Eurasia note #89: Georgia, Beware An Offer Of ‘Ukraine 2014'

NGOs work outside the electoral process - Georgia-EU Part 1

Apr 29, 2024

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Western money buys NGOs and protests but at whose cost?
Enlightened national interest cannot proceed from corporatist interests
Armenia found itself in the cross hairs of U.S.-Turkish oil policy
Ukraine was lured away from Russia with hints of EU membership
EC demands economic convergence, low corruption before extending a hand
A depopulated Ukraine with a closed border to Russia - that's a different matter
Why did EC/NATO find fault in attempts at multi-nation states like Yugoslavia?
If Clinton-Blair Third Way meant anything, it was the non-aligned movement
Culture is the sticking point; globalists replace it with ‘values and trust’
Values is code word for post-democratic government by elites who demand trust
We do not argue for or against the EC/EU but the purposes to which it is put
NATO expands to South America, in search of carbon credits. EU next?

Eurasia note #84: Georgia Warns U.S.-Backed Groups Plotting Unrest - Economic interests seeking control of land to reshape energy routes (Oct 04, 2023)
Eurasia note #83 - Tragedy As Armenians Flee Karabakh -Yerevan yields Artsakh to Azerbaijan, Russia stands aside (Sep 26, 2023)
Georgia's Colourful Riot Not Yet Revolution - Violent protest over registering 'foreign agents' timed for president's visit to U.S. (Mar 08, 2023)
Europe, Gas And The Endgame - Switching energy flow from East-West (Sep 30, 2022)

(2,100 words or about 10 moments of your company)

Tbilisi, Apr 29, 2024

The streets of Georgia’s capital Tbilisi have seen their biggest demonstration in recent years, triggered by the re-introduction of a foreign agent registration act.

This time with added fireworks after Aleko Elisashvili, the leader of the Citizens opposition party, punched Mamuka Mdinaradze, head of the ruling party, during a sitting of parliament on Apr 15.

This weekend there was one incident of police using pepper spray near parliament, otherwise the rally was peaceful as protesters spread out across Rustaveli Ave.

As usual, everybody and their dog is hijacking the bandwagon - lots of EU flags and slogans like "Georgia is Europe."

A three legged dog who I know lives in Giorgi Leonidze Park, off Rustaveli, has also joined the protests.

This has little to do with the law to register NGOs and make public their income and accounts. It would reveal who funds any NGO, political or otherwise, backed by anyone, U.S., EC, NATO or Russia.

The U.S. makes similar demands. In fact, American journalists living abroad have to be careful if they do work for non-U.S. news organisations or they'll end up having to register as a foreign agent.

On Apr 15, Georgian prime minister Irakli Kobakhidze met the ambassadors of the U.S., Robin Dunnigan, Britain, Mark Clayton, and the EU, Pawel Herczynski. They discussed the Bill on the Transparency of Foreign Influence - or the foreign agent registration act.

The PM said the bill seeks to make public the annual revenues of NGOs and media outlet - putting them on the same level as domestic institutions.

See Georgia's Colourful Riot Not Yet Revolution - Violent protest over registering 'foreign agents' timed for president's visit to U.S. (Mar 08, 2023)

Protesters are cheap, that's for sure, the first thing that jumped to mind when I saw the crowds in Tbilisi. Not polite to say, but the protests are scripted to a degree, as they were in Mar 2023.

George Soros of the Open Society Foundation actually has a connection to the U.S. campus protests (Students for Justice in Palestine) and the Tbilisi marches.

Soros' branch in Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, was among the earliest backers of Otpor, the Color Revolution specialists, wrote LA Times back in 2001. [1]

When Ukraine proposed a similar foreign accounting bill in 2017 which would have exposed the donors to NGOs, it was the Soros-funded "anti-corruption action center" AntAc that coordinated the opposition to the bill. [2]

Transparency International used to do good work but it has been taken over by the same private philanthropies and now, irony of ironies, TI is opposing transparency in Georgia.

Thus calling the bill a "Russian Law" has nothing to do with the content and is purely a slogan to rile Georgians.

