Revolution in the air - Redux

Background post on Georgia

The lesson, though, goes far beyond Moldova, and Georgia's "velvet revolution" is currently reverberating throughout the entire former Soviet Union. The 15-country bloc, with its population of more than 200 million people, chose the open, democratic route back in 1991, but so far, most of the area's residents have experienced nothing of the sort.

With the exceptions of the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, who are light-years ahead of the rest and poised to join the European Union next year, the rest have seen little more than the same old authoritarianism for the past 13 years -- albeit with freer markets and rigged elections as window-dressing to make it easier for Western investors to justify doing business here.

The Georgian example, however, has reignited for many the dormant idea that the peoples of this region don't have to submit to bad leadership. As soon as Mr. Shevardnadze fell, opposition movements as far away as Ukraine and Kazakhstan -- as well as those in Georgia's immediate South Caucasus neighbourhood, Azerbaijan and Armenia -- hailed what happened, and said they would use it as their own model to wrest their countries away from quasi-dictatorships and put them back on the course to becoming liberal democracies.

The excitement is highest in Ukraine, where President Leonid Kuchma is set to step down next year and is constitutionally barred from running for a third term. Until recently, it's been accepted that Mr. Kuchma would try to orchestrate an election win for a hand-picked successor. The Ukrainian opposition says it no longer plans to sit back and wait for that to happen.article

Who knows how this ends, but it appears that the time is ripe for people to demand their leaders be responsive to the needs of the citizens. Maybe that can happen here. But I have a feeling that it will take a bit longer for our blindered citizens to realize that they are simply fodder units to their leaders, and that they are being led into a caged hole. And that democracy American style is a perversion of true democracy.

Mr. Shevardnadze's Georgia was one of the freer states in the region. In neighbouring Azerbaijan, for instance, the aging Geidar Aliev was able to pass the presidency on to his son, Ilham, in an October vote that was at least as rigged as the parliamentary vote that lit the fuse in Georgia few weeks later.

When the clearly phony results were announced, the opposition took to the streets of Baku, the Azeri capital. But where Mr. Shevardnadze allowed the protesters to exercise their democratic right to demonstrate, Mr. Aliev cracked down, sending riot police out to reclaim the city's main square using batons, tear gas and rubber bullets.

Ah. The American Model.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.