Mediamax, Armenia
Nov 21 2012
Georgia: Worrying About the Wrong Neighbor
Thomas de Waal, Senior associate for the Caucasus with the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace
Much of the focus on Georgia’s recent election result has focused on
the Russia question. Understandably so, because one of the few things
everyone knows about Georgia’s new prime minister, Bidzina
Ivanishvili, is that he made his vast fortune in Russia.
The pundits are worrying about the wrong neighbor. Nothing much is
likely to change in Georgia’s relations with Russia. Its relations
with Turkey are a much bigger cause for concern.
As soon as Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream scored its decisive victory
over President Mikheil Saakashvili’s governing party in the October
parliamentary election, a host of commentators raised the Russia
issue, with headlines such as `A Russian Victory in Georgia’s
Parliamentary Election.’
Some of the most alarmist pieces came from a section of the
pro-Western Moscow commentariat which had rather naively adopted
Mikheil Saakashvili as its idol. Some of these comments betrayed a
rather neocolonial attitude towards Georgia, a desire, to quote the
famous lines of Bertold Brecht `to dissolve the people and elect
another one.’ Yulia Latynina printed an opinion piece entitled `The
Georgian opposition has done what the Russian army could not.’
In fact, most Georgians can see a difference between the Russian army
and Russian money (a lot of which is already invested in Georgia).
Ivanishvili’s Russian business background is an intriguing story. A
boy from a poor family in a village in central Georgia, he lived in
Russia for twenty years and made a colossal fortune there in the
1990s, now estimated to be worth more than six billion dollars,
chiefly through the bank Rossiisky Kredit. He worked with some of the
more controversial figures of the time, such as the Uzbek-born tycoon
Alisher Usmanov. He also dabbled in politics, in 1996 supporting the
presidential bid of Alexander Lebed, who went on to become Boris
Yeltsin’s national-security adviser.
Ivanishvili then left Russia in 2002, first for France and then for
Georgia. He has not returned to Russia since. When he entered
opposition politics last year, he declared he would sell his assets in
Russia, which he said comprised one third of his wealth.
But that is about as much of a story as there is. Ivanishvili was a
quiet tycoon, not really deserving of the term “oligarch” because of
his low public profile. Almost all of the suspicion around him is
circumstantial and there are no obvious links to Putin or the Kremlin.
We have much more juicy material from the biographies other
Russia-based billionaires of that period, such as Roman Abramovich,
Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Gusinsky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky- or indeed
the Georgian Kakha Bendukidze who served as economics minister under
Saakashvili.
This is not to say there are no skeletons in Ivanishvili’s Russian
closet. But if there were obvious ones, I would have expected they
would have come to light and been broadcast with lurid commentary by
the two pro-Saakashvili television channels, Imedi and Rustavi-2,
which made a habit of smearing members of the Georgian opposition as
pro-Russian. They had a whole year to come up with something.
As it is, Ivanishvili came to Georgian politics with pretty much a
blank slate. The first political allies he chose were two opposition
pro-Western parties and in government, he has committed himself to a
pro-Western policy similar to his predecessors. And his new foreign
minister said there could be no restoration of diplomatic relations
with Russia as long as it had embassies in Abkhazia or South Ossetia.
The evidence of the election suggests that most Georgian voters wanted
Russia to be a non-issue. In other words, they mainly worried about
the economy, while not wanting to see any compromise on Georgia’s
claims to its territorial integrity, including Abkhazia and South
Ossetia. But a lot of Georgians also look forward to restored trade
with Russia, including the return of mineral water and wine to the
Russian market-something that was likely to happen anyway, following
Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization earlier this year.
The bitter political conflicts with Russia over the past 20 years have
obscured a deeper historical reality: ordinary Georgians feel a closer
affinity with Russians than they do with many other nationalities,
including Americans. Probe below the surface and you find an older
“other” in Georgian cultural attitudes: the Turks, not the Russians.
Over history, the Ottomans threatened Georgian nationhood far more
than the Russians did, while the Russians periodically protected
Christian Georgia from Muslim Persians and Turks.
Polling by the Caucasus Barometer of the Caucasus Research and
Resources Center shows that Georgians approve of Georgian women
marrying Russians (41 percent in favor, 53 percent against) more than
they approve of them marrying Americans or, in particular, Turks (21
per cent in favor, 74 per cent against). There were similar answers to
the question of which nationality Georgians approved of doing business
with.
To its credit, the Saakashvili government worked hard to combat this
anti-Turkish stereotype and cultivate better relations with its most
Western-looking neighbor. Earlier this year, the two countries signed
a visa-free agreement by which you can cross the border with only
domestic identity documents. Turkey has turned into Georgia’s biggest
trading partner. In the first three quarters of 2012, trade between
the two countries was worth more than one billion dollars.
Turkish money and Georgian politics fused in the Black Sea resort city
of Batumi, close to their common border. Batumi was a pet project of
Saakashvili, who orchestrated an extravagant building boom that cast
up a Hilton, Sheraton, Radisson and a string of casinos.
Yet all this caused a backlash. Batumi was part of the Ottoman Empire
until 1878 and the surrounding region still has a large Muslim
population. Local nationalist politicians, aided by the Orthodox
Church, began to stir up fears of a neo-Ottoman expansion into their
city, of Turkish workers taking Georgian jobs and Muslims pushing out
Christians. Plans to rebuild an Ottoman-era mosque, destroyed in the
Stalin era, were a lightning rod for this nationalist sentiment. One
local politician, Murman Dumbadze, said that if the mosque was
reconstructed he would like to see it bulldozed.
If in Tbilisi Ivanishvili’s supporters had a democratic tinge, in
Batumi these nationalists were at the forefront of Georgian Dream.
Georgian Dream took over the parliament. Dumbadze won the
parliamentary seat for Batumi.
There will now be calls to restrict Turkish immigration and Turkish
trade. Turkish exports to Georgia are indeed ten times higher than the
trade going the other way-a symptom of an unbalanced economy
established by the previous government. But it will be a mistake if
Georgia’s new government allows its nationalist wing to alienate what
is currently its friendliest neighbor. This issue, not Russia, may be
Ivanishvili’s first foreign-policy challenge.
Thomas de Waal is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace. This commentary was written for National
Interest.
http://www.mediamax.am/en/column/12346/