Llewellyn
King
Read Llewellyn's bio and previous columns
August 25, 2008
Mysterious Georgia; and
Russia: The Bad Neighbor
Georgia on my mind.
I
was struck when I arrived in Tbilisi a few years ago, in the early hours
of the morning, that the lights were blazing in dozens of stands that
dotted the road from the airport to the city. This gave the impression
that Georgia was booming – that the economy was vibrant and the people
were entrepreneurial.
The next day, I learned that nothing in the small and ancient country of
Georgia is quite the way it seems. A year after my visit a colleague
from The Washington Times, Joseph Curl, also mistook the
appearance of prosperity for the real thing.
The fact is that lights blaze night and day in Tbilisi because the good
business people steal their electricity. Every one of the road stands is
located next to a power line, and there is no attempt to hide the
illegal connections. No wonder the lights stay on all night – no
switches.
Georgia, like its bullying neighbor Russia, has fostered a
strange indifference to law. It goes like this: Laws are for the people
who make laws, not for the rest of us. We just have to do the best we
can.
In
few countries have I felt more isolated by language than in Georgia. In
most countries at street level – hotels, restaurants and taxis – someone
speaks English. Not so in Tbilisi. The first language, of course, is
Georgian, and the second is Russian. Happily, I was traveling with
another journalist who spoke excellent Russian. Otherwise, like so many,
I would have been confined to the international hotel where English was
spoken.
Our first order of business was to get press passes at the information
ministry. We were registered, photographed, paid a fee and were issued
press passes by an engaging young woman. My colleague, Nathan Hodge,
elicited that our friendly registrar was going to a rock concert where
the tickets would cost about $150. We calculated that this would be many
times her weekly salary and were perplexed. Georgians are poor and
government workers are not well paid. A role in the black economy? A
rich lover?
Much in Georgia is unexplained. Since the Russian tanks rolled into
South Ossetia, one of those unexplained issues is how the government of
Mikheil Saakashvili thought it could taunt Russia, when it knew that
Russia has been paranoid about its borders throughout its history. That
paranoia was exacerbated by the West's quick recognition of Kosovo and
the loss of face by Serbia, a Russian Slavic ally.
Russia was poised to invade and the Georgian president lit
the fuse when he sent Georgian troops to reclaim South Ossetia. Justice
may have been on Saakashvili's side, but realpolitik was not.
While Russia feels surrounded by American surrogates in the colors of
NATO, it is going to bully where it can and use its energy superiority
to try to separate Europe from the United States. Europe is 50 percent
dependent on gas from Russia. Watch for European indignation to subside
as winter approaches.
There is a precedent for Russia annexing chunks of its neighbors and
getting away with it. Remember what happened to Finland during World War
II. With the spread of mechanized warfare, Russia felt its crown jewel
of a city, St. Petersburg, lying a few kilometers from the Finnish
border, was vulnerable. So they began a land grab for about one-tenth of
Finland, known as Karelia. This was to be a buffer zone.
After the bitterly fought Winter War of 1940, in a lopsided peace,
Russia grabbed Karelia, including the second-largest Finnish city and
most of its industrial infrastructure. Twelve percent of the Finnish
population had to be resettled. It was a great blow to the Finns, and is
remembered painfully today.
Neither candidate for the American presidency has any idea what to do
about Russia. It is not an economic colossus. If it were not for energy,
it would be sick indeed. It is not a competitive manufacturer in
anything except vodka and nuclear power plants. It has not been able to
divert its oil wealth for the betterment of its rural towns and
villages, and its population of 142 million is declining rapidly.
But Russia is armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons and is our partner
in some things that work well, like weapons decommissioning and the
International Space Station. John McCain has proposed throwing the
Russians out of the G-8. To what end? It has no real role in that group.
Barack Obama would talk to them more. No one has courted the Russians
more assiduously than George W. Bush or been as thoroughly rebuffed.
The Russian enigma will be with us a long time. As for the enigma of the
Tbilisi rock concert ticket-holder, I think she was making money selling
press passes to gullible American journalists who did not need them.
© 2008 North Star
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