On November 4, Mikhail Saakashvili, the pro-US president of the former Soviet republic of Georgia, accused Russia of fomenting mass protests against him. Saakashvili's remarks were his first response to three days of protests in the capital Tbilisi in which some 100,000 people — a tenth of the city's population — demanded his resignation.
The protests were organised by a 10-party opposition alliance, the National Council of Unified Public Movement. Formed in late September, its key demand is for parliamentary elections to be held in April 2008, when the current term expires, rather than coinciding with the scheduled presidential election in late 2008. It also wanted greater opposition representation on the country's election commission, which is currently dominated by Saakashvili supporters.
Saakashvili, a graduate of the George Washington University law school in 1995 (courtesy of a US State Department fellowship), came to power four years ago in a US-backed coup — dubbed the Rose Revolution by the West — that ousted Eduard Shevardnadze, Georgia's president from 1992.
Saakashvili served as Shevardnadze's justice minister in 2000-01, but was elected mayor of Tbilisi in 2002 on an anti-corruption, anti-Shevardnadze platform.
Following a disputed outcome to the November 2003 parliamentary elections, mass anti-government demonstrations started in Tbilisi. On November 22, 2003, opposition supporters, led by Saakashvili, with roses in their hands, seized the parliament building.
The following day, after two phone calls to him from then US Secretary of State Colin Powell, Shevardnadze met with Saakashvili and agreed to resign the presidency. The speaker of the Georgian parliament, Nino Burjanadze, a former Shevardnadze crony, assumed the presidency until a new presidential election, in January 2004, was won by Saakashvili with a claimed 97% majority.
The overriding factor in Shevardnadze's ouster was Washington's withdrawal of support. The November 24, 2003 Wall Street Journal reported that the Saakashvili-led opposition to Shevardnadze was "backed by a raft of non-governmental organizations that have sprung up since the fall of the Soviet Union. Many of the NGOs have been supported by American and other Western foundations..." Chief among these NGOs was the Liberty Institute, funded by the US Agency for International Development.
Georgia, with 4.6 million inhabitants, is strategically situated between the Black Sea and the oil-rich Caspian Sea: it had been a focal point of Washington's drive in the 1990s to have Caspian oil transported to European markets through Georgia rather than through Russia or Iran. The linchpin of this plan was the construction, in 2002-05, of the US$3.6 billion Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline running from the Azerbaijani capital of Baku on the Caspian Sea through Tbilisi to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan.
In November 2004, the Washington-based Institute for the Analysis of Global Security observed that Moscow "views BTC as a way to weaken its position as a major supplier of oil to the European market" and would therefore "not shed tears if BTC is sabotaged. It might even clandestinely lend its hand to groups that might do just that."
Washington's support for Shevardnadze was eroded by his regime's inability to bring two break-away regions bordering Russia — Abkhazia and South Ossetia — back under Tbilisi's rule. Both regions have their own armed forces, and both have several thousand Russian peacekeeping troops on their soil.
Since 2002, the US military has trained Georgia's 17,000-strong armed forces, including preparing Georgian units for operations with the US forces in Iraq. In March, Saakashvili announced an increase in the number of troops in Iraq from 850 to 2000, making Georgia the third largest contributor to the US-led occupation (after the US itself and Britain).
Associated Press reported on November 4 that "Popular discontent with Saakashvili erupted after Irakli Okruashvili, a hawkish former defense minister, accused the president of corruption and plotting to murder a prominent Georgian businessman".
The September 29 British Independent reported that, "Perhaps the most sensational allegation made by Mr Okruashvili was that in July 2005, the president personally ordered him to have Badri Patarkatsishvili assassinated". Patarkatsishvili, a Georgian business magnate living in London, is a long-time business partner of Boris Berezovsky, the paper reported.
"I have no doubt that the accusations are 100% true", Tina Khidasheli of the opposition Republican Party told the Independent. "Everyone has been talking about them for a long time, but now someone from the inner circle has come out with it, they have more credibility."