Georgia's Political Theater

...It is perhaps not surprising that the art of compromise has not found fertile ground in a nation where a simple greeting—gamer jova—literally means "I wish you victory...

...as the saying goes, even paranoids have enemies...

...Opponents were systematically harassed—and some jailed, including Georgi Chanturia, head of the National Democratic party, and Dzhaba Ioseliani, chief of the Mkhedrioni ("Horsemen"), a paramilitary group that was originally allied with Gamsakhurdia's Round Table...

...34 The American Spectator March 1992...

...He was clearly not a pacifist...

...Gamsakhurdia's autocratic tendencies were in evidence well before he was elected Georgia's president...

...He came upon the world with the mark of brilliance," wrote Gamsakhurdia's culture minister in a progovernment newspaper last June...

...Stories circulating around Georgia suggest that he also has a corpse or two in his past...

...Gamsakhurdia's friends and relatives expressed doubts that the confession was voluntary, and were quoted to that effect by the New York Times and "Zviad Gamsakhurdia is destined to lead Georgia along the path to true freedom...

...As Georgia's leader, Gamsakhurdia soon began to display the Larouche-like paranoia for which he has become famous...

...In his early twenties, Ioseliani committed several armed robberies, during one of which he reportedly tore the earrings off a woman's ears...

...Ossetian leaders claim that the Georgians committed atrocities in the ensuing violence...

...A second version involves a vendetta: after a friend of his was murdered, Kitovani ran over the killer—back and forth, to make sure the job was thorough...

...The Initiative Group wrote about the plight of the Meskhetians, a southern Georgian ethnic group that had converted to Islam under Turkish rule and was deported to Central Asia and elsewhere by Stalin in 1944...

...In April 1977, however, real trouble found Gamsakhurdia, when he and Merab Kostava were arrested for "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda...

...This should not be seen as a reflection on Georgians as a whole: their hospitality is renowned, and among them are many savvy businessmen and impressive intellectuals and artists...

...A caravan of thousands of Georgians, reportedly led by Gamsakhurdia, descended on Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital...

...Yet his first job, apparently, was as a criminal...

...Nationalist sentiment was galvanized, and Gamsakhurdia's Helsinki group, renamed the Helsinki Union, was able to forge alliances and outmaneuver other pro-independence groups like the National Democratic Front and the National Independence party...

...politics in post-Soviet Georgia is a contact sport, more often than not marked by an exchange of mortar fire in the fourth quarter...

...While no one implicates Gamsakhurdia, Alexeyeva recalls that he welcomed the attacks...

...Their origin is indeed Ibero-Caucasian," he states in The Spiritual Mission of Georgia, "and had they knowledge of their descent they might never have started such conflicts with their kindred nation...

...In the summer of 1989, following pogroms against Meskhetians in Uzbekistan, Georgia's Communist government indicated it would be willing to allow the Muslim minority to return home...

...I think the hand of Providence can be seen in this...

...her husband died of either suffocation or a heart attack after being gagged...

...As a result, his "Round Table" 32 The American Spectator March 1992 coalition gained control of the parliament...

...But by the mid-1980s, the leaders of the Georgian national movement decided to put aside personal and ideological differences and accept Zviad back into the fold...

...He is called to it by his origins, his genes, his career, his entire life...

...In a tactical blunder, these groups chose not to run candidates in the 1990 elections to the Supreme Soviet, arguing that it was an illegitimate body imposed by Moscow...

...Gamsakhurdia, whose group had taken up the Meskhetians' plight back in 1976, helped organize protest demonstrations around the theme of "Georgia for Georgians...

...Today, Georgian politics is dominated by gangster intellectuals—theater critics with guns...

...An admirer of Francisco Franco, Ioseliani formed the Mkhedrioni in 1989...

...Some observers paint Archvadze as the real hard-liner—a Caucasian blend of Elena Ceausescu and Eva Peron—who counseled her husband to show the opposition no mercy...

...Last May, he won the presidency with 87 percent of the vote...

...Gamsakhurdia even approached a Western government about financing and arms...

...If so, the advice worked...

...Zviad Gamsakhurdia is destined to lead Georgia along the path to true freedom...

...Baltimore Sun...

...According to one account, while ferrying his brother—who was on the run after murdering someone—into hiding, Kitovani drove his car over several people leaving a wedding...

...It is a heavy thing to see a man broken...

...Early last year, one of the leaders of Pamyat, the ultra-nationalist and anti-Semitic Russian group, showed up in Tskhinvali to declare his support for the Ossetians...