The source is not hard to find. Kate Shoshiashvili of Transparency Ge is calling it "pro-EU rallies in protest of Russian law," conflating it with EU and NATO membership. The marches are a multi-issue expression of the leanings Georgians have towards the latter.

There does not seem to have been much advance in discussion in the year since protest over the same issue in March 2023. That makes one wonder why suddenly such large crowds. The situation bears watching closely.

Inorganic roots

Georgia’s opposition is dominated by NGOs and media organisations which are financed by the European Union and U.S. foreign policy tools like USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy.

This allows them to hire capable individuals and in theory deploy protesters by the thousand, and also to monopolise the channels of communication between London, Brussels and Washington, and Tbilisi.

As Sapo Japaridze Tweeted on Apr 18:

“Many former members of the Georgian government are now part of Ukraine's administration, positioning them on the opposite side of the dual power dynamic in GE. These individuals hold the attention and sympathy of European and US politicians, further bolstering the strength and legitimacy of the anti-government forces in Georgia.”

Context and colour

Last Oct, Georgian security service warned “Color Revolution teams” were active in South Caucasus.

The speaker of Georgia’s parliament, Shalva Papuashvili, accused USAID of using its considerable financial resources to incite riots in foreign countries.

As we shall see, the head of USAID arrived in Armenia in September just as Yerevan’s globalist-aligned prime minister gave up Ngorno Karabakh to Azerbaijan.

USAID funds the Centre for Applied Non-Violent Action and Strategies (CANVAS), a successor to Otpor! which orchestrated protests against Slobodan Miloševic after the election of Sep 2000, resulting in his resignation.

State Security Service of Georgia (SSG) published a video which it said showed foreign nationals from the group training activists in Tbilisi on how to bring down governments.

CANVAS and a United Nations affiliate, Civil Ge, denied it was fomenting unrest and stated its activities, in more than 50 countries, are “based on the non-violent struggle curriculum that is publicly available online.”

Balancing act

Georgian Dream, now in its third consecutive term, would like to join the European Union and is aligned with NATO. On the other hand it has a big neighbour to the north, Russia, and another to the west, Turkey.

Since war in Ukraine, Georgia’s economy has become more integrated with Russia, not less.

That’s not what the Western analysts expected — and they don’t like it. That’s one reason they pressure the government. Tbilisi may be no friend of Russia (it calls it an occupier of Abkhazia and South Ossetia) however, Georgian Dream has tried to calm tensions with the Kremlin for reasons of practical self interest.

Keeping trade routes open facilitates economic opportunities for its people: bringing tourists in, and sending workers abroad, as emigrants. In turn they send money back home in the form of remittances. That means learning the regional languages, such as Turkish and Russian (which former president Mikheil Saakashvili began to phase out).

See Eurasia note #84: Georgia Warns U.S.-Backed Groups Plotting Unrest - Economic interests seeking control of land to reshape energy routes (Oct 04, 2023)

Flaring up

Last year, between the Maui fires and the Hamas attack in Gaza, tragedy unfolded in Armenia as Azerbaijan seized Ngorno Karabakh.

The latter two events were linked, as Israel supplied weaponry to Azerbaijan in advance of its invasion. The head of USAID, Samantha Power, arrived in Yerevan, on Sep 25 to coordinate events.

Associated Press wrote that in the months before the 24-hour blitz on Sep 19, Azeri military cargo planes repeatedly flew to southern Israel. Likewise before the 2020 war with Armenia, Haaretz counted 92 military cargo flights to Israel’s Ovda airport.

Azerbaijan supplies 40 per cent of Israel’s oil needs and with the profits, buys 70 per cent of its weaponry from Israel, including drones it used to overcome Armenian defences.

Baku denies that it hosts a base of Israeli covert operations against Iran.

Armenia’s prime minster Nikol Pashinyan, who is aligned with the globalist World Economic Forum, essentially relinquished Karabakh. As a result of his actions, Russia said it was unable to defend Armenians, and its peacekeepers stood aside as the Azeris entered.

See Eurasia note #83 - Tragedy As Armenians Flee Karabakh -Yerevan yields Artsakh to Azerbaijan, Russia stands aside (Sep 26, 2023)

Oil routes

Armenians fell victim to power politics. The U.S. is keen to re-route Europe’s energy supply from east-west to south-north.

