The most famous and influential Georgian in world politics since Joseph Stalin, Eduard Shevardnadze, finally bowed out last weekend after controlling his small, but strategically crucial, country for more than a generation.
The ageing, white-haired fox, whose double-act charm offensive with Mikhail Gorbachev gained him a place in the history books as a key agent in the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, leaves behind a failed state.
As the buoyant, but inexperienced, opposition expanded its takeover ambitions and key figures in the presidential entourage switched sides, the 75-year-old president cut a lonely figure from another era. In his final days, he clung to power by trying to forge alliances of expediency with unsavoury warlords and the Kremlin.
Nepotism and patronage, adroit exploitation of United States backing over the past decade, and ruthless control of the communist security apparatus throughout the Soviet Union’s final two decades ensured Shevardnadze’s longevity.
But despised at home and increasingly isolated, he miscalculated badly in the end. Most importantly, perhaps, he lost Washington’s confidence as the guarantor of longer-term Western interests in the country, which lies between Russia and the Middle East, astride the fabulous hydrocarbon riches of the Caspian basin.
Clinging to power in the face of the kind of popular demonstrations he helped to trigger in the pro-democracy revolutions of 1989 to 1991, Shevardnadze was pushed back into Moscow’s embrace, a bitter irony for the man who had spent the past decade snubbing the Kremlin and currying favour in Washington.
The KGB veterans and ”great power” Russia advocates running President Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin despise Shevardnadze as the man who helped destroy the Soviet superpower. Putin’s hostility has been compounded by his conviction that Shevardnadze has been less than helpful on the war in Chechnya, across Georgia’s northern border.
Building on the plaudits he gained in the West as the Soviet foreign minister, ”Shevvy” had long been Washington’s darling. But in recent months, the US has despaired of him. Richard Miles, the US ambassador in Tbilisi, has been actively grooming the young, US-trained lawyer Mikhail Saakashvili to lead the succession. A series of senior US figures passed through Tbilisi this year to warn Shevardnadze that his days were numbered.
”We would like to see stronger leadership,” Miles told The Washington Post recently in an unusually public criticism of a long-standing US ally.
The November 2 election shambles that triggered the Tbilisi tumult featured a number of elements cut straight from the template the Americans are using to engineer democratic change in target countries.
The same tactics were applied by the US triumphantly in Serbia in 2000 to topple Slobodan Milosevic. Michael Kozak, the US ambassador in Minsk, then sought to emulate the success in elections in Belarus against the authoritarian Alexander Lukashenko and failed.
The elements include grooming an opposition leader, such as Saakashvili. US-funded pollsters, strategists, consultants and NGOs are also deployed to defeat ballot rigging by conducting ”parallel vote tabulations” and instant exit polls that win the propaganda war by getting the message of extensive poll fraud out long before the official results. As a result, a tidal wave of discontent with Shevardnadze was unleashed and built up for three weeks, leaving the president to conclude bitterly that Washington is a fairweather friend.
For most of the past decade it was different. Back in 1999, Boris Yeltsin phoned Shevardnadze and demanded to use Georgia for a Russian invasion of Chechnya. Strobe Talbott, the Clinton administration’s Russia specialist, said no and Shevardnadze took his cue from Washington. Putin, then just entrenching his power by launching the war in Chechnya, never forgave the Georgian leader.
Within a month of the September 11 attacks, Shevardnadze was in the White House offering to host US troops, while Georgia benefited from some of the highest per-capita aid handouts made by the US. In late 2001, at US bidding, Shevardnadze purged the top ranks of the security agencies and brought in the pro-US former ambassador in Washington, Tedo Dzhaparidze, as his national security chief. The latter now appears to be the hinge between the old and the new regimes, and his role will be central to the outcome of the current tussle.
The proactive US policy on Georgia is explained not least by the country’s centrality to control of the Caspian wealth, with the US-backed BP pipeline being built from the Caspian to Turkey running through Georgia, bypassing Russia and Iran.
In short, Georgia has continued to be a Cold War playground, with Russia and the US competing for a country that is a strategic prize in the contest to control the Caspian mineral bonanza. ”This is a place,” said a senior European official in Tbilisi, ”where the Cold War is still boiling hot. You have a clear confrontation between Russia and the West.”
While the US shored up Shevardnadze as Georgia degenerated into a classic ”failed state”, the Russians made mischief and contributed hugely to keeping Georgia a failed state. They kept troops and military bases there and refused to pull out. They backed separatists and turned off gas and electricity supplies to keep Tbilisi in the dark.
They crippled Shevardnadze’s Georgia and fomented disaffection. But the prospect of a Saakashvili regime that owes its arrival to strong US backing is also anathema to Moscow.
The US, British, European and United Nations statements on the crisis all called for dialogue, compromise and eschewal of violence, but said little of the Constitution. — Â