Time to go, buddy....

The Power change in Tbilisi explained with savoir-faire. Battered Georgia - Time running out for Saakashvili

The main collateral damage from Georgia’s failed military operation, apart from the loss of Abkhazia and South Ossetia for the foreseeable future, is to the prospects for the President’s

By Nina Bachkatov In the six weeks since the repulse of Georgia’s incursion into South Ossetia, President Saakashvili has been able to keep a high profile, thanks to the numerous visits to Tbilisi by Western leaders and the attention of the ‘international community’. Innumerable photo opportunities and joint press conferences have given him the feeling of strong foreign support. There have also been street demonstrations in support of national unity and of solidarity with the president. But both things are fragile, and Saakashvili is living on borrowed time. At first there were moments of real unity in face of adversity, thanks to the country’s strong national identity and a deep resolve that, as the President loves to repeat, ‘not a square centimetre of our territory can be given away’. But in the Caucasus, it is vae victis- a warrior is respected as long as he wins. And Saakashvili has lost. He has now two kinds of critics of the military operation: those who believe it was stupid to attack and those who believe he was foolish to wait so long before using force to recover the secessionist statelets. In addition he is criticised for having misunderstood what kind of support he might receive from the West and for having misled the population. (Russians who have seen records of the interrogation of Georgian prisoners say prisoners believed that NATO would assist them; some thought that Georgia was already a NATO member; and other believed there was to have been an operation by Turkish special forces to secure the Roki tunnel to block Russian reinforcements.) In addition there are those who say that by his gamble he has sacrificed Georgians’ relations with Russians, which were always good at personal level, for the uncertainty of Western integration. Displaced persons Then, again, there are those who mourn dead relatives or have been obliged to shelter displaced persons. And, finally, there are the displaced people themselves, some of whom will never go back; people who from Day One have accused the president of destroying any hope of continued secular coexistence with Ossetian – not only by launching the military operation but also, earlier, by using their villages to shell Ossetian settlements, and, earlier still, by creating an artificial ‘Ossetian administration’. Displaced persons have been a political force to contend with since the massive expulsion of Georgians from Abkhazia in 1993. And the emotion over the new wave of refugees will not offset the scandal over the way the earlier ones have been treated in Georgia, including the expulsion of dozens of families who were living in a run-down Tbilisi hotel to make way for it luxurious refurbishment. The question is: who will organise the political opposition? For the first weeks, the motto was ‘national unity’. Any sign of attack against the person of the president was tantamount to treason. Saakashvili skilfully used ‘Unity against Russia’, depicted as the assailant, as a rallying cry. There could be no question of the President ‘resigning in face of Russian ultimatums’. But the war was his personal decision, taken without consultation (Saakashvili himself has said that he gave orders for the attack on his mobile telephone). So the defeat, too, is a personal one. ‘Heroes’ let down The first criticisms were quick to come, not only over the decision to attack but also over the way it was done. Within days Georgian experts were portraying simple soldiers as heroes obliged to relinquish their positions due to lack of preparation and support, left to themselves by their officers. This was followed by political criticism of Saakashvili’s management of the country and his regression from the promises of the Rose Revolution in 2003. The criticism inevitably includes references to the use of force against opposition demonstrators last November. Other targets are the return of corruption, the President’s personal style of leadership, the high turnover of ministers and high officials, the lack of internal debate, fraudulent elections, and the lack of media freedom (only one television chain, a state channel, is allowed to broadcast ‘news’; the others are confined to providing entertainment). There are also questions about the personality of the president, including his judgement and even his mental stability. The opposition movement is still timid, but here thing have clearly moved on from 8 August when the opposition parties declared a moratorium with the authorities in order to protect their ‘invaded’ country. That day, former defence Minister Irakli Okruashvili, now a fugitive in France, also declared his complete support to Saakashvili and expressed his readiness to come back to Georgia as a simple soldier to fight for his country. Switch of opinion Since then, there has been a switch in opinion, which occurred about 20 August with calls for dissolving the government, which Saakashvili could well do, and for the departure of the president, which is quite another question. In fact he has received the unintended backing of Russians who have described him as a political corpse and no longer a possible interlocutor. Of course, this prompted the response that Moscow had to deal with the elected, and silenced opponents, including those inside his close circle, who had the same thought but dared not look like being ‘sold to Moscow’. However, the danger to Saakashvili is not from Moscow, politically at least. It comes from his ‘Western friends’. The