Thinking Green in Georgia

Eddie Murphy was doing his “Bend over Norton” routine from a Russian dubbed version of “Raw” on the Batumi-Tbilisi train monitors when a stewardess asked me for my collected rubbish. “Thank you very much!” I said. I watched her walk up the aisle and fill her plastic bag of our garbage and thought about how much service has improved in this country. Then she walked over to a window, slid it open and flung the bag of trash out of the train.

This is not an isolated case of “out of sight, out of mind.” In fact, Georgians can be incredibly selective of where they choose not to look. At one picnic next to an ancient chapel in Kakheti, we drained our cups of wine to the greatness of Georgia and I watched our host toss all of our rubbish onto an accumulating garbage pile in the bushes next to the picnic table.
“Why did you do that,” I asked.

“Do what?”

People just don’t see the garbage around them. They can’t be bothered to.

In the 21st century, keeping your country beautiful should not be an esoteric concept. While to its credit, the government has stepped up and installed litter bins in many public areas throughout the country, it has taken ten steps backwards by passing a string of amendments intended to attract investors by allowing them to willfully pollute the environment. It is pretty much the craziest thing the government has done since the Rose Revolution, but what’s more insane is that nobody is even talking about it.  The concept of ecological responsibility is only understood by a few people. The rest of the country pretends that they don’t think of the environment in Soviet terms.

If you want to establish a pollution factory, all you have to do is approach the Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources and make a deal that will allow you to do things like: dump industrial waste and sewage wherever you want, destroy demarcation lines of protected territory, violate mineral rights laws, contaminate the sea, emit as much hazardous substances in the atmosphere you want, and break many other laws that were designed to protect the environment for future generations. In Georgia there is a Ministry of Environmental Protection in name only.

My MT piece here and below

Georgia’s Green Policy Means More Pollution

16 April 2012

By Paul Rimple

Georgia’s legislature has just passed groundbreaking legal amendments to attract foreign investors to come pollute the Georgian environment. Thanks to the astute foresight of the country’s lawmakers, a company can open up shop and legally dump its hazardous waste wherever it wants to, providing it pays the Energy and Natural Resources Ministry in advance.

It has long been established that polluting your air, ground and water is simply immoral, except when private interests are concerned. The question is whether a green light to break existing environmental laws will really attract foreign investors. Or will it make it easier for handpicked developers to rape the country’s natural resources?

Unlike Georgians, foreign investors think about the long term. The law exempts a license holder of virtually any responsibility and prevents the state from even challenging a license holder’s intentional emissions of toxic pollutants. But that’s not the kind of business pheromone stable enterprises sniff around for. Their first question will be: What should happen if a new government comes along and repeals the law and sues me to clean up the mess and compensate everybody?

For local developers, however, particularly those with companies registered off shore, the law is a godsend. These companies are scattered all over Georgia. A guy purchases property from the state for millions of dollars, sells it to an offshore company for $1,000 and becomes the firm’s director. It’s hard to sue a license owner when you don’t know who he is.

The law also effectively neuters those pesky environmentalists who always demand environmental-impact studies required by law. Now the government can go ahead with its environmentally disastrous plans to build more hydroelectric projects. President Mikheil Saakashvili won’t have to worry that the location of his quixotic city, Lazika, is in a national park and protected wetlands.

Oddly, nobody within the government has considered what this law could mean to Georgia’s tourism industry. Instead of cleaning up its mess along the Black Sea coast, it is encouraging people to pollute the sea more.

In developed countries, the trend is toward improving the wretched ecological conditions of our planet for our children’s sake — particularly as our planet is warming. Georgia claims it is modeling itself on Western concepts, yet inviting factories to wantonly pollute the environment, This reflects a Soviet mentality where thinking green has an entirely different meaning.

The Boobs of the Georgian Tube

I was sitting across from the US embassy press attache and a big shot from USAID at a luncheon a few years ago. The press attache asked me what I was working on and I said I was doing a training gig in election coverage for some regional journalists. The USAID person perked up to that. Media training in Georgia is to USAID what a prisoner’s death in Georgian police custody is to opposition politicians.

