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Pro-West leaders in Georgia push Shevardnadze out

By Hugh Pope, The Wall Street Journal, November 24 2003

TBILISI -- The resignation Sunday of Georgian President Eduard
Shevardnadze, under siege by a massive popular uprising, throws
in doubt the international political alignment of this strategic
Caucasus nation.

Mr. Shevardnadze stepped down after thousands of protesters
stormed the parliament, blaming the president for a recent
election marred by ballot-box stuffing and sabotaged voter
lists. A former member of Mr. Shevardnadze's inner circle, Nino
Burdzhanadze, declared herself acting president on Saturday and
called for new presidential elections
in 45 days.

The dramatic developments in a nation that holds the key to
Western access to Caspian Sea oil reserves and broader U.S.
interests in the region could signal a stunning shift. A pro-
Western transformation, which Washington has long hoped would
tug the former Soviet Republics away from their totalitarian
past, may now be under way.

But the wildly popular exuberance that greeted Mr. Shevardnadze's
resignation didn't completely put to rest concerns about the
stability and territorial integrity of Georgia, a nation of 4.4
million people in the Caucasus. The revolution so far hasn't been
marked by violence, but its chaotic unfolding could still take
unexpected turns.

Mr. Shevardnadze was once lionized by the West as the Soviet
foreign minister who helped the peaceful dismantling of the
Soviet Union and as a man who might lead the former Soviet
republics toward a future of open economies and more democratic,
Western-oriented governments. But when his failure to bring
prosperity to Georgians weakened his domestic support, he leaned
back toward Moscow, where he was embraced as a bulwark against
the pro-Western opposition.

U.S. officials have been cautiously critical of Mr. Shevardnadze
since the Nov. 2 elections, which the State Department criticized
as fraudulent. Over the weekend the Bush administration signaled
that its support was finally running out. In a joint telephone
conversation on Saturday with United Nations Secretary General
Kofi Annan, Secretary of State Colin Powell urged Mr. Shevardnadze
" to exercise restraint and do the right thing for Georgia,"
according to a senior U.S. official. The official described Mr.
Shevardnadze's decision to step down as "a noble gesture for
peace."

After Sunday's resignation, Mr. Powell spoke by telephone with
the interim president, Ms. Burdzhanadze, telling her that the
U.S. "would work with her as she moved toward free and fair
elections," the official said. In Georgia, the constitutional
court is expected to cancel the Nov. 2 parliamentary elections
and hold presidential and parliamentary elections together in
45 days.

After a Russian envoy failed to forge a compromise keeping Mr.
Shevardnadze in power, Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov warned that
Russia would oppose decisions that "could cause the situation
to explode ... threatening the territorial integrity of Georgia."
Instability in Georgia threatens Russia not just because of the
new, more nationalist Tbilisi government but also because there
is a Russian military base in the pro-Russian autonomous region
of Adjaria in western Georgia.

Whether the new government takes Georgia down a path that
leads toward the West, the East or further into confusion could
dramatically influence the development of the promising oil
fields of the Caspian. While Georgia doesn't possess the huge
potential oil and gas reserves of its regional neighbors -- such
as Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan -- it is the crucial
corridor through which those reserves can pass on their way to
Western markets without going over Russian or Iranian territory.
Any outbreak of violence could threaten construction of a
massive pipeline from the oil-rich areas around the Caspian to
Turkey's Mediterranean coast.

For the U.S., helping the new government, even at the expense
of an old ally such as Mr. Shevardnadze, could also help shape
perceptions of broader Bush administration aspirations for
spreading U.S.-friendly democracies in places such as the
Middle East. "How can we promote democracy in the Arab world if
we can't even promote it in a small, Christian, pro-American
country, where we have spent so much money over the past decade?"
asked Zeyno Baran, a Georgia specialist and director of
international security at the Nixon Center in Washington.

The opposition that forced out Mr. Shevardnadze Sunday is led
by three former key members of his own government. The main
opposition leader, Mikhail Saakashvili, is a graduate of
Columbia Law School in New York and former minister of justice
who oversaw a radical cleanup of Georgia's Soviet-era judiciary
in the mid-1990s.

Ms. Burdzhanadze, the 50-year-old chairman of the outgoing
parliament, broke with Mr. Shevardnadze in August over his
handling of the departure from Georgia of U.S.-based AES Corp.
The energy giant sold its operations in the country to a
Russian state energy company at a substantial loss. The third
is Zurab Zhvania, a former ecology activist and coordinator of
Mr. Shevardnadze's mid-1990s reform team.

Western Support

The three politicians are backed by a raft of nongovernmental
organizations that have sprung up since the fall of the Soviet
Union. Many of the NGOs have been supported by American and
other Western foundations, spawning a class of young, English-
speaking intellectuals hungry for pro-Western reforms.

Chief among these is the Liberty Institute, which has received
funds from the U.S. government and financier George Soros. It
became the organizing juggernaut behind the move to push Mr.
Shevardnadze out of office. How the institute's 30-year-old
director, Levan Ramishvili, and its 31-year-old co-founder,
Giga Bokeria, went from Shevardnadze fans to his biggest
opponents is the story of the forces behind the revolution
that took place over the weekend.

