South Ossetia is largely known to the outside world as a wrestling mat for Georgia and Russia, but little attention is paid to the breakaway region’s internal politics, which increasingly appear to be a mare’s nest of intrigue.
With the race heating up for the region's de facto presidential election on November 13, South Ossetia's miniature, 34-seat legislature on October 5 got busy and got rid of its speaker, Stanislav Kochiyev, who earlier had blocked attempts to extend the presidential term of de facto leader Eduard Kokoity.
Kochiyev, who ran against Kokoity in South Ossetia's 2006 presidential election, has described himself as one of the few guardians of constitutional discipline in a bare-knuckle race for power. "This was done to deny me the possibility of not permitting falsifications in the elections," Kochiyev, a Communist Party member, claimed in reference to his removal as parliamentary speaker.
Kokoity insists he will not run for a third term, but that insistence has done little to make for a snoozy election campaign. His supporters have gone out of their way to push for a constitutional change that would keep him in office for another five years. A group of thuggish Kokoity admirers even invaded the parliamentary building in June after the region’s de facto supreme court struck down the proposed amendments.
That tactic has also been tried by the opposition. On September 30, supporters of Jambolat Tedeyev, a former wrestling champion, stormed South Ossetia's de facto election commission after it refused to register Tedeyev's candidacy for president. (Fellow former wrestling champion Kokoity earlier accused Tedeyev of trying to stage a "color revolution," a charge that, in South Ossetia, essentially amounts to an allegation of attempted terrorism.) Arrests followed.
Nor has life been much more peaceful for the non-wrestling contingent among South Ossetia's politicians.
Another opposition presidential candidate, Roland Kelekhsayev, was beaten on October 3 by unknown assailants in Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital. Yet another candidate, Alan Kochiyev, is in prison for beating a member of the region's de facto parliament.
Ex-speaker Kochiyev warned that the de facto statehood of South Ossetia may face a serious challenge unless its political players stick to peaceful means of political struggle. Whether that's prophecy or pure political PR, time will tell.
Giorgi Lomsadze is a journalist based in Tbilisi, and author of Tamada Tales.
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