Caucasus Report

Predictably, the Georgian local elections last month have served to exacerbate the antagonism between the ruling Georgian Dream coalition and the opposition United National Movement (ENM) that it defeated in the parliamentary ballot of October 2012.

The ENM has not only accused the authorities of resorting to deliberate intimidation and fraud, but argues that the July 1 arrest and subsequent detention in custody of former Tbilisi Mayor Gigi Ugulava, the coordinator of the ENM's election campaign, on new charges of misuse of public funds constitutes political persecution.

In addition, the ENM claims that the Central Election Commission violated the law when setting the date for runoff votes for the post of mayor in eight towns and cities and the heads of 13 regional councils (of a total of 59). Electoral amendments enacted in March raised to 50 percent the minimum vote a candidate for the post of mayor or regional council head must garner for an outright win.

The initial voting on June 15 evinced a clear preference for Georgian Dream among the 43.3 percent of the electorate motivated enough to cast ballots. (In the 2010 local elections, turnout was 49 percent). Georgian Dream polled marginally over 50 percent of the vote nationwide, followed by the ENM with 22.41 percent; the United Opposition comprising former parliament speaker Nino Burjanadze's Democratic Movement-One Georgia and Jondi Baghaturia's Kartuli Dasi (Georgian Group) (10.23 percent); the Alliance of Patriots of Georgia (4.71 percent); the Labor Party (3.45 percent); the Nonparliamentary Opposition bloc (2.25 percent); and Georgia's Way (1.21 percent). None of the remaining 17 parties and blocs received more than 1 percent of the vote.

In Tbilisi, one of the eight towns where the mayoral race went to a second round, Georgian Dream candidate David Narmania polled 46.09 percent of the vote, followed by Nikanor Melia of the ENM with 27.97 percent and Dmitri Lortkipanidze, representing the United Opposition bloc, with 12.81 percent.

By contrast, in an opinion poll conducted in mid-April on behalf of the U.S. National Democracy Institute, 48 percent of those questioned said they planned to vote for Georgian Dream and just 12 percent for the ENM. By the same token, 39 percent of respondents planned to vote for Narmania, 10 percent for Melia and 9 percent for Lortkipanidze.

Both the election campaign and the voting were overshadowed by numerous allegations of foul play. The Tbilisi embassies of the United States, Britain, and the Netherlands, which jointly fielded 95 observers who visited 600 polling stations in 23 electoral districts, nonetheless characterized the actual voting as "successful and well-administered," and as demonstrating "the growing pluralism in Georgian democracy."

The International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy (ISFED), however, registered a high number of void ballot papers and irregularities in drawing up final vote-summary protocols in hundreds of precincts, and called on June 23 for a vote recount in hundreds of polling stations.

Having assessed over 80 separate formal complaints lodged either by election watchdogs or the ENM and United Opposition, the Central Election Commission annulled the results at 14 polling stations and scheduled repeat voting on June 29.

Turnout for the repeat voting was even lower than on June 15: 36.63 percent. This time, ISFED registered only what it termed "minor technical flaws" that precinct officials sought to redress as they occurred. The NGO Fair Elections similarly described the voting as proceeding "quietly and in an organized fashion." The Central Election Commission said the following day that it had not received any complaints from organizations that monitored the vote.

The ENM nonetheless continues to accuse the authorities of creating unfair conditions for the runoff vote. On July 1, ENM representatives walked out of a session of the Interagency Task Force for Free and Fair Elections to protest what ENM's Zurab Chiaberashvili termed the body's "practice of justifying illegal actions or the inaction of law enforcement agencies" and its alleged failure to investigate violent clashes in the run-up to the June 15 vote or violations on polling day. One week earlier, Deputy Justice Minister Aleksandre Tabatadze had informed the Interagency Task Force that the commission had investigated all the complaints received and that for the first time ever, a criminal case had been opened in connection with malpractice.

The ENM has also played up the fact that the Central Election Commission, whether deliberately or inadvertently, apparently violated the law when scheduling for July 12 the runoff vote in the eight towns and cities and 13 regions where no candidate for mayor of district council head polled the minimum 50 percent of the vote on June 15. Ugulava had urged Central Election Commission Chairwoman Tamar Zhvania on June 23 to announce the runoff date at the earliest opportunity in order to give candidates the maximum time to prepare. Zhvania responded immediately that setting the date was not within her competence and could not be done until all complaints about the first round of voting had been resolved.

The commission duly endorsed the final results of the June 15 voting on July 3 and immediately scheduled the runoff for July 12. The ENM protested that decision, pointing out in a seeming inconsistency that the runoff date should not have been announced until July 9, and that a ruling adopted by the Central Election Commission on June 19 stipulated that a minimum of 10 days should elapse between the announcement and the vote. The party construed that glitch as further evidence that "the Central Election Commission is not serious about holding the second round."

