Memorial for a Lost Son

In a corner of Alla Hovannisian's living room in Yerevan is a small memorial to her son, with religious icons, flowers, and an old school photograph. 23-year-old Tigran died during civil unrest in the Armenian capital on March 1 last year, in violence which shocked and divided this small country.

His mother says that when she first heard that he had been killed, she refused to believe it. "I said it must be a mistake, it must be someone else's body in the morgue, and my husband went a second time to check," she recalls.

Pitched battles raged into the early hours of the morning after riot police moved in to end more than a week of round-the-clock demonstrations against the results of presidential elections which the opposition claimed were falsified.

The night sky was lit up with tracer bullet fire and flames rose from burning cars as police fired tear gas and fought with protesters who had set up barricades and armed themselves with petrol bombs and metal staves. Alla's son was one of several people who were shot during the clashes which left eight civilians and two policemen dead, causing the Armenian authorities to impose a state of emergency and send the army onto the streets.

"Tigran was killed with a special weapon, a tear gas gun which only the police have," claims his mother. "I blame the people who killed him, but most of all I blame the ones who gave the orders to shoot."

As she spoke, her husband sat nearby, quietly crying.

This is an excerpt from a piece I wrote for the Al Jazeera website about the anniversary of the deadly clashes in Yerevan last year and this week's Human Rights Watch report, which claims that the Armenian authorities used excessive force to crush the protests, and are now conducting politically motivated prosecutions of opposition activists. Unfortunately, the TV version of the piece is not online.

Jailhouse Rocker

Some notes on Georgia's infamous 'protest TV' show, 'Cell No. 5', from my column in The Moscow Times:

To some people, it’s a new kind of chat show which is challenging the establishment and fuelling righteous dissent. To others, it’s a crude piece of propaganda produced by degenerates. For the past month, the reality-TV programme Cell No. 5, which features a popular singer holding topical discussions and ranting against the government from a purpose-built ‘prison cell’, has been highlighting the political divisions within Georgian society.

The singer, Giorgi Gachechiladze - better known as Utsnobi, or ‘The Unknown’ - is the brother of opposition leader Levan Gachechiladze, who unsuccessfully challenged Mikheil Saakashvili for the Georgian presidency a year ago. A notorious video clip for one of his songs depicts Saakashvili as a deranged Nero, cavorting with scantily-clad women and dispensing brutal injustice until his people rise up against him.

Cell No. 5 opens with images of the disturbing Mickey Mouse-style riot masks worn by police when they dispersed opposition protests in 2007, and a map of Georgia shorn of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the regions which were effectively lost during the recent war with Russia. During the programme, the scruffy, unshaven Gachechiladze chats about political developments with his guests, usually opposition activists, civil-rights advocates or journalists.

It’s broadcast by a small independent channel which can only be seen in the capital, and while it may not be subtle, it has caused strong reactions. One senior government politician, Givi Targamadze, raged about “drug addicts” who were “preaching to society from a ‘cell’”, and insinuated that the singer and his opposition friends were Kremlin stooges. “They are so deep inside the Russians that only their legs can now be seen on the TV cameras,” Targamadze said.

President Saakashvili has also watched the show, and even mentioned it during a televised question-and-answer session with the public last month. Critics claim that Georgia’s main television channels are effectively government mouthpieces, and that media freedom has declined under Saakashvili. But the Georgian president said Cell No. 5 proved that wasn’t true: “When they say on TV that we haven’t got freedom of speech – and they say it while speaking live for three hours – it is ridiculous,” he declared.

Gachechiladze has vowed to remain in self-imposed incarceration in his studio jail until Saakashvili resigns, although the Georgian president still has four years of his term left to serve. But while the show may not provoke the kind of uprising seen in one of the singer’s videos, in terms of provoking controversy, it has already been a success.

You can watch 'Cell No. 5' (in Georgian) here.

New Russia-Georgia Conflict Predicted

The Russian military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer, who predicted the war between Russia and Georgia last year, has suggested that a new war is "very likely" to break out this summer, partly because the current ceasefire is so fragile, and partly because Moscow hasn't yet fulfilled its strategic objectives in the South Caucasus region. This time, the analyst predicts, the Russians would take the Georgian capital and totally subjugate the country. "The only way you could avoid it," Felgenhauer says, "is if there's regime change in Tbilisi - or regime change in Moscow." Read more here and here.

Information Wars (Again)

A new report from the Committee to Protect Journalists is highly critical of the media freedom situation in both Georgia and Russia, accusing the governments of Mikheil Saakashvili and Vladimir Putin of establishing control over television broadcast networks to ensure that their messages drown out alternative viewpoints. "As different as these leaders may be, both have demonstrated intolerance to criticism and a strong desire to control influential national television," the report alleges. "Using strikingly similar tactics, both leaders have helped fashion uncritical television media that are supportive of their governments. The results were on display during the South Ossetian conflict, when television in each country portrayed the fighting in one-sided, one-dimensional ways." While a lot of television reporting in Georgia is pro-government, it's clear that there is much more open criticism of the authorities on national television than is ever allowed in Russia, or in most other former Soviet states. But the idea of a genuinely free and independent media has been slow to take root here. Georgia's radical opposition, for example, seems to believe that free media simply means more airtime for their opinions (they recently demanded that an entire channel be handed over to them), rather than any kind of independent scrutiny of politicians on all sides. Meanwhile, investigative reporting has been marginalised. Two independent studios do produce documentaries examining official corruption and miscarriages of justice, but they are not shown on national TV.

Eurovision Protest Pop: Update 2

The slyly anti-Russian song We Don't Wanna Put In has been chosen as Georgia's entry to the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest in Moscow - if the event's organisers allow one of the entries to denigrate the host country's prime minister, of course. See previous posts for more details and a link to the song itself.

Eurovision Protest Pop: Update

The potential Georgian entry for this year's Eurovision Song Contest, aimed at annoying Moscow, where the event will be held, is actually called We Don't Wanna Put In (not Put-In Disco, as was reported by Georgian TV yesterday). It's typical tacky Europop, sung by Stefane Mgebrishvili and Georgian girl group 3G (pictured in photo), and its chorus goes like this: "We Don’t Wanna Put In/The negative move/It’s killin’ the groove." What you actually hear ,of course, is "we don't wanna Putin" - but that's about the extent of its 'protest' element. You can hear it here. Georgia had previously considered boycotting the Moscow Eurovision because of the war with Russia last year; now it seems the Georgians might go to poke a little gentle fun instead.

Eurovision Protest Pop

Georgians may use the Eurovision Song Contest to poke fun at neighbouring Russia after losing last year's war between the two countries if one potentially provocative song is chosen by the Georgian public as their entry for 2009. Eurovision, of course, will be held this year in Moscow, where the song Put-In Disco would probably not get much of an enthusiastic welcome. According to the Georgian pro-government television channel Rustavi-2, "the content of the song will be embarrassing for the Kremlin". But the TV station believes it will not breach the contest's rules because "the lyrics do not include insulting phrases".