Russia aside, Georgia chief is pressed at home

By Ellen Barry

Wednesday, December 31, 2008

GOMARDULI, Georgia: On the eve of his 41st birthday recently, President Mikheil Saakashvili was racing around western Georgia shaking hands. He told a group of miners that his "heart hurt" when he saw their city suffer, and promised to build a ski resort in the village of Gomarduli, posing with a gold-toothed grandmother who giggled in his embrace like a naughty schoolgirl.

The day felt curiously like a presidential campaign, and Saakashvili was relaxed and happy. "I never said anything about Russia, and they never asked about it," he said later. He reeled off grandiose plans, like a two-year campaign to teach English to "every Georgian in every remote village." This was the old Misha, as he is known — the dazzler, the wunderkind.

It has become harder to spot that man in Tbilisi, the capital city. As winter bears down on Georgia, Saakashvili has found himself on the defensive. In August, he ordered an attack on separatists in South Ossetia, one of two territories — Abkhazia is the other — where Georgia and Russia had been locked in a 15-year standoff. Georgian forces were quickly routed, and Russia seized both territories.

Saakashvili has cast the attack as a necessary response to a Russian invasion, but no evidence has emerged to verify the claim, and critics have said he acted rashly.

Russian leaders have made it brutally clear that they want him out; at home, political challengers are demanding early elections that they believe could topple Saakashvili. And Georgians, who swelled with loyalty after the war, are facing a steep economic downturn that could upend the political order.

"What is the future for Saakashvili?" said Sozar Subari, Georgia's ombudsman for human rights and a longtime critic of the president. "He started the war, he lost the war, he lost the territories. There is a crisis. There is no investment in Georgia. The situation is getting worse and worse. If there is no change, he will leave Georgia as the president who lost everything."

Saakashvili has spent months disputing such appraisals, and says he is confident that he enjoys the support of the Georgian people. For all his political adroitness, Saakashvili generally reacts to criticism with visceral anger. He compares skeptics about his account of the war to apologists for Nazi Germany, "the same people who thought Poland started the Second World War," as he put it.

"There was preparation of war, they wanted war, they invaded us, then they occupied our territories," he said. "If people just prefer not to see it, not to hear it, it's their choice."

Just 36 when he became president in 2004, Saakashvili set out to become a historic figure: A model he has often cited is David the Builder, a 12th-century king who drove the Turks out of Georgia and is worshiped as a saint.

Saakashvili won his first election with 97 percent of the vote and, buoyed by passion and adrenaline, pressed to amend Georgia's Constitution, granting himself extraordinary power. His advocates say this was the only way to wrench a corrupt post-Soviet state into the modern age; critics say he created an autocracy, surrounding himself with a clique of loyalists. Either way, no comparable figure has yet emerged from Georgia's fractured opposition. Saakashvili called this "very sad."

"If I had been in the opposition, I would have destroyed this government in three months," especially given the economic crisis, he said. Asked how, his answer was almost teasing: "I know how to do it," he said, "but I don't want to teach them how to do it."

Saakashvili thinks, talks, and moves at a high rate of speed. When he decides that an event has ended, his aides often break into a full run, lest they be stranded, panting, in his wake. His appetite is legend: On a 45-minute flight, he ordered three cups of tea, a glass of wine, a cognac, and gave a stewardess a genial hard time for not stocking up on cheese.

He is easily bored. For reading material on the same flight, he had a glossy magazine, a biography of Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain, the disgraced French general; architectural plans for a cargo airport which he had sketched himself when 20 submissions fell short ("I hate to confess it," he said); and a Georgian newspaper, which he glanced through and put aside.

"Every Georgian newspaper hates me; what's the difference?" he said. "If you can find me one that likes me, I'll read it all the time."

From the beginning, Saakashvili's presidency has been marked by audacious gestures. Months after his swearing-in, he dismissed all 13,000 of Georgia's GAI — the Soviet-era traffic police notorious for low-level corruption — replacing them with 1,600 officers modeled on American state troopers. He also promised to reclaim South Ossetia and Abkhazia, stoking Georgian nationalism and inflaming tensions with Moscow.

