THE STORY OF THREE IDEALISTS

THE SAAKASHVILIS AND ZHVANIA
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
Guerillas Without Guns/Chapter 5
Posted February 2007

While useful to Washington, Shevardnadze was ever more unpopular with his own people, whose patience was wearing thin on territorial integrity and those economic issues as well as widespread official corruption, which the president seemed incapable of stopping. Presented in 1999 by his old friend James Baker with the esteemed “Enron Prize for Distinguished Public Service,” by 2003 Shevardnadze’s government was increasingly seen as plagued with corruption, mismanagement, and secrecy. [1] These problems steadily drained Shevardnadze’s power like a hole in his gas tank and strategically vital Georgia began to look rather vulnerable to another round of instability and violence, sure to put the brakes on any pipeline with a “T” in the middle. Major protests had been staged off-and-on since 2001; criticism from the media was squashed with raids on the opposition stations, while political protest was met with dismissal of the government. US Secretary of State Colin Powell announced at one point “an unstable Georgia automatically results in an unstable Caucasus,” a statement some took to mean that rather than expend more political capital propping Shevy up, the Americans should “ditch him to ensure stability.” [2]

There are certainly other reasons as well for the US to support Shevardnadze’s ouster, like the attractiveness of the well-formed, popular, and more firmly pro-West opposition leader - 36-year-old Mikhail Saakashvili. His role in this episode is the U.S.-supported front-runner who had spent years cultivating an image as a youthful, optimistic crusader against corruption and the forces of the old. Saakashvili is a skillful demagogue, promising a brighter, more liberal future aligned less with Moscow than with London and Washington – pure gold for frustrated voters, especially the young and naïve.

Saakashvili was born in Tbilisi, but came to power as an international man, reportedly fluent in seven languages. He is married to a Dutch woman, Sandra Saakashvili-Roelofs, a human rights crusader, founder of the humanitarian foundation SOCO, and author of the autobiography The Story of an Idealist (2005). Not only is she Saakashvili’s Western wife, illustrating his desire to marry Georgia into Europe, the two also met and solidified their partnership in the system and cities of the Euro-Atlantic community.

"Misha" in the early '90s

A 25-year-old Mikhail graduated college in Georgia with a degree in international law in 1992 and briefly worked in the new government under Shevardnadze. This early on, someone in Washington saw promise in the budding leader and extended him a fellowship from the newly-created and Soros-funded Edmund S. Muskie/Freedom Support Act (FSA) Graduate fellowship Program. Under this program Saakashvili received law degrees from Columbia University in 1994 and the George Washington University law school in 1995.

He also studied at the International Institute of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, where in 1993 he met fellow student Sandra. The two of them wed quickly and moved to New York where she worked at Columbia while he studied there, and later she worked at a Dutch law firm while he worked with an American one in Manhattan during 1995. They were busy people. Not a lot of time for romance I would guess.

Later that year, Mikhail was approached in New York by his old Georgian friend Zurab Zhvania, then working on behalf of President Shevardnadze to recruit promising young Georgians to join his party, the Georgian Citizens Union. By the end of the year, Saakashvili and Zhvania had both returned home and won elections for seats in parliament, serving together under the party’s banner. Sandra relocated with Mikhail and worked for the International Committee of the Red Cross and at the Consulate of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Tbilisi. [3] (keep the red cross in mind when looking at the new flag adopted after the Sakkashvilis came to power - coincidence?)

Next: A Warm Relationship: Kmara, Soros, Saakashvili

Sources:
[1] Cohen, Ariel. “Shevardnadze’s Journey.” Policy Review Online. April/May 2004. http://www.policyreview.org/apr04/cohen.html
[2] Feinberg, Leslie. “Washington and the coup in former Soviet Georgia.” Worker’s World. January 22, 2004. Accessed at: http://www.workers.org/ww/2004/georgia0122.php
[3] Sandra Roelofs Biography and Activity. Communications Office of the President of Georgia. 2005. http://www.president.gov.ge/?l=E&m=2
[4] Georgian Justice Minister resigns. RFE/RL Newsline, Vol. 5, No. 179. September 20 2001.
http://www.hri.org/news/balkans/rferl/2001/01-09-20.rferl.html
[5] Areshidze, Irakly “Georgia’s Mounting Opposition.” Eurasianet. January 21 2003.
http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/rights/articles/eav012103.shtml
[6] Areshidze, Irakly “Tbilisi City Council Controversy Deals Blow to Political Opposition in Georgia.” Eurasianet. November 12 2002. http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/insight/articles/eav111202a.shtml
[7] Traynor, Ian. “US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev.” The Guardian. November 26 2004. http://www.guardian.co.uk/ukraine/story/0,15569,1360236,00.html

