George Soros’ role in installing Saakashvili - was put in power by NGOs & American foundations

[MikeWB]

George Soros' role in installing Saakashvili


The Puppet Masters Behind Georgia President Saakashvili

By F. William Engdahl, 12 August, 2008

The controversy over the Georgian surprise military attacks on South Ossetia and Abkhazia on 8.8.08 makes a closer look at the controversial Georgian President and his puppet masters important. An examination shows 41 year old Mikhail Saakashvili to be a ruthless and corrupt totalitarian who is tied to not only the US NATO establishment, but also to the Israeli military and intelligence establishment. The famous 'Rose Revolution of November 2003 that forced the ageing Edouard Shevardnadze from power and swept the then 36 year old US university graduate into power was run and financed by the US State Department, the Soros Foundations, and agencies tied to the Pentagon and US intelligence community.

Mihkail Saakashvili was deliberately placed in power in one of the most sophisticated US regime change operations, using ostensibly private NGOs (Non Governmental Organizations) to create an atmosphere of popular protest against the existing regime of former Soviet Foreign Minister Edouard Shevardnadze, who was no longer useful to Washington when he began to make a deal with Moscow over energy pipelines and privatizations. Saakashvili was brought to power in a US-engineered coup run on the ground by US-funded NGO's, in an application of a new method of US destabilization of regimes it considered hostile to its foreign policy agenda. The November 24 2003 Wall Street Journal explicitly credited the toppling of Shevardnadze's regime to the operations of "a raft of non-governmental organizations ... supported by American and other Western foundations." These NGOs, said the Journal, had "spawned a class of young, English-speaking intellectuals hungry for pro-Western reforms" who were instrumental laying the groundwork for a bloodless coup.

Coup by NGO

But there is more. The NGOs were coordinated by the US Ambassador to Georgia, Richard Miles, who had just arrived in Tbilisi fresh from success in orchestrating the CIA-backed toppling of Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade, using the same NGOs. Miles, who is believed to be an undercover intelligence specialist, supervised the Saakashvili coup.

It involved US billionaire George Soros' Open Society Georgia Foundation. It involved the Washington-based Freedom House whose chairman was former CIA chief James Woolsey. It involved generous financing from the US Congress-financed National Endowment for Democracy, an agency created by Ronald Reagan in the 1980's to "do privately what the CIA used to do," namely coups against regimes the US Government finds unfriendly.

George Soros' foundations have been forced to leave numerous eastern European countries including Russia as well as China after the 1989 student Tiananmen Square uprising. Soros is also the financier together with the US State Department of the Human Rights Watch, a US-based and run propaganda arm of the entire NGO apparatus of regime coups such as Georgia and Ukraine's 2004 Orange Revolution. Some analysts believe Soros is a high-level operative of the US State Department or intelligence services using his private foundations as cover.

The US State Department funded the Georgia Liberty Institute headed by Saakashvili, US approved candidate to succeed the no-longer cooperative Shevardnadze. The Liberty Institute in turn created "Kmara!" which translates "Enough!" According to a BBC report at the time, Kmara! Was organized in spring of 2003 when Saakashvili along with hand-picked Georgia student activists were paid by the Soros Foundation to go to Belgrade to learn from the US-financed Otpor activists that toppled Milosevic. They were trained in Gene Sharp's "non-violence as a method of warfare" by the Belgrade Center for Nonviolent Resistance. ...

WSJ said Saakashvili was put in power by NGOs & American foundations

Manufactured revolutions?

by Dragan Plavsic

International Socialism

A quarterly journal of revolutionary Socialism {a Trotskyist magazine}

Issue: 107

Posted: 27 June 05

http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=122issue=107

When is a revolution not a revolution? That is the question commentators have been asking following a wave of regime changes that has zigzagged its way progressively eastwards over the last five years. After Slobodan Milosevic's overthrow in Serbia in 2000 came the downfall of Edward Shevardnadze in Georgia in 2003, then Viktor Yushchenko's successful defeat of his presidential rival in Ukraine in 2004, and earlier this year the sudden fall from power of Kyrgyzstan's Askar Akayev.

