BACK TO NORMAL, UNFORTUNATELY

Noel Malcolm says that Eduard

Shevardnadze's return to power in Georgia is good news for criminals and communists

Tbilisi ANYONE WALKING through the centre of the Georgian capital might think he had wandered into a war zone. On Rustaveli Avenue, the grandest street of the city, a row of monumental buildings stands gut- ted and bullet-riddled. This is where the fervent anti-communist and elected Presi- dent of Georgia, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, made his last stand in January of this year, before being driven out of the country by a combination of a private paramilitary force and a rebellious fraction of his own National Guard.

Today, crowds of Georgians stroll past these shattered buildings without even looking at them; the shops are open, a warm autumn sun is shining, and life, it seems, is normal once more. God is in his heaven, and Mr Eduard Shevardnadze, victorious in Sunday's Georgian election, is back in power in Tbilisi.

Not everything is as normal as it seems, however, and not everything even seems entirely normal. Groups of men in an assortment of makeshift uniforms lounge at street corners with kalashnikovs over their shoulders. After dark, military check- points block the entrances to the city and armoured cars patrol the deserted streets; sleep is interrupted by the occasional rat- tle of gunfire. These shootings are never reported or explained, except with the vague phrase that 'Georgia is at war'.

There is a war, of course — an official one — against ethnic separatists in the north-western province of Abkhazia, 200 miles away. But there is also an unde- clared civil war, of Georgians against Georgians, which is still claiming many lives in the western coastal region of the country. This is the war against the `Zviadists', the followers of Zviad Gam- sakhurdia. According to the Georgian gov- ernment, they are `extremists' and 'terrorists'. According to them, they are the supporters of a democratically elected President who was thrown out of power by a military putsch. Gamsakhurdia received 87 per cent of the vote in the May 1991 'I suppose as a last resort we could get married and let those people sort us out.'

election. During his months in power, his haughty and erratic style of government may have alienated many of his supporters

(though not as much as he alienated the communist nomenklatura and intelli-

gentsia, with whom his relations were dis- tant and frosty). His opponents denounced him as a `dictator'. There was a process of impeachment provided for in the Georgian constitution; but they chose not to use it. They used machine-guns, artillery and tanks instead.

'Treason doth never prosper; what's the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.' To begin with, many ordinary Georgians did dare to call what had hap- pened an act of treason, and some of them paid for this imprudence with their lives. Public demonstrations in the streets of Tbilisi in January and February were bro- ken up with machine-gun fire: on one such occasion (2 February) 23 people were killed and 182 were wounded. More than 200 journalists, members of parliament and academics were arrested and detained for varying lengths of time without trial; some are known to have been tortured.

One journalist, Anna Chavchavadze, told me how she had been arrested for publish-

ing an article defending Gamsakhurdia. Six

plain-clothes men with machine-guns seized her at a friend's home, and then

went to her house, where they confiscated

copies of her appeals to international human rights groups. She was then taken

to the State Council building, where she was interrogated for six hours and told to sign a confession stating that she had been gathering weapons for terrorist attacks: when she refused, she was beaten and threatened with rape. Her newspaper has

been closed down, and the only other opposition newspaper has been raided four times by men with crow-bars, who ran- sacked its files and wrecked all its equiP- ment.

These methods did not come as a sur- prise to anyone who knew either the com- munist background of many members a

the new `Council of State', or the personal history of the strongman of the new goy' ernment, Djaba Ioseliani. Mr Ioseliani had a colourful career. Now deputy chair- man of the Georgian government, he has the strongest personal power-base of anY politician in the country, since he founded and still commands the paramilitary force

(the Mkhedrioni, or `Knights') which helped to overthrow President Gamsakhur- dia. Before he turned to raising a private army, he had a successful career as a the atre director. And before that, he had3, rather unsuccessful career as a criminal specialising in bank robbery — unsuccess-. ful, that is, because he was arrested and served 17 years in prison. Mr Ioseliani's supporters like to describ.e him as a former `political prisoner', an his personal election posters display his prison mugshot as if it were a badge of honour. But when I met him at his military head-

quarters in Abkhazia (where he is direct- ing Mkhedrioni activities against the sepa- ratists) and asked him to describe the reason for his imprisonment, he became strangely coy, and said it had all happened a long time ago when he was a young man. Coincidentally, some of the young Mkhedrioni toughs who were with him also had Soviet prison identity numbers tattooed on their hands. No doubt many members of this private army (which has now been given quasi-official status under the quaint title of the 'Rescuers' Force') are students and other young idealists who only want to serve their country. But some members are all too visibly the sort of men who would otherwise, one feels, be gainful- ly but not legally employed. Critics of the Mkhedrioni say that the movement — which receives no financial support from the state — is partly funded by organised crime.

Mr Ioseliani may be a criminal, but he is not a fool. Together with his fellow-organ- isers of the coup against Gamsakhurdia, he knew that it was not enough for them just to gain power: they also had to gain respectability. This they achieved two months after the coup by the simple device of inviting Eduard Shevardnadze to return to his native Georgia and act as chairman of their newly appointed State Council. All the supporters of Gamsakhurdia I have spoken to insist that the entire coup was masterminded by Shevardnadze in the first place; but no definite evidence of this has

yet been produced. What is clear is that Mr Shevardnadze had several personal friends among the old communists who helped form the State Council after the coup. The official invitation to return to Georgia came from a political grouping called the Democratic Union, which con- sists of former Communist Party activists.

Eduard Shevardnadze's entire career (until his appointment as Soviet foreign minister in 1985) was spent in the Geor- gian Communist Party, where he rose from a political instructor for Komsomol to minister of the interior and first secre- tary of the Georgian Central Committee. Despite his international reputation as an innovator, he is not so much a thinker as a doer of what other people think: he will ride the waves of change if others are making those changes seem necessary, but he will seldom stand out against those who surround him. 'To this day,' he says in his recently published autobiography, 'I can muster the determination to act in an uncompromising manner only after a long struggle with myself.' Ioseliani and the two other `putschise leaders, Tengiz Kitovani and Tengiz Sigua, may have been thinking of that characteristic when they installed Mr Shevardnadze as their figurehead; but, just to be on the safe side, they also gave themselves the power to veto anything he decided.

That precaution was hardly necessary. Mr Shevardnadze has done nothing to cross their wills or check their abuses of

human rights. (But that is not so surprising, since his own period as Georgian minister of the interior in the 1970s was also marked by a sudden increase in arbitratY arrests and the use of torture in detention.) What he has done is to endow the new regime with a kind of personal legitimaoY in the eyes of the world, and to persuade many ordinary Georgians that he repre- sents their only chance of stability and peace. Last Sunday's elections were designed to complete this process of legiti- mation, with a special extra ballot for the newly invented post of chairman of the par- liament — for which Mr Shevardnadze was the only candidate. No fewer than 47 par- ties took part in the elections to parlia- ment; but not a single one of them was opposed to the coup, and those few remaining opponents who called for a com- plete boycott of the elections were prompt- ly arrested. At one polling station on election day, I was talking to the local schoolmaster, a well-informed and intelligent-looking man. When I asked if he knew of any parties that could be described as 'opposition' parties, he was utterly baffled. 'Opposed to she- vardnadze,' I ventured; but this concept was almost completely beyond his grasp. I had raised a logical impossibility: it was as if I had asked him if he knew any triangles with fewer than three sides. He laughed, nervously. 'No, we have nothing like that, he said. 'All our parties are democratic now.'