Caucasus Research Resource Centers (CRRC) are a network of research centers in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia started in 2003, and backed by Carnegie, USAID and something called the Eurasia Foundation, which projects western values into the former Soviet space.

To Georgia watchers the year 2003 will ring familiar. It was the year of the rose revolution, which many Georgians at the time thought was a real pro-democracy revolution, but we later found out was a faux palace coup intended to symbolically enact a break with the past, which in turn would legitimize shock treatment style of reforms to promote a liberalistic market economy.

CRRC was part of this venture, which was inextricably linked to the personality of Mikheil Saakashvili, the poster boy of the U.S. right wing establishment who saw in him the perfect friend who never said no, no matter how wacky their ideas.

Also CRRC wagered its fate on the neoliberal experiment Georgia was to become, as it set out to provide the social survey material that was required in order to calm fears among western audiences that the human price was too high to bear for Georgians.

Being the dominant polling company in Georgia, one would expect that it took extra precautions to not indulge in politicizing spin or unethical sellout, but instead it turned to capitalizing on its exclusive market position in a sheer parody of the various pitfalls involved when a polling company manages to establish a monopoly on its services within a population.

The organization claims to be just doing social science research for the benefit of individuals, organizations and policy makers. But as experience would show, it's not really a research center at all. Although it sporadically hosts professional researchers, for show, in reality it's a think tank pushing the neoliberal agenda of "reforms", and its polls are filtered and tailored to fit this ideological agenda. With results often giving a skewed picture, the CRRC data obscure the reality and misleads scientists looking for reliable sources.



CRRC is not neutral

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The first myth that needs to be dispelled is CRRC's claim to be non-partisan, and that its mission is providing neutral data to the public based on the Pew model. [1]

In fact, its polls are highly partisan and were used in partnership with the media during the authoritarian regime of Saakashvili (2004-2012) in order to suppress problems such as lack of real democracy and human rights violations.

During these dark years, every time there was an election, CRRC allowed its opinion polls to be kept secret and then leaked directly to some of the political parties, from where the results were further leaked to the local media, thus fueling a "rumor mill". The leaking process was handled by the National Democratic Institute (NDI), the publicly funded U.S. international influence organization with offices in many countries.

Recently, CRRC admitted that it was wrong to allow its work to be used like this, but there has not been a public explanation of what happened.



CRRC supported Saakashvili

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Through its misleading reports, CRRC provided the documentation which legitimized the brutality of Saakashvili's regime, and made Western observers doubt the veracity of the many calls for help from locals who were victims of the regime.

Perhaps the worst example of the way CRRC let itself be used, is the 2011 survey of attitudes to the justice system. We have specific information that the interviewers who carried out this survey consciously selected respondents to get answers that were generally positive to the justice reforms.

Recall that by 2011, the Saakashvili regime's crime policy, which in actual fact was based on American television series and films of the kind where police shoot first and ask later, had led to Georgia rising to the top among European countries in percentage of population behind bars, overtaking Russia. There was widespread torture and a growing backlog of miscarriages of justice that caused Georgia to become the country with the highest number of pending cases at the European Court of Human Rights.

In this situation, the outside world needed to know: Was there any truth to the increasingly desperate calls for help from the population, with at one point a quarter of the population of Tbilisi out in the streets calling for the president's resignation? When the world most needed neutral unbiased facts, CRRC helped cover up the crimes and put out this opinion survey, which concluded that the reforms were going fine, just carry on full steam ahead.

Western countries provided assistance to the Saakashvili regime because they thought the reforms were moving in the right direction and that such assistance would actually help. But in fact, the reforms had another role: they were also a facade behind which heinous crimes were covered up. CRRC's work helped Saakashvili maintain this facade, and therefore delayed and obstructed the necessary process to reveal the reality behind the facade.

When one year after this poll, the voters responded to the prisoner abuse with a resounding "you're fired" to Saakashvili and his criminal gang, their primary reason for doing so was the system of injustice that he had created. A systemic injustice, which included torture and extrajudicial killings.



CRRC is limiting political debate

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For democracy to thrive, there can't be placed a filter on what can and cannot be discussed. But CRRC has actively filtered out certain opinions through the design of its surveys. People and groups who want to openly discuss other policy options for Georgia in foreign policy are actively suppressed.

This is in sharp contrast to how CRRC on some other non-sensitive issues includes a broad range of alternative answers for respondents to choose from, sometimes more than ten options. But in the question of foreign policy allegiance, there are mainly two options: either the West or Russia.