Iran currently supplies gas to Azerbaijan’s exclave Nakhchivan. A gas pipeline is being built through the Zangezur corridor which crosses the Armenian territory, Syunik.

This will give an uninterrupted connection from Azerbaijan’s gas, connecting with the Trans-Anatolian gas pipeline through Turkey.

In Sep 2022, while people were asking who blew up the Nord Stream pipeline, we pointed out the effort to change the axis of gas in Europe and the Mediterranean from East-West, to South North.

Central to that: the Levantine gas field off Gaza.

It was not possible to predict it would be achieved by the wholesale bombing of Gaza— but it was already clear who held the chips.

See Europe, Gas And The Endgame - Switching energy flow from East-West (Sep 30, 2022)

Unsafe European home

As crowds gathered in Tbilisi, the German Bundestag’s foreign affairs committee chairman Michael Roth appeared on Georgian television to support the protests, calling Tbilisi the capital of Europe.

This tells you something: the impetus is coming from Washington and Brussel, from a European Commission that sees constant expansion as the only answer to Union's near insolvency.

Before the Maidan coup of 2014, the EC and NATO played cat and mouse with Ukraine. They lured Ukrainians away from Russia with hints of joining the Union.

The EC requires a high degree of economic convergence, and especially a reduction in corruption, before beginning the accession process.

It was unrealistic, even impossible, yet Ukrainians fell for it. Moreover, the EC was never going to allow a fully populated Ukraine into Europe because that would throw open the door to Russians to use it as a corridor.

A depopulated Ukraine, hostile to Russia and with a closed border — now that's a different matter.

Georgians should be wary of any offer that resembles that made to Ukraine in 2014; you might think they'd ask what that led to. The protesters do not ask because there is a large, inauthentic, activist presence among them.

Interim conclusion

The European Union is not a pot of gold… perhaps for politicians and a few useful NGOs.

To conclude, Georgia's desire to join the EU must be seen in context. Like Ukraine, it is likely that the EC regards it as way to further encroach on the Eurasian landmass, rather than celebrating European values.

If the EU is about values, those are not the same cultural values you cherish. In EU-bureaucrat-speak, values and trust are code for post-democractic government, as we discussed in our recent series on censorship, "Trust and Servitude" and will, again, in part two.

If the EC one day talks to a government that brings Georgia into the EU it is, sadly, unlikely that Brussels will embrace its culture.

So what is it that Georgia aspires to join? What is Europe?

Why did the EC-NATO find fault in previous attempts at multi-nation states such as Yugoslavia; and take part in a war that resulted in Yugoslavia’s destruction?

As with war in Ukraine it would neutralise what NATO saw as a Russian satellite. But Yugoslavia was much more than Serbia. It was an example of Europe in action: west meeting east, communism meeting capitalism, and later one of the most successful socialist experiments.

If Tony Blair and Bill Clinton were serious about the Third Way, which came out of the Fabian London School of Economics from Prof Anthony Giddens, surely Yugoslavia was it.

Lest some sniff at socialism, the Western economies have moving towards a form of socialism-lite since WW2. Fabianism, as we often discuss, is the diversion of socialism into a form of monopoly capitalism with a client state.

So why did the Fabians-in-chief, Rhodes scholar Clinton and Rothschild functionary Blair, break up Yugoslavia? And since it was relatively small in the scheme of things, what does it tell us of their vision of Europe?

More importantly, in what image did they intend to build back better?

Today countries like Ukraine and Georgia, as Yugoslavia, are caught in not-so-frozen conflicts, with the similar transition economies.

Key issues include:

What is Europe, and why it found fault in previous attempts at multi-nation states such as Yugoslavia;
The EU’s internal crisis and the solution of expansion;
What replaces European culture? The decline of the Franco-German axis;
Migration no longer a taboo topic - now it’s the institutions themselves that must not be challenged;
Military redefines democracy - the relationship of NATO and the EC;
Carbon as the new colonizer - carbon credits a tool of imperialism;
Climate and migration as tools of change;
Virtual nations.

Read Part Two tomorrow.

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