...Gamsakhurdia's reputation suffered as a result...

...reputation of a Nicolae Ceausescu...

...In any event, things worked out rather well for Gamsakhurdia: he was released a year later, while Kostava remained in prison until May 1987...

...There is also little doubt that prior to the coup the KGB was busy trying to foment ethnic turmoil in Georgia...

...On the face of it, it is hard to understand why a philologist and former dissident, who was once nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize by the U.S...

...These proto-Iberians, who settled in the Caucasus and the Pyrenees, were "Jupiter's race," "the Japhetic race"—i.e., the original white race...

...they refused to issue a retraction...

...Zviad's father at that time told Khrushchev that if they received a severe jail sentence or were sentenced to death, then he, Konstantin, would commit suicide...

...The tragedy of Georgia, the land that produced J. V. Dzhugashvili, is perhaps best summed up by an émigré: "In Georgia, good people don't go into politics...

...His 1990 book, The Spiritual Mission of Georgia, a compilation of The American Spectator March 1992 33 lectures and essays, puts forth the theory that the Georgians are descended from a "proto-Iberian" people driven out of Europe, Asia Minor, and India by the spiritually and culturally inferior Indo-Europeans...

...Nonetheless, a significant portion of the blame for the bad blood between Georgia and its minorities can be traced to Gamsakhurdia's views on ethnicity...

...The center of Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, lies in ruins following a two-week shootout between gunmen loyal to Zviad Gamsakhurdia, the popularly elected autocrat, and his opponents...

...It is hard for us to imagine the pressure and the isolation he faced, but the amazing thing is that people do stand up to such pressure...

...In Gamsakhurdia's version, as told to Komsomolskaya Pravda last year, he and his comrades were saved by "the efforts of Georgian writers and scholars"—no mention of his dad...

...On September 2, Gamsakhurdia's militia shot at a crowd of unarmed protesters...

...Violence between Ossetians and Georgians left 250 dead last year, and well over 50,000 South Ossetians have fled into North Ossetia...

...He denounced his political opponents as "hooligans" and "degenerate representatives of the intelligentsia" (not entirely false), as "agents of the Kremlin," "agents of the center," as pawns of Communists, neo-Nazis, and—his favorite—Eduard Shevardnadze...

...The South Ossetian Popular Front, which includes paramilitary formations, maintained close links with Soviet hard-liners like Col...

...In various interviews, he described the group as a "peace corps" established to "work for political and national accord for progressive reforms in Georgia and to avert ethnic conflicts," to help out in natural disasters or, if necessary, "to defend Georgia from anarchy and defend our borders...

...yet Gamsakhurdia left no one with the impression that he was the next Sakharov...

...0 Today, Georgian politics is dominated by gangster intellectuals—theater critics with guns...

...The volume includes an exegesis of Praise and Glorification of the Georgian Language, a work ascribed to loaneZosime, a tenth-century Georgian monk...

...Gamsakhurdia and Kostava untary...

...From his new base in Mingrelia, the western region that is the home of his ancestors, Gamsakhurdia is vowing to usurp the usurpers, and gathering armed supporters for a march on the capital...

...That`Gamsalchurdia did not is his misfortune, his tragedy, his guilt...

...Gamsakhurdia said last year that the protests arose "out of a sense of national pride," not support for Stalinism...

...The two journalists were found guilty and fined...

...In December, however, he let the cat out of the bag, declaring that "in Georgia there is no room for opposition, so let [the opposition] get out and join those on whose payroll it is...

...Initially, Gamsakhurdia's response to mounting criticism from abroad was to cry "conspiracy,"and to insist that Georgia is a model democracy...

...He even offered a unit of Mkhedrioni to the Allied forces during Operation Desert Storm...

...The broadcast had all the earmarks of a KGB editing job...

...In 1976, there were three bombings in Georgia, one of them near Tbilisi's Government Hall...

...A year later Gamsakhurdia's allegations were substantiated when police officials in Georgia went on trial for such abuses...

...People just dreaded their appearance...

...Following a prison term in the Solovki Islands—Lenin's Gulag—during the 1920s, Konstantin Gamsakhurdia, Georgia's greatest twentieth-century novelist, was rehabilitated...

...In June 1990 he called mixed marriages "fatal to the Georgian family and the Georgian language," and suggested that they would be banned in an independent Georgia...

...In January, the two were trying to win legitimacy in Georgia and support in the West by promising to cede power to a civilian government "in about a month...