GEORGIA: THE OLD ORDER

SHEVARDNADZE AND GEORGIA'S PLACE ON THE CHESSBOARD


The former Soviet republic of Georgia, birthplace of Josef Stalin, is a fractious little land in the volatile and strategically important Caucasus - a ridge of mountains between the Caspian and Black Seas shoehorned between Russia, Turkey and Iran (and, yes, the origin of the word “Caucasian.”) Georgia shares borders with former SSRs Armenia and Azerbaijan, in a near-constant war over disputed territory. Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge is just across the border from the conflict-torn Russian republic of Chechnya, and frequently absorbs Chechens hiding from Russia’s reach. Georgia itself is torn by internal divisions; separatist struggles between ethnic Russians and Georgians in Abkhazia killed thousands and marred the country’s transition to independence in the early 1990s. A United Nations Observer Mission in Georgia (UNOMIG) was set up in 1993 to monitor the cease-fire, its mandate renewed by the UN Security Council every six months. UNOMIG remained for a decade before being expanded in 2003, and in 2006 is still in place, awaiting a final settlement thirteen years later.

Russians were among the UNOMIG observers but were excluded from its military security force. However peace-keepers under Russian command were also deployed in Abkhazia alongside the UN, part of the overall pattern of domination Moscow reserved in Georgia, part of the southern outpost of Moscow’s withered Empire. Though an agreement to pull the troops out was reached with the OSCE-brokered Istanbul Accords of 1999, a controversial rotating force of Russian troops and heavy weaponry remains in Abkhazia into 2006, with smaller forces and Russian-sponsored militias remaining in the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Ajaria.

As late as 2001 Russian troops had been sent into the Pankisi Gorge to ferret out Chechen rebels, but the Russian role there was taken over by Georgian troops, trained since May 2002 by American Special Forces as part of its “War on Terror.” In addition to fighting Chechen bad guys, Political analyst Matthew Riemer succinctly explained, the U.S. policy was “to strengthen an independent, Moscow-free Georgia that would eventually become a member of NATO and the European Union,” a shift that would be enabled by privatization and Western capital injections. [1]

The most obvious investment was in westbound Caspian oil pipelines; Georgia’s capital Tbilisi was attractive to Western investors as the middle link in at least two ambitious Europe-bound pipelines through the Caucasus alley. Both originate in Baku, Azerbaijan and pass through Tbilisi before diverging. The more famous of the two is set to end at Ceyhan, on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast. A consortium of companies headed by British Petroleum backed this Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, and President Bush has endorsed it by name as furthering his energy policy as work began on laying it in May 2003. [2] The Baku-Tbilisi-Supsa (BTS) pipeline was set to end at Georgia’s coast to feed 120,000 to 150,000 barrels a day of Azerbaijani oil into an underground pipeline beneath the Black Sea to Europe. Soros’ EurasiaNet described how these pipelines “will allow both Georgia and Azerbaijan to more effectively resist geopolitical pressure exerted by Russia.” [3] The flip side, of course, is the ability they could give the West to exert such leverage against Russia.

President Shevardnadze, problematic US ally and target of the Rose Revolution

In these efforts the West worked closely - or tried to - with long-term Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze. He was a former Soviet heavyweight: KGB officer, Chairman of Georgian Communist Party, and Soviet Foreign Minister from Gorbachev’s ascendancy in 1985. In December 1990 he dramatically resigned both his post and his Party membership, complaining of a resurgence of hard line military types. “Boys in colonels’ epaulettes are pushing the country to dictatorship,” he declared in a speech from the floor of the Supreme Soviet on his resignation, eight months before those boys would try to overthrow his ally Gorbachev. [4]

After the USSR collapsed, Russian President Yeltsin sent Shevardnadze to reign in the chaos in his native Georgia, where President Zviad Gamsakhurdia had been deposed in a coup while the region of Abkhazia had moved to split and civil war broke out. He took effective control in Tbilisi in mid-1992, and when stability allowed was finally elected president in mid-1995. While somewhat dictatorial by Western standards, Shevardnadze was no Milosevic. He had charted a path amenable to the US, generally playing Russia and the West against each other as so many other nations did during the Cold War. In 1994-1995, he collaborated with Azerbaijan’s leadership on a Western-backed transportation and energy corridor the Europeans dubbed Transportation Corridor Europe-Caucasus-Asia (TRASECA). The BTS oil pipeline was the first phase of this ambitious endeavor that Ariel Cohen noted “will create relatively few jobs and relatively little transit-tariff revenue for Georgia.” [5]