Western observers were impressed by the reforms and charmed by Tbilisi's new political elite, who had infused a failing state with hope and glamour.

"It felt as if 'Ocean's Eleven' had been given custody of the republic," Mark Leonard, a British foreign policy expert, wrote in The New Statesman. "A cabal of beautiful young people dashing around changing the country from top to bottom."

The Western allies' faith was shaken in November of 2007, when opposition leaders rallied tens of thousands of protesters against Saakashvili's government. Riot police officers attacked protesters with tear gas and rubber bullets, and the government declared a state of emergency, forcing two opposition television stations off the air. Under criticism from his Western allies, Saakashvili said he had acted to stop a Russian plot.

He survived the crisis by calling for early presidential elections to "renew his mandate," as he put it, and won with 53 percent of the vote.

The August war has brought Saakashvili back into damage-control mode. The West rallied around him when columns of Russian tanks poured into South Ossetia and Abkhazia. But increasingly, observers blame Saakashvili for escalating the low-level conflict that preceded the attack, while acknowledging that in the days before it began, Georgian villages had come under fire from separatist positions.

Saakashvili has vigorously disputed these critiques — in particular, a Nov. 7 New York Times report that quoted independent observers in the war zone as questioning Georgia's account of the conflict's origins. In an interview, he said Russia was so well-prepared that its forces immediately took control of Abkhazia, hundreds of miles away from the fighting in South Ossetia.

He recalled a conversation he had with Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee for president, after Georgia released intercepted telephone messages that showed Russian armor moving into Georgia early on Aug. 7.

"I said, 'This proves we didn't start the war.' " Saakashvili said. "He said, 'You know, I'm military. I know tanks don't fly, especially Russian ones. I don't need proof.' "

The change in American administrations injects further uncertainty for Saakashvili, who enjoys warm personal friendships with both President George W. Bush and Senator McCain. Saakashvili said he has no worries about continued support from the United States, which has pledged $1 billion in aid and will sign a strategic cooperation treaty with Georgia this week.

But key questions remain, among them: Will the United States re-equip Georgia's battered military, at a cost its defense minister estimated at $8 billion to $9 billion?

And as he copes with sporadic violence and internal dissent, Saakashvili is also under close scrutiny from European capitals. Early this month, several NATO members balked at granting Georgia and Ukraine a Membership Action Plan, in part over fears of that Saakashvili could be drawn into renewed conflict with Russia.

"Georgia has a lot of problems, and one of them is how people perceive Saakashvili," said Sarah Mendelson, a Russia specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "He's the elected president and ultimately this is all up to Georgians. But I hear some people say, 'You need to get rid of him, or get him under wraps.' "

Ronald Asmus, executive director of the Transatlantic Center at the German Marshall Fund, said Saakashvili must commit to institution-building, and swallow the presence of Russian troops in Georgia.

"The advice of people like me is: To whatever degree possible, forget about the Russians," he said. "Accelerate reform and regain the moral high ground you had, and lost." In the past, he said, Saakashvili's team has committed to that path, "but it's hard for them to stick to it."

The advice is not casual. In his response to the state of emergency in November 2007 and the war, Asmus said, Saakashvili has "arguably made two big mistakes," even as the Russians were searching for a way to bring him down.

"Most politicians don't get to make two big mistakes and survive," he said. "I don't know how many political lives he has left."

And so, at the age of 41, Saakashvili is faced with the strange task of downsizing himself: scaling down his passion, impatience and even his power. Answering questions in the airy white interior of his presidential retreat, he seemed keenly aware of this: If there is a flaw with his government, he said, it is that "it's based on personality, more or less, and it should be based on institutions."

He said he had tormented himself over whether he had made a mistake ordering the attack on Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, asking himself the question "a thousand times" in the early days.

"Every night when I am not angry with myself is lost," he said.

Last week, he announced a constitutional amendment that would lessen the president's power over Parliament. Lately, he said, he's less attracted to the model of David the Builder, and more to George Washington, who, he said, "could have been a king, but instead chose to give up power, and become a democracy."

"It's something I'm thinking about more and more," he said. "George Washington."