After 10 years Saakashvili of Georgia is out!

[man]

Saakashvili era ends as Georgia elects new president
Published time: October 27, 2013
http://rt.com/news/georgia-presidential-election-saakashvili-806/

After a decade of controversial rule, Mikhail Saakashvili is set to step down after Georgians elect their new president Sunday. Once a popular and powerful head of state, he steps down from a post that has been largely reduced to ceremonial functions.

Some 3.5 million Georgians are eligible to vote in Sunday’s poll, with more than 50 percent of votes needed to win in the first round of voting. There is no minimum turnout requirement, and if a second round of voting is needed, it would be held within two weeks.

The new Georgian president will be a ceremonial figure thanks to a number of constitutional amendments adopted in the past year by the country’s parliament. The reforms have been pushed through by Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream coalition, which beat President Saakashvili’s United National Movement in parliamentary elections last year.

Prior to Sunday’s election, opinion polls put Georgy Margvelashvili, a candidate endorsed by Ivanishvili, ahead of the other 22 candidates, including Saakashvili’s preferred candidate, former parliamentary speaker David Bakradze. Saakashvili himself is barred from running after two terms in office.

Ivanishvili, who is Georgia’s wealthiest man, took to politics with the goal to oust Saakashvili and his followers from power. Before his party took control of parliament, he pledged to step down as soon as Georgia elected a new president. Now he says he intends to keep his promise, even though the office of prime minister currently holds much more power in the country.

Saakashvili became Georgia’s leader after ousting his predecessor, Eduard Shevarnadze, in the 2003 public uprising dubbed the Rose Revolution. Once in power, he took a strong pro-American stance, hiring a number of western advisers to help his ambitious reforms, sending Georgian troops to Iraq and Afghanistan to join the US- and NATO-led forces, and campaigned for Georgia’s accession to NATO.

He enjoyed notable successes in reducing official corruption, cracked down on powerful crime rings and gave a boost to the country’s economy with a combination of liberal reforms and foreign loans. The policies won Saakashvili widespread praise in the West as an example of success and a beacon of democracy in the post-Soviet space.

At the same time, Tbilisi’s relations with Moscow deteriorated dramatically under Saakashvili, as Georgia accused Russia of betraying its role as peacekeeper in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The two regions were parts of Soviet Georgia, but sought independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Both fought against Georgia in bloody armed conflicts, and Russia kept its troops in both enclaves to prevent further violence. Tbilisi said that Moscow was secretly supporting and encouraging the secessionists while opposing Georgia’s attempts to bring them back under control.

Moscow too voiced anger at Georgia, saying it turns a blind eye on militants fighting in Russia’s troubled south, who found shelter in Georgian territory. The confrontation reached its peak in 2008, when Saakashvili’s government sent its army to take control of South Ossetia. Angered by the invasion, Russia intervened, defeating Georgian the army and prompting a major diplomatic crisis with western countries. After the war, relations between Georgia and Russia were frozen for years.

The disastrous military campaign seriously weakened Saakashvili’s support at home. However it was his increasingly authoritarian policies that led his party to defeat in the 2012 parliamentary election. His government launched brutal police crackdowns on opposition rallies in 2007, and again in 2011. Critics blamed his party of extorting bribes from big businesses, undermining the independence of the courts and the media and even accused them of political assassinations. The final straw was the release prior to the election of video footage from a Georgian prison, which showed inmates beaten and tortured by guards.

After the new parliament backed an Ivanishvili-led cabinet, Saakashvili’s supporters found themselves in rough water. Several former top officials, including ex-Interior Minister Vano Merabishvili, were arrested, while others fled the country. Saakashvili enjoyed presidential immunity from prosecution while in office, but the new government has threatened to take him to court after his term in office ends on several occasions.

Over the past year, Saakashvili’s role in Georgian politics shrank. Among his most recent actions, he delivered an anti-Russian speech at the UN General Assembly, campaigned unsuccessfully for Georgia to boycott the 2014 Sochi Olympics and made a posthumous award of Hero of Georgia to independent Georgia’s first president, Soviet dissident-turned-nationalist Zviad Gamsakhurdia, who died in 1993.

Saakashvili has said that after leaving office he plans to retire from politics, live in Georgia and start a wine business.

