THE WEST SHOULD STOP PICKING LOSERS
By Mark Almond
International Herald Tribune, France
Nov 12 2007
The tear gas has cleared from Tbilisi streets, but the political
crisis in Georgia is not resolved.
Even President Mikhail Saakashvil’s surprise decision to call early
presidential elections for Jan. 5 merely offers his country an
increasingly tense eight-week run-up to what on past form will be an
election that settles nothing.
The Georgian political class has yet to throw up good losers or
magnanimous winners. Since independence in 1991, Georgia has not seen
a president serve out his term. The first post-Communist president,
Zviad Gamsakhurdia, an emotional Georgian nationalist, was overthrown
only eight months after winning 87 percent of the popular vote.
His successor, Eduard Shevardnadze, took 92 percent of the vote.
Western well-wishers were anxious to promote stability in the
post-Soviet Caucasus, so they happily endorsed Shevardnadze’s election,
despite the lack of an opposition candidate. After all, wasn’t he
the man who ended the Cold War and opened the Berlin Wall?
But as Shevardnadze got older his Soviet ways began to show. The
Tbilisi street toppled him in 2003.
The beneficiary of that outburst of "people power," Saakashvili, was
endorsed by 97 percent of the voters, and the West ardently welcomed
a bouncy 35-year-old who could speak English and knew how to speak
our political language.
Trained as a lawyer at Columbia University, with a Dutch wife, he
waxed eloquent on how to rescue Georgia from its decline into ever
deeper poverty and corruption. Anything Western advisers could say,
Saakashvili could say clearer.
Last week the world saw the "rose revolution" dissolve in tears and
police beatings that even Saakashvili’s Western admirers found hard
to stomach.
Saakashvili and his rose revolutionary team averaged 34 years old.
Sadly, youth is no inoculation against corruption. Quite to the
contrary, thirty-somethings across the Caucasus have grown up knowing
nothing other than the corruption of competing clans.
Born into Leonid Brezhnev’s decaying Soviet Union, the Saakashvili
generation barely had time to finish military service (as a border
guard, in Saakashvili’s case) before the Communist system collapsed
and the in-fighting to control the spoils of post-Communism.
Anthropologists would not be surprised that formative years in the
Caucasian cockpit of corruption under Brezhnev and Shevardnadze bred
ambitious people who knew to spin a plausible line when it came to
attracting Western sponsors. Saying what Big Brother wanted to hear
was ingrained in Soviet people.
Honest or hard work was not the way to fame or fortune in the
Caucasus. The collapse of Communism shifted the Caucasus states from
the Second to the Third World, which exaggerated the negative aspects
of late Soviet-socialization.
Like many failed regimes dependent on foreign aid and playing one
power off against another, Georgian politicians learned to pre-echo
what Uncle Sam and the Eurocrats think. Some of it they meant. Our
knee-jerk Cold War suspicion of the Kremlin made their Russophobia seem
natural. But playing up nationalism even when it has a real emotional
basis is not the way to stabilize a society, not to stabilize its
regional relations.
Anti-Armenian and anti-Azeri rhetoric worried the near neighbors.
Saakashvili demolished both the neo-classical building that had housed
the Imperial Russian gendarmerie and a district of Armenian houses
to make way for his new palace.
Georgians noted the contrast with his claims in 2003 that he only
needed a "three room apartment," but the neighboring nations heard
his apologists say that the new government’s massive re-ordering of
old Tbilisi only "affect Armenians, Azeris, Kurds and foreigners."
Whereas the authoritarian Aliev clan running neighboring Azerbaijan
has enough oil revenue to fund a stable state system and many Azeris
have jobs, Georgia’s much-praised reforms have boosted unemployment
and mass migration. The only surviving industry from Soviet days
seems to be massaging the statistics.
The oil pipeline across Georgia to Turkey from the Azeri oil fields
in the Caspian has been a nice cash cow for the Georgian government
and its appointees, but it hasn’t provided any boost to the rest of
the economy. In fact, now that the Baku-Ceyhan project is finished,
lay-offs – not new jobs – are the result. Part of the political
infighting in Tbilisi is to control the transit fees.
The West has a long history of misguided efforts to promote democracy
and economic reform. Ninety years ago, two giants of British imperial
policy debated intervention in the Caucasus.
Lord Curzon insisted that a British presence in the Caucasus was
essential to keep the Russians out and facilitate nation-building:
"We are talking of staying in the Caucasus to put the people on their
feet there."
But Arthur Balfour counseled against placing too much hope in the
capacity of Western neo-colonialism to do anything beyond protecting
its economic interests: "If they want to cut their own throats why do
we not let them do it? . . .We will protect Batum, Baku, the railway
between them, and the pipeline." In the end the Red Army’s advance
put paid to Curzon’s hopes and Balfour’s cynicism.
Nowadays no one seriously expects the Russian Army to cross south of
the Caucasus again. In fact, while Saakashvili was denouncing Russian
meddling, the remaining Russian troops in Batumi on the Black Sea
were being withdrawn ahead of schedule.
Georgia suffers from Russia’s economic boycott, not any meddling by
the Kremlin in its politics. Sadly, the zero-sum game of Georgian
politics is something the natives are perfectly capable of playing
without foreign interference.
Worse still, Western efforts to pick model reformers have failed
twice. Backing Shevardnadze and then Saakashvili produced only "reform
in one family" rather than spreading the benefits of democracy and
the market to the population at large.
Instead of hoping third time lucky, Washington and the EU should
step back from trying to pick a winner in the coming elections, who
most likely will only make ordinary Georgians losers again. We should
remember the Georgians don’t forget the West’s mistakes even if we do.
Mark Almond is a lecturer in history at Oriel College, Oxford, and
a frequent election and human rights monitor in Georgia since 1992.