For some commentators, analysis of these events is unproblematic. They argue that what we have been witnessing is a spontaneous resurgence of people power, necessitated by unfinished business from 1989. As Timothy Garton-Ash, the indefatigable doyen of velvet revolution, has put it, these events are 'the latest in a long series of velvet revolutions which have helped spread democracy around the world over the last 30 years'.1

Other commentators have seen matters quite differently. Instead of people power spontaneously reborn, they argue that thinly disguised pro-western coups have been taking place funded by a United States determined to manipulate elections to its imperial advantage. These are not popular revolutions at all but street scenes orchestrated by powerful external forces. One leading exponent of this view, John Laughland, has ridiculed what he describes as 'the mythology of people power' based on 'the same fairy tale about how youthful demonstrators manage to bring down an authoritarian regime, simply by attending a rock concert in a central square'.2

There are real problems, however, with both views. In Laughland's case, it is his implicit portrayal of the US as a near-omnipotent puppet-master successfully pulling all the key strings behind the scenes. This view reduces people power to little more than the pliant tool of the US. By contrast, Garton-Ash's argument remains locked within the mindset of 1989, steadfastly refusing to acknowledge the extent to which today's velvet revolutions have fallen increasingly prey to manipulation by ruling class and imperialist interests.

These events certainly involve a confusing mix of US imperial manipulation, internal opposition and popular revolt. In each case, the relative weight of these factors varies. An assessment of these events must therefore be concrete enough to cater for this. ...

Georgia today plays a central role in US strategic thinking. One reason for this is the $3 billion oil pipeline under construction across Georgia from neighbouring Azerbaijan, thereby avoiding both Russia and Iran on its route to Turkey. But a pro-US Georgia is also in any event a valuable obstacle to Putin's more assertive Russia. Edward Shevardnadze, once Gorbachev's foreign minister, became Washington's man in Georgia in 1992. A supporter of NATO membership who welcomed a symbolic contingent of US troops onto Georgian soil, Shevardnadze also sent troops to Kosovo and Iraq. Under him, Georgia became the largest per capita recipient of US foreign aid after Israel.

Nevertheless, the Bush administration became increasingly disenchanted with Shevardnadze for two reasons. Firstly, his regime was visibly losing support amid a growing tide of popular anger at poverty, unemployment and crony privatisation. Secondly, as he sensed growing US disillusionment, Shevardnadze began to tilt his sails towards Moscow.

In Serbia, US strategy had been simple: to remove Milosevic. In Georgia, the strategy was twin-tracked: to maintain official support for Shevardnadze, but also to cultivate those pro-US Georgian oppositionists skilled enough to voice popular anger without jeopardising US hegemony. Three leading figures were cultivated: Mikhail Saakashvili, a 35 year old lawyer and graduate of Columbia University Law School in New York, who had been Shevardnadze's minister of justice, Nino Burdzhanadze, the speaker of the parliament, and Zurab Zhvania, a former speaker. All were one-time Shevardnadze supporters. As the Wall Street Journal put it,

 The[se] three politicians are backed by a raft of non-governmental organisations that have sprung up since the fall of the Soviet Union. Many of the NGOs have been supported by American and other Western foundations, spawning a class of young, English-speaking intellectuals hungry for pro-Western reforms.7

The original purpose of this strategy was to oversee an orderly transition from Shevardnadze, due to leave office in 2005 having served two full terms as president, to the Saakashvili generation. But the US was also prepared to contemplate a Serbian-style solution if Shevardnadze outstayed his welcome or sought Russian help. It was not for nothing that Saakashvili visited Serbia, and veteran Otpor! activists, by now pale, degenerate shadows of their former selves, were hired to train members of Kmara, Otpor!'s Georgian counterpart.