While this is in line with how the political elites in London, Washington and Brussels see things, it hides the fact that there are several political parties in Georgia that have tried to raise a debate about what benefits the country would have from joining the West, and compare this to other options.

In the elections for parliament in 2016, for example, former speaker Burjanadze advocated her proposal for a referendum about non-bloc status but in the debate many argued that there was no need for having such a debate because CRRC's polls showed a clear majority for joining EU and NATO.

Meanwhile Tbilisi's pro-NATO elite, represented by then speaker Usupashvili pushed a proposal to rewrite the Constitution so Burjanadze's idea could never be brought up again. This proposal was eventually passed by parliament, and Georgia is now bound by its Constitution to seek membership in NATO. When some of the leading opposition voices in Georgia tried to have a substantive debate about this, it was overruled by media and leader by reference to CRRC's opinion polls, which showed a clear majority for seeking Euro-Atlantic integration [2]. In other words, by suppressing the debate at the crucial moment, CRRC helped bring this about.

The organization claims to be neutral in foreign policy issues [1], but in fact it is pushing for Georgia to join "the Euro-Atlantic community', i.e. NATO and the European Union.

This is happening at a time when the world is moving toward what many call multipolarity, with many power centers. Georgia recently signed a free trade agreement with China - only Switzerland and Australia have done so among the Western nations - tensions between the West and Russia are at levels of the Cold War with NATO troops stationed along Russia's western borders, and pressures are even stronger to conform to these dominant policy goals of the local political elite.

As in Ukraine 2014, the stakes are high for the Georgian population and if the West's strategy fails the country could be destined for a disastrous situation. Georgians have a right to have a debate about how they connect to large trade blocs and military alliances. It is no business of the USA or European Union to interfere with this debate. The CRRC has been a tool for such interference.



CRRC board members linked with Tbilisi business circles

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The backers of CRRC have links to the business community of Georgia and there is therefore a conflict of interest. When a polling company is trusted with research that may define the country's policy course in profound issues like military alliances, social policy and taxation, these links reveal an agenda which is at odds with the interests of the Georgian people.

CRRC Georgia's backer Eurasia Foundation sports such stalwarts of Tbilisi's business lobby as David Lee, longtime president of the local chapter of Amcham 2008-2012 (the prime lobby in Tbilisi which wrote many of the laws during the Saakashvili regime) who was also vice chair of the EU Georgian Business Council 2012- 2016, as well as Andrew Coxshall, managing partner in KPMG's South Caucasus bureau.



How you can help

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CRRC needs to be made aware that their cover is blown. They are not neutral and what they do is not social science by any reasonable stretch of that term. They are an influence mechanism to enforce a neoliberal type of society on Georgia, which people may agree with or not, but their record shows that in achieving their goals, they were willing to cover up systematic human rights abuses and back up an autocrat's PR efforts.

What Georgia needs is to confront the monolithic influence pushers like CRRC and open up to more pluralistic research and polling. No polling company is completely independent, and bias is amplified when the results are used by some political group. Therefore, every country needs a range of pollsters and survey companies, controlled by different actors along the political spectrum.

If you agree, sign the online petition titled 'What's wrong with CRRC?' at Change.org and show your support. Don't let them get away with it.

Second, consider writing directly to the head of CRRC Georgia, Koba Turmanidze, email: [crrc-geo@crrccenters.org]. In your email, feel free to use the information in this leaflet, but write it from your own perspective and in your own words, emphasizing the things that matter most to you.

We must let CRRC know that we know. Together, we can make the CRRC responsible for its participation in Saakashvili's fake facade democracy. Together we can move Georgia out of its dark past and toward a brighter more democratic future based on a more pluralistic polling environment.





Notes

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[1] Dustin Gilbreath, CRRC research associate, wrote in July, 2016: "On being a think tank, we quite openly say we are a think tank or fact tank, quite often actually :). We are non-partisan however. We were originally based on the Pew Model and still very much are engaged in this original mission of providing neutral data to the public." See

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Sakartvelo/comments/4qlsne/opinion_polls_differ_ahead_of_georgian_election/d4ysifa/

[2] Rustavi 2, political talk show 2016-08-30, with main guest Nino Burjanadze, leader of United Georgia - Democratic Movement. Clip starting from 1 hour 5 minutes 55 seconds, journalist Thea Adeishvili claims that there is no need for a referendum about non-bloc status because a CRRC poll showed a 64% majority for seeking NATO membership. Adeishvili calls CRRC's poll "a very authoritative poll".

[https://youtu.be/MwWPzx9HEQg?t=1h5m55s