Saakashvili's personal weapon: the media
Published 13 August, 2008, 02:42
With his face shown daily on nearly all international news channels, Mikhail Saakashvili has been literally making the news. The Georgian President seems to have chosen the media as his battlefield in the conflict.
As Russian peacekeepers tackled violence on the ground, Saakashvili fought back – increasingly with soft power – through the airwaves.
With his polished international image and fluent English, the American-educated lawyer turned the international news media into his playing field.
But for Nazi Veshaguri this is not a game. For five days she’s been worried sick about her son. She hadn’t heard a word from him, his cell phone appeared to be switched off. Finally, she made contact.
“He said to me, 'mom I’m alive. I’m safe. And I’ll be back'. Oh, I can’t tell you how relieved I am. It’s been a living nightmare. For five days I didn’t know where he was. I’ve already lost one son. It’s enough in my life. I cannot support my government in this war. I cannot. But I support my Georgia,” Veshaguri said.
Despite the calls from mothers like Nazi, Saakashvili has no time for their tears. His arsenal lies with the foreign media.
TV journalists come and go from his office and, since the start of the war, his face has appeared at least four times on CNN, four times on BBC World, and once on Bloomberg TV.
Only Russian journalists have not been welcomed into his office.
“We have a feeling that he’s acting too much to the West, to his allies, to the foreign and especially Western media. We were surprised as well that he makes so many statements in English. He knows the public face of his work and I think he does it very well. And I think these last days he’s been giving a lot of interviews with CNN, the BBC and other channels. He knows what he’s doing,” Spanish television journalist Mikel Reparaz says.
But it’s not only on the foreign front that Saakashvili’s propaganda machine has been working. At home it’s in full swing to raise patriotic feelings among his own people
Alex Gaelia, a cameraman who has just returned from the frontline, captured the horrors of the conflict.
“I don’t believe Saakashvili’s image will be better after this war. After so many dead, how can his image be better in Georgia?” Gaelia asks.
Nano Abisadze, who works for the Georgian Human Rights Centre, says history will judge the president's image.
“It doesn’t matter if he speaks English or not. He speaks Russian very well too. It’s not about image, it’s about political and economic interest. Saakashvili thinks that for Georgia it’s better to be with the West; and the West have put a lot of money into Georgia. This is why they deal with each other,” she says.
On Tuesday thousands demonstrated in front of the parliament building in support of the Government.
But the demonstrators are more likely to be worried about the facts on the ground than whether or not Saakashvili’s slick media campaign is doing their country any favours.
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