The sudden resignation of Mikhail Saakashvili as Governor of Odessa
and his accompanying tirade of accusations of corruption and treason against
the Ukrainian President, Petro Poroshenko and his coterie in Kiev came as a
bombshell for the Western media on 7th November. But it was a
strangely bland bombshell.
Yes, the voices of the West - the BBC, CNN, Wall St.
Journal, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty – mentioned that the former Georgian
President, who had been brought in to combat corruption in Ukraine’s key port
and one of its major Russian-speaking cities, had resigned, even that he
criticised his patron and old university chum, Poroshenko, for being on the
take. But the reportage has been strangely opaque.
Remember both Saakashvili and Poroshenko had been routinely
characterised as the epitome of anti-corruption campaigners by Western neo-con
voices whose echo-chamber is the supposedly liberal media, CNN, NBC in the USA
and BBC and Channel Four News in the UK. No mention of Poroshenko’s past
service to the “notoriously corrupt” regimes in Ukraine before 2014 is
permitted, nor reference to his alleged business dealings with pariahs like
Iran before he came on board for the regime-change of the decade in February,
2014. As for the reality that to most Georgians their ex-president, President,
Mikheil Saakashvili, was the
personification of a brutal, loud-mouthed demagogue that too was passed over in
silence by those who boast that “they tell truth to power” from the editorial
suites of Western newsrooms and newspapers.
Saakashvili’s own
people remember how it was exactly nine years ago on 7th November,
2007, that his Western equipped para-military police smashed demonstrations
against him in Tbilisi with a mixture of high-tech ultra-low frequency
disorientation weapons and good old-fashioned swagger sticks and jackboots. The anniversary of
Lenin’s seizure of power ninety-nine years ago has strange fascination for
Saakashvili as his day for decisive coups.
After his fall from power in Georgia four years ago,
Saakashvili had become a kind of post-Communist Flying Dutchman albeit
inverted. Abandoned by his Dutch wife after revelations of the crudest kind of
tax-payer-funded infidelities on the Georgian presidential jet, he roamed the West trying to find sanctuary.
Even the USA quietly but firmly denied him a haven as revelations that
underneath his glass-fronted police stations – much-vaunted in the Guardian and
Transitions online as model reforms - secret dungeons housed torture and sexual
abuse against his opponents have shattered his reputation at home and were known
to insiders abroad.
Saakashvili has of course embarrassed his US sponsors before
by launching unilateral action without consulting them and getting full
permission in advance. Remember how in August, 2008, he thought he could
overrun South Ossetia before Russia could react and would earn the plaudits of
the neo-cons in the West for his “courageous leadership”. Instead, he provoked
a Russian backlash and the disintegration of his army. In a grand strategy
worthy of Mussolini’s placement of his best troops in Ethiopia before invading
Greece and Libya with badly equipped conscripts, Saakashvili had sent his 6,000
US-trained troops to do garrison duty in Iraq for his American sponsors when he
decided to provoke Russia in 2008.
The worthless adventure shattered Saakashvili’s value to the
West less than a year after it had ignored his brutal suppression of opposition
and had endorsed yet another rigged presidential election in his favour.
Ousted by even some of his ex-cronies after 2012, it was his
old university contemporary, Petro Poroshenko, who threw a lifeline to the
ex-Georgian President and a slew of his ex-enforcers from Georgia. Rather as
the old Soviet Communist Party had deployed loyal apparatchiks from outside
each republic to enforce the Kremlin’s will on the multi-ethnic population of
the USSR, so Washington now backed a strategy of parachuting outsiders from
other ex-Soviet republics and of course the children of Nazi-era emigres from
Ukraine itself into key positions to control the Ukrainian people themselves in
case they took it into their heads to take democracy seriously.
The Americans often overlooked the internal contradictions
of this parody of Comintern tactics. Saakashvili was notoriously anti-Armenian
in power in Georgia, when he bulldozed scores of ancient Armenian buildings in
Tbilisi to make way for his Reichstag-look-alike presidential palace. So it
wasn’t by chance that he got into a brawl with the ethnic Armenian interior
minister of “independent” Ukraine last year.
Saakashvili’s arrival in largely-Russian-speaking Odesa was
a red rag to the locals. They resisted his attempt to massage local elections
in favour of his preferred candidates for mayor and so on as he had done back
home in Georgia. He denounced the opposition as corrupt but at best this was
the pot calling the kettle black. Saakashvili’s own tarnished reputation went
before him across the Black Sea even if seminars in Oxford or Harvard took his
credentials as “Mr Clean” at face value.
Now his wrestling match with the Ukrainian mafia and his
attempt to impose his own Georgian clan in Odessa has come into the open.
The publication of the Panama Papers was supposed to tarnish
Vladimir Putin but in reality the dirt spewed out of Poroshenko for his murky
Caribbean cash pile. Just as the revelation of David Cameron’s family ties to
offshore accounts fatally undermined his standing in the run-up to the Brexit
referendum. Poroshenko’s claims to represent Westernization for Ukraine were
not without an ironic plausibility.
Then to compound Poroshenko’s credibility gap as an
anti-corruption campaigner, an MP of Soros-sponsored Afghan Communist
background got a bill passed with American backing requiring politicians and
officials to publish declarations of their wealth. The published amounts
commonly enraged ordinary, poverty-stricken Ukrainians even if they were often
a shadow of the real wealth stashed away by the representatives of the people.
Having come to power by decrying Viktor Yanukovich’s alleged
“orgy of corruption”, the Poroshenko crew looked odiously bloated with
inexplicable wealth.
Into the scandal stepped the unpopular, alien governor
Odessa. Despite being appointed by the President, Saakashvili chose to denounce
him personally for betraying the Ukrainian people, Western values and the
anti-mafia crusade which Saakashvili claimed to personify.