Washington's initial reaction, therefore, when OSCE election monitors issued a statement pointing to 'serious irregularities' with Georgia's parliamentary elections in November 2003, was to call allegations of fraud an 'overstatement'. As the Financial Times reported, 'Observers believe the US had hoped to keep Mr Shevardnadze, its old favourite, in office until the scheduled 2005 presidential election.' Three weeks later, on 21 November, the US changed tack, declaring that it was 'deeply disappointed' with the way the elections had been run.8

By then, Washington was faced with mounting popular revolt. The opposition, led by Saakashvili, had embarked upon a campaign of demonstrations against electoral fraud that was soon being driven by popular anger at poverty and unemployment. After three weeks, Shevardnadze's authority had all but evaporated and a reported compromise the US tried to broker was abandoned in favour of unqualified support for Saakashvili. This Georgian scenario has recently been very well summarised by Russian socialist, Boris Kagarlitsky:

 As soon as Washington realises that popular dissent is rising in a country and that regime change is imminent, it immediately begins to seek out new partners among the opposition... The money invested in the opposition by various [non-governmental organisations] is a sort of insurance policy, ensuring that regime change will not result in a change of course, and that if change is inevitable, it will not be radical.9 ...

NOTES

1: 'First Know Your Donkey', The Guardian, 27 January 2005. 2: 'The Revolution Televised' and 'The Mythology of People Power', The Guardian, 27 November 2004 and 1 April 2005. 3: See for this information R Cohen, 'Who Really Brought Down Milosevic?', The New York Time Magazine, 20 November 2004 and Michael Dobbs, 'US Advice Guided Milosevic Opposition', Washington Post, 11 December 2000. 4: P Watson, 'US Aid to Milosevic's Foes Is Criticized as ÒKiss of DeathÓ', Los Angeles Times, 28 August 2000. 5: D Bujosevic and I Radovanovic, The Fall of Milosevic: The October 5th Revolution (Palgrave, 2003), p4. 6: Jonathan Steele's phrase in his 'Ukraine's Untold Story', The Nation, 20 December 2004. 7: H Pope, 'Pro-West Leaders in Georgia Push Shevardnadze Out', Wall Street Journal, 24 November 2003. 8: G Dinmore, 'The Americas & Europe: Flaws Exposed in Strategy of 'Realpolitik''', Financial Times, 27 November 2003. 9: Quoted in P Escobar, 'What Kind of Revolution is This?', Asia Times Online, 2 April 2005. ...

Georgia's Liberty Institute received funds from U.S. & Soros - WSJ Nov. 24 '03

http://www.leftgatekeepers.com/articles ... opeWSJ.htm

Pro-West leaders in Georgia push Shevardnadze out

By Hugh Pope, The Wall Street Journal, November 24 2003

TBILISI -- The resignation Sunday of Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze, under siege by a massive popular uprising, throws in doubt the international political alignment of this strategic Caucasus nation.

Mr. Shevardnadze stepped down after thousands of protesters stormed the parliament, blaming the president for a recent election marred by ballot-box stuffing and sabotaged voter lists. A former member of Mr. Shevardnadze's inner circle, Nino Burdzhanadze, declared herself acting president on Saturday and called for new presidential elections in 45 days.

The dramatic developments in a nation that holds the key to Western access to Caspian Sea oil reserves and broader U.S. interests in the region could signal a stunning shift. A pro- Western transformation, which Washington has long hoped would tug the former Soviet Republics away from their totalitarian past, may now be under way.

But the wildly popular exuberance that greeted Mr. Shevardnadze's resignation didn't completely put to rest concerns about the stability and territorial integrity of Georgia, a nation of 4.4 million people in the Caucasus. The revolution so far hasn't been marked by violence, but its chaotic unfolding could still take unexpected turns.

Mr. Shevardnadze was once lionized by the West as the Soviet foreign minister who helped the peaceful dismantling of the Soviet Union and as a man who might lead the former Soviet republics toward a future of open economies and more democratic, Western-oriented governments. But when his failure to bring prosperity to Georgians weakened his domestic support, he leaned back toward Moscow, where he was embraced as a bulwark against the pro-Western opposition.

U.S. officials have been cautiously critical of Mr. Shevardnadze since the Nov. 2 elections, which the State Department criticized as fraudulent. Over the weekend the Bush administration signaled that its support was finally running out. In a joint telephone conversation on Saturday with United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, Secretary of State Colin Powell urged Mr. Shevardnadze " to exercise restraint and do the right thing for Georgia," according to a senior U.S. official. The official described Mr. Shevardnadze's decision to step down as "a noble gesture for peace."