“Tell us about it!” they said. I exchanged a smirk with a journo friend next to us. “What?”they asked.

“Well, you can train journalists all you want, but it’s doesn’t really help them in the real Georgian world,” I more or less said.

“Oh, so we need to train their editors?” The USAIDer asked.

“Well, that wouldn’t hurt, but it still won’t change anything.”

I could see by the way they looked at their clean plates that I was losing them. It’s the expression anybody who has been in a bad relationship knows.

It’s not good to tell somebody who makes a living doling money out to non-governmental organizations that their good efforts are being wasted. Until the private interests of a media owner is to provide balanced news coverage and not to present coverage that caters to a special friend or particular dogma, then there is no use teaching a journalist much more than how to operate a camera.

Earlier this month, the 3 major Georgian TV stations, Rusatvi 2, Imedi TV and Georgian Public Broadcaster, ran a story from essentially the same script and with the same video footage. It would have been less insulting to just have one anchor do the story for all three TV channels. Of course, the story was about how rude opposition politicians were to the family of a guy who died in police custody. It was not about how these politicians raised the fact that this guy’s death ought to be honestly investigated. The way the TV station covered it, you would think that not only do people fall down and die in police custody everyday, but somehow Bidzina Ivanishvili, the billionaire opposition dude, was behind the death.

I interviewed Akaki Gogichiashvili, who used to be the producer of “60 minutes,” Rustavi 2 TV’s investigative news program, when Rustavi 2 was an opposition channel. After the Rose Revolution, Rustavi 2 became an anti-opposition channel and dropped its popular investigative program. Some people say Akaki sold out because he’s working for the man by producing Rusatvi 2′s business news program instead of pursuing the travails of investigative journalism in a country that no longer airs investigative reports on TV. That may be so, but he’s not afraid to say what everybody knows. “The national channels are quite loyal to the government.”

Akaki gave a perfect example of how USAID is wasting its money. Typically, the government press office contacts the TV stations and tells them what is happening and what the issues are. They pass out press releases. The journalists do not make an effort to find other sources of information or fact check. They are lazy, he says. This explains why the 3 major stations broadcast the same story, the same way at the same time. He doesn’t say, however, if they are ordered to be lazy or just encouraged.

The truth is, there are many western educated journalists working for the Big 3 who know what they are doing is wrong and do it for the sake of a job, or they do it because they believe in the revolution – that by skewering the news they are serving their country. Such is the pitiful state of the media.

My media stories are here:

Deutsche Welle radio – World in Progress

Moscow Times – Here and below

‘Free Press’ Means ‘Free To Support Saakashvili’

19 March 2012

By Paul Rimple

On Feb. 27, 46-year-old Solomon Kimeridze died of contusions in a police station located in a small Georgian town. The prosecutor’s office maintains that he accidentally fell over the handrail of the third-floor stairway. Case closed.

In developed countries, mainstream news would cover the story by questioning the possibility of foul play because even in upstanding cities like Los Angeles and Chicago, people have been known to die after being accidentally pushed around too much in police stations.

In the West, people expect to hear all sides to a story. In Georgian media, there is only “our side” to a story.

The major Georgian television networks will never suggest that some bad cops may have killed a detainee because their job is to remind us that the police are all good guys and that the all-glass “see-through” police stations were supposed to guarantee transparency and honesty.

To hear how the police are really bad guys, you have to tune into Kavkasia TV and Maestro TV, Tbilisi’s two small opposition television stations. In Georgia, this is called “free press.”

When Georgia’s three major television stations, Rustavi 2, Imedi and The Georgian Public Broadcaster covered Kimeridze’s death, they all read from the same script and used the same footage for a story that emphasized how opposition leader Bidzina Ivanishvili is exploiting Kimeridze’s death for political purposes.

When Ivanishvili announced his intention to challenge President Mikheil Saakashvili‘s authority, the multibillionaire became bad guy No. 1. The major networks have ignored his demands for an open investigation into Kimeridze’s death and snub stories of how his supporters are continually intimidated by authorities. Apparently, this is also a free press.

