitimately, but quite often, as I say, the international election observers are willing to see problems when they don't really exist because it's policy.
Take Georgia, for instance.
Ironically, in Georgia, the international official election observers, the state department sponsored groups, were prepared to turn a blind eye to the most terrible, crude, obvious frauds because it was good to have Shevardnadze, a great man who had led to the end of the Cold War in power.
The last election that he held in 2003 was, by his standards, remarkably honest, yet it was suddenly covered in a cascade of criticism by the international observers, often, if I may say so, taken out of our own previous reports and just applied to 2003 rather than 1999 or 1995.
Well, they're just outright plagiarized, you know?
Yeah, they were.
I did see that they had sort of dug into the bag of tricks and said, here are things that he did in the past, let's really do it now.
And more shockingly now, let's be shocked by what we didn't notice before.
And you know, I think the most disturbing thing about this is, I guess the first one was the revolution in Serbia and then Georgia, and then this is the template, I guess Justin Raimondo at Antiwar.com calls it the Ukrainian template.
You have almost a half dozen of these color-coded revolutions around Europe and Asia.
Yeah, exactly.
We saw it in Ukraine, as you say.
We then saw it in Kyrgyzstan, and we've seen it in other places as well.
And I think one of the problems has been that if we look at the track record of the West's, whether we're talking about Western governments or people like George Soros sponsoring upheaval and picking the winner who should be in power, you have to say it's not very good.
Let me just take on George Soros for a moment.
He originally supported Leonid Kuchma to be president of Ukraine, but then he decided six years later he didn't like him anymore and he was a bad guy, terribly corrupt, and we ought to have the president, Mr. Yashchenko, instead.
He supported Shevardnadze, and then he changed to Mr. Saakashvili.
Now, if I had made those mistakes, I would be perhaps a bit reticent, even if I had oodles and oodles of money, about throwing my money behind picking another winner, if the previous winners turn out to be such phonies, not the great Democrats, not the proponents of open society.
And the same could be said of official US and British policy.
We have often our government to pick people, we proclaim them to be modeled.
All right, well, looks like we lost Mark Allman.
Sorry about that.
We're wrapping up.
We were at the end.
Telephone difficulties, there's a gigantic Atlantic Ocean between here and there, and not to mention, you know, half of the continental United States besides that.
So it's not always easy, even in the 21st century.
But yeah, please check out the website.
It's BHHRG, the British Helsinki Human Rights Group, and the guest was Mark Allman.
And I want to thank Dan McAdams for recommending him.
This is Antiwar Radio Chaos 92795.9 FM in Austin, Texas, and we'll be right back.