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Georgia's President Declares Election Victory
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Although government officials hailed Wednesday's election as clean and fair, some voters were skeptical. "Everybody knows who will win," said George Kaladze, a 38-year-old chauffeur standing outside a polling station in central Tbilisi. "Of course there will be on some level unfairness." He said he had voted for United Opposition.
Recalling ex-president Eduard Shevardnadze, the former Soviet foreign minister who was ousted in Georgia's 2003 Rose Revolution by a new generation of politicians who promised to stamp out corruption, Kaladze added, "It's the same government but just younger."
Temuraz Jinjolava, 55, a refugee from the 1993 war in Abkhazia, said that "little by little, we are going toward democracy. It would be a betrayal" to turn the ruling party out now.
Overnight, Saakashvili prepared to fly to Zugdidi, close to where government officials said would-be voters were fired on Wednesday.
The people had walked from Gali, an Abkhaz-controlled city of ethnic Georgians, to a Georgian-controlled village where buses waited to take them to polling stations, said Shota Utiashvili, head of analysis for the Georgian Interior Ministry.
"When the Abkhazians saw that they were boarding the buses, they started firing," Utiashvili said, adding that rocket-propelled grenades were used to blow up the buses. He said that it was not clear who was firing but that the attacks came from the Abkhazian side of the border.
Georgian Reintegration Minister Temuri Yakobashvili called the shootings "a terrorist act" but declined to speculate on who was responsible.
Abkhaz leader Sergey Bagapsh said at a news conference in Moscow that Abkhazians had nothing to do with the shootings, calling them a "Hollywood-like show" staged by the Georgians.
The United States has tried to mediate the conflict, sending Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Matthew Bryza to the Abkhazian capital, Sukhumi, this month. Bryza said the United States was looking into the shootings, which he called "an egregious attempt to undercut the democratic rights of Georgian voters and to jeopardize an invigorated peace process that is just taking shape."
