By Tara Bahrampour
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 18, 2008
TBILISI, Georgia, Aug. 17 -- In November 2003, Georgia's Rose Revolution toppled President Eduard Shevardnadze, and he retired to his gated residence in Tbilisi to watch his flashy successor take the country on a roller-coaster ride of reform, economic development and increasingly tense relations with Russia.
On Sunday, 10 days after that tension spilled over into a war that has devastated Georgia's infrastructure, displaced 100,000 people and shaken the national psyche, Shevardnadze would not say whether he thought Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili was wrong to send military forces into Tskhinvali, capital of the separatist region of South Ossetia.
But Shevardnadze, known as the "Silver Fox," criticized the deterioration of Georgian-Russian relations under Saakashvili, especially in regard to the breakaway regions whose reintegration the current president has pushed for so vehemently.
"For reconciliation, much more time was needed, maybe five or six more years," Shevardnadze said. "Now, this will be even further postponed, but I would like to emphasize that, whatever time elapses, both Abkhazia and South Ossetia will be an integral part of Georgia."
To many Georgians, that idea now seems like a distant dream. But Shevardnadze is used to waiting.
The son of a poor teacher, he became the Soviet Union's minister of foreign affairs under Mikhail Gorbachev. Unlike Stalin, who was born in Georgia but did his fellow Georgians no favors, Shevardnadze said he opposed Soviet moves that were not in Georgia's interest. For example, he was against the building of a tunnel between North and South Ossetia through which Russia's army moved in last week.
"They were wanting this for what is happening right now," he said of the Soviet leadership.
Shevardnadze was chosen by Gorbachev in 1985 and was a soul mate of the Soviet leader from the early days of glasnost and perestroika. He played a role in negotiating major arms-control agreements with the West and in allowing the revolutions in Eastern Europe to unfold without the use of force by Moscow.
Shevardnadze resigned as foreign minister in December 1990, warning of a coming dictatorship when he felt Gorbachev was abandoning reform. After the Soviet collapse, he became acting leader of Georgia's state council in 1992. Before he took office and after, Georgia was embroiled in a period of ethnic conflict. He was formally elected president in 1995.
Under his watch, Georgia formed strong ties with the United States, which provided military training after Sept. 11, 2001, to Georgian forces to combat Chechen fighters on the Georgian side of the Russian border. During his presidency, Georgia began constructing a pipeline to bring Caspian Sea oil from Azerbaijan through Georgia and Turkey to the Mediterranean, bypassing Russia and Iran. That pipeline, Georgian officials say, has become a target of Russian bombing.
His administration was riddled with corruption, however, and since being replaced, he has had little to do with politics.
Sitting in a spacious office filled with portraits and photographs from his years as Georgia's president, Shevardnadze, now 80, condemned recent actions by the Russians, noting that they had for centuries seen Georgia as a colony. He flipped through a book of his memoirs, opening to a picture of him meeting with Ossetian leaders in the mid-1990s, in calmer times.
"I did not arrange concerts during my presidency," he said, referring to Saakashvili's mention last week of having brought in Western rock bands to promote goodwill in the breakaway territory. "However, we would go, we used to visit Abkhazia, visit Ossetia, and meet people there -- and we were building that relationship."
But critics say that while separatist tensions in those regions began during the Soviet era, Shevardnadze did not stand up to Russia strongly enough in negotiations over their status.
"The Russians pushed him in a corner and practically took these territories from him; he had no power to stop them," said Alexander Rondeli, president of the Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank here.
Matthew Bryza, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state, noted that when Shevardnadze took over, Georgia was embroiled in multiple civil wars.
"He accepted settlement terms in Abkhazia and South Ossetia that were highly disadvantageous to Georgia and advantageous to Russia, setting up deeply flawed conflict-resolution mechanisms," Bryza said. "But Georgia was under duress at the time, and then-President Shevardnadze may have had no real alternative."
For his part, Shevardnadze said he successfully negotiated the return of tens of thousands of displaced Georgians to Abkhazia with Russia's then-president, Vladimir Putin. He added that Putin had not seemed bothered when the United States began training Georgia's military.
Shevardnadze said that he is proud of maintaining good relations with both sides and that the current Georgian administration had made a mistake in letting its ties with Russia turn sour.
"These threads that connected us with the United States and also with Russia, these threads should not be cut," he said. "We have lost much due to this."
Like most Georgians, regardless of their political views, Shevardnadze bristled at recent calls by Russia's leadership for the overthrow of the man who overthrew him. "Would you tolerate it that Canada or another country will call for the resignation of Bush?" he asked. "The goal of Russia is to restore the influence that it had during the Soviet period and during the empire, period."
But Shevardnadze said he sees no role for himself in current affairs. "I am a retired person," he said. "I write books."
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