GEORGIA’S DANGEROUS GAME
By Jon Sawyer

Foreign Policy
Oct 31 2006

The former Soviet republic is determined to antagonize Russia, and
it thinks the United States has its back. It had better think again.

Domestic discontent: The Georgian government is under pressure to
resign by opposition groups at home.

VANO SHLAMOV/AFP/Getty Images

While much of the world has been distracted by crises in Iran,
Iraq, and North Korea, a dangerous dispute over espionage, energy,
and ethnicity has been growing between Russia and its diminutive
neighbor Georgia.

The relationship, prickly since the breakup of the former Soviet
Union, took a sharp turn for the worse in late September, when Georgia
arrested four Russian soldiers for alleged spying and threatened to
block Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization. Russia
responded with a ham-fisted crackdown on all things Georgian,
cutting off trade and telecommunications to the country and deporting
planeloads of Georgian citizens.

Media coverage of the dispute has focused on the behavior of the
principal antagonists, Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili and
Russian President Vladimir Putin. But there is another powerful player
who has remained far off stage: the United States. Its fingerprints
aren’t obvious, but Washington has helped to fuel this crisis-by
showering Georgia with cash and praise, by extending the promise
of NATO membership, and by standing silent as Saakashvili and his
government made ever rasher attacks on Russia.

U.S. security aid to Georgia totaled $30.5 million in fiscal year
2006, on top of $60.5 million the previous year and $60 million the
year before that. Due in large part to American largesse, Georgia’s
overall military expenditures shot up 143 percent last year. Georgia
has also been a favorite of the Millennium Challenge Corporation, the
Bush administration’s signature program that was intended to reward
those developing countries that demonstrate effective governance.

Contracts totaling $295.3 million have been signed with Georgia,
making it fourth in the world in total Millennium Challenge aid.

Flush with cash and the superpower’s blessing, the American-educated
Saakashvili has become more brash with time, seizing every opportunity
to stick it to the colossus to the north. "We can’t be treated as some
second-rate backyard to some kind of re-emerging empire," Saakashvili
told reporters earlier this month as the latest crisis gained momentum.

The tough talk plays well at home, as evidenced this month when
Saakashvili’s United National Movement party swept more than three
quarters of the vote in local elections. But it is a triumph of bluster
over geographical common sense in a nation that remains very much in
Russia’s shadow.

Georgia, with fewer than 5 million people, depends on Russia for
natural gas, a lesson reinforced last winter when Russia used the
excuse of a still-unexplained pipeline explosion to cut off the taps.

Last spring, Russia ratcheted up the pressure, shutting its market to
wine and Borjomi mineral water, Georgia’s two most important exports.

Now, it is threatening the country’s biggest source of hard currency,
cash sent home by the nearly 1 million Georgians who work in Moscow
and St. Petersburg.

Saakashvili’s claim to be fighting the good fight against a hegemonic
Russia has been dented by the way he’s handled his country’s own
territorial disputes. He came to power promising to reunite Georgia
with South Ossetia and Abkhazia, two regions that broke away in the
bloodshed following the collapse of the Soviet Union. He has spent
more time rattling sabers than building trust, however, with the
predictable result that many of the residents in those regions have
taken Russian passports and now look to Moscow, not Tbilisi, as the
more reliable engine of jobs and security.

Saakashvili has also come under fire for his management of the
parts of Georgia his government controls. Ethnic Armenians and
Azerbaijanis say they are as marginalized as ever. Human Rights Watch,
the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and other
outside groups have documented judicial corruption, police abuse,
and the gross mistreatment of prison inmates, including the deaths
of seven prisoners last March in a "riot" that critics say was set
off by prison authorities themselves.

That same week in Tbilisi, hundreds of demonstrators protested
the government ‘s alleged cover-up of the Interior Ministry’s
involvement in a high-profile murder. One of the country’s most
prominent television newscasters quit her job on camera, to protest
attempts to censor the news at the government-affiliated channel.

And where was Saakashvili during all the turmoil? He was at the White
House, basking in the glow of President George W. Bush’s praise.

Saakashvili "is a man who shares the same values I share," Bush said.

"He believes in the universality of freedom."

Bush even singled out Saakashvili’s work in law enforcement, the
issue that had sent protesters to the streets and brought the sharpest
criticism from groups like Human Rights Watch. "[H]e cleaned out the
police forces in order to rid the country of corruption in the law
enforcement," Bush said, ignoring critics who say that the Georgian
president has run roughshod over basic human rights.

Saakashvili shouldn’t believe everything he hears from Washington.

Despite the fulsome rhetoric and American largess, make no mistake-the
United States would not come to Georgia’s aid if its confrontation
with Russia heats up. Georgia is in Russia’s backyard.

Given its military exposure elsewhere and its interest in Russian help
on issues like North Korea and Iran, the United States will almost
always side with Russia, or at the very least, remain on the sidelines.

America’s true interests were on display in this month’s debate on
Security Council sanctions against North Korea. The United States
needed Russia’s vote, and Russia’s vote it got, but only after the
United States acquiesced to a separate Russian-backed resolution.

That resolution endorsed the presence of Moscow’s soldiers in the
Georgia breakaway regions and criticized Georgia for its military
incursion into Abkhazia this summer.

U.S. officials insist there was no quid pro quo, that in fact they
successfully softened an earlier Russian draft that was even tougher
on Georgia. To many Georgians, however, the U.N. episode was a splash
of cold water, a reminder that loose cash and looser talk on the
American side has done little more than fuel reckless behavior by
Georgia’s leader.

If Saakashvili gets the war with Russia he has sometimes appeared to
seek, it is the people of his country who will pay the price. But,
far away from the fighting, the United States will bear a large part
of the blame.

Jon Sawyer is director of the Washington-based Pulitzer Center on
Crisis Reporting. He traveled to Georgia and other South Caucasus
countries this summer.

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