Ivanishvili bought the license to Igrika TV and gave it to his wife. The last time a billionaire owned a television station that broadcast anti-government views, riot cops stormed the studio during a live broadcast, threw journalists down on the floor at gunpoint, destroyed much of the station’s equipment and shut it down. It is now a pro-government station. Georgia does not need another opposition television network.

Some defenders of the status quo say media freedom is better in Georgia than in Armenia and Azerbaijan, but they forget that Georgia has set itself a Western benchmark. People are tired of propaganda on television and wonder whether they’ll ever be able to get two sides of a story without changing channels from one skewed station to another.

The Killing Marshes

The last time I went hunting I was 15 years old, living in Pennsylvania, where I had perfected the art of spitting tobacco juice. I had a Marlin .22 and went with my buddies Steve, Scott and John to the hunting preserve to kill squirrels, which I was told we would eat. Walking in the woods with a gun is pretty cool. It is a well established fact that there is a heightened sense of self worth when you become a lethal being.

Steve and Scott, who were older, went off in one direction while John and I went off in another to look for victims. We would meet later at our campsite, a place forbidden to set up in a hunting preserve for obvious reasons.

After a few hours of walking around without sighting a single animal, John and I decided to give it a rest and wait for the squirrels to come to us. We sat above a little meadow and chewed tobacco. It seemed a waste to be hunting without firing a single shot, so we picked a target – a leaf on a limb – and went for it. If there were any varmits in the area when we arrived, there weren’t by the time we popped in the next plug of tobacco, for we had made a pretty strong impression of our presence by then. At one point we heard somebody shout a “Hey!” Thinking it was Steve or Scott, we shouted “hey” back. A dude dressed in camouflage, with green grease painted all over his face, came out of the trees into the meadow. “Hey!” he said. He was packing a bow and arrow.

“You guys hear a bunch of gunfire?” he asked.

“Gunfire? No,” we replied, .22 shells littering the ground around us.

“Some assholes are shooting the place up. They don’t realize that they’re scaring the animals and that these woods are full of hunters too.”

Ï offered him some chewing tobacco, but he wasn’t a chewer I guess. He turned around and disappeared back into the woods.

When I moved back to California a year later, I brought my rifle with me, where it ended up rusting out in the garage. The next time I touched a gun I ended up blasting a hole though a pair of my brother’s windows and decided that maybe I should stay away from firearms all together.

30 years later, I decided to do a story about a new law in Georgia that allows hunters to kill animals that are threatened species. I called up a guy named Temur, who is the head of the Georgian chapter of Safari International, a world-wide hunter’s association, and he invited me to come on a hunting trip. Two surgeons, Mamuka and Sandro picked me up at 3 AM.

“Where’s your gun?” They asked.

“I’m not going to shoot, just record.”

They shrugged their shoulders and we sped eastwards across the country to some marshlands in Laghodekhi. It was duck season.

“I love hunt. I am big killer!” Mamuka quipped.

“I like to fish,” I said, hoping the revelation would score me a couple outdoorsman points.

Ducks are not endangered species and I don’t have a problem with the sport, if you can call it that. After all, cooked well, duck tastes good. Getting off on killing them is a different matter though, especially after introducing old Disney animated films like Bambi to my daughter. I stuck around with Temur and a young cop named Dima while the other guys disappeared into the marsh. Decoys were set, including a live quacking duck, and the guys stuck kazoos in their mouths and started quacking too. A pair of geese flew by and got whacked. I thought of their orphans, for they must have been mates, I reckoned. One slayer, Dima, a young cop, picked it up and gave it to me to check how heavy it was. Picking up the big beautiful dead bird, I had forgotten about its Disneyesque offspring. I suddenly remembered how much I love Foie Gras and set it back down gently.

