Last year's peaceful Rose Revolution has brought positive changes

TBILISI -- Ushangi Kitiashvili has a contagious enthusiasm for what he calls the new Georgia.
"Look!" the portly cab driver shouted, taking his hand off the steering wheel of his ancient Volga sedan for a disconcerting moment to point at a passing police cruiser. "They're on patrol. Working! Doing things! A year ago, they'd just be standing on the corner, asking me for money."

The year since the peaceful Rose Revolution on the streets of Tbilisi has been good for people such as Mr. Kitiashvili, who gave up two weeks of work last November to stand with tens of thousand of other Georgians in front of the country's parliament building and demand the ouster of Eduard Shevardnadze and his corrupt administration.
Mikhail Saakashvili, the man who led the storming of parliament last year, carried the rose that gave the revolt its name and was later elected Mr. Shevardnadze's successor. He has followed up those victories with a series of populist moves that have kept up the revolution's momentum and maintained his stunning popularity among ordinary Georgians.

The country, while still desperately poor, now shines as a beacon of democratic hope in a region populated with former Soviet republics whose regimes can be defined as either kleptocratic, authoritarian or both. The revolution continues to send shock waves through such republics as far away as Ukraine, Belarus and Central Asia: Many of those who took to the streets of Kiev yesterday to demand a fair count in presidential elections there cited the Rose Revolution as inspiration. Some even held up Georgian flags in a demonstration in the Ukrainian capital's Independence Square.

"Lots of people are scared of what happened here," Mr. Saakashvili, the still boyish 36-year-old president, said in an interview in a central Tbilisi office, recently renovated as if to purge all traces of the Shevardnadze era. "We're not going to export the revolution, but we're going to set the example . . . and some leaders in the region might feel uneasy about that."

He was slouched into a leather chair like a teenager watching television and favouring a right hand he broke when he took a spill jogging, but Mr. Saakashvili exuded nothing but enthusiasm, confident that the Rose Revolution remains on track.

The President's most popular step has been to tackle the rampant corruption that used to cripple the country's police force. The size of the force has been cut in half, and those who remain have received raises that allow them to live without being forced to extract bribes from passing motorists. As Mr. Kitiashvili points out, officers no longer stand on street corners in the capital menacing passersby. Instead, they cruise about importantly in newly bought Volkswagon Passats.
The new government followed that up by repaving the Kakheti Highway, the main road between downtown Tbilisi and the capital's international airport, ensuring that its support among cab drivers will not soon fade.

It's been a year of such symbolic successes for Mr. Saakashvili, who won the presidency in January with a stunning 96 per cent of the popular vote. Six months after the revolt on the streets of Tbilisi, he replicated it in the port city of Batumi, driving out autocratic local governor Aslan Abashidze, who had ignored the weak central government for years, withholding billions of dollars in taxes and customs duties.

More recently, Mr. Saakashvili's government privatized Tbilisi's Iveria Hotel, which long stood in the middle of the capital as a symbol of the country's many troubles -- packed not with guests but with more than 1,000 refugees from a civil war in the early 1990s. In September, the refugees were given $7,000 (U.S.) per family to move out, and the Soviet-era building is now owned by German investors who reportedly plan to replace it with a modern business centre or a Western-standard luxury hotel.

"People have been feeling the change; that's obvious. They feel that things are moving forward," Mr. Saakashvili said proudly before reeling off the statistics that support his point.

Because of his attack on corruption and with the revenues from Batumi, the government budget has tripled in size from a paltry $400-million in 2003 to $1.2-billion this year, he said. And while poverty is still rife, the government has managed to double pensions to $15 a month from $8.

"The hardest part is to manage expectations," Mr. Saakashvili said. "The worst thing that could happen to a politician was to get 96 per cent of the vote, as I got. . . . With 96 per cent, it's unavoidable that you will always disappoint a certain number of people."

And there are critics. Some say the revolution has gone too far. Mr. Saakashvili's brash style may have worked in forcing Mr. Shevardnadze aside, but it has also introduced extraordinary tension into relations with Russia, which is Georgia's former colonial master and remains its largest trading partner.

