The rose revolution shows its thorns.

Progressive, The, Oct, 2005 by David Zane Mairowitz

Early May 2005. In a few days the first visit of an American president to the small Caucasian country of Georgia will be the main event. Building facades along Bush's motorcade route are being repainted in gaudy pastels, the gaping potholes in the roads filled with cement and tar. Huge billboards are going up in town with the smiling faces of the Georgian and American presidents.

A private company has made the city of Tbilisi a gift of thousands of Bush posters, which are pasted up everywhere (luckily, because these would be otherwise difficult for the administration to afford). The schools are closed and the TV stations exhort Georgians to turn up in masses to greet Bush when he speaks in Liberty (formerly "Lenin") Square. Georgians are generally thrilled to be receiving so much attention, but are worried about whether he'll like their food and their country. My taxi driver practices his two words of English--"Georgia, good?"--and a local website's reporter gets so carried away that he proclaims, "U.S. President Georgia Bush." For those who know what is on the other side of the facade in this impoverished country, a joke is making the rounds: If only Bush would turn up twice a year.

It's now more than a year and a half since Georgia's much vaunted "Revolution of Roses." It isn't so much that the rose has faded, but rather that well-hidden thorns are beginning to draw blood. While Bush hails Georgia as a "beacon of liberty," alarm bells are already sounding amongst civil libertarians. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, young and Western-trained, darling of the European media, is beginning to display autocratic tendencies that go even beyond those of his deposed predecessor, Eduard Shevardnadze.

Saakashvili holds nearly all the cards in the Georgian deck. His party won almost every seat in the last parliamentary elections, and he can still claim unparalleled popularity. His challenge to the dinosaur Shevardnadze, effectively ousting him after fraudulent elections and literally chasing him out of parliament in the middle of a speech, made him a national hero at thirty-six. Yet, while Saakashvili makes the rounds of European capitals, brandishing the word "revolution," many of the social evils he inherited are still in place while others have worsened. The ex-mayor of Gori, Paata Tckheidze, believes the time has come for the president to "drop the word 'revolution' and get the country back to work."

It is true that the country Saakashvili took over was a wreck. Georgia, once considered the cote d'azur and breadbasket of the Soviet Union, now looks like a Third World country: poor in resources and destructively corrupt. Saakashvili has tried to address many of the country's problems, but it will take years, if not decades, before the effect is really felt. The central notion of his reforms appears to be simple: If you pay people a decent wage, they will not be tempted by corruption. So, after weeding out 18,000 men in overstaffed police departments, he has now given those remaining a pay raise as well as spanking new VW squad cars instead of the old Soviet-style jalopies they used to drive. He has also put them on the streets where they can be seen; in fact, they are everywhere, reinforcing the black-clad private security men guarding nearly every hotel, restaurant, and gas station. He has reformed the army as well, giving them more money and trying to instill a new respect in the profession. Most importantly, salaries, however meager, are now actually paid at the end of each month, something that was a hit-and-miss affair under Shevardnadze.

Yet while every politician worth his salt knows he has to buy himself the army and police force, Saakashvili is less generous in other sectors of the economy. He has doubled pensions from about $7 to $14 a month. There has also been an education reform, hotly contested by students, where the old system of exams is now being overhauled. The practice up to now has been a simple one: If you want to take your exams, you pay the teacher a bribe. (Professors earn only between $15 and $30 a month.) And the better the grade you desire, the higher the bribe. A friend of mine who is a university professor in the provinces tried to gather his colleagues to put an end to this corruption and was nearly lynched.

Saakashvili argues that, in order to put through reforms, he needs to act quickly and decisively. Because he has a free hand, because there is no serious opposition, Saakashvili has let his natural inclination for power augment itself. He recently changed the constitution to weaken parliament and strengthen the presidency. He can now dissolve parliament without much ado (at the moment he doesn't need to, as these are nearly all members of his own party); on the contrary, he has made impeachment proceedings so complex as to be virtually impossible. The result is a rubber-stamp legislature.

Saakashvili has thus succeeded where Shevardnadze failed. This is the viewpoint of the researcher and civil rights activist, Paata Zakareichvili, once one of the president's closest friends and political associates, now in the opposition: "Shevardnadze tried to diminish the role of parliament; Saakashvili did it. Shevardnadze tried to control the local administrations and failed; Saakashvili did it. Shevardnadze dreamed of controlling the media and couldn't; Saakashvili does."