Always Winter, Never Christmas: Etseri, Svaneti
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Well, not quite, but this quote from a popular children’s book sums up my feelings as the results of the recent presidential runoff become clear.
Actually, winter held off for much longer than usual this year, with possibly permanent snow bucketing down only now as I write. Yesterday it was partly rain, and the night’s forecast temperature wasn’t even in the minuses. So even this snow might not last.
But some local men came to the shop just after dark and among their other purchases acquired some of our biggest fireworks for an anticipated Georgian Dream victory. Sure enough, just before 9 pm we saw the things blasting off into the sky despite the mild rain, and this, if nothing else, brought a few minutes of pleasure in the night.
I was very ambivalent about the elections, feeling similarly to another event in which I couldn’t vote for the same reason of not being a citizen: the USA presidential elections of a couple of years ago. Then, too, the question in my mind was, which of these two candidates and parties will do the least harm?
Here, both are former Georgian foreign ministers; she is a few years older, was born in France, and is backed by the currently reigning Georgian Dream party which formed expressly to take out its opponent. He, for the Nationalists, promised to pardon self-exiled former president Mikheil Saakashvili of his waiting six-year jail term, and this presumably would also involve somehow getting him back into the country and then into power.
The media campaigns in the interim period between the two elections were filled with furious, bitter mudslinging, to the extent that Georgian TV became unwatchable. The first election featured many unknown candidates, some apparently fake, but boiled down to these two. How could she win when many of that election’s candidates vowed to cast their own and direct all their people’s votes for him? But she did, by much more than the >1% margin of that multi-candidate event.
My neighbor told me of a new tampering tactic: offer to borrow people’s personal ID card for a sum of money over the period of the election. One could not vote without it, you see; instead of buying votes, they were buying non-participation, despite the huge number of neutral TV ads urging all to vote. He also said that the corruption which began to return during Saakashvili’s second term has flourished greatly during the GD party’s first try at office, leaving us much worse off than before.
This makes our time now seem like the calm before the storm. Svaneti was a gangster haven, much too dangerous for casual tourists to dare entering, when I first began visiting; blissfully unaware of just who had my back until Saakashvili sent 10 helicopters to take him out in the village where I now live. That is a story in itself, waiting for its day and permission to be told. How did the previous, Soviet-era tourist paradise which the province had certainly been degenerate into that? I wasn’t here for the period, so I only have locals’ memories to go on, which I should.
I very much hope that I won’t have to see it happen all over again, as a resident, not a visitor. Not by dying first, but simply by its not happening at all. My grave has a location here already, but what’s the hurry? Nor do I hope that we will simply be hounded out, survive but lose everything we have worked for here, along with everyone else. Etseri and many other villages only had houses for us to consider buying because so many of them had been abandoned. People had left an unbearable life. Please, not again.
More: that same neighbor was at a local election station on election day. The ladies in charge were proclaiming that they would simply vote for whoever gave them the most money. He then retold a scene from the film series of Data Tutashkhia. A group of men are having a supra (feast), being served by a woman. One of them offers her money to disrobe for them. She refuses, but he slowly ups the ante, until her price is met and she takes off her clothes for them. Parallel much?
Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 1900 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/
He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri:
www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti
By Tony Hanmer