"Georgia On Their Mind"

John Laughland, The Guardian

In 1918, when Lord Balfour was foreign secretary, he said: "The only thing which interests me in the Caucasus is the railway line which delivers oil from Baku to Batumi. The natives can cut each other to pieces for all I care." Little has changed in world geopolitics since the end of the first world war, when the Black Sea port of Batumi in Georgia was briefly under British rule. Although an oil pipeline from Baku to the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan in Turkey is planned, it will take years to complete. When it is built, it will deliver oil exclusively to the American market, but for the time being Caspian oil still trundles across the Caucasus to Batumi in trains.This is why, in Sunday's partial rerun of last November's parliamentary elections, the world's media concentrated exclusively on the prickly relations between the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, and the autonomous region of Adjara, of which Batumi is the capital. This is in spite of the fact that Adjara, unlike Abkhazia and South Ossetia, has never declared independence from Georgia. The standard-issue media fairy-tale pits a democratically elected Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili — who overthrew his predecessor Edward Shevardnadze in a US-backed coup last November — opposing an authoritarian regional leader in Adjara, Aslan Abashidze.

This is not how the Georgians see things. In an interview with a Dutch magazine, Sandra Roelofs, the Dutch wife of the new Georgian president and hence the new first lady of Georgia, explained that her husband aspires to follow in the long tradition of strong Georgian leaders "like Stalin and Beria". Saakashvili started his march on Tbilisi last November with a rally in front of the statue of Stalin in his birthplace, Gori. Unfazed, the western media continue to chatter about Saakashvili's democratic credentials, even though his seizure of power was consolidated with more than 95% of the vote in a poll in January, and even though he said last week that he did not see the point of having any opposition deputies in the national parliament.

In Sunday's vote — for which final results are mysteriously still unavailable — the government appears to have won nearly every seat. Georgia is now effectively a one-party state, and Saakashvili has even adopted his party flag as the national flag.

New world order enthusiasts have praised the nightly displays on Georgian television of people being arrested and bundled off to prison in handcuffs. The politics of envy and fear combine in an echo of 1930s Moscow, as Saakashvili's anti-corruption campaign, egged on by the west, allows the biggest gangsters in this gangster state to eliminate their rivals.

History is repeating itself: it was on the back of an anti-corruption campaign that Shevardnadze became first secretary of the Communist party in Georgia in 1972. Following his stint as foreign minister of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev, he returned to his former fiefdom, which he ran as a brutal dictator from 1992 to 2003. He was as assiduously lauded by the west then as his protege and successor is now.

And as for the operetta "revolution" staged against Shevardnadze's regime last November, it has allowed a changing of the guard within an unchanged power structure. Not only was Saakashvili minister of justice under Shevardnadze, but the thuggish Zurab Zhvania, the prime minister, had the same job under Shevardnadze, during which the worst abuses of power (now denounced) occurred. The head of national security is the same, and all the members of the former president's party have converted to the new president's party. Shevardnadze's old party has disappeared.

That November's "revolution of roses" was stage-managed by the Americans has been admitted even by the new president himself, who has said that his coup could not have succeeded without US help. Abashidze also confirmed it on Saturday in Batumi, when he said that his discussions with the American ambassador to Georgia, Richard Miles, had convinced him that nothing can happen in the country without a green light from Washington. Georgia, Russia's backyard, and the country used as a base by the Chechens, is now as thoroughly controlled by the US as Panama — and for much the same reasons. As in Central America, economic devastation has been the handmaiden of political control, reducing what was previously the richest Soviet republic to a miserable, pre-industrial subsistence.

As we know from Tony Blair's visit to Libya, the west is happy to make alliances with dictatorships if strategic interests dictate. Georgia certainly qualifies on that score. And events in the Caucasus are connected to events in Iraq. Because of the intensity of Iraqi resistance to US and British occupation, oil is not flowing from there as freely as had been hoped. Hence the imperative quickly to secure other sources of cheap fuel for America's gas-guzzlers. In Libya as in Georgia, western support for dictators, in the name of strategy, may be the oldest trick in the book. But it is also the most short-sighted.

[John Laughland is a trustee of the British Helsinki Human Rights Group — BHHRG