Georgia Provides Troops for Iraq; Gets a Free Pass on Human Rights?

[sabra]

http://harpers.org/archive/2007/07/hbc-90000482

Georgia Provides Troops for Iraq; Gets a Free Pass on Human Rights?

Guess which Eastern European country will soon have the third largest military force in Iraq? That same country is strongly pro-NATO and has on retainer a Washington lobbyist who was a leading advocate for the war in Iraq? Now guess which country is getting a free ride from the Bush Administration—and the media—on human rights and democracy?

The answer is Georgia. Ever since the “Rose Revolution” of 2003 that toppled Eduard Shevardnadze, the former Soviet official, the Bush Administration has maintained close ties to the government in Georgia. The media, too, has been sympathetic to President Mikhail Saakashvili, who is generally portrayed as a spunky leader who is creating a Western-style state bound by the rule of law.

That portrait, though, is far from accurate. In 2005, Human Rights Watch released a report that described “the ongoing impunity for torture, a problem that persists despite some government measures taken to combat it.” In another report last year, “Undue Punishment: Abuses against Prisoners in Georgia”,” Human Rights Watch found that many prisoners “live in severely overcrowded, filthy, and poorly-ventilated cells. In the last two years, the prison population has nearly doubled due to the routine use of pretrial detention, even for nonviolent offences.” (Incidentally, there were 16,911 convictions in Georgia last year and just 37 acquittals, a rate that even an old Soviet-era prosecutor would have had a hard time matching.)

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Georgia’s cause in Washington is probably also helped by its lobbyist, Randy Scheunemann, a former advisor to Donald Rumsfeld who helped draft the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998. A week after the 9/11 attacks Scheunemann joined with a group of conservatives who sent a letter to President Bush calling for Saddam Hussein’s overthrow, and in 2002 he became the founding president of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq; now he’s helping former Soviet Bloc states win business there.

It’s ironic that the Bush Administration criticizes Russia for backsliding on democracy but says nothing about similar types of problems in Georgia and other former Soviet states that have undergone pro-Western revolutions. The media faithfully echoes the charges on Russia but has generally failed to explore the situation elsewhere in Eastern Europe.