GEORGIA’S PRESIDENT Mikheil Saakashvili has claimed that Russia is intent on ousting him and occupying his country, two years after the countries fought a vicious five-day war.
The conflict led Russia to recognise the independence of the breakaway Georgian provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. It devastated Georgia’s economy, displaced tens of thousands of people and heaped huge pressure on Mr Saakashvili and his government.
The president and his allies still run Georgia, however, and its economy is recovering with the help of billions of euros in international aid, while the dispute over the two rebel regions has simmered down into a “cold war” of diplomatic wrangling and mutual recrimination.
Mr Saakashvili said last week that Russia had not abandoned plans “to overthrow Georgian democracy and to occupy our entire territory”.
“So our task is to stop their further advance and Georgia’s eventual political goal is to liberate our territories and to achieve full deoccupation,” he added.
Addressing top military officials, Mr Saakashvili said Georgia would be strengthened by its troops’ experience of fighting alongside western allies in Afghanistan, but he also demanded the creation of a “robust civil defence system” to protect the country.
“Each village should be able to defend itself. There should be small, trained teams in each village and each settlement . . . so that everyone should be able to defend their own land, village, street, town and region,” he said.
“If the enemy force decides to advance from the ethnically cleansed territories, each and every square metre of the Georgian land should burn beneath them – that is the task.”
For its part, Russia says it has no intention of dealing with Mr Saakashvili, whom prime minister Vladimir Putin reportedly threatened to “hang by the balls” during European Union-brokered peace talks that ended the 2008 war.
“But it does not mean that such relations cannot be restored if other people come to power in Georgia,” Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said this week.
“I am sure that it will happen. Sooner or later, Georgian people will make their choice and those friendly, century-old relations that link Russian and Georgian peoples will be restored.”
Mr Saakashvili’s reputation as a reliable democratic leader in the volatile Caucasus was battered by the war, which is widely believed to have started when his forces tried to retake control of South Ossetia on the night of August 7th, 2008. He insists that his military did not make the first move, but only responded to an invasion by Russian troops.
Moscow says it sent its forces over the border to protect Russian citizens from attack, but it had massed troops near the frontier in apparent preparation for conflict and had long goaded Georgia by backing separatists who regularly fired on ethnic-Georgian villages.
Despite his missteps, Mr Saakashvili still enjoys the support of western powers and they have urged Russia to end its “occupation” of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, where the Kremlin has stationed thousands of troops.
Russia’s own hopes of toppling Mr Saakashvili and winning widespread recognition for the sovereignty of the two regions have been dashed, with only Venezuela, Nicaragua and tiny Nauru following its lead.
Georgia’s economy – which expanded more than 12 per cent in 2007 – is still in the doldrums due to the war and the financial crisis, but the government hopes it will return to growth next year.
Tbilisi is still struggling, however, to provide opportunities for the 250,000 people displaced by separatist fighting in the early 1990s and the war that erupted two years ago today.