Western media express surprise at the ferocity of
Saakashvili’s attacks on the integrity of his old university friend,
Poroshenko, who had rescued him from exile and given him his new lease of
political life in Odessa. Don’t these hacks remember how Saakashvili had been
raised up by Georgia’s Eduard Shevardnadze, who became godfather to his
protégé’s son, Eduard, while he was Minister of [In]Justice in that cruelly
corrupt regime, before Saakashvili turned on his patron and ousted him in the
so-called “Rose Revolution” in November, 2003? Now thirteen unlucky years
later, Saakashvili has bitten the hand that fed him in Ukraine.
Part of the Western media’s amnesia is of course that until
yesterday both Saakashvili and Poroshenko were portrayed as model reformers,
anti-corruption campaigners and so on. Suddenly, one paragon of civic virtue
smears the other. CNN, BBC and Wall St. Journal can’t compute it. Clearly,
no-one in the Central Information Agency had distributed the script in advance
of this crisis – so unlike the well-signalled abandonment of a Western darling
like Shevardnadze in 2003 or the preparations for the Maidan uprising in
2013-14. Then of course, the Amanpours et al. were on hand with the moniker and
mood music to encapsulate the propaganda line. Yesterday’s hero was now a
villain but forget about Shevardnadze or Kuchma, here comes an English-speaking
motor-mouth spewing out all the New World Order guff about civil society,
anti-corruption and, of course, Russophobia.
The Saakashvili-Porodshenko spat not only casts a garish
light on the sleazy reality of Western-backed regime change on either side of
the Black Sea – Georgia as well as Ukraine – but more importantly it illustrates
the dangerous tailspin into which the casual promotion of corrupt and unstable
post-Soviet politicians as paragons of civic virtue has plunged Western policy
in Eastern Europe. The recent uptick in sabre-rattling by NATO reflects the
bankruptcy of the political options promoted by the Euro-Atlantic
regime-changers. Having toppled and re-toppled post-Communist regimes,
promoting and then pulling down successive corrupt and brutal “heroes of the
street”, the West now faces the grim reality that its reputation is as
tarnished by this sleazy process as much as its former local heroes.
Maybe one of the youthful Najibullahs of Kiev will be pushed
to fill the void. But don’t underrate the ability of Ukraine’s oligarchs to
navigate the storms of post-Communist politics and never ending flow of
embarrassing revelations of hypocrisy and corruption which the Dnieper can
never wash away. Saakashvili has declared war in a most Hobbesian environment
on the most powerful and odious characters in the country. Above all, he has
denigrated the President of Ukraine himself whose authority cannot survive
allowing his former protégé to abuse him with impunity.
This cannot end well for both men. No-one should be
surprised if Saakashvili and Poroshenko are suddenly reconciled, but any
embrace of these two old comrades from the Komsomol can only follow Lenin’s
dictum: put your arms around the enemy’s shoulders so you get your hands closer
to his throat. Saakashvili may be counting on the Americans to save his bacon.
He seems to have forgotten what President Sarkozy told him in August, 2008:
“The Seventh Cavalry is not coming over the hill to rescue you.” Ultimately,
even the global nation par excellence does not believe that a Georgian
political clan can takeover Ukraine and rule it for Washington against the will
of the Ukraine’s own mafias.
Saakashvili’s impulsive detonation of this crisis might lead
other Ukrainians to pose as champions of probity against Poroshenko, but the
West’s international brigade of reformers who failed at home sent in to
transform Ukraine have had their day. Some slink back home to the Baltic States
or Chicago, but Saakashvili has no homeland anymore.
With his Georgian citizenship revoked, and Tbilisi demanding
his extradition for a host of alleged crimes in office from 2003 until 2012,
Saakashvili has few places to run to. Remember the USA wouldn’t give him
permanent residence which was why he jumped at the chance to serve Poroshenko’s
bogus anti-corruption but very real anti-Russian drive in Odessa. With the
boss-of-bosses’ backing in Kiev, Saakashvili could find himself facing
extradition back to Georgia – or even to Russia which accused him of genocide
for killing so many civilians in his madcap invasion of South Ossetia in
August, 2008.
The West can afford to throw away Saakashvili. Poroshenko
and his prime minister, Groysman – godson of Poroshenko’s father – have been
Washington’s key allies in Kiev. If they were to fall, or, if fearing
Washington was about to push them, they jumped ship back to their old comrades
in Moscow, the neo-cons’ house of cards in Eastern Europe could collapse.
Maybe the strange silence of the West’s normally vocal media
analysts about Saakashvili’s bombshell reflects their bewilderment that the
best-laid plans for domination in the East are beginning to crumble like one of
the stale cookies handed out in Kiev by that pin-up for regime-change, Victoria
Neuland. After all the hullaballoo about Donald Trump being the cat’s paw of
pro-Russian interests who had backed Viktor Yanukovich in the swirling crisis
in Ukraine three years ago, that none of
the hacks decrying his “hidden Kremlin links” have explained how Saaki and
Porky Poroshenko fell out so spectacularly or what it means for Western grand
strategy. Their silence is very revealing. Even Google’s Orwellian approach to
news-management has rarely been so crude: the story was a bombshell, headlined
with “live updates” – but not anymore.
Amnesia not analysis is increasingly the Western
media elite’s response to the crisis besettin its most cherished policies. Does
this silence imply retreat or will the West lash out after Tuesday’s US
Presidential election? Maybe Saakashvili’s tantrum will set the Seventh Cavalry
in motion, not to rescue him today any more than in 2008, but to mask the
failure of regime-change with open war in the East. Now that is something
the Western media has been talking about a lot recently.