After Sunday's resignation, Mr. Powell spoke by telephone with the interim president, Ms. Burdzhanadze, telling her that the U.S. "would work with her as she moved toward free and fair elections," the official said. In Georgia, the constitutional court is expected to cancel the Nov. 2 parliamentary elections and hold presidential and parliamentary elections together in 45 days.

After a Russian envoy failed to forge a compromise keeping Mr. Shevardnadze in power, Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov warned that Russia would oppose decisions that "could cause the situation to explode ... threatening the territorial integrity of Georgia." Instability in Georgia threatens Russia not just because of the new, more nationalist Tbilisi government but also because there is a Russian military base in the pro-Russian autonomous region of Adjaria in western Georgia.

Whether the new government takes Georgia down a path that leads toward the West, the East or further into confusion could dramatically influence the development of the promising oil fields of the Caspian. While Georgia doesn't possess the huge potential oil and gas reserves of its regional neighbors -- such as Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan -- it is the crucial corridor through which those reserves can pass on their way to Western markets without going over Russian or Iranian territory. Any outbreak of violence could threaten construction of a massive pipeline from the oil-rich areas around the Caspian to Turkey's Mediterranean coast.

For the U.S., helping the new government, even at the expense of an old ally such as Mr. Shevardnadze, could also help shape perceptions of broader Bush administration aspirations for spreading U.S.-friendly democracies in places such as the Middle East. "How can we promote democracy in the Arab world if we can't even promote it in a small, Christian, pro-American country, where we have spent so much money over the past decade?" asked Zeyno Baran, a Georgia specialist and director of international security at the Nixon Center in Washington.

The opposition that forced out Mr. Shevardnadze Sunday is led by three former key members of his own government. The main opposition leader, Mikhail Saakashvili, is a graduate of Columbia Law School in New York and former minister of justice who oversaw a radical cleanup of Georgia's Soviet-era judiciary in the mid-1990s.

Ms. Burdzhanadze, the 50-year-old chairman of the outgoing parliament, broke with Mr. Shevardnadze in August over his handling of the departure from Georgia of U.S.-based AES Corp. The energy giant sold its operations in the country to a Russian state energy company at a substantial loss. The third is Zurab Zhvania, a former ecology activist and coordinator of Mr. Shevardnadze's mid-1990s reform team.

Western Support

The three politicians are backed by a raft of nongovernmental organizations that have sprung up since the fall of the Soviet Union. Many of the NGOs have been supported by American and other Western foundations, spawning a class of young, English- speaking intellectuals hungry for pro-Western reforms.

Chief among these is the Liberty Institute, which has received funds from the U.S. government and financier George Soros. It became the organizing juggernaut behind the move to push Mr. Shevardnadze out of office. How the institute's 30-year-old director, Levan Ramishvili, and its 31-year-old co-founder, Giga Bokeria, went from Shevardnadze fans to his biggest opponents is the story of the forces behind the revolution that took place over the weekend.

In the aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse back in 1992, Mr. Shevardnadze returned to his Georgian homeland promising a new beginning. Compared with the paramilitary groups and anarchy that plagued his country's first year of independence, his Soviet record didn't look bad. He had protected Georgia's culture and language from Russification, and Georgians were impressed by the plaudits he won from the West for his peaceful handling of the Soviet break-up along with former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

Messrs. Ramishvili and Bokaria, who were working as part- time journalists while they finished their studies, initially supported Mr. Shevardnadze's efforts to bring back law and order. "There was this feeling that Shevardnadze might not be a big democrat, but he was in touch with the world, he would play according to the new rules of the game," said Mr. Ramishvili. "We thought he would build state institutions, a democratic and prosperous Georgia."

U.S. officials also vaulted Mr. Shevardnadze, whom they viewed as one of the few progressive officials in the former Soviet regime, into the role of standard bearer for what they hoped would be a gradual migration of the former republics out of the sphere of Russian influence and into a more-Western orbit.

In Georgia, though, Shevardnadze supporters such as Messrs. Ramishvili and Bokeria were becoming disenchanted as Mr. Shevardnadze gave up on trying to put down a Russian-backed secession movement in the northwest of the country and slowly moved Georgia back toward Moscow.