...Since Gamsakhurdia's flight from the besieged parliament building on January 6, Ioseliani's men have been on Tbilisi's streets, enforcing the Military Council's state of emergency...

...Like the Soviet authorities after the massacre in Vilnius a year ago, the president claimed the demonstrators fired first...

...Both denied having any long-term political ambitions...

...People like Orlov, Kostava...

...A group of fanatical female supporters known as the "tent ladies" camped outside the parliament building in Tbilisi, regularly haranguing and even attacking opposition legislators...

...They are blamed for shooting into crowds during two pro-Gamsakhurdia rallies in January...

...I think the hand of Providence can be seen in this...

...One of his contributions detailed the use of torture on people arrested for "economic crimes...

...But when Soviet television then brought correspondents Craig Whitney and Harold Piper for slander before the Moscow City Court in July 1978, Gamsakhurdia, appearing as a prosecution witness, said his confession had been volAlexeyeva believes that Gamsakhurdia felt protected from persecution by his father's reputation...

...For exposing corruption among the Orthodox hierarchy and the republic's officialdom, Paylodze was arrested for "anti-Soviet slander" and sentenced to one-and-a-half years in a labor camp...

...Fortunately there were no victims, but there were several explosions, and he was very impressed—he liked it...

...The two finally went on trial in May 1978, the same week that Yuri Orlov, founder of the Moscow Helsinki chapter, was tried and sentenced to seven years in a labor camp...

...He also fingered Igor Belousovich of the U.S...

...In April 1989, he helped organize the huge pro-independence rally that was brutally crushed by the Red Army...

...He is called to it by his origins, his genes, his career, his entire life...

...ndeed, there is a lack of quality leadership in the former Soviet republic...

...The day of his conviction, Gamsakhurdia appeared on Soviet television and said he was guilty of "slanderous inventions" against the state, adding: "My activity in disseminating anti-Soviet literature did great harm to our country...

...Victor Alksnis, at least prior to the failed August 19 coup...

...Gamsakhurdia is not the only Georgian politician given to strong-armed tactics and wacky ideas...

...What Gamsakhurdia has since said, and what his wife told me when I spoke to her three years ago," says Elizabeth Fuller, "is that Gamsakhurdia and Kostava had decided, before they were ever arrested, that one of them would repent and get the shortest possible sentence, so that that one would go back to Georgia and be the nucleus, the focus, of Georgian dissent...

...Then there is Tengiz Kitovani, Gamsakhurdia's former national guard chief...

...In November 1989, the inhabitants of South Ossetia, an autonomous region inside Georgia, demanded reunification with their Persian Muslim brethren across the border in North Ossetia, part of the Russian republic...

...Gamsakhurdia has stated that the Ossetians have no Gamsakhurdia's...

...and Tengiz Kitovani, chief of the Georgian national guard, who broke with Gamsakhurdia last August...

...The man was arrested, and Gamsakhurdia defended him, calling him a Georgian hero...

...He was sort of burning with strange passions," says one Westerner who knew him in the 1970s...

...In 1974, Gamsakhurdia helped start up Georgia's first human rights monitoring group dubbed the Initiative Group, after the Moscow organization of the same name—along with music scholar Merab Kostava and Valentina Paylodze, the choirmaster in Tbilisi's main Georgian Orthodox church...

...Ioseliani, 65, a doctor of philology known in Georgia as a playwright and theater critic, has a résumé similar toplete lawlessness...

...On the other hand, his criticisms of the Abkhazians, a Muslim ethnic group that has also been calling for secession (there were bloody clashes with Georgians in 1989), have been made more in sorrow than in anger...

...A cult of personality, weirdly reminiscent of the one that surrounded another Georgian-born leader, soon emerged...

...It was comright to autonomy in Georgia because they are "newcomers from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries...

...Yet some Georgians charge that this group of young Christian warriors (it numbers from 1,000 to 5,000, depending on the estimate) have behaved more like a Lebanese militia than a civic group...

...Five people were killed...

...Gamsakhurdia's populism went down well with the masses, particularly in the countryside...

...Gamsakhurdia's hatred of the former Soviet foreign minister is perhaps understandable, given the torture Georgian political prisoners suffered while Shevardnadze was Georgia's interior minister...

...They literally taxed people in the rural areas—a certain amount of meat, a certain amount of grain—in the name of supplying 'the guardians of Georgian borders' with food...

...Following the broadcast, Sakharov was tactfully critical: "I feel great disappointment...