As Soviet Foreign Minister “Shevy,” as the Americans came to call him, had been a great help in the prelude to the 1991 Gulf War; he grew so close to Secretary of State James Baker, the Texan once sang the standard Georgia on My Mind to him in one of their less formal meetings in Wyoming. [6] The Georgian leader also proved a workable ally in the post-9/11 world; in addition to allowing American special forces in 2002, he also offered enthusiastic support for the controversial 2003 Iraq War. Georgia was a proud member of the “Coalition of the Willing” (with 400 troops as of mid-2005, including special forces, medics and engineers, at least seven wounded so far.) [7] President Shevardnadze addressed his countrymen as the war opened, explaining that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was “a totalitarian regime […] which poses a threat to the whole region.” He reiterated the Washington line that the coalition was forced to take on the role that the UN Security Council should have fulfilled (Recall Russia’s resounding “Nyet” vote). He also noted that a Georgian-US partnership “could help Georgia resurrect its territorial integrity and resolve a number of economic issues.” [8]

Yet while useful to Washington, Shevardnadze was ever more unpopular with his own people, whose patience was wearing thin on territorial integrity and those economic issues as well as widespread official corruption, which the president seemed incapable of stopping. Presented in 1999 by his old friend James Baker with the esteemed “Enron Prize for Distinguished Public Service,” by 2003 Shevardnadze’s government was increasingly seen as plagued with corruption, mismanagement, and secrecy. [9] These problems steadily drained Shevardnadze’s power like a hole in his gas tank and strategically vital Georgia began to look rather vulnerable to another round of instability and violence, sure to put the brakes on any pipeline with a “T” in the middle. Major protests had been staged off-and-on since 2001; criticism from the media was squashed with raids on the opposition stations, while political protest was met with dismissal of the government. US Secretary of State Colin Powell announced at one point “an unstable Georgia automatically results in an unstable Caucasus,” a statement some took to mean that rather than expend more political capital propping Shevy up, the Americans should “ditch him to ensure stability.” [10]

MISHA TAKES TBLISI

THE ROSE REVOLUTION AND ITS FIRST THORNS
Adam Larson
Caustic Logic / Guerillas Without Guns
2/25/07

On the day before the election, November 18, small rallies of a few hundred Saakashvili supporters each were reported in cities across Georgia. The crowd at Zugdidi swelled to thousands on Election Day as they prepared to mobilize, led by Misha himself under the plan to march halfway across the country and into his capital to claim the election victory. [1] The march was delayed to allow more time to prepare, but the procession finally snaked its way along the rough route of the BTC line and arrived in Tbilisi like an invading army on the 20th.

In the meantime, the election had been called in the President’s favor, as expected, so the opposition swarms took up positions around the parliament building and dug in for a fight. Others joined from Tbilisi itself and other cities; over 100,000 people were bused in from the countryside in an operation organized by Kmara, who also set up loudspeakers and a giant television screen amid the crowds. [2] For three days the downtown area was a thriving hub of human energy, protesting, networking, and listening to speeches by opposition leaders. The Rose Revolution that thus formed took its name from the roses Saakashvili and his supporters handed out to symbolize their nonviolent intent and the beauty of the transformation at hand. The opposition prima donna reportedly waved a long-stemmed rose in Shevy's face at one point, shouting “Resign!” [3]

The opposition to the opposition also mobilized. On the day before the election an estimated 10,000 supporters of the Revival party boarded chartered buses in Batumi, capital of the contested autonomous region of Ajaria. Ajaria’s de facto president Aslan Abashidze was normally a Russian-leaning opponent of Shevardnadze’s but was willing to form an alliance to keep Saakashvili out of power; he had just toured Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Russia on the President's behalf to bolster support from those countries' leaders. [4] The Revival activists were soon marching on Tbilisi’s streets to counter Kmara and its allies, with 600 of them keeping a night vigil in front of parliament. [5] The head of Revival's Tbilisi branch told reporters “we demand that the whole of Georgia stand united under a single motto: ‘No to fascism, No to extremism, No to civil confrontation.’ Let us all defend Georgia's constitutional order and respect the legitimacy of the state.” [6]

Otpor-trained Mikhail Saakashvili exhorts his followers in Tbilisi.

