Translated material
Freestyle wrestling
The South Ossetian opposition in Moscow demanded the resignation of Eduard Kokoity
At the end of last week, the confrontation between the current administration of South Ossetia and its opponents reached unprecedented intensity. It developed, however, not in Tskhinvali, but in Moscow. But Moscow was able to make sure once again that the “South Ossetian opposition” is not a myth. On Friday, the South Ossetian opposition organized a full-scale forum in Moscow, attended by about 500 people.This is no small feat, taking into account the tragically small population of South Ossetia itself. The forum received addresses to the people of South Ossetia, as well as to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. The main idea of those gathered was early presidential elections in the republic.
“A year has passed since the Republic of South Ossetia received state recognition from Russia, and with it the long-awaited chance for peaceful and democratic development. Over the past year, despite the multi-billion-dollar assistance from Russia, the current authorities have done negligible... - says the appeal to Russian top officials. - This situation is quite understandable - the republic is ruled by an incompetent and corrupt government, which only imitates vigorous activity to restore the economy destroyed by the war. The current leadership has lost the trust of its people and, disregarding public opinion, is trying to maintain control over the situation only by relying on repressive measures. The forum participants express deep concern about the current situation in the republic, the criminal inactivity of the current authorities, the misuse of funds coming from Russia, the violation of human rights, the growth of unemployment, and the continuing outflow of people. Realizing the danger looming over South Ossetia, we intend to resolutely resist the anti-people policy of the ruling regime by consolidating healthy forces in the republic. We know that great Russia has always come to the aid of South Ossetia in difficult times. Such a time has come."
Initially, the forum was planned to be held in the capital's Cosmos Hotel, but literally the day before the rental agreement for the premises was revised - as the oppositionists themselves believe, not without pressure from the South Ossetian administration, which used its Moscow connections. At the last moment it was decided to move the event to the Renaissance Hotel. Although the start of work was scheduled for 10 am on Friday, participants and organizers began arriving at the hotel an hour and a half earlier. As expected, we met several dozen supporters of the President of South Ossetia, including some government officials and members of the republic’s parliament.
“Loyal” South Ossetians arrived by bus and several jeeps. They did not try to harshly resist the attempts of the forum participants to enter the hotel. Apparently, they themselves wanted to take part in the event, announced as the “First Russian-South Ossetian socio-political forum.” But they were not on the list of invitees. Eyewitnesses claim that at some point even friendly hugs began between the strong guys on one side and the other, who turned out to be familiar to each other from Tskhinvali and from the war of last year. After this, the organizers of the “counter-picket” had to retreat.
But at about three o’clock in the afternoon, while the meeting was still in progress, a message appeared on the official website of the South Ossetian Ministry of Press and Mass Communications with, to put it mildly, a peculiar description of what was happening: “The so-called South Ossetian opposition fled cowardly when they saw the real defenders of South Ossetia who came to take part in the so-called forum of the Ossetian people, which did not take place, but turned into a closed corporate matinee with the participation of the Georgian Moscow community from Georgian television. Representatives of the South Ossetian media were not allowed to attend the event. By the way, with rare exceptions, there were no representatives from South Ossetia at the so-called forum.”
Meanwhile, the organizers of the forum specifically tried to alternate speeches by political leaders with appearances by ordinary residents of Tskhinvali, Java and Kvais. Although many, naturally, came from North Ossetia or simply from another metro station: one of the main accusations that the forum brought against President Kokoity was the actual expulsion from the republic of hundreds, and possibly thousands of capable, energetic people. One of the opposition leaders, businessman Albert Dzhusoev, believes that now in South Ossetia, which Eduard Kokoity, who was first elected in 2001, “accepted” with a population of about 150 thousand people, lives 14-15 thousand. “I could be wrong by a thousand or two,” added Mr. Dzhusoev. “In my native Kvaysa, 17 thousand people lived, now there are about 1000.”
“The greed of a few people is causing people to leave their homes. You can’t help but catch yourself thinking that someone is successfully fulfilling the social order of Mikheil Saakashvili (President of Georgia - Ed. ), clearing the land of South Ossetia from Ossetians,” shrugged the head coach of the Russian Olympic freestyle wrestling team, Dzhambulat Tedeev. Mr. Tedeev is a representative of an influential South Ossetian family that contributed to the election of Eduard Kokoity in 2001 and was then ousted from the republic by him. The coach remembered with resentment how, after the Olympics in Beijing in 2008, his players from South Ossetia, who brought several medals to Russia, literally rushed from a ceremonial reception at Dmitry Medvedev to Tskhinvali, which had not yet cooled down after the war, carrying with them hastily collected humanitarian aid: “Kokoity I couldn’t even find a way to shake the guys’ hands for two minutes. We are not on the same path with this president. Taking this opportunity, I would like to apologize to those gathered for the fact that we supported him in the 2001 elections.”
Dzhambulat Tedeev is perhaps the main “personnel” acquisition of this branch of the South Ossetian oppositionists: he is not only known as a kind of “presidential maker” thanks to his participation in the campaign to “promote” Eduard Kokoity to the place of the first South Ossetian president, Ludwig Chibirov. Thanks to his sports contacts, he also has connections in Russia, including through the United Russia party, although it officially supports its pro-presidential South Ossetian clone called Unity. Despite the fact that, according to some, the beginning of the Tedeev family history was associated with crime, the wrestling coach himself continues to be an authority for a significant number of South Ossetians of the most capable age.