...Yet to some degree the crackdown had more bark than bite: as the confrontation escalated last summer, most opposition newspapers remained open, and government opponents virtually took over Rustaveli Avenue, Tbilisi's main drag...

...Speaking of those passions, Alexeyeva says: "He wasn't a human rights activist—he was a nationalist from the beginning...

...Through samizdat, the group protested state interference in church affairs, as well as the Soviet army's use of the site of an old monastery for artillery practice...

...Meanwhile, the new rulers, who insist their insurrection was a popular one, have demonstrated their commitment to democracy by gunning down unarmed demonstrators...

...It must be said that most Georgians, Gamsakhurdia supporters and opponents alike, feel that South Ossetia was unfairly carved out of Georgia by the Bolsheviks in 1921, the year Georgia's short-lived independence was crushed...

...These theories have guided at least part of his politics...

...The request was denied.were found guilty and given three years' hard labor...

...They would just steal cars they liked, and it was declared that it was a requisition in the name of national defense," says an émigré who maintains contacts with both sides of the conflict...

...Ioseliani and his droogs were later busted for bank robbery, and he served fifteen years in prison...

...that the Georgian nation and its language, adorned and blessed in the name of the Lord, is a Lazarus among the nations and languages, four days (i.e., 4,000 years) dead, humbled and rejected, which must bear an unprecedented testimony to Christ, will rise in the future, regain its universal position as mankind's spiritual teacher, and at the Second Coming of Christ will become exposer of sinful humanity...

...He was no ordinary man...

...Gamsakhurdia writes: loane-Zosime explained explicitly...

...In late 1989, the Georgian government abolished South Ossetia's autonomous status and imposed a blockade...

...Last fall, the confrontation became more violent...

...In January 1977, Gamsakhurdia and Merab Kostava helped The American Spectator March 1992 31 form the Georgian Helsinki Watch Group, once again following the lead of the Moscow dissidents like Yuri Orlov, Andrei Amairik, and Andrei Sakharov...

...He and half a dozen other lads founded what was for all intents a secret political society calling for Georgia to secede from the Soviet Union and become a free country," says Elizabeth Fuller, an analyst with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty...

...The new regime is certainly not dominated by civil libertarians...

...Several days later, he stripped a group of opposition parliamentary deputies of its powers...

...It was later discovered that the bombings had been done by a single person, not an organization...

...In an interview with the Moscow weekly Megapolis-Express, Ioseliani admitted only that his men "expropriate ill-gotten money from underground millionaires" to buy weapons...

...Embassy in Moscow, Al Friendly of Newsweek, and David K. Shipler of the Washington Post, saying they had provided him with anti-Soviet literature...

...They printed leaflets, and inevitably they were all rounded up by the KGB...

...While provisional prime minister Tengiz Sigua, who resigned as Gamsakhurdia's prime minister last August, is by all accounts a reasonable—if undistinguished—pol, the real power is in the hands of a military council led by a real pair of deuces: the aforementioned Dzhaba Ioseliani, a Bashir Gemayel wannabe who heads the Mkhedrioni paramilitary group...

...The Helsinki Union issued a document stating that the Meskhetians should be allowed to return to Georgia only if they dropped their Turkish names for Georgian ones and converted to Christianity...

...They denounced Gamsakhurdia as "Ceausescu" and "Saddam Hussein," and even suggested that he fly to Cuba and join Fidel...

...Under his leadership, the Helsinki Union, his erstwhile human rights group, mutated into a Georgian chauvinist organization...

...It was Gamsakhurdia Sr.'s intercession with the authorities that got his son off the hook in 1956, when Zvi-ad, age 17, was arrested for nationalist agitation during Georgian student protests against Khrushchev's de-Stalinization...

...Congress, would end up with the Jonas Bernstein covers post-Soviet affairs for Insight...

...Khrushchev backed off and they got a jail sentence of only a few months...

...I received information from Gamsakhurdia on several occasions," recalls dissident historian Ludmilla Alexeyeva, who at that time worked for Moscow's samizdat Chronicle of Current Events...

...The contest has gone into overtime: Zviady, as his supporters like to call him (it means "proud, overbearing, arrogant"), has returned to Georgia following a brief exile in neighboring Armenia...

...The women—also referred to as the "Black Pantyhose," a mocking reference to the feared Soviet "Black Beret" militia—were reportedly organized by Manana Archvadze, Gamsakhurdia's wife...

...The information was so horrific that Alexeyeva and other human rights activists did not believe it and did not use it...