A couple hours later the clouds began to lift from the foot of the Caucasus. Laghodekhi is one of the most majestic places in a county abounding in majesty. I was happy I could stare at the range without having to be on the lookout for birds to kill. My daydreams were interrupted with the sound of Mamuka and Sandro slushing up through the marsh. Mamuka had a half dozen ducks around his neck and the other goose over his shoulder. Sandro was dragging a full grown muskrat. I didn’t ask if it was muskrat season too.

By 9 o`clock, it was time to pose for pictures with the kill. I used to do this with my catch of fish as a kid, but somehow this was different; maybe because fish are cold-blooded and I don’t like “The Little Mermaid,” I don’t know, but the dead mammals changed from dinner items to war trophies (only ducks can’t shoot back). I couldn’t see the picture value in posing with what had suddenly become Bambi’s friends again, but then I’m not a hunter.

I asked my companions what they thought of the new hunting law. They said it’s good that the government is finally doing something to regulate hunting, but were noncommittal to an answer about red-listed species.

“I love to hunt,” Mamuka said. “Red list, I don’t know. Today I kill ducks.”

My Moscow Times piece is below

Endangered Species Are Poached, Not Protected

05 March 2012

By Paul  Rimple

The Georgian Tourism Department and Caucasian Safari,  a private hunting outfitter, was in Las Vegas in February,  trolling for sportsmen at the Safari Club International hunters’  convention. Standing in front of wildlife images “borrowed”  from a local environmental group, they presented a booklet advertising  animals to kill in Georgia. Three of the six featured — the Brown Bear, Caucasian Tur, Caucasian Grouse — are on Georgia’s  list of most endangered species.

Environmentalists fail to see the logic in inviting people  to come to kill threatened species when nobody knows exactly how many  there are. Counts have only been done on two species — the Caucasian  Tur and Red Deer, of which there are believed to be less than  100. There is neither a monitoring system nor a conservation program  nor an efficient enforcement mechanism in place.

Irakli Matcharashvili, biodiversity program coordinator at Green  Alternative, a local environmental group, says environmental crime is  rarely punished in Georgia. He points to the prevalence  of poaching videos of threatened species on YouTube and how  pet bears are kept in cages in gas stations and restaurants  around the country. “Somebody killed their mother,” he reasons.

While some poachers have been fined and jailed, most are never pursued.  Even the Environmental Protection Ministry admits that their hands are  tied, as they have very little resources to combat poaching. With  a budget of $10.5 million, it is one of the least-funded  ministries in the government.

Last year, most of the Environmental Protection Ministry’s  responsibilities were handed over to the Energy and Natural Resources  Ministry, whose business is to sell, not protect. It will soon announce  the recipient of a tender to count 19 mammals and seven  birds for the equivalent of $110,000. It’s a tall order  for such a sum and reflects the improvisational character  of the ministry.

In January, it issued hunting quotas for particular species without  identifying specific hunting areas. For example, 168 badgers, 96 raccoons  and 77 wildcats may be “extracted.” Nobody knows where these numbers came  from or how they will be monitored.

The problem is that the government has never showed its willingness  to protect its No. 1 tourism asset — the environment. Private  interests, whether they be new hydropower plants in Svaneti, oil terminals  in protected wetlands or hunting outfitters for a few foreign game  hunters, reflect a belief that the best way to protect  the environment is to privatize it.

Resist the Urge

What the hell is a delegation from Georgia’s Ministry of Education doing in Fiji and why are they giving them 200 computers? Because it’s the least they can do.

                                                                                                                                  

From my Moscow Times column:

Try Telling Tbilisi That You Can’t Buy Me Love

The latest Pacific island nation caught in the tug-of-war struggle of influence between Georgia and Russia is Fiji, which recently received 200 new netbook computers by virtue of Georgia’s Education Ministry. The gifts, made in a Tbilisi factory, arrived one week before Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov appeared in Fiji to talk about trade and visa-free travel.

Some critics wonder why the Education Ministry is donating computers to a Pacific island nation most Georgians would have difficulty finding on a map — particularly when there are schoolchildren in Georgia who cannot afford books. They have a point. Why give these speck-sized island countries anything at all?