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In this 2008 photo, when Putin was about to hang Saakashvili from his balls, Saakashvili send a distress signal to his masonic party of the West by eating his tie (the sign agreed upon was to rub his tie with his hand, not to eat it, but Saakashvili in order to show how bad in a situation he is in, started eating his tie. Soon after the acting president of EU parliament and at that of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, was send to Kremlin to save Saakashvili's skin and balls.

http://rt.com/files/news/20/e9/60/00/screen_shot_2013-10-27_at_15.17.16.jpg

 

Anti-Saakashvili Candidate Claims Victory in Georgia Vote
http://en.ria.ru/world/20131027/184381244/Anti-Saakashvili-Candidate-Claims-Victory-in-Georgia-Vote.html

TBILISI/MOSCOW, October 27 (RIA Novosti) – An opponent of outgoing president Mikheil Saakashvili has claimed victory in Georgian presidential elections Sunday just hours after voting stations closed in the former Soviet nation on Russia’s southern border.

Initial exit polls gave Giorgi Margvelashvili, from the anti-Saakashvili Georgian Dream party [founded by currant PM of Georgia], about 65 percent of the vote in an election that marks the end of Saakashvili’s decade in power.

“I want to thank everyone who supported me,” Margvelashvili said outside his party headquarters in Tbilisi on Sunday evening where his supporters had already taken to the streets to celebrate his win. “Thanks to the Prime Minister who facilitated today’s victory.”

Margvelashvili is a close ally of Georgian Prime Minister and billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, who crushed Saakashvili’s United National Movement in parliamentary polls in 2012.

Twenty three candidates took part in the elections in the South Caucasus nation, but the size of the prize was markedly reduced earlier this year after laws were passed diluting presidential powers.

Margvelashvili’s main rival, Davit Bakradze of Saakashvili's United National Movement, said shortly after the end of voting that exit polls - which gave him about 20 percent of the vote - provided a “clear picture” that was unlikely to differ from the official results.

About 3.5 million people were registered to vote in the Georgian election, and turnout was 46.6 percent, according to the country’s election commission.

Outgoing Georgian President Saakashvili told journalists earlier on Sunday that he was looking forward to having time to relax after leaving office.

Saakashvili, a Columbia Law School graduate, enjoyed broad public support early in his presidency after successful insitutional reforms, but saw his approval ratings drop precipitiously towards the end of his second term, not least because of a disastrous war with Russia in 2008.

Ivanishvili, a secretive tycoon whose fortune Forbes magazine puts at $.5.5 billion, has been Prime Minister since last October. He has said he will quit politics after the presidential vote, but has yet to name a successor.

[man]

Experts see little indication of substantive changes in the relationship between Georgia and Russia unless the coming new PM of Georgia is anti-NATO one. Nevertheless, for Russia it's going to be easier to cooperate with Georgia now, since the Georgian government is willing to engage Moscow directly now and be open to cooperation and dialogue with Russia, restoring the broken diplomatic relations; something that was a taboo with Saakashivili with his anti-Russian stand and paranoiac mindset who was able to hide his mental disability behind a fiendish childish smile. Armenia will be happy now to deal with a sane new power in Georgia and looks forward to restore the broken harmony between the two countries after the mad dictator of Georgia is gone.

Yet the main sources of discord between Russia & Georgia will remain; the first discord is the two breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which Georgia regards them as its own sovereign territory and no Georgian leader is likely to ever say otherwise. The second, Ivanishvili the PM and his dream party in power now have been saying that they will maintain the policy of integrating Georgia with the European Union and NATO, and, much to Moscow's chagrin, Georgia hopes to sign a major free-trade Association pact with the EU in November in Vilnius.

 

As to the relations of Georgia with Turkey, Azerbaijan and Israel now --time should tell!

Edited October 28, 2013 by man

[man]

The Dismantling the Saakashvili's Georgia Has Began

The glass-domed palace, built by outgoing President Mikheil Saakashvili after taking office, will house now a planned Georgian-American university. Egoistic Saakashvili launched the construction of the presidential palace in 2004 and the building was completed five years later costing $Millions while poor Georgians, who came running for their lives from S. Ossetia and Abkhazia did not have a roof under their head for years and still do not..

Georgian President-Elect Snubs Predecessor’s Luxury Palace

 

TBILISI, November 4 (RIA Novosti) – Georgia’s president-elect said he would not move to the luxury palace currently occupied by his predecessor and would choose a more modest residence after taking office, News Georgia reported on Monday.

"During the electoral campaign, I have repeatedly expressed my disagreement with the size and cost of the presidential residence and said that the money spent on its construction should be returned to the people,” said Giorgi Margvelashvili, who won the latest presidential elections in Georgia in the first round.

The glass-domed palace, built by outgoing President Mikheil Saakashvili after taking office, will house a planned Georgian-American university instead. The university is due to open next year.

The presidential administration will instead move to a building that previously housed the US Embassy and is now being renovated. Before the renovation is over, the president will reside in the State Chancellery, which also houses the prime minister’s office.

Saakashvili launched the construction of the presidential palace in 2004 and the building was completed five years later. Although the outgoing president said the project’s cost was $7.8 million, the opposition said the true costs were many times higher and probably amounted to dozens of millions of US dollars.