Pro-Kremlin separatists still control two of Georgia's provinces, the result of civil wars in the early 1990s, and Mr. Saakashvili's promise to restore the country's territorial integrity led to armed clashes in one of them, South Ossetia, this summer. Sixteen Georgian soldiers died in the conflict, and Mr. Saakashvili now says the country's strained relations with Moscow are his biggest disappointment.

There have also been complaints from the country's marginalized opposition that it can't get access to the media, and many say they had more freedom to criticize the government under Mr. Shevardnadze. A group of 14 non-governmental organizations said the revolution risks becoming "anti-democratic," warning in a letter this month that the anti-corruption drive has gone too far. Arrests of high-profile members of the old regime are still taking place.

"People are kind of scared to say anything negative about the revolution. No one will speak out," said Davit Saganelidze, secretary-general of the opposition New Conservative Party.
Some also worry about the apparent influence of the man viewed by many as the patron of last year's Rose Revolution, billionaire financier George Soros.

Mr. Soros's initiatives to promote democracy in Georgia gave rise to organizations that wound up leading the anti-Shevardnadze street demonstrations. Now, many graduates of those groups are leading forces in Mr. Saakashvili's government, including several who sit as prominent MPs and cabinet ministers. The President himself refers to Mr. Soros as "a good friend," but denies that the billionaire has undue influence.

Even many of those who cheered the revolution are concerned about a program that pays the salaries of government officials from deputy ministers up to Mr. Saakashvili from an international "anti-corruption" fund established by Mr. Soros.
"Soros definitely plays too big a role here. Let's start from the fact that he's paying the salaries of our top officials; as the saying goes, he who pays the musicians calls the tune," said Zaza Gachechiladze, publisher of the Georgian Messenger newspaper. "It's wrong, absolutely wrong."

But such concerns are far too theoretical for Otari Maisuradze, a war veteran who lost a finger fighting in Afghanistan for the Red Army in the 1980s and was wounded again in the 1990s while serving with the Georgian army in Abkhazia. To him, the revolution has meant progress in very real terms. Not only is his pension on the rise; he figures his money goes twice as far now that he no longer has to pay bribes to corrupt police and tax officials.
"Those who complain just want it to be back like it was, so they can just sit there and collect money," he said, smoking a cheap Russian cigarette as he stood on Tbilisi's central Freedom Square, a traffic circle dominated for decades by a statue of Lenin. "Everything will be okay. Things are getting better."
Even Mr. Shevardnadze himself finds it hard to criticize too harshly those who forced him from office 12 months ago. The Cold War icon now spends his days in seclusion, still living in the hilltop presidential residence in Tbilisi and writing his memoirs.

The man nicknamed the Silver Fox while he was Mikhail Gorbachev's foreign minister moves stiffly now and definitely looks his 76 years. His aides say they're worried about his deteriorating health, and that his spirits have sagged since his wife, Nanuli, died last month.

While Mr. Shevardnadze stepped aside with no small amount of bitterness last fall -- he referred to the Rose Revolution as a Soros-sponsored coup -- he has become more sanguine about what happened and pleased with his role in avoiding bloodshed during the transfer of power.
Last Nov. 22, when the opposition stormed parliament to protest the conduct of parliamentary elections, Mr. Shevardnadze declared a state of emergency and pondered the use of force to disperse protesters, he said in an interview. But when he got home, Nanuli urged him to avoid violence at all costs, as did his son Paata, who called from Paris to tell his father that he risked undoing all the good he'd done in his life if he ordered troops into the streets.

He took their advice to heart and resigned the next day, prompting celebratory fireworks and dancing on Tbilisi's main drag.

"There was really only one correct decision," Mr. Shevardnadze said, sitting in a black leather chair in a study lined with photographs of his days as a globe-trotting diplomat. "In my hand I held the whole army, with their tanks and weapons, and these people on the streets were relative youngsters. They were huge in number, but they couldn't have resisted the army. But I decided there couldn't be bloodshed."

Perhaps trying to again position himself on the correct side of history, the Silver Fox insisted that in deciding to go peacefully, seven months before the end of his term, he in effect chose his successors. And although he said he is concerned about the reports about freedom of speech, a right that he considers part of his legacy, he says he isn't disappointed with the progress made so far.
"They are very young and talented people who work in very modern ways," Mr. Shevardnadze said. "They'll work things out."

The Globe and Mail; Monday, November 22, 2004