Though conspiracy theories about the death of billionaire opposition leader and media mogul Badri Patarkatsishvili seem to be losing steam, one question remains unanswered: What will become of Patarkatsishvili’s embattled television station?
According to a recent article on EurasiaNet.org, Rupert Murdoch’s son is to arrive in Georgia in the near future to discuss purchasing a controlling share of the station.
The station, Imedi TV, has been off the air for about two months since officials accused Patarkatsishvili of using it as an instrument in his alleged coup attempt.
Recently deceased Georgian billionaire Badri Patarkatsishvili – a man who had monetarily sustained much of the political opposition to Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili – had lived in fear of assasination.
He was wanted in Georgia and Russia and living in exile in England and Israel.
When he died at the age of 52 on Tuesday, British police called it “suspicious.”
But according to today’s article from the BBC, preliminary test results indicate Patarkatsishvili may have died from natural causes. Extensive toxicology tests will be completed in the next few weeks.
Some wonder what will happen to Georgian politics with the removal of such a significant source of funds for the opposition.
The Economist printed a great summary of the situation, describing the two sides to Patarkatsishvili thusly:
“Seen one way, he was a champion of democracy, staking his fortune—and perhaps his life—to overturn corrupt and murderous rule in his native Georgia in the Caucasus. Seen another way, he was an opportunist using a murkily obtained fortune, loosely estimated at up to £6 billion, to topple Georgia’s pro-Western government and move it closer to Vladimir Putin’s Russia.”
Though admitting it is entirely possible Patarkatsishvili died of heart failure, the article draws up a list of suspects for the possible assasination:
Georgian authorities looking to end Patarkatsishvili’s support for political opposition
business rivals looking to end his reign as the richest citizen of Georgia
Russian authorities looking to discredit Georgia, which is seeking to join NATO, or looking to intimidate other exiles living in London such as Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky
As I described in my previous post, Georgia’s richest citizen (and possibly the one who most resembled Mark Twain) died a “suspicious” death at the age of 52 on Tuesday. Badri Patarkatsishvili had been in exile in London after the Georgian government accused him of plotting a coup.
Gideon Lichfield, Jerusalem correspondent for The Economist, wrote about his encounter with Patarkatsishvili in his blog. Lichfield writes that he interviewed the late billionaire at his home in Tbilisi in 2002.
He describes meeting Patarkatsishvili:
“He had decided to grant me and a journalist from the Financial Times his first interview in a year and a half. We went to his house in Tbilisi, an enormous palace on a hill, where were shown into the garden—or rather gardens; there were several of them lumped together, each in a different style (Japanese, tropical, English country, and so on). I think we picked a spot under a gazebo, and sat waiting for Patarkatsishvili, who duly arrived in a golf buggy which he manoeuvred gingerly in between the bushes.”
He has published his unedited noteshere. In them, Patarkatsishvili speaks of economic revival in Georgia and the need to strengthen ties with Russia but also with America and Europe.
Television station Russia Today posted their English-language report of Patarkatsishvili’s death on YouTube.
The richest citizen of Georgia died suspiciously on Tuesday at the age of 52.
I wrote about Badri Patarkatsishvili on Jan. 30 and and Jan. 15. He was the billionaire media mogul who supported Georigan President Mikheil Saakashvili during the Rose Revolution but ran against him in the most recent election.
He was in exile, having been accused of plotting a coup after last year’s protests.
Patarkatsishvili denied the charges of plotting to overthrow the government. However, according to an article from Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, he did admit to offering police large sums of money not to break up the protests.
According to the article,
“[o]n December 27, [Patarkatsishvili] briefly pulled out of the presidential election, saying his life was in danger. The same month, he told AP that he had obtained a video showing a Georgian Interior Ministry official commissioning a Chechen warlord to kill him in London.
“…In October, former Defense Minister Irakli Okruashvili stunned Georgians by alleging in a televised statement that Saakashvili had commissioned him to assassinate Patarkatsishvili. Okruashvili was arrested and later retracted the statement.”
According to an article from the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, Patarkatsishvili had told the media, “I have 120 bodyguards but I know that’s not enough. I don’t feelsafe anywhere and that is why I’m particularly not going to Georgia.”
Patarkatsishvili died in his mansion outside London.
Officials have not completed the autopsy, but according to an article from the BBC, his aides say he had a heart attack. British officials have classified Patarkatsishvili’s death as “suspicious.”
He was a wanted man in Russia as well, facing embezzlement charges.
Relations between England and Russia still have yet to heal since the 2006 murder in London by radioactive poisoning of former Russian security officer and Kremlin critic Aleksander Litvinenko.
For a BBC timeline of events surrounding Litvinenko’s death, click here.
I give Russia a break, and Putin has to go and threaten to aim nuclear missiles at Ukraine.
Ukraine and Russia may have just reached an agreement about Ukraine’s unpaid gas debt, but that doesn’t make Russian President Vladimir Putin any happier about Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko’s desire to join NATO.
Putin told Yushchenko at their recent meeting that if Ukraine allowed NATO to station missiles in its territory, Russia would aim warheads at Ukraine.
Check out some discussion about this issue at Topix.com.
Focusing in this blog on three countries that simultaneously depend upon and rebel against Mother Russia, I tend to write entries that portray President Vladimir Putin as the bad guy.
