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Post-Communist Georgia Under Eduard Shevardnadze 117 Post-Communist Georgia under Eduard Shevardnadze 117 CHAPTER FOUR RELatIONS WIth POST-COMMUNIST GeorgIA UNDer EDuarD SheVarDNADZE Pstazaras jyq’ow apsadgjyl awp’ ‘Life is the homeland’ (Abkhazian aphorism) The first months of 1992 saw Georgia in the hands of an unelected Military Council, buttressed by K’it’ovani’s National Guard and Ioseliani’s Mkhedrioni, and facing not only war on two fronts (South Ossetia and Mingrelia, where Zviadist supporters of the ousted president resisted the Council’s unconstitutional takeover of power) but also growing tensions in Abkhazia. Whereas other former union-republics of the USSR were be- ing recognised by, and establishing diplomatic relations with, the outside- world, Georgia’s chances of gaining similar benefits, quite understandably, looked decidedly unpromising, given the chaotic condition in which the state found itself. The desperate situation called for a desperate measure. In March, Eduard Shevardnadze, who had resigned as Soviet Foreign Minister in the wake of the failed coup against Gorbachev the previous year, was invited to return to his original power-base to chair the Military Council (shortly to be restyled State Council). The invitation was accepted, and he flew in on 7 March, bringing with him a wealth of goodwill from the Western politicians and diplomats whom he had come to know in his capacity as the external face of the Soviet Union and who felt they owed him a debt of gratitude for his perceived role in permitting the peaceful collapse of the Berlin Wall and subsequent disintegration of the USSR. The consequences were to be profound, in both a positive and negative sense, depending on the perspective of the ethnic group concerned. It should not, however, be assumed that his fellow-countrymen necessarily shared with his (relatively) new Western friends the same rose-tinted view of Shevardnadze the man, politician and head of state; after all, their memo- ries went back to murkier years, when, as Party Boss in Georgia (1972–85), he was very well-known to his local fellow-citizens but essentially un- known outside his native republic.1 And, thus, his return to lead his native 1 On 18 November 1983, a group of young persons from privileged families decided to undermine Shevardnadze’s plans to impress Leonid Brezhnev with glorious celebrations 118 CHAPTER FOUR republic, albeit in a revised format, was by no means universally welcomed jointly to mark the 200th anniversary of the Treaty of Georgievsk and the 60th anniversary of both the consolidation of the USSR and Soviet rule in Georgia by playing a mindless prank—they hijacked a plane, intending to divert it to Turkey. The hijackers were tricked into thinking the plane had landed on Turkish soil, whereas it was actually at Batumi airport in south-western Georgia (near the Turkish border). Russian Spetsnaz forces were flown from Moscow, and the hijacking was speedily ended; two died and five were wounded in the process. In the spring of 1992 an article, in the form of a letter to the new Georgian leader (‘After 8 years of silence’ by Prof. Vazha Iverieli, Chairman of Georgia’s Medical Society of Endocrinologists and President of Georgia’s Diabetic Association, whose sons were two of the hijackers) was published by the Georgian diaspora in France in Gushagi ‘Sentinel’, (issue 27, pp. 19–29). Iverieli’s ten pages are a blistering attack on Shevardnadze’s personality, as revealed by his actions during his communist days in Georgia. No relatives of the defendants were allowed to attend the hijackers’ ‘open’ trial, access to which was carefully controlled, and, Iverieli asserts, it was only in 1989 that the relatives learnt that all of the accused had been executed in 1984. After cataloguing examples of Shevardnadze’s misrule in Georgia, including the rather widespread view that he raised corruption to ‘a mechanism for governing the state’, Iverieli drew the following conclusion: And so, we have a twofold picture of you: in Georgia as the apostle of the unclean vs abroad as an ‘angel’ sent to us as an apostle of peace. The question arises as to which of these two is the real you and which the mask. It is our firm conviction that there has been no perestrojka within your internal nature—internally you are the same Shevardnadze you were in Georgia—simply the role has changed. The main aim of your life has been to achieve peaks in your career; all your skill and energy are directed towards attaining these. Any other moral categories have for you no value whatsoever. For you human beings have just the same sort of significance as do figures on a chess-board for the chess-player. It would be laughable to talk in terms of the categories of feeling about how sorry a chess-player might be when called upon to sacrifice this or that piece. Equally baseless would it be for me to censure you for your stony-heartedness when in consideration of your career you were despatching human beings to the slaughter-house. This is why we have ex- pressed no censure of you in this manner, so as not to make ourselves a laughing- stock. For you patriotism and philanthropy are weasel words, as indeed is every category of feeling; in like vein, ideology has no meaning, whether it be Marxism- Leninism, fascism, or democracy. It is just your very nature which leads you always to strive to be among the ranks of the prominent, regardless of whatever might be the foundation upon which your career is at any moment being built—that of Marxism-Leninism, that of fascism, that of democracy. No matter what face you shew to the world, internally you will remain the self-same Shevardnadze forever. In the same issue of the journal is another ‘Open Letter to Comrade Shevardnadze’ (pp. 61–4) by Elizabed Chikhladze, daughter of Father Teodore (aka Teimuraz Chikhladze), who, though not on the plane and though arrested only three months after the event, was exe- cuted on the charge of being the hijackers’ ringleader. His daughter saw this as a trumped up allegation, being in reality a cynical move to rid Georgia’s communist authorities of a troublesome prelate who wanted an end to it. She was outraged to read in an interview with Shevardnadze in the Georgian paper Republic of Georgia his assertion: “I knew nothing, had nothing to do with it, and recall nothing.” She ended her letter with her own accusation: “I charge you with manufacturing the death-sentence against my father! I charge you with executing a servant of God!…”.
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