The building is topped with a dome, made up of 12 bullet-resistant glass panels produced in Germany. The price of each panel is estimated at $56,000.

Edited November 4, 2013 by man

[man]

Saakashvili gained power in Georgia in a bold maneuver that was scripted by the following independent NGOs: the National Endowment of Democracy, George Soros, Freedom House, and some others. The aim of England BP was to detach Georgia from Russian influence and make of that country dependent on the West, specially on UK, so that oil and gas pipelines would pass unhindered and free from Russian meddling and influence. Saakashvili was their chosen vessel to accomplish this.

When Saakashvili lost the November 2003 elections to his rival Eduard Shevadnadze; without any evidence he called the elections unfair and claimed to be the winner. This was a tactic that those same independent NGOs would try to apply in Armenia also but in this later case they failed after a state of emergency was declared in Yerevan.

A series of mass protests were held in Yerevan in the wake of the Armenian presidential election of 19 February 2008. Mass protests against alleged electoral fraud were held in the capital city and organized by supporters of the unsuccessful presidential candidate Levon Ter-Petrosyan who had lost in that election.

In the case of Saakashvili, he called for protests and civil disobedience claiming fraud in the elections, then his supporters held red roses in their hands and, after seizing the parliament building in its opening day, they interrupted Shevardnadze's speech who left for his safety. Georgia's Supreme Court annulled the elections in which Saakashvili lost; Saakashvili himself declared a state of emergency and convinced Shevadnadze to resign. This came to be known as Georgia's bloodless "Rose Revolution."

On January 5, 2004, Saakashvili was elected president. He was inaugurated after 20 days. In March 28 when new parliamentary elections were held, Saakashvili supporters used heavy-handed tactics to win the majority.

In Georgia familiar tactics were used when it came to elections; election rigging, organized street protests, major media propaganda, and whatever else it takes to prevail.

In Armenia after nine days of peaceful protests at the Opera Square of Yerevan the capital, the national police and military forces tried to disperse the protesters on 1 March, 2008. A bloody confrontation ensued where 10 people were killed. Levon Ter-Petrosyan (who was under de facto house arrest) asked the protesters to go home, thus ending the protests; and everything returned to normal in Armenia. Subsequent attempts by Ter-Petrosian to revive the demonstrations and force the acting Armenian president to resign were unsuccessful and his movement then fizzled off.

While in Georgia, following Saakashvili's election, state enterprises were privatized. Georgia's civil service was gutted. Business-friendly tax cuts were enacted. Widespread corruption gamed the system for personal advantage of the relatives of Saakashvili and his supporters.

Georgia became a ruthless police state. Rule of law principles were spurned. Heavy-handed repression targeted the protesters of Saakashvili's rule. Legitimate opposition was crushed by a police cleansed from its corruption.

Saakashvili's tenure included suspicious deaths, disappearances, mass arrests, detentions, torture, loss of civil liberties, mass media control, and allying with England's financial empire. Armenians of Javakhk were repressed and their rights suppressed, some of the Armenian leaders were imprisoned.

His biggest mistake was to wage war on South Ossetia in August 2008. He picked the wrong fight against the wrong adversary. South Ossetia has lots of Russian citizens. Moscow intervened to protect them. It justifiably called Saakashvili's invasion flagrant aggression and responded forcefully.

In January 2008, election rigging gave Saakashvili a second term. In May, angry Georgians demanded change. They had to wait five more years. What follows his departure remains to be seen, what is certain is that the new comers are not insane like Saakashvili and will act in a balanced way, with friendliness both with Russia and the West.

Some called Saakashvili "a charismatic leader"; however what is ignored is that whatever charisma he had vanished soon after his taking of office; in a region where elected leaders too often turn into dictators Saakashvili has become another such leader for 10 years. It was the billions of those supporters of independent NGOs that transformed Georgia into a somehow modern nation, with their billions, specially of the billionaire George Soros (who some say to be only a secret rep for Rothschild and BP of England), Saakashvili would not have been able to accomplish something of significant. Georgians wanted him gone long ago and now they are happy that their wish has come true. Armenians of Javakhk were able to take a breath of air of thankfulness because the one who put yokes on them was no more in power; one such yoke was when Saakashvili forbade them to speak, read and sing in their native Armenian language while forcing them to learn to speak, read and sing in Georgian language. Someday, and he has now plenty of time away from politic, it's expected that Saakashvili will repent for his treatment of the Armenians of Javakhk and start learning Armenian --speak, read and sing in Armenian language! Then it will be possible for those maltreated Armenians to hold the hands of Saakashvili and do a typical Armenian dance all together.