Georgia on My Mind

The Jerusalem Post published an article of mine today. Space limitations meant that sections had to be cut out. The full article appears below.

News item: The president of Georgia introduced a 15-day state of emergency last week after riot troops used clubs and tear gas against opposition protesters in the capital, Tbilisi. Demonstrations were banned, as were all television news broadcasts except on state television.

Walking down the broad Rustaveli Boulevard in Georgia’s capital city of Tbilisi, I sensed a political upheaval in the winter air. Groups of energized young people were moving hurriedly and with purpose to demonstrations; there was excitement in their conversations and actions. I went back to my hotel on Freedom Square and told my partners, “I think it’s time we met with some people in the opposition.”

The incident did not take place last week. It took place four years ago, after the Georgian population rejected the results of rigged parliamentary elections. Within months, the government of President Eduard Shevardnadze would be replaced in the “Rose Revolution” with a new generation of government officials, led by the newly-elected President Mikheil Saakashvili.

In the first month of Saakashvili’s presidency my partner and I set up meetings for him with Washington opinion-makers and with the leadership of the national Jewish organizations in New York. For the next two years we worked – all pro bono -- to warn American and NATO officials of major radiological stores and conventional weapons stockpiled in Georgia that had been abandoned by the Soviet Union.

My team and I had been invited one evening to dinner in Tbilisi with the minister of defense, a tough general and veteran of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. Demonstrations were taking place a few blocks away, and I told my colleagues that I thought our dinner would be cancelled. No, the Georgian minister insisted. Throughout the sumptuous dinner, the general was taking phone calls and barking orders, which we did not understand. After one call, he sighed heavily and with tears in his eyes, he said, “I was just asked if I’ll call out the army to put down the demonstrations. I said, ‘By no means. Our army serves to protect our people, not attack them.’” The peaceful course of the Rose Revolution was set that night.

At that dinner and at subsequent ones with Georgian military officials and officers we followed Georgian customs. Throughout the multi-course dinners, toasts were made to peace, country, hosts, armies, fallen friends, wives and children, etc. Every toast by the Tamada toastmaster had to be answered, and that task usually fell to me. Not fair, I insisted. I drank only kosher wine, and while everyone toasted on the excellent (I am told) Georgian wine, I had to resort to responding with the much stronger vodka. But I persevered, not that I remembered much.

But this I do remember: in vino veritas, and my antennae were always alert for signs of anti-Semitism. There were none. Nothing, not even among the coarse and inebriated military men. In fact, when I raised my glass to toast Georgian tolerance, the comfort with which I wore my kippa throughout Georgia and the lack of anti-Semitism that I sensed, my hosts had no idea what I was talking about. They admired and respected Israel, its army and the Jewish people.

The Jewish community of Georgia has dwindled to some 10,000-15,000, with perhaps 80,000 moving to Israel in the last 25 years. But Jews of Georgia make their mark, and without much fanfare. Saakashvili’s early political ally, Prime Minister Zurab Zhvania, was Jewish. (Zhvania died under mysterious circumstances in 2005.) Saakashvili’s current Defense Minister, David Kezerashvili, lived in Israel when he was younger and speaks Hebrew.

In a meeting with the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations right after his election, President Saakashvili confided that his special appreciation for the Jewish people and his understanding of the Holocaust was conveyed to him by a law professor. Saakashvili studied law at Columbia and George Washington Universities. At the latter, he attended a seminar with Prof. Thomas Buergenthal, today a judge on the International Court of Justice. One day, Saakashvili related, Buergenthal let his hair down and spent four hours describing how he was a survivor, growing up in the Jewish ghetto of Kielce and later an inmate in the Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen concentration camps.

An American Ally

On our first visits to Georgia we always brought along a Russian translator, but suddenly, that was a thing of the past. The new ministers and officials were fluent English speakers, many educated in the West. Virtually every Georgian could speak Russian, but they wanted to speak to the West in the West’s language.

Today, Georgia seeks to become a member of NATO, much to the fury of Russia. American military personnel train the Georgian army, and, if the soldiers I saw on guard duty four years ago were a motley, rag-tag bunch, today they take pride in their spit-and-polish uniforms and demeanor. Today, 2,000 Georgian soldiers are serving in Iraq, the largest contingent after Great Britain. While other contingents are pulling out, Georgia’s may actually grow.

I visited Tbilisi two months ago after a two year hiatus. Construction is going on everywhere, the potholes on the major streets are filled, the old decrepit Ladas have been replaced by Audis and Mercedes. Much of the spiffying up was in preparation for President George Bush’s visit in 2005. But a walk a few blocks parallel to Rustaveli Boulevard showed that the potholes were still there, that tilting tenements with their cracks from a 2002 earthquake were somehow still standing, and that maybe some of the country’s new wealth still needed to trickle down some more.

