US Opposition to Georgian Foreign Agents Law Assault on Its Sovereignty
Georgian billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili waves to the crowd during a rally aimed at countering days of mass anti-government protests over a controversial “foreign influence” bill.
On Tuesday, the Georgian parliament overcame a Presidential veto to pass a new ‘foreign agents’ legislation that requires foreign-funded Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) to register as foreign agents and disclose their donors.This seemingly reasonable legislation was supported by 84 MPs out of 150, comfortably more than the 76 required to overcome a veto according to the Georgian constitution.Officially known as the Transparency in Foreign Influence Act, the bill would not ban NGOs from the country, and would instead require any NGO, media outlet, or individual receiving more than 20% of their funding from abroad to register as an entity “promoting the interests of a foreign power” and disclose their donors or receive a fine of up to $9,500.Last week, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the US plans to impose visa restrictions on Georgian legislators who supported the legislation. Nevermind that Washington has its own foreign agents legislation, the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) which the Joe Biden administration recently used alleged minor violations to arrest and charge the leader of the African People’s Socialist Party with crimes that could land him in prison for more than 15 years.
AfricaFBI Raids African People’s Socialist Party, Claims the Group Was ‘Controlled’ by FSB30 July 2022, 13:58 GMTMeanwhile, a spokesperson for the EU warned that the legislation will harm Georgia’s “EU path” and said its “Member States are considering all options to react to these developments.”Like good little lap dogs, the Western media has followed suit, calling the legislation pro-Russian, an assertion only backed by the fact that Russia similarly took action against foreign NGOs influencing its domestic politics.There are about 10,000 NGOs registered in Georgia, about one for every 400 Georgians and Western NGOs have been used to foment revolutions around the world in the past.“A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” Allen Weinstein, one of the founders of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), said in 1991. Since that time, the NED has been linked to influencing elections, revolutions and coups (both failed and successful) in numerous countries including Venezuela, Nicaragua, Haiti and most significantly, in Ukraine in 2014.The NED, along with USAID are two of the most prominent and well-funded US-based NGOs, both of which receive most of their funding from Congress. Both operate in Georgia.
“No one in Georgia is pro-Russian. What they don’t want is another war with Russia,” explained senior research fellow at the Global Policy Institute and journalist George Szamuely on Sputnik’s The Critical Hour. “But what they don’t want above all else is a violent revolution in Georgia. And clearly, they know that this is what’s going on. This is the plan here [by Western influences]. And that’s why they’re so adamant about this legislation.”
Szamuely noted that Georgia was invited to join NATO at the same time Ukraine was, and it does not want to be used as a battering ram by the West against Russia. “[Georgia is saying] we don’t want to go down the Maidan path, we don’t want to… be pushed into a war that we cannot possibly win, that we’re going to lose more territory as Ukraine has lost territory and Georgia lost territory in 2008 and that’s what these NGOs are trying to do.”Last week, Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze said that a high-ranking EU Commissioner threatened him by bringing up the attempted assassination of Slovakian President Robert Fico who was shot four times by a pro-Ukrainian activist.“In my conversation, the European Commissioner listed a number of measures Western politicians can take after [Georgia passes] the transparency law and, while listing these measures, [the Commissioner] said ‘look what happened to Fico, you should be very careful,’” Kobakhidze said.The EU Neighborhood and Enlargement Commissioner Olivér Várhelyi later admitted to making the comments but claimed Kobakhidze took them out of context.“Democracy in the American and essentially, the Western definition is governments doing as they’re told by their American and Western masters,” Szamuely asserted.