Burjanadze's Democratic Movement–One Georgia, which qualified for the municipal runoffs in Tianeti, Tkibuli, Akhmeta, and Martvili, claimed the constitution required that runoffs should be announced 14 days in advance.

The Tbilisi Municipal Court has nonetheless upheld the Central Election Commission ruling.

ENM parliament member and former Deputy Justice Minister Giorgi Vashadze posited a direct link between the scheduling of the runoffs and Ugulava's arrest, which, Vashadze said, will put his party at a major disadvantage.

Meanwhile, Melia, the ENM's candidate for Tbilisi mayor, has finally agreed to his rival Narmania's proposal to hold televised debates in the run-up to the July 12 vote.

-- Liz Fuller

A court in the Chechen town of Urus Martan has sentenced Assembly of Peoples of the Caucasus head Ruslan Kutayev to four years in prison on a charge of illegal possession of drugs that human rights activists say was blatantly fabricated. He is barred from engaging in public political activity for a further year after his release. The prosecutor had called for a five-year jail term.

Just days prior to his arrest on February 20, Kutayev had convened a conference in Grozny to mark the 70th anniversary of the deportation on orders from then-Soviet leader Josef Stalin of the entire Chechen and Ingush nations to Kazakhstan and Central Asia. Speaking at that conference, Kutayev had incurred Chechen Republic head Ramzan Kadyrov's wrath by criticizing his edict two years earlier that henceforth the deportation anniversary should be marked not on the actual date (February 23), but in early May, concurrently with the anniversary of the death in 2004 of Kadyrov's father, Akhmed-hadzhi, in a terrorist bombing.

According to the prosecution, Kutayev, 56, was detained on the street in the town of Gekhi in the Urus Martan district, southwest of Grozny, because he was behaving "oddly." A search of his person reportedly revealed 3 grams of heroin. Kutayev and other witnesses, however, say he was apprehended at the home of friends he was visiting and was not searched before being driven away. And as Assembly of Peoples of the Caucasus Vice Chairman Abdulla Khizriyev points out, having just antagonized Kadyrov, Kutayev would hardly have ventured out on the street with a pocket full of drugs inviting arrest.

What is more, the six witnesses for the prosecution who claim to have been present at Kutayev's arrest gave mutually contradictory testimony in court. While all agreed on what the weather was like that day, they were unable to say who authorized Kutayev's arrest or whether they made their way to the spot where he was apprehended on foot or in a police vehicle. They were also unable to describe the packet of heroin purportedly found on Kutayev.

Committee Against Torture head Igor Kalyapin said Kutayev's lawyer spent 2 1/2 hours in court on July 4 enumerating the various discrepancies in the indictment. The Moscow-based human rights watchdog Memorial designated Kutayev a political prisoner several weeks ago on the grounds that the criminal case against him was clearly fabricated.

After his arrest, Kutayev was taken not to the local Urus Martan police station, but to Grozny, where he was questioned in the presence of Chechen Deputy Interior Minister Apti Alaudinov and Magomed Daudov, head of Kadyrov's administration. Daudov had telephoned Kutayev after the deportation anniversary conference and demanded he report to his office for questioning, a demand that Kutayev ignored as he considered it shameful to comply immediately.

Testifying on May 7, Kutayev said that after his arrest he was "brutally beaten and kicked" by top officials in the presence of their bodyguards. He did not name the officials in question.

While most human rights activists attribute Kutayev's arrest to his public criticism of Kadyrov and/or his refusal to report immediately to Kadyrov's office for questioning when ordered to do so, Kutayev himself sees the reprisals against him as part of a broader trend -- "a clear tendency to discredit political and public figures who criticize the authorities." He explains that his political engagement as a leading member of the Alliance of Greens and Social Democrats headed by former Russian State Duma Deputy Gennady Gudkov placed him in that category, given that "the course we have launched of developing social and political institutions, and hereby developing civil society is geared toward seeking to come to power within the framework of the laws and Constitution of the Russian Federation."

Gudkov for his part appears to lend credence to the hypothesis that Kutayev was arrested because he had defied Kadyrov. Testifying on Kutayev's behalf, Gudkov said that "as someone who has drafted laws, I find the way in which they are applied very strange. Laws that you would think are written absolutely clearly, concretely, in order that justice and the law should prevail, are used as an instrument of revenge."

The groundswell of support for Kutayev is not confined to the two organizations for which he worked. In Stavropol Krai, the heads of two Russian NGOs collected signatures to an open letter to Kadyrov asking him to ensure Kutayev gets a fair trial. The two dismiss the drug charge against Kutayev as "clearly absurd." Vladimir Nesterov, who heads a Council of Russians and Other Slavic Peoples, characterized Kutayev as "the sole representative of the peoples of the Caucasus who stood up for Russians in the Caucasus and Russia as a whole."

Kutayev accepted the July 7 verdict with equanimity, according to his lawyer Pyotr Zaykin, who called the sentence "unprecedentedly harsh."

-- Liz Fuller