Sergey Bagapsh and Eduard Kokoyty. Photo: Eduard Mornienko/REUTERS
For two years and a half, the Sailor company was a kind of office of the de facto governments in Washington. The staff of the company attended all discussions on Georgian conflicts held at analytical centers, held meetings at the Department of State and Senate, and talked to the US media.
This company became a kind of window to the United States for Tskhinvali. After the war, Tskhinvali managed to publish articles written by South Ossetian representatives in several leading world publications. They wrote about their own version of the 2008 war. Through the Sailor company, officials from Tskhinvali attended meetings in official US agencies and their comments appeared in local newspapers.
It was with the assistance of this company that at least two reports by US analysts have appeared over the past two years, comprising recommendations for the US administration to pursue a more open policy regarding Sukhumi and Tskhinvali.
The Sailor company has been not so active in this field over the past six months and its activities are going to stop altogether from next month. This has become known from the company's report, which every lobbyist company has to submit to the Justice Department twice a year in accordance with the US legislation. The report for April, which was published on the department's website last week, says that the Sailor company is going to stop working for the de facto South Ossetian government.
The company did not provide any explanations. The Sailor company's representative from Washington, Steve Ellis, "expressed hope" in his email that cooperation with Tskhinvali would resume "in the future" and cooperation with Sukhumi would continue on "individual projects". The de facto governments also refused to speak about the reasons.
The suspension of contacts with Tskhinvali by the lobbyist company gives rise to a lot of questions.
The problem is that an election of de facto president is going to be held in Tskhinvali in autumn. Signatures have now been collected for one month to secure a third term for Eduard Kokoyty. It is going to be quite difficult to present this scenario to foreigners as "the development of democracy in a small sovereign state". Support from a lobbyist in the United States could be very useful for the local government in South Ossetia in this situation.
In addition to "explaining" actions by the de facto government to the international public, the Sailor company was also involved in justifying Russia's presence in South Ossetia. The contract signed with the Tskhinvali government in 2010 says that in their activities, representatives of the company should "emphasize the importance of maintaining close ties with Russia, including the need for the presence of Russian soldiers on South Ossetia's borders to protect it from military aggression from Georgia".
Waging information war "against Georgia and its allies that continue to reject the fair status of South Ossetia as an independent state and member of the international community" is among other purposes mentioned in the contract.
"I am surprised to hear that this company has continued to work for us up to now," said a South Ossetian journalist, who preferred to remain anonymous. Neither he nor many others have heard anything about the activities of the Sailor company in South Ossetia for a long time now.
The problem is that the Sailor company's activities have moved behind the curtains since 2009. They have preferred cautious relations with journalists rather than open ties with them.
This change in the Sailor company's tactic followed a scandal that erupted around South Ossetian human rights activist Lira Tskhovrebova in December 2008. The company helped Tskhovrebova to travel to the United States and meet US politicians. However, the Georgian Interior Ministry handed over recordings of some of her telephone conversations to the Associated Press. The recordings featured Tskhovrebova reporting on her activities to the Tskhinvali KGB.
The Associated Press invited Tskhiovrebova to an interview in Washington with the help of the Sailor company and submitted the recordings to her in front of cameras, which were switched on. Since Tskhovrebova failed to provide any convincing explanations, the head of the Sailor company demanded that the cameras be turned off. "However, it was too late. Everyone understood everything," Matt Seagull, a journalist working for the Associated Press, told me. His article and scandalous videos became known to the media throughout the world.
Since then, the Sailor company have confined themselves to sending out press releases and forwarding journalist questions to "tried and tested people" in Tskhinvali and Sukhumi.
The Sailor company was founded in 2007 by the former editor-in-chief of The Los Angeles Times, Mark Sailor. Its main office is located in California, but the company also has an office in Washington. The governments of the United Arab Emirates and Ethiopia were among Sailor's clients.
Activities linked to Abkhazia and South Ossetia have been the main source of the company's income over the past two years and a half. The company received 720,000 US dollars a year from the two de facto governments, while the Georgian government paid one million dollars to three US lobbyist companies last year, which is just 30 per cent more.
"The advice to hire this company came from Moscow. No one thought about that here then (several months after the war)," a representative of the journalist circles in Tskhinvali told me. "All of us were well aware that all this was false".
There is no trace of Russian funding in the Sailor company's open documents. All the money officially came from Sukhumi and Tskhinvali. However, very few believe that the de facto republics were able to pay such sums independently.
"The money came from Moscow and was then transferred from one account to another in the United States," a journalist from Tskhinvali assumes.
An election of de facto president is going to be held in Tskhinvali in autumn. Support from a lobbyist in the United States could be very useful for the local government in South Ossetia.
The terminology used in the article belongs to the author and not “Liberali”.
The article is prepared with support of Heinrich Boell Foundation. The publication statements and ideas do not necessarily express the Heinrich Boell Foundation opinion.