Identifier
Created
Classification
Origin
07TBILISI3178
2007-12-28 12:56:00
CONFIDENTIAL
Embassy Tbilisi
Cable title:  

GEORGIAN ELECTIONS: CAMPAIGNS SPAR OVER PROCESS IN

Tags:  PGOV PREL KDEM GG 
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VZCZCXRO1147
OO RUEHFL RUEHKW RUEHLA RUEHROV RUEHSR
DE RUEHSI #3178/01 3621256
ZNY CCCCC ZZH
O 281256Z DEC 07
FM AMEMBASSY TBILISI
TO RUEHC/SECSTATE WASHDC IMMEDIATE 8541
INFO RUEHZL/EUROPEAN POLITICAL COLLECTIVE
C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 03 TBILISI 003178 

SIPDIS

SIPDIS

DEPT FOR EUR DAS BRYZA & EUR/CARC

E.O. 12958: DECL: 12/27/2017
TAGS: PGOV PREL KDEM GG
SUBJECT: GEORGIAN ELECTIONS: CAMPAIGNS SPAR OVER PROCESS IN
KUTAISI

Classified By: Ambassador John F. Tefft for reasons 1.4(b&d).

Comment
-------
C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 03 TBILISI 003178

SIPDIS

SIPDIS

DEPT FOR EUR DAS BRYZA & EUR/CARC

E.O. 12958: DECL: 12/27/2017
TAGS: PGOV PREL KDEM GG
SUBJECT: GEORGIAN ELECTIONS: CAMPAIGNS SPAR OVER PROCESS IN
KUTAISI

Classified By: Ambassador John F. Tefft for reasons 1.4(b&d).

Comment
--------------

1. (C) During a December 19-20 pre-election visit to Kutaisi,
Georgia's second largest city, we found opposition campaigns
focused almost exclusively on alleged government plans to
intimidate voters or to manipulate the results. Some of the
charges contained credible-sounding details, especially those
suggesting that activists for the ruling party had warned
opposition supporters that they could face problems with
their jobs or businesses. Many of the charges, however,
seemed less credible, either because they were unspecific,
seemed unlikely to effect the results even if true, or
concerned things that had not yet happened, i.e., abuses that
the opposition suspected the government was planning to
commit. When the opposition did turn to the issues, it
tended to favor process-oriented ones. For example, a local
campaign official for Levan Gachechiladze said his candidate
was winning support because of his call to abolish the
position of elected president, adding that Gachechiladze was
intentionally not emphasizing economic issues. Ruling party
and government officials were more focused on promoting their
record in improving Kutaisi's infrastructure, and their
ambitious plans to develop Kutaisi as a tourism and
conference center. We stressed to all parties that the
government has a responsibility to ensure a free and fair
election and, if international observers certify that this
has happened, the losing parties have a responsibility to
accept the results. All parties agreed in principle, but at
the same time all seemed more focused on criticizing their
opponents than on reining in their own supporters. End
Summary.

Charges Range from Serious...
--------------

2. (C) Local representatives of all the major opposition
candidates -- Gachechiladze, Gamkrelidze, Natelashvili, and
Patarkatsishvili -- as well as the Georgian Young Lawyers
Association (GYLA) provided us with a wide array of alleged
government abuses that they said would, if not stopped
immediately, make a free and fair election impossible. Many

said their campaigns had encountered difficulty renting
space. Gamkrelidze's local campaign chief Goga Asatiani said
he had been unable to get city officials to allow him to rent
the city's theater for a Gamkrelidze rally, until Gamkrelidze
raised the issue himself with Acting President Nino
Burjanadze (who represents a Kutaisi district in Parliament),
and Burjanadze passed word through the regional governor to
make the hall available. Asatiani gave several other
examples with names included, including one village resident
who had rented the campaign office space and then lost his
job with the tax department. Gachechiladze managed to hold a
rally in the Kutaisi theater December 19, but one
Gachechiladze supporter told us the next day that the lights
had gone out for 20 minutes during the rally -- something he
was certain was intentional.


