A Rose Among Thorns: Georgia Makes Good

Charles King

From Foreign Affairs, March/April 2004

Summary:  Georgia's recent, peaceful revolutions might allow the country to become a beacon of hope for a troubled region. For that to happen, however, its new leaders must find a way to deal with local secessionists, as well as with Moscow and Washington.

Charles King is Associate Professor of Foreign Service and Government at Georgetown University and author of The Black Sea: A History.

THINGS FELL APART

Georgia is among the smallest of the former Soviet republics -- a little bigger than West Virginia, with a population of about five million. Yet it loomed large in Soviet history and post-Soviet politics. Its capital, Tbilisi, was the site of one of the first major Bolshevik operations, a 1907 bank heist that swelled party coffers. (One of its planners, Iosif Dzhugashvili, would later change his name to Stalin.) Blessed with an appealing climate, productive farmland, and legendary hospitality, Georgia was also among the Soviet Union's wealthiest republics. After the end of communism, it adopted a strongly pro-Western orientation and learned to leverage its strategic location on the Black Sea's eastern shore to become a major player in discussions about routes for Eurasian oil and gas exports. (The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline now under construction will be the primary conduit for transporting hydrocarbons from the rich Caspian basin to the rest of the world. Transit fees are expected to bring Georgia billions of dollars in the coming decades.)

The breakup of the Soviet Union was accompanied by the fracture of Georgia itself. In the northwest, members of the Abkhaz ethnic group asserted their right to self-determination, and the Georgian army launched a poorly executed war to prevent their secession. Ethnic Ossetes also declared their own separate republic in the north, while, in the south, Azeri and Armenian minorities complained of discrimination and occasionally rumbled about breaking away. Political differences, fueled by competition among regional clans and criminal gangs, escalated even among ethnic Georgians. A full-blown civil war of Georgians against Georgians raged alongside the secessionist conflicts.

Because of these disputes, the state known as "Georgia" has largely been a fiction of recent international diplomacy. Nearly 20 percent of the country's territory remains beyond the central government's control. Abkhazia and South Ossetia, for example, function as de facto independent countries, even though no one has recognized them. The presence of Russian soldiers -- in peacekeeping contingents authorized by the Georgians themselves and on bases left over from the Soviet era -- has discouraged Tbilisi from trying to retake the areas by force. And Adjaria, a province along the Black Sea, maintains an uneasy "autonomous" relationship with the Georgian center -- and hosts a Russian military base to underscore it.

When Shevardnadze stepped into the presidency in 1992 promising to restore Georgia's territorial integrity and promote ties with the West, he was greeted as a savior. Relative political calm did return during his tenure, but he proved unable to solve the basic conundrums of territorial control and state performance. Today still, the central government's influence begins to wane just a few miles outside Tbilisi. Even in the capital, average citizens often do without electricity or running water. Although the population is highly educated, the economy is in shambles. Georgia's per capita national income is lower than Swaziland's, and more than half of the population lives under the poverty line.

Under Shevardnadze, the government's inherent weakness was exacerbated by a dysfunctional political system. Parties appeared and disappeared. Elections were falsified. Corruption became rampant: police officers extracted fines for imaginary traffic offenses and government officials misappropriated international aid or helped sell off state industries to their cronies. In the end, nothing became Shevardnadze in power like the leaving of it.

This is the difficult legacy that Saakashvili's government has inherited. The secessionists in Abkhazia and South Ossetia will look no more kindly on the new leadership than they did on the old. There are signs, in fact, that they may be even less inclined to cooperate with energetic reformers than they were with the generally accommodating and avuncular Shevardnadze. As soon as Shevardnadze fell, the renegade regions appealed to Russia, their long-time protector, to dissuade the new Georgian leadership from making aggressive moves. Elsewhere, local elites have become accustomed to running their own affairs, and efforts by the central government to rein them in may produce conflict. That is the case with Aslan Abashidze, the potentate in Adjaria. Once a rival of Shevardnadze, Abashidze threw in his lot with the former president and often manipulated electoral results to guarantee a victory for Shevardnadze's party, as he did last November. Abashidze has already proved to be a thorn in the side of Saakashvili by discouraging Adjarians from participating in the latest presidential elections and complicating plans for the next parliamentary ballot.

Then there are the entrenched interests of bureaucrats and businesspeople who benefited from the largesse and laxity of the Shevardnadze years. (Off-the-record deals are said to account for 60 to 70 percent of the country's total economic activity.) Corruption has long tentacles in Georgia, and setting out to tame the criminal networks that infest state structures can be a dangerous pursuit. Shevardnadze himself was the target of several assassination attempts, even though he was hardly a serious reformer. The murder of Zoran Djindjic, the reformist prime minister who tried to clean up Serbia after Slobodan Milosevic, undoubtedly weighs heavily on the minds of Saakashvili and his cohort.

Georgia's revolution injects a welcome dose of uncertainty in a region where political outcomes have become oppressively predictable. It is unclear, however, whether the country's new leaders will have the conviction and deftness to capitalize on Shevardnadze's departure. They will have to deal with (or buy off) local power brokers without prompting them to turn to violence. They will have to root out the widespread use of public office for private gain. They will have to find ways to keep the electricity on and the water flowing. Otherwise, Georgians will begin to wonder whether the end of Shevardnadze really marked the beginning of something better.