The revolution is proving thorny for one leader who says recent elections were rigged. David Shanks reports
When the Yakovlev 42D plane carrying the Western press pack landed at Batumi airport, the head of the autonomous Georgian republic of Adjara was waiting to greet us. He shook hands with each of the two dozen journalists who had come to observe recent national elections, apart from me. I got an emotional hug. What had I done to deserve this?
I had written a piece suggesting that whether or not Aslan Abashidze is a tinpot dictator who runs the little Ruritanian republic as his personal fiefdom, his greatest enemy, the new president of Georgia, is not above criticism either. "Babu" (grandfather, as Abashidze's followers call him) was overcome with gratitude that someone in the West had voiced a critical thought about Mikhail Saakashvili, the US-backed and educated leader of last November's "rose revolution" that toppled Eduard Shevardnadze and who would now dearly like to topple Babu, too.
Georgia's stipulation that a party has to poll 7 per cent of the national vote to get a seat in parliament has since left Saakashvili running a country that has virtually no opposition. Indeed he has said he does not really see the point of opposition. His Dutch wife has said that he aspires to follow Georgia's tradition of strong leaders "like Stalin and Beria". Saakashvili's National Movement flag is now officially Georgia's.
Abashidze's Revival party, with 6 per cent, got none of the available 150 seats, while Saakashvili's party came out with over 67 per cent. Only one other party, the New Rightists-Industrialists alliance, with 7.6 per cent, won seats.
So after an election validated by the Council of Europe and OSCE, post-communist Georgia is destined for near one-party rule again.
Abashidze has cried foul, saying the National Movement rigged it by buying votes and that intimidation forced his party to close many of its regional party offices. He has threatened to hold a referendum to show he is still popular. Saakashvili says that would be illegal.
A short registration period - as little as a week in some cases - meant many did not bother to vote, Abashidze says. In one case, 1006 voters out of a list of 1,300 were struck off, according to observers, who said "systematic obstructions were a major alienation of the right to vote". The National Movement dominated many local electoral committees. There are even unconfirmable claims that money was paid out of car boots.
Abashidze complained of misinformation by pro-Saakashvili media. There was some evidence of that. And he claims Saakashvili abused the constitution by excluding many voters on grounds of mental incapacity.
Campaigning was overshadowed by a stand-off between the central government and Adjara, which may well yet become a civil war. When Saakashvili appeared unannounced at the border with a heavily armed escort, Abashidze's guards turned him away, accusing him of trying to stage an "invasion".
Saakashvili threatened to shoot down Abashidze's plane as it returned from a "help me" mission to Moscow, where he has friends in high places, and may well end up in exile. Saakashvili blockaded Adjara, froze its leaders' bank accounts, and cancelled their diplomatic passports. Georgia's impetuous new president regularly characterises Abashidze as a feudal lord from the Middle Ages. Yet, whatever Abashidze's faults, he is a popularly elected leader.
The case against Abashidze is that he rules Adjara with a firm hand, and with his own army, has more than a finger in local business pies, and fails to hand over enough of Adjara's earnings from its Western European-financed oil terminal at its (natural deep water) port capital of Batumi. Significantly, a planned American-financed oil pipeline from Azerbaijan through Georgia avoids Adjara.
Abashidze denies the charge about revenues, saying Adjara has not seen a cent of Western aid billions to the new government. But in this basket case of a country George Soros heavily subsidises the salaries of Saakashvili and his ministers. Saakashvili includes Abashidze in his strident campaign against Georgia's endemic corruption and nepotism, which Babu says is just a stick to beat opposition. But Reporters Without Borders has reported five journalists have recently been assaulted, one of them badly while on a corruption investigation.
On the positive side Abashidze's rule has meant a slightly better lot for his poor people, stability and relative peace for the past 13 years, in contrast to the rest of Georgia, which has been at war with its two other autonomous republics, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. They are virtually independent, buffered by Russian "peacekeepers".
Breaking Adjara could be Saakashvili's key to a united Georgia. At the weekend he declared the people's "honour and dignity" was being "flouted by all kinds of separatists, enemies and dwarves". Babu denies being a separatist, casting himself as a Georgian patriot.
This was my second visit in a month, at the invitation of Abashidze. The first time our group of Western journalists was told a military train was ready to come and sort out Adjara. It never arrived. This time Babu cried wolf again, making me think at first he is losing it under the strain of this confrontation. He told us of tanks and troops massing at Poti, 60km along the Black Sea coast in greater Georgia, and suggested that we, his "shield" of almost 40 Western journalists and election observers, go there to expose this aggression to the world.
It turned out to be a sleepy town indeed, where the only military activity was unarmed soldiery voting. Several of us went to its barracks, where not even a military tyre track could be seen. Abashidze said, implausibly, the force had been moved overnight.
Commander Bakradze, chief of staff at Georgia's naval headquarters, from where Batumi's shipping had been blockaded, genuinely thought it was a joke. "When people get old they say things," he said. Abashidze is 65.
But since then Saakashvili has ordered his army to "be ready to land in any area of Georgia where separatist tendencies appear" and his government claimed at the weekend it had uncovered an Adjaran plot to assassinate him.