In September 2010, Georgia gave tiny Tuvalu $12,000 to cover the cost of ”transportation of medical cargo” after Tuvalu voted for the Georgia-sponsored resolution at the UN General Assembly for the rights of refugees to return to Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Cash-strapped Tuvalu returned the favor a year later by recognizing Sukhumi and Tskhinvali, among rumors of a Russian payoff.

The Kremlin reportedly gave Nauru $50 million for it’s recognition of Georgia’s two breakaway republics, which started the whole Pacific island race for favor. But Nauru has made a name for itself to recognize and unrecognize states for profit. After a formal 22-year relationship with Taiwan, Nauru accepted $130 million from China to unrecognize Taiwan’s independence. A couple years later, Nauru re-recognized Taiwan in exchange for payment of a $13.5 million debt.

The neighboring archipelago nation of Vanuatu, which also flip-flopped between Taiwan and China, has set itself apart for recognizing and not recognizing Abkhazia at the same time. It recognized Sukhumi in May and retracted a month later, although the foreign minister reaffirmed the recognition. Nevertheless, Vanuatu voted in favor of the Georgia-sponsored UN resolution for refugees’ right to return even though it reaffirms recognition of Abkhazia on its government’s website.

Moscow has denied it is trading money for recognition, a claim Tbilisi takes with a grain of salt. Georgia can’t compete with Russia to buy influence, but at the same time it is not going to sit back and let the Kremlin tally up recognition for the separatists one island at a time. All it can do is make symbolic gestures to help persuade places like Fiji to ”remain loyal to international principles” and to resist the urge.

 

(image from sandeelrampton/signspotting.com)

Soaking Up A Dying Tradition

Funny how it has taken me ten years of enjoying the hot baths in Tbilisi’s ancient Abanotubani bathhouse district to realize there was a story there. Here’s what I did with my favorite photographer, Justyna Mielnikiewicz, for Eurasianet.org

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Misha, the Canards and Me

I am upset with the President of Georgia. While I was trying to secure an interview with him, he was gallivanting across the country opening new hospitals. When I finally cornered his aide, they were getting ready to board a plane to the USA. While it is very likely I will miss my deadline and remain in debt as a result, it’s no reason to unfairly castigate him, like some people in Tbilisi are doing.

My latest Moscow Times column takes a poke at two impetuous figures whose delusional comments were exploited by equally audacious media outlets in the aim to discredit Saakashvili, at the cost of destabilizing the peace in the region.

How Rivals Use Canards to Villify Tbilisi

Prior to preparing for his visit with U.S. President Barack Obama in Washington on Jan. 30, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili spent much of January cutting ribbons at the opening of new hospitals and clinics that have been popping up across the country like weeds. The construction of these new units was financed by various Georgian insurance companies. For the record, the United States is not spending $5 billion to build new facilities in Georgia in anticipation of war with Iran.

It would be a good story if it were true, but the fact is that Russia Today, David Icke, Alex Jones and thousands of crazy left-wing bloggers have picked up on the canard spread by Elizbar Javelidze, the education minister under Georgia’s first post-Soviet president, Zviad Gamsakhurdia.

Since being deposed, Javelidze has become a permanent fixture in Georgia’s opposition periphery, known for making wildly ludicrous charges — for example, that Tbilisi Mayor Givi Ugulava intends to overthrow Saakashvili. He appeals to a fringe element of Georgian society that is waiting for the Gamsakhurdia government to be restored even though its leader has been buried three times in the last 20 years.

The rest of Tbilisi stopped listening to Javelidze years ago and finds it preposterous that any non-comedian would ever quote him. Nevertheless, Russia Today published a story on Jan. 10 based solely on his claims that Saakashvili’s dream city, Lazika, is being built to house a U.S. military base, that a submarine port is being constructed at the Kulevi oil terminal and that a secret airport has been built in southern Georgia. Media from around the world pounced on the story despite the total lack of corroborating evidence.