Mark MacKinnon, author of “The New Cold War,” wrote an interesting blog entry a few days ago entitled “It’s not always Russia’s fault.”
MacKinnon argues that a new Cold War has begun between the U.S. and Russia and that we can’t pin all the blame for this development on Putin.
After Sept. 11, 2001, Putin opened up to America in unprecented ways. Of course, MacKinnon argues, he did this in part because he wanted to include his fights with separatists in Chechnya in the “War on Terror.”
Nonetheless, he acted as a partner to the U.S.
MacKinnon writes:
“By easing the way for the U.S. to establish airbases in the former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, he greenlighted the first-ever NATO military presence in an area that had been Russia’s zone of influence since the time of the Tsars.
“Russia also offered to share its intelligence and advice on Afghanistan, something that perhaps should have been of more interest to the U.S. and its allies, since we now find ourselves just as bogged down there as the Red Army was in the 1980s.”
MacKinnon argues that Russia has gotten a bum deal in return.
NATO continues to expand eastward, possibly into Ukraine, with no intention of including Russia.
American troops have entered Georgia.
President George Bush refuses to construct missile defense in Azerbaijan instead of Poland, despite the fact that Azerbaijan is closer to Iran and Poland so close it could pass Russia the salt at dinner.
Russia may seem like a big bully, but is America an even bigger one?
The U.S. media tends to break down State of the Union addresses as if they were sporting events.
They count the number of breaks for applause, show replays of important people falling asleep and list most-used words.
Imagine how much fun they’d have if Congress were more like Ukraine’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, where a fistfight that broke out among lawmakers prompted Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko to cancel his State of the Union address this week.
Members of Ukraine’s pro-Russia parties, the Party of Regions and Communist Party, have been hopping mad since Yushchenko, Parliamentary Speaker Arseniy Yatsenyuk and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko sent a love letter to NATO without consulting the parliament first.
They’re not the first Ukrainian politicians to resort to blows this winter, either.
Earlier this month Kiev’s mayor, Leonid Chernovetsky, accused his political rival Yuriy Lutsenko of “kicking him in the face and the groin” after a meeting on Jan. 18.
Lutsenko admitted to having hit Chernovetsky, but says the mayor was the one who started the fight and that he deserved the “manly slap” for defaming him.
There’s a new way of avoiding allegations of fraud at the ballotbox. Decide the next election by Ultimate Fighting.
“Severed ears and fingers have been sent in packages to three high-ranking government officials in Kyrgyzstan.
“The body parts were sent to the presidential administration chief, the director of the competition monitoring agency and a member of the electoral commission.”
An opposition leader said the grim deliveries were meant as warnings.
“The finger means: ‘Don’t put your hands where they don’t belong’…The ear means: ‘Be obedient.’”
If they were trying to save paper, they might’ve just made a phone call.
Politics in Kyrgyzstan have been a deadly business in the years since the Tulip Revolution. You’ll see what I mean if you take a quick scroll through recent events on the BBC’s timeline of Kyrgyz news.
Russia doesn’t usually look too kindly on former Soviet states that elect pro-Western leaders.
But Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavro seems to have found a Georgian he can get along with: Ilia II, a 75-year-old man who has been a patriarch in the Georgian Orthodox Church since 1977.
1977 - that’s 14 years before Georgia declared its independence from the Soviet Union.
According to an article from Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, the patriarch was the first person Lavro visited on his recent trip to Georgia to see Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s inauguration.
Ilia II reportedly told Lavro he had ”deep respect” for Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom he credited with “doing a lot” to improve relations between Russia and Georiga.
No wonder Lavro started off his visit with a trip to church.
He could hardly expect such kind words from President Saakashvili, who has made one of the main goals of his presidency regaining control of the Russian-supported separatist regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Russia has troops in both areas, and both have asked to be annexed by Russia.
Russia and Georgia have had especially strained relations since Russia banned the importation of Georgian wine and mineral water.
Relations between the Russian and Georgian Orthodox churches have not always been as rosey as a revolution either, but the two have much closer ties.
Eighty percent of Georgians are Orthodox. For more than a century, the Georgian Orthodox Church was under the authority of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Although the Georgian Orthodox Church gained its independence in 1917 after the fall of tsarism, the Soviet Union did not recognize it as separate from the Russian Orthodox Church until 1943.
The remaining ties between the two churches stem in part from their common opposition to Western influence.
In 1997, clerics in Georgia withdrew their country from the World Council of Churches, but became closer to the Russian Orthodox Church.
Leaders from the two churches cooperated in 2007 to lift the flight ban Russia imposed on Georgia after Georgian authorities arrested alleged Russian spies.
Many of the residents of former Soviet states who continue to favor Russia over the West are those who can recall fondly their times back in the U.S.S.R.
With such elderly clerics leading the Georgian Orthodox Church, Russia may have found the perfect ally.
To listen to the English interpretation of the speech Ukrainian President Victor Yushchenko gave at the WTO meeting, click here.
Russia is now the world’s last major economy left out of the trade organization.
As Ukraine has beat Russia to the finish line in this race, it will hold veto power over Russia’s membership.
According to an article in the New York Times, WTO member country Georgia has already threatened to use its veto power to force Moscow to lift its ban on imports of Georgian wine.
But according to the article, Ukraine plans to support Russia’s membership bid so the WTO can mediate the two countries’ disputes over trading milk, steel and sugar.