questions we mentioned earlier have been raised in different circles, including during a US Congress hearing where the main reproach to Bush was that he backed with public money a president whom Washington was unable to control – in short, another bad investment. There were also embarrassing questions about the way US aid funds pouring on Georgia (the second recipient after Israel) have been spent, and about Saakashvili’s attitude towards the opposition and the minorities who represent 40% of Georgia’s population. Similar questions have been raised in Europe, at both EU and national levels. Nearly all come back to human rights and legal issues, especially in the Council of Europe, and there has been an offensive by Georgian NGOs there, who can play the role that the Georgian opposition cannot play for the moment. The involvement of the EU, whose representatives shuttle between Tbilisi and Moscow, shows that any solution of the present crisis will escape the Georgian president’s overall control. EU and NATO divided He will also suffer from appearing as the man who produced tension between EU and NATO, tensions evidenced in statements by NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer on the occasion of the visit of 26 NATO ministers to Tbilisi. During the visit (seen in the EU as an untimely diplomatic move, to say the least), the Secretary General echoed Washington’s dismay at the EU-brokered peace deal, saying that it only made things better for Moscow. For Georgia to be a factor of division even before entering pre-membership discussions is scarcely a promising start. In any case, Saakashvili will now be under more scrutiny and can no longer count on charm and flowery rhetoric. The time of facts is approaching; and it plays against him. Most damaging are calls for an inquiry into the way the war started, and it will not be enough to present some vague version of an intercepted Russian telephone call – at least outside the narrow but strong circle of people ready to accept anything against Russia. As Yulia Tymoshenko, another product of a coloured revolution seems to have realised in Kiev, there is a limit to Russia-bashing as political tool, and it is time to move on. But Saakashvili cannot move on. He has damaged himself beyond recovery. If the inquiry reveals that he did indeed start the operation and that he misled his Western friends intentionally, there will be no possible rescue operation. In this case, his only hope will lie in the lack of alternative leader. One should here remember what happened to former president Shevardnadze, who was also in his time the friend of the West and the darling of Washington. When he became too embarrassing, as we ourselves observed in advance at the time, Washington began looking for someone to replace him. Its almost religious belief in ‘new men’ led it to put its money on a young contender, with little experience but a tempestuous ministerial record, who had been studying in the US. Thus the fate of Shevardnadze was sealed. Choosing a successor Today a similar operation is almost inevitable but the problem is who to choose as his successor. Political logic would favour the former speaker of parliament, Nino Burjanadze, a heroine of the revolution with Saakashvili and Zhvania. She is formidably efficient, with great charm and very strong will. Having clashed with the president before the May parliamentary elections, she now heads the Foundation for Democracy and Development, an organisation that allows her to criticise the authorities while keeping her international and national network, without declaring herself in opposition. But she is born of a Soviet nomenklatura family, and by marriage and professional background she is part of the new nomenklatura. In short, she is not open to manipulation and not exactly what the Americans have in mind, despite her warm and regular reception in Washington. Another candidate could be from the entourage of Saakashvili, but his bunch of very young men with not much more than experience in Soros Institutes does not look like yielding what is needed. There is a also former presidential candidate, David Gamrelidze; and there might be an outsider whom nobody has spotted. But, in any case, the Americans will not drop Saakashvili too quickly, because it would look like a victory for Moscow. First test The first post-war political test will come on 3 November, with the elections in Ajaria. Nine parties will take part in elections to the regional Supreme Council, including the ruling United National Movement. The return of Ajaria under Tbilisi control has been one of the great successes of Saakashvili; it came after a brief armed clash, the departure of the local strong man, Abashidze, and a democratic victory by Saakashvili allies. The fact that the president thought he could repeat the operation with Abkhazia and South Ossetia should have alarmed his Western friends, because it showed a complete misunderstanding of the situation on the ground. In the case of Ajaria, Saakashvili was able to count on the help of Moscow, which sent a special envoy to persuade Abashidze to renounce power without a fight, in return for keeping a part of his money and being allowed to live peacefully in Russia. Of course, anyone who has followed the past twenty years’ events in Georgia, including the nationalist fever of the late 1980s and the civil war in the early 1990s, will be cautious about predicting developments . But in any country, a moment comes when reality overtakes great speeches. And time is short for Saakashvili, especially since he sees himself as a winner and shows no intention of changing his line. All this in a region where his actions jeopardise the fragile stability and threaten hugely important energy projects. 20 September 2008