Another marginal opposition figure, Nestan Kirtadze of the Georgian Labor Party, has also taken to fabricating stories at the expense of her country’s security. Again, Georgians are so accustomed to the harebrained drivel coming from the Labor Party that most people just rolled their eyes when she stated that Saakashvili is going to Washington to negotiate the construction of U.S. military bases in Georgia. The Kremlin, however, is fully aware that even if it were true, Kirtadze would be the last person to actually know about it. Yet it is the kind of statement the Kremlin exploits to bolster its anti-Georgian and anti-U.S. position.

Between chuckles, we forget such people can be dangerous. While their target is Saakashvili, their words are being used against the interests of the country and threaten a fragile peace in the entire region.

Georgia and the Brotherhood of Detention

In Georgia, like its Caucasus and Russian neighbors, a suspect is guilty until proven guiltier. The country has a 99% conviction rate, which makes you wonder why there are any defenders at all. It is also tied for 4th place in per capita prison populations, one notch above Russia. HRW released a report: Administrative Error – Georgia’s Flawed System for Administrative Detention, which examines how those who are suspected of committing misdemeanors have less rights than suspected felons. My piece about the report can be found here at MT, where you can go and click “like,” or you can read it below, since the story only stays up temporarily at MT.

Georgia’s Midnight Express

12 January 2012

By Paul Rimple

Crossing the Georgian border from Armenia or Azerbaijan, the first thing you notice, besides the new customs buildings, is a sense of legitimacy. You do not have to jump through hoops to get a visa, nor will you be slapped with arbitrary crossing fees. You will not see cops slouching at the side of the road with whistles in their mouths and batons in their hands. Georgian cops drive new patrol cars and write tickets for only actual infractions, just like police in the West.

Behind the Western veneer, however, is a judiciary that resembles Georgia’s neighbors. You do not want to be accused of even breaking a little law in Georgia, particularly if you are a political activist.

Human Rights Watch released a report on Jan. 4 that reveals how Georgia’s Soviet-era Code of Administrative Offenses still fails to meet the country’s human rights obligations, even after being redrafted last year.

Administrative offenses are misdemeanors that used to carry a maximum punishment of 30 days, but after large-scale opposition protests in 2009 the law was fortuitously amended to 90 days. According to international law, such punishment constitutes a criminal penalty, or felony, and therefore you should have the same due process rights as a felony defendant. But Georgia’s administrative code has loopholes that allow police to throw you in a holding cell without telling you what you were arrested for.

You have the right to legal counsel at the hearing, but the code does not state whether you have that right from the moment of your arrest. The police are not necessarily obliged to inform you of your rights, and they may not let you make a phone call. It’s up to your family to find out that you have been detained and to hire a lawyer, who must then try to find where you are being held.

Administrative trials are swift 15-minute affairs, where the court extensively relies on police testimonies. Because the accused is assumed in advance to be a troublemaker, the judge will not notice the wounds he has sustained during the detention process. Furthermore, a defendant’s lawyer will not have had time to prepare a defense, especially if he was appointed by the court. Of course, the judge may decide the accused doesn’t need a lawyer at all, even if he is a minor.

Giorgi Lapiashvili, 17, was arrested in May after calling Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili a ”murderer” at a theater the president was present at. Police refused Lapiashvili’s request to call his family or a lawyer. During the trial, the judge also denied the boy’s request to have his parents and lawyer present and appointed the arresting officer to represent him instead. Lapiashvili was fined 400 lari ($240).

In Georgia, felons serve time in prison while misdemeanor offenders serve their sentences in temporary detention facilities, which were designed to hold people for 72 hours and are often in conditions akin to Midnight Express.

Armenia and Azerbaijan make no pretenses about egalitarian reform, so we are not surprised when opposition activists, journalists or even satirists are imprisoned on bogus charges. But Georgia is different. It prides itself on being the region’s leader of reform, and if you look in the right places you can see evidence of this. But the day Georgia truly distinguishes itself from its neighbors is when Lady Justice will finally be blindfolded and holding a set of scales instead of the current hammer and sickle.