3. (C) Asatiani provided names of Gamkrelidze supporters who
had been harassed for signing petitions, in some cases by
their own relatives who had themselves allegedly been
threatened with trouble because of their family ties to
Gamkrelidze supporters. Gachechiladze's local campaign
manager said that someone he knew had forced him to resign
from a lucrative state job, threatening him with such things
as trumped-up drug charges or with the arrest of family
member, after he appeared in a video clip of the opposition
rally that ended in violence November 9. We raised such
reports of intimidation in meetings with a range of local
officials and the ruling National Movement's campaign. All
dismissed the charges as exaggerated. Imereti Regional
Governor Akaki Bobokhidze noted that the wife of a leading
official of the Patarkatsishvili campaign was a member of his
staff and would remain there. National Movement campaign
manager Gocha Tevdoradze said the possibility of such actions
could be completely "excluded," arguing that the National
Movement did not need to intimidate voters to win.

...To Curious and Conspiratorial
--------------

4. (C) Other opposition complaints tended to raise more
questions than answers, for a variety of reasons. Two
Gachechiladze campaign officials spoke at length about
protocols from several recent precinct election commission
(PEC) meetings in the region that had never been signed as
required. They had challenged the protocols in court,
arguing that they suspected the PEC meetings had never taken
place. Asked what advantage the National Movement could gain
from the unsigned protocols, they could not answer, other
than to suggest the National Movement could use such

TBILISI 00003178 002 OF 003


procedural irregularities as an excuse to invalidate the
election if it went against them. (Note: We have elsewhere
heard a more credible-sounding complaint that some early PEC
meetings were called without informing opposition members, to
deprive them of a say in the election of PEC officers.) The
local head of Natelashvili's campaign, Samson Gugava, said
the ruling party would know how people on the supplemental
list -- those whose names were not on the initial rolls --
voted, and would decide whether to count their votes
depending on whether they would help win the election. These
theories grant the National Movement a kind of sinister
omniscience that is not very credible.


5. (C) All the opposition parties complained at length about
"dead souls" on the voters list. DEC Chairman Avtandil
Osepaishvili agreed that there are many more names on the
list than people residing in Kutaisi. He explained that the
families of deceased people often failed to file documents to
remove the names, many other Georgians are working abroad
without documenting their absence, and the early elections
had not given officials enough time to correct the list
fully. Several opposition campaigns are spending
considerable resources going house-to-house to try to check
the list themselves, and in the process they discovered that
some registered addresses do not even exist. None of the
opposition representatives had specific evidence proving that
the ruling party would use these extra names for vote fraud,
although many repeated widespread rumors that local officials
were printing fraudulent IDs in the names of the "dead
souls," complete with pictures of National Movement activists
who would use them to cast multiple votes. When we noted
that recent changes to the Election Code putting opposition
members on the PECs might deter this kind of abuse, some
opposition representatives acknowledged that this helped, but
others argued that the government would put so much pressure
on even opposition PEC members that they would be unwilling
to object to fraud.


6. (C) All opposition candidates mentioned reports that the
National Movement had instructed its voters to take a digital
photo of their marked ballot with a cell phone, in the voting
booth, so that they could later prove that they had voted for
Saakashvili. In order to guarantee that it was in fact their
ballot in the photo, these voters were reportedly told to
include a bit of their hand, or a ring, in the shot. When we
asked the National Movement's Tevdoradze about these
allegations, he replied that it would be impossible to find
enough cell phones for such a large number of voters in
Kutaisi. Later, when we conducted an experiment by trying to
photograph a piece of paper and a hand with a typical
Georgian cell phone, we found it practically impossible to
read anything written on the paper in the photo.


