The National Interest
Summer 2001

Potemkin Democracy

by Charles King

 

. . .Like all its neighbors from the south Balkans to the south Caucasus to Central Asia, Georgia is a chronically weak state. In a region of only minimally successful countries, however, the Georgian case is particularly dire, even compared to its immediate neighbors, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Indeed, it is worth asking whether a state called "Georgia" even exists today in any meaningful sense.

Some 20 percent of the country's territory is either wholly outside the control of the recognized government or is only tenuously connected to it. After winning secessionist wars in the early 1990s, Abkhazia and South Ossetia are de facto independent states with their own armies, customs posts, flags, currencies (the Russian ruble) and school systems. Neither considers itself to be in the same time zone as the rest of Georgia; because of their strong political connections with Russia, locals set their clocks on Moscow time, an hour behind Tbilisi's. Travel between Tbilisi and Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital, is relatively easy, if one can push through the crowds of smugglers selling contraband petroleum products, wheat flour and cigarettes imported from the Russian Federation. Traveling in Abkhazia, however, is still dangerous, so much so that the U.S. government now forbids its two soldiers working with the United Nations mission in Georgia to go anywhere near the security zone separating Georgian and Abkhaz forces.

Achara, while still officially committed to existence inside a unified Georgia, has little real connection to the center. The region's population is linguistically Georgian, although many inhabitants are Muslim rather than Orthodox Christian. The region does send deputies to the parliament in Tbilisi but, in practical terms, Achara is controlled by one man, Abashidze. He and his extended family have enriched themselves by controlling the border trade with Turkey, where illegal commerce in hazelnuts, cigarettes, alcohol and women is rife. So profitable has Abashidze's fiefdom become that it even attracted the attention of Hillary Clinton's brothers, Hugh and Tony Rodham, who signed a hazelnut export deal with Abashidze in 1999, before being dissuaded from going through with it by the Clinton administration.

In Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Achara, state structures exist that are, more or less, independent of the Georgian center. But plenty of other regions of Georgia are only theoretically part of a single state. The country's main north-south artery, the Georgian Military Highway, is no more than a wagon trail for much of its length, becoming impassable in the winter snows and the spring thaw. For most Georgians outside Tbilisi and a few other urban centers, the only interaction with the Georgian state is through a corrupt traffic policeman, waving down cars loaded with produce to extort a few lari in "fines." So accustomed have average Georgians become to the predatory state that they either voluntarily pull over and drop a few bills in the police coffer or speed past the roadblock, hoping that the officers will think that only someone too important to be swindled would dare rush through without stopping. In Georgia, flouting the law has become a hedge against being cheated by it. . .