In the aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse back in 1992,
Mr. Shevardnadze returned to his Georgian homeland promising
a new beginning. Compared with the paramilitary groups and
anarchy that plagued his country's first year of independence,
his Soviet record didn't look bad. He had protected Georgia's
culture and language from Russification, and Georgians were
impressed by the plaudits he won from the West for his
peaceful handling of the Soviet break-up along with former
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

Messrs. Ramishvili and Bokaria, who were working as part-
time journalists while they finished their studies, initially
supported Mr. Shevardnadze's efforts to bring back law and
order. "There was this feeling that Shevardnadze might not
be a big democrat, but he was in touch with the world, he
would play according to the new rules of the game," said Mr.
Ramishvili. "We thought he would build state institutions, a
democratic and prosperous Georgia."

U.S. officials also vaulted Mr. Shevardnadze, whom they viewed
as one of the few progressive officials in the former Soviet
regime, into the role of standard bearer for what they hoped
would be a gradual migration of the former republics out of
the sphere of Russian influence and into a more-Western orbit.

In Georgia, though, Shevardnadze supporters such as Messrs.
Ramishvili and Bokeria were becoming disenchanted as Mr.
Shevardnadze gave up on trying to put down a Russian-backed
secession movement in the northwest of the country and slowly
moved Georgia back toward Moscow.

In 1996, Mr. Bokeria and Mr. Ramishvili were hired by a new
independent television station called Rustavi 2. After it
attacked a Shevardnadze minister, the government closed the
station down. So the two men founded the Liberty Institute,
initially to organize the station's defense. But by the time
they won that battle with a court ruling in 1997, they decided
to stick with the NGO.

Fueled by grants from the U.S. Agency for International
Development-backed Eurasia Foundation, George Soros's Open
Society Institute, and others, the Liberty Institute did much of
the backroom work on Mr. Saakashvili's radical legal reforms.
The U.S. Embassy also helped behind the scenes, bringing in exam
papers prepared by the American Bar Association to provide the
basis of tests for Georgia's judges. Almost 90% of Soviet-era
judges failed the exam, allowing the government to fire them.

But even as reforms emerged, Mr. Shevardnadze began to change
course. In 1998, he sustained the double blow of an assassination
attempt that narrowly missed him and the economic collapse in
Russia, Georgia's main trading partner. Although never accused of
personal corruption, he became closer to his family and friends
who had grown rich on their relationship with him.

"The main problem was that Shevardnadze could never rely on an
army or a state, but only by balancing power among members of
his team," Vakhtang Abashidze, a former Shevardnadze aide and
chairman of the Georgian National Communications Commission. As
the reformers distanced themselves from him, Mr. Shevardnadze
became reliant on a corrupt clique. "Shevardnadze supported
building up the NGOs. But as soon as they voiced some dissent,
for Shevardnadze they became an opposition force," said Mr.
Abashidze.

Fighting Back

Mr. Shevardnadze began to fight back. In 2001, he again tried to
close down the Rustavi 2 television, which had gone back on the
air and was repeatedly accusing people close to him of corruption.
The Liberty Institute and others responded with a mobilization of
student demonstrations that forced him to leave the country's
most popular TV station on air.

Local elections in 2002 should have sent a clear message to Mr.
Shevardnadze. Pro-government parties lost heavily, and Mr.
Saakashvili swept to power at City Hall in the capital of Tbilisi,
putting his office a few hundred yards down the hill from Mr.
Shevardnadze's chancery. The Liberty Institute came under more
pressure. In July of that year, 15 unknown men charged into their
offices in a converted apartment, threw a computer at Mr.
Ramishvili and beat him up.

But international support for the Liberty Institute -- including a
personal visit from the German ambassador -- shamed Mr. Shevardnadze
into sending a state minister to pay a visit to the premises. The two
sides agreed to work on three things: civilian oversight of police,
decentralization of schools and above all work on new voter lists
ahead of the November 2003 parliamentary elections. "There was delay
after delay. It was just lip-service. We withdrew from the talks in
February 2003," Mr. Bokeria said.

Mr. Bokeria did more than that -- with Mr. Ramishvili, he started
planning the revolution. In late February, he took a Soros Foundation-
funded tour of Serbia to see how the Otpor, or "Resistance," student
opposition had ousted President Slobodan Milosevic in 11 days after
he annulled the presidential election in 2000. "The biggest lesson I
learned was that it was key to create absolute moral superiority,
everywhere, including among the police," Mr. Bokeria said last week,
as the protests built up steam.

During the summer, Otpor activists visited Georgia, running three-
day summer courses that trained 1,000 student activists from all
over the country in revolutionary techniques using humor and
peaceful subversion. The students, fed up above all with corruption
in their society and universities, organized under the slogan
" Kmara!" or "Enough!"

The fraudulent elections provided a greater catalyst for popular
outrage than the Liberty Institute and Kmara expected. That was
largely because of U.S.- and NGO-funded exit polls broadcast on
Rustavi 2 TV, which showed everyone exactly how pro-Shevardnadze
parties had stolen the election.

Using the Liberty Institute's computer room as one of their main
action bases, and backed with a steady barrage of advertising slots
from Rustavi 2 television, Kmara's 5,000 students became the foot
soldiers of the opposition politicians. In the last push into the
parliament on Saturday, they flanked Mr. Saakashvili as he led the
way in, holding a bunch of roses.

"We did it! There was a huge number of people, nobody could stop
it," Mr. Ramishvili said Sunday, watching the new interim government
spell out its program on TV. He hoped it would really set about
radical reforms, but worried that there might be clashes with the
three regions of Georgia that remain virtually outside central
control. "What makes me so happy is that it ended so peacefully.
It's a good precedent for our future."