Five years ago, you couldn’t drive 500 meters without a cop pulling you over for his lari payoff. One of the first steps taken by Saakashvili upon taking office was to put a stop to the police corruption. Today residents complain that the corruption may have been eradicated at the street level, but that it has grown at the upper levels of government. [The complaints echo what we hear and say in Israel.] The protests and demonstrations may be fed by legitimate complaints by impatient citizens who want their corruption-free democracy and reforms now. Or they may not.

Georgia is making nasty people unhappy

The Georgian government’s democratic, pro-American and anti-Russian policies and its anti-Jihadi military commitment make lots of nasty people unhappy, and Georgia could be a fat target on their radar screens.

Russia continues to stir up tensions, using its separatist proxies in Georgia’s regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The latest demonstrations and anti-Saakashvili protests may well have some Russian fingerprints.

Today, oil flows west from Azerbaijan through Georgia to Turkey via the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, one of the world’s longest, costliest and most vital pipelines. Several international players – states and non-states – may have an interest in stopping the BTC flow.

There is virtually no Muslim presence in Georgia, but situated between Turkey and Chechnya, Georgia has served as a transit route for al-Qaeda terrorists, according to American intelligence sources.

It is clear that the “bad guys” have a motive to undermine Georgia’s stability. The goal of my dozen visits was to make sure that they didn’t have ready access to the means.

I was first invited to Georgia to explore whether foreign funds could be found to provide security for army bases and arms depots. I crisscrossed Georgia visiting bases and arsenals. I was shocked, even terrified, to see massive amounts of bombs, missiles, mines, rockets, and shells of all types. The Soviets saw Georgia as a major forward supply area in the event of conflict with the West. But after the fall of the Soviet Union, the broken fences and minimum security meant the arsenals were one-stop shopping malls for thieves, black marketers and terrorists. Most ominous were the strewn-about shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles – “ MANPADS” -- we saw in one poorly secured base inside a major urban area. The Strella and Igla missiles were the terrorists’ wet dream and the American and Israeli security officials’ nightmare. [That’s a picture of one of my team members holding an anti-aircraft missile. If he permits me to run his full picture I will.]

The haphazard storage of weapons, some corroding, meant that chemicals were leaching into the ground and water. But there was another environmental hazard. At one base an officer admitted that in 1996 parts of his base exploded. A fire burned for several days forcing the evacuation of thousands of residents of neighboring villages. The officer was relieved that the fire and explosions didn’t spread to one area of the camp, but he wouldn’t explain further. Later, as I toured other bases I learned why: In many bases radioactive cesium-137 was stored. Why? Heaven -- and maybe old Soviets -- knows. The local Georgians didn’t. After Alazani rockets with radioactive warheads were discovered in a nearby country, I asked Georgian base commanders if they had stocks of such weapons. Yes, they responded, thousands of them. No one was interested in finding out how many had radioactive warheads. These weapons were designed to break up hail-laden clouds above agricultural areas, and some Soviet scientists believed that cobalt particles couldn’t hurt. These missiles had also been used against civilian buildings in earlier civil wars. Cobalt and cesium were perfect ingredients for terrorists’ dirty bomb.

I discovered that before I could warn the Americans and Europeans about the threats I had to first warn the new Georgian leadership themselves about the strategic and ecological timebombs in their midst. The newly elected and appointed Georgian officials with whom I met had no idea of the existence of the problems, let alone its scope. The then-Foreign Minister Salome Zourabichvili went through our photographs and wept during my briefing.

I met with U.S. military officials in Tbilisi and in the Pentagon, and showed them the condition of the depots and their contents. I briefed American and Israeli security officials. I met a dozen officials in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Nuclear Security Administration. A Washington Post correspondent followed me around and produced a lengthy expose. Congress began to show interest in funding conventional weapons reduction programs, not just the multi-billion dollar Nunn-Lugar non-conventional weaponry program.

Last year, our efforts began to pay off. A June 2006 Report to the UN Secretary General on “The Accumulation of Conventional Ammunition Stocks” includes an accounting from Georgia listing the destruction or demilitarization of SAM missiles, artillery, explosives extracted from shells and bombs, and other “combat materials.” The project, financed by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, just may make it a little more difficult for terrorists to secure weapons or for a truck bomber to blow up the BTC pipeline, particularly as Georgia enters its latest exercise in democracy.

Lenny Ben-David served as Deputy Chief of Mission in the Israeli Embassy in Washington. Today he is an international consultant.

Sphere: Related Content