In 1996, Mr. Bokeria and Mr. Ramishvili were hired by a new independent television station called Rustavi 2. After it attacked a Shevardnadze minister, the government closed the station down. So the two men founded the Liberty Institute, initially to organize the station's defense. But by the time they won that battle with a court ruling in 1997, they decided to stick with the NGO.

Fueled by grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development-backed Eurasia Foundation, George Soros's Open Society Institute, and others, the Liberty Institute did much of the backroom work on Mr. Saakashvili's radical legal reforms. The U.S. Embassy also helped behind the scenes, bringing in exam papers prepared by the American Bar Association to provide the basis of tests for Georgia's judges. Almost 90% of Soviet-era judges failed the exam, allowing the government to fire them.

But even as reforms emerged, Mr. Shevardnadze began to change course. In 1998, he sustained the double blow of an assassination attempt that narrowly missed him and the economic collapse in Russia, Georgia's main trading partner. Although never accused of personal corruption, he became closer to his family and friends who had grown rich on their relationship with him.

"The main problem was that Shevardnadze could never rely on an army or a state, but only by balancing power among members of his team," Vakhtang Abashidze, a former Shevardnadze aide and chairman of the Georgian National Communications Commission. As the reformers distanced themselves from him, Mr. Shevardnadze became reliant on a corrupt clique. "Shevardnadze supported building up the NGOs. But as soon as they voiced some dissent, for Shevardnadze they became an opposition force," said Mr. Abashidze.

Fighting Back

Mr. Shevardnadze began to fight back. In 2001, he again tried to close down the Rustavi 2 television, which had gone back on the air and was repeatedly accusing people close to him of corruption. The Liberty Institute and others responded with a mobilization of student demonstrations that forced him to leave the country's most popular TV station on air.

Local elections in 2002 should have sent a clear message to Mr. Shevardnadze. Pro-government parties lost heavily, and Mr. Saakashvili swept to power at City Hall in the capital of Tbilisi, putting his office a few hundred yards down the hill from Mr. Shevardnadze's chancery. The Liberty Institute came under more pressure. In July of that year, 15 unknown men charged into their offices in a converted apartment, threw a computer at Mr. Ramishvili and beat him up.

But international support for the Liberty Institute -- including a personal visit from the German ambassador -- shamed Mr. Shevardnadze into sending a state minister to pay a visit to the premises. The two sides agreed to work on three things: civilian oversight of police, decentralization of schools and above all work on new voter lists ahead of the November 2003 parliamentary elections. "There was delay after delay. It was just lip-service. We withdrew from the talks in February 2003," Mr. Bokeria said.

Mr. Bokeria did more than that -- with Mr. Ramishvili, he started planning the revolution. In late February, he took a Soros Foundation- funded tour of Serbia to see how the Otpor, or "Resistance," student opposition had ousted President Slobodan Milosevic in 11 days after he annulled the presidential election in 2000. "The biggest lesson I learned was that it was key to create absolute moral superiority, everywhere, including among the police," Mr. Bokeria said last week, as the protests built up steam.

During the summer, Otpor activists visited Georgia, running three- day summer courses that trained 1,000 student activists from all over the country in revolutionary techniques using humor and peaceful subversion. The students, fed up above all with corruption in their society and universities, organized under the slogan " Kmara!" or "Enough!"

The fraudulent elections provided a greater catalyst for popular outrage than the Liberty Institute and Kmara expected. That was largely because of U.S.- and NGO-funded exit polls broadcast on Rustavi 2 TV, which showed everyone exactly how pro-Shevardnadze parties had stolen the election.

Using the Liberty Institute's computer room as one of their main action bases, and backed with a steady barrage of advertising slots from Rustavi 2 television, Kmara's 5,000 students became the foot soldiers of the opposition politicians. In the last push into the parliament on Saturday, they flanked Mr. Saakashvili as he led the way in, holding a bunch of roses.

"We did it! There was a huge number of people, nobody could stop it," Mr. Ramishvili said Sunday, watching the new interim government spell out its program on TV. He hoped it would really set about radical reforms, but worried that there might be clashes with the three regions of Georgia that remain virtually outside central control. "What makes me so happy is that it ended so peacefully. It's a good precedent for our future."

This page was posted on 12.12.03