Kaha Lomaia, director of Georgia's branch of the Soros Foundation explained that Kmara’s message “was very close to the hearts and minds of people. People listened to them.” [7] It’s less clear who exactly Kmara themselves were listening to, but on the third and final day of the Revolution the demonstrators and Mr. Saakashvili acted so in unison they nearly resembled an army and its general. The final battle was won in less than twenty-four hours, as dramatically detailed in a BBC News timeline. Despite the Rose occupation of the capital, the new parliament was set to convene on the morning of November 22. Before the session even started, at 10:21 am, Misha proclaimed that Shevardnadze had 45 minutes to admit defeat in the elections and disband his sham parliament. An hour later protesters advanced on the presidential palace towards a line of police who turned them back by firing smoke bombs. At 1 pm Shevardnadze, ignoring Saakashvili’s threats and the crowds, opened the parliament session. Fifteen minutes later protesters stormed the parliament building itself and took it - Shevardnadze left by a side door. [8]

Inside the chamber, the usurper Saakashvili declared dramatically “the velvet revolution has taken place in Georgia!” Meanwhile the President gathered with supporters in the cold outside the building telling them “I will only resign by constitutional means.” He declared a state of emergency amid what he called an attempted coup d'etat, and withdrew to the presidential palace where security had been beefed up. Opposition leader and Saakashvili ally Nino Burjanadze announced assumption of the presidency until things sorted themselves out.

Later in the afternoon, Misha called Shevy and told him he could stay in office for a transitional period if he only agreed to early presidential elections. Twenty minutes later, a crowd stormed the palace, apparently a reminder that he had little choice. [10] The whole thing had begun as a wrangle over parliamentary elections, but now a referendum on the presidency itself was forced onto the agenda. At the end of the day, what happened looked suspiciously like a CIA-sponsored coup of days past, this time simply masked by the popular uprising of the Rose Revolution and the coronation was to be by popular demand.

2004: Miles awarded the State Department's Robert C. Frasure Award for “peaceful conflict resolution.” 2005: ends his tenure as US ambassador in Tbilisi. March 2006: nominated Executive Director of the Open World Leadership Center, a Congressional body founded in 1999 to bring emerging economic, political, and cultural leaders from Russia, Ukraine, etc. to study in the US.

The next day Shevardnadze bowed to the inevitable and turned the reins over to Burjanadze until Saakashvili could be confirmed by election. Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov was present, having flown in the previous night to manage the Russian aspect of the crisis. [11] After talking with the ousted president and sizing up the situation, Ivanov announced in an interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper “there are enough facts proving that what happened in those days wasn’t spontaneous, it didn't arise suddenly. Of course there were preparations and the U.S. ambassador was involved, as Shevardnadze himself admitted.” [12] Shevy was now more open about the forces behind his overthrow, pointing out to the media that Richard Miles, the U.S. ambassador in Yugoslavia and allegedly involved in organizing the overthrow of Milosevic, had been posted as ambassador to Georgia shortly before the roses were distributed.

Some remained faithful to Shevardnadze even after all this. Aslan Abashidze’s “fiefdom” of Ajaria refused to recognize Saakashvili, and Tbilisi responded by imposing sanctions and closing off the border. Fearing an invasion, Abashidze blew up the bridges into the region in May, but was finally forced – by mass protest, of course - to step down and flee to Russia. [13] Batumi was at the time host to a dozen Russian Military bases, but after the mini-revolution there, Tbilisi has pushed for their removal, reaching an agreement with Moscow in 2005 that all Russian forces will be withdrawn by 2008. [14]

Abashidze’s self-imploding show of diehard support was too little too late to save Shevardnadze’s power. The ousted President was reportedly “stunned” by what he perceived as Washington's betrayal. “I was one of the staunchest supporters of the U.S. policy. When they needed help on Iraq, I gave it,” he lamented. “I don't have an explanation to what has happened here.” [15] Almost certainly the answer lies in his relationship with Russia. He’d been sent to Tbilisi in 1992 by Moscow, after all, and if he’d been allowed to observe the scale of the American offensive in the former Soviet space that soon unfurled, Moscow-Tblisi relations could well have thawed even to the melting point. But for whatever reason, he was taken out of the game first. He did not go into exile, though he was invited by the Germans, and remains free though in forced retirement in his homeland.

Saakashvili’s desired early election came a little over a month after he demanded it, on January 4, 2004. It must be noted that with five-year terms and Shevardnadze’s last election in April 2000, the next election wasn’t set until some time in 2005. Thus with elections called at least a year in advance, the Rose Revolution’s leader took in a whopping 96 percent of the vote, a stunning result even with a narrowed playing field in which the parties had no time to field strong candidates. Such results, if pulled by any other post-Soviet despot, would be taken as a sure sign of fraud in what nearly everyone calls a divided and fractious country that had after all hosted large anti-Saakashvili protests even before he took the capital and pushed his speedy coronation. Yet Western observers batted nary an eyelash as he claimed only 4% of the country voted against him, and simply took the results as a simple display of the man’s overwhelming popularity