7. (C) We spoke with only one person in Kutaisi whose
analysis of the election contained any degree of
qualification, balance, or sense that the truth may not be
all on one side or the other: International Society for Fair
Election and Democracy (ISFED) Regional Coordinator Teona
Gogoshvili. She said there were a few cases ISFED had
identified as violations, including one in which an
opposition supporter was pressured to resign as a tax
inspector, and another in which an opposition member of PEC
was threatened with business problems if she did not behave
in a certain way. Gogoshvili said that when such cases got
attention, higher-ups in the government often stepped in to
protect the people who had been pressured, suggesting the
cases may have been the result of "excessive zeal" by
lower-ranking government supporters. Gogoshvili said that
this is why ISFED is encouraging people to speak up if they
are pressured, although she acknowledged that many are
probably afraid to do so. She said ISFED meets regularly
with the opposition campaigns, but added that most of their
concerns are "not well-based or verified."

What About the Issues?
--------------

8. (C) Governor Bobokhidze predicted that Saakashvili would
win over 60 percent of the vote in Kutaisi, and 70 percent in
the outlying villages of the Imereti region. He said
Saakashvili was running on a record of achievements,
including reducing crime by defeating the "thieves-in-law"
criminal network. He acknowledged that the government had
made some mistakes, but expressed confidence that the public
would not want to go back to the situation of 2003. (Note:
Bobokhidze is himself a controversial figure, cited in our
Human Rights Report for beating a journalist in 2005.)
National Movement campaign chief Tevdoradze offered a similar
analysis, saying the government had fulfilled its promises,
including improving roads and strengthening the army and
other basic elements of statehood, and was now focusing its

TBILISI 00003178 003 OF 003


campaign on the next step: solving social problems.
Bobokhidze and Kutaisi Mayor Nugzar Shamugia highlighted the
government's plan to make Kutaisi the next city targeted for
tourism development, following Sighnaghi, by promoting
construction of hotels and conference facilities. Bobokhidze
said that because of Kutaisi's historical sites, it would be
well-placed for such development once the government finished
four-laning the main road from Tbilisi.


9. (C) Gachechiladze's campaign offered a very different
view, saying Saakashvili's popularity in the region was near
zero, and his only hope for support was scaring voters.
Campaign officials said Gachechiladze's support was rising
because his platform of constitutional reform -- including an
end the presidency as it is currently known soon after
Gachechiladze is elected to it -- was resonating with voters
tired of the "cult of the leader." A succession of such
leaders, they said, had brought no progress to Georgia since
independence. Asked about Gachechiladze's economic message,
they said he is not focusing much on economic issues because
he does not want to give voters "false promises," as
Saakashvili does.

Comment
--------------

10. (C) All parties described the election in purely black
and white terms, but in fact many of the alleged violations
are most likely the result of the imperfect realities of
campaigning in a country where a democratic political process
is still relatively new. All parties are conducting
aggressive voter outreach, using door-to-door visits and
phone calls, in some cases from friends and family members of
targeted voters. In addition to canvassing for votes, these
contacts are often also intended to gauge public opinion and
to check the accuracy of the voters list. These efforts may
be a legitimate part of campaigning (assuming the activists
are honest about who they represent) but they are no doubt
unpleasant for many voters, and it is quite likely that many
instinctively fear that contacts from the ruling party
contain an implicit threat of trouble if voters oppose them.


11. (C) Public opinion in Kutaisi is hard to gauge. There
have been no clearly unbiased polls taken since the violence
in November, and the parties' views of public opinion are
wildly divergent. Kutaisi has not benefited from economic
growth to the same extent as Tbilisi and Batumi, and has the
feel of a city that has yet to recover from the economic
dislocation at the time of the Soviet collapse. At the same
time, the region has earned a reputation for being less
politically active than Tbilisi and Batumi, despite Kutaisi
being Georgia's second-largest city, and for dividing its
votes more or less in line with the country as a whole. Even
some opposition leaders told us they did not expect Kutaisi
voters to play a visible or unusual role on January 5 or
after.
TEFFT