The remaining leaders have known each other for a long time and are known as opponents of the current South Ossetian president. Albert Dzhusoev heads a construction company that spent three years building a gas pipeline from Russia to South Ossetia and, at the cost of great effort, completed it last August. The leaders of two political parties - the head of "Fatherland" Vyacheslav Gobozov and the chairman of the "People's Party" Roland Keleskhaev - tried to fight for mandates in the elections of the new South Ossetian parliament in May of this year.
Another oppositionist, former secretary of the South Ossetian Security Council and hero of the defense of Tskhinvali in August 2008, general of the South Ossetian army and retired colonel of the Russian army, Anatoly Barankevich, resigned from the South Ossetian government last fall, unable to cope with the abuses of local officials during the post-war distribution of humanitarian aid. He advised the Ministry of Regional Development of the Russian Federation on South Ossetian issues for some time, and then disappeared from the media’s radar for several months.
At Friday's forum, Mr. Barankevich was the moderator. The audience at least twice applauded the general, who personally knocked out a Georgian tank with a grenade launcher and tried to coordinate resistance in the city, which was left almost without weapons and without a commander-in-chief after Eduard Kokoity left for Java. At some point, Mr. Barankevich began to read out notes from the audience, but it turned out that they all contained words of gratitude for his valor in August last year. The general was clearly embarrassed: “Notes to the presenter about Barankevich. I had to read it out, since I am both the presenter and Barankevich.”
General Barankevich said that he “cannot consider as a person” the leader of the South Ossetian “Unity” Zurab Kokoity, who, according to the general, “challenged the now former speaker of the parliament of the Republic of South Ossetia, 85-year-old Znaur Gassiev, to a bandit showdown in order to threaten his consideration in the House of the question of a third presidential term.
It is possible, by the way, that it was the story of the third term, which was supposed to perpetuate the presidency of Eduard Kokoity, on the contrary, which significantly undermined his position. The fact is that during the elections of the new parliament in May of this year, which, in theory, should make a decision on the appropriate amendment of the constitution, the head of the Russian presidential administration, Sergei Naryshkin, turned to the South Ossetians with an old dissident call to observe their basic law and not change it at any cost. in vain. This caused several very sharp remarks from Tskhinvali, where they immediately remembered the sovereignty of an independent republic. After this, irritation, in turn, arose in Moscow.
By the way, the forum participants spoke rather reservedly about the government of Vadim Brovtsev, which has been working in South Ossetia for several months. According to those gathered, Mr. Brovtsev and several managers he brought from the Ural town of Ozersk are not able to become real crisis managers, because they inevitably must coordinate every step with President Kokoity, even after the recent reform of the cabinet of ministers, which seems to have left behind - Mr. Brovtsev the entire socio-economic sector.
The forum thanked Russia in every possible way both for its life-saving assistance in last year’s war and for the opportunity to gather in Moscow. The speakers called Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin heroes. The event was guarded by numerous police officers - in contrast to the first timid pickets of the South Ossetian opposition in the Russian capital, which were ignored at best, and dispersed at worst. The loyal behavior of the capital's police also inspired the oppositionists. On the sidelines, they lamented that they could not gather in Tskhinvali, but laughed at the recent attempt by the Tskhinvali authorities to hold a rally of residents of the republic, supposedly indignant at the holding of the forum: “All over the world the opposition is rallying against the authorities, and only in South Ossetia the authorities are rallying against the opposition "
The forum participants in absentia appealed to President Eduard Kokoity with a proposal to voluntarily resign, and to the population of the republic with a request to begin collecting signatures for such an early resignation as soon as possible. Let us remind you that Eduard Kokoity’s second presidential term expires in December 2011. Having felt a clear surge of energy on Friday, the oppositionists hope that they will not have to wait for this date, and early elections will become a reality. “It depends on how persistently we inform the Russian leadership about the situation in the republic,” Vyacheslav Gobozov told Vremya Novostey.
The forum did not formulate any proposals regarding the candidacy of a possible successor to Eduard Kokoity. “The president should not be Dzhusoev, not Tedeev and not Gobozov, but the one who is elected president by South Ossetia,” noted Albert Dzhusoev. And Mr. Gobozov added that a change of president is meaningless without accompanying legislative reform: “The current system is such that any person, once in this place, turns into a little dictator.”
The most skeptical forum participants suggested on the sidelines: Moscow allowed the meeting to be held not because it was tired of the current president of South Ossetia, but because, in its best traditions of regional governance, it wants to show him that he is not indispensable.
In any case, Tskhinvali tried to react promptly: already in the afternoon, officials who had stood in the rain picketing near Renaissance in the morning gave a press conference on Interfax. The head of the South Ossetian State Committee for the Implementation of Reconstruction Projects, Zurab Kabisov, said that construction work is currently underway in each of the more than 300 completely destroyed private houses in Tskhinvali. He shared plans for the development of the economy of South Ossetia for the coming years. There was practically no talk about the oppositionists and their demands. Perhaps they will be answered by President Eduard Kokoity himself, who is going to give a public lecture at Moscow State University today.
Meanwhile, the first Russian-Abkhaz forum took place on Friday in Sukhumi. It was not the resignation of Sergei Bagapsh that was discussed, but the Abkhaz economic prospects. In fact, the Sukhumi forum is the first big event of the campaign for the next elections, the official start of which was given last week. The presidential elections in Abkhazia are scheduled for December 12 this year.