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Chris Smith is a writer, photographer and editor who has worked in the Middle East, Africa, the Caucasus and at home in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is available for assignments worldwide. See more of his work at www.ca-smith.net.

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LETTER FROM GEORGIA
By Chris Smith, with additional reporting by Heidi Zeiger

In the fall of 2004, they finally emptied out the Hotel Iveria, in downtown Tbilisi, Georgia. The old Soviet-era highrise was a wreck: rusting, crisscrossed with washing lines, its insides stripped bare by looters. Packed for the last decade with refugees from the civil wars that tore this tiny Caucasian nation apart after its independence from the U.S.S.R. in 1991, the Iveria looms over the capital, a constant reminder of Georgia’s lost years.

Now, though, a German investment company plans to demolish the hulking old building and replace it with a luxury hotel complex. The Iveria’s 1,000 or so residents were given cash to help them find new apartments. Unfortunately, they still can’t go home: Georgia lost both of its civil wars, and the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia have only drifted farther out of the government’s orbit in the years since, propped up by Russian guns and money.

For some residents, the move is bittersweet. "For better or worse, we lived here, and it was ours," says Nazi Janashia, a 72-year-old ethnic Georgian who fled her home in Abkhazia when it fell to Abkhaz separatist fighters in 1993. "Where we are going, we don’t know it and we will have to start again."

The same could be said for the country itself, which is going through some profound changes -- most of them set in motion by the “Rose Revolution” in November 2003. The bloodless, American-backed coup -- in which a group of young reformers led by Mikhail Saakashvili, a US-trained lawyer and politician, drove the wily ex-Communist boss Eduard Shevardnadze from power -- raised hopes that Georgia, at long last, might pull itself together. Elected president two months after the putsch, Saakashvili -- or “Misha,” as everyone calls him -- pledged to crack down on corruption, revive the economy and reunite the country. In recent years, with the construction of a US-backed oil pipeline, the introduction of American soldiers and generous amounts of aid, Georgia has become something of an American protectorate. Saakashvili has promised to speed up Georgia’s integration with the West.

Whether he’ll succeed is anyone’s guess. Corruption and poverty are endemic, the conflicts with Abkhazia and South Ossetia seem intractable and Moscow – which still sees Georgia as a wayward Russian fiefdom -- isn’t happy with Georgia’s moves toward the West. Face with these troubles, the glow of Saakashvili’s revolution has begun to fade.

Alexander Rondeli, for one, is still hopeful. Before the revolution, things were so bad that Rondeli, president of the Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies, had given up on Georgia. These days, instead of advising young professionals to emigrate, he is cautiously optimistic.

“I’m supportive [of the new government] because I understand that they want to improve this country,” he says, adding that there’s no quick fix for Georgia’s many problems.

A little more than a year on from the revolution, there is some evidence of progress. Transparency International, a corruption watchdog group, ranked Georgia the one of the most corrupt countries in the world - just a few spots behind Nigeria and Myanmar. But Saakashvili’s anti-corruption drive, at least so far, seems to be having an effect. Top-level government officials, for instance, appear to be clean – a sharp contrast to Shevardnadze’s gangster regime, in which men close to the president were tied to drug trafficking and kidnapping. As the Tbilisi-based Transnational Crime and Corruption Center’s Tina Bochorishvili points out, “We have cases [where] people are in jail, which is absolutely fantastic.” In Georgia, this is a new thing: Previously, she says, corruption carried “no consequences.”

The difference might be most apparent on the roads, where the level of police corruption has fallen dramatically. According to Dima Bit-Suleiman, a Tbilisi journalist who worked as our fixer, the traffic police “used to hide in the trees on the side of the road. Their purpose wasn’t for safety; it was to take bribes.” This past summer, the government fired almost all of the traffic cops, retrained the rest, and hired some new ones. Now, the capital is abuzz with police in brand-new Volkswagens. On our last day in town, Dima gets a parking ticket. Ordinarily, this would be an invitation to bribery; instead, the policeman politely hands him the ticket. Dima is dumbfounded. “I’m going to keep this as a memento, a piece of history,” he says, adding, “And you tell me nothing here has changed?”

Others are less sure. When we meet Nana Kiuti, a 21-year-old ethnic Georgian refugee from Abkhazia, she’s busy packing for the move out of the Iveria. Kiuti has already lost faith in the new government. During the revolution, she remembers, “I stood there every day in the rain screaming, ‘Misha! Misha!’” in support of Saakashvili. But, gesturing to the piles of boxes on the floor, she says, “If he is supposed to get us back to [Abkhazia] in two years – like he promised – why couldn’t we stay here until then?”

Some in civil society, meanwhile, give the new government credit for good intentions but little else. “I was expecting something more,” says Nana Janashia, executive director of the Caucasus Environmental Network, one of the country’s leading independent non-governmental organizations. “I personally still believe that the president, at least he’s an honest guy. But the fact is either he simply cannot control the situation, or something is going very bad.”

One thing’s certain: There’s no nostalgia for the man who presided over Georgia’s meltdown. Just to mention Shevardnadze these days is to conjure the bad old days. In the down-at-heels spa town of Cemi, we ask Alex Sarkisian, a 48-year-old in a tracksuit, about the difference between the new government and the old. His answer is simple: “Well, Shevardnadze is gone.” Everyone laughs, and Sarkisian goes back to playing dominoes under a 200-year-old tree. At first we think he’s joking, but then he explains: no matter what else happens, Shevardnadze isn’t coming back, and that’s worth something.

We huddle around a small table in a wood-paneled restaurant in Tbilisi’s old town, the detritus of a supra, or feast, surrounding us. Plates of eggplant, spare ribs, and Georgian pastries litter the table. A waitress brings jug after jug of strong, red Georgian wine, a variety known as Saperavi – literally, “pigment,” for its staining effect on the teeth and lips. Shota, a rugby-playing 28-year-old who sells mineral water for a living, raises his glass in a toast to “Mother Georgia.”

“We are surrounded by enemies,” he begins, his eyes wet and unfocused, “but we are still here, and soon we will be rejoined in one country.” For the next few minutes, he speaks of David the Builder, the medieval king who liberated Georgia from Turkish occupation, unified the country and ushered in a century of peace, a rare commodity in this part of the world. “This place is an Eden,” he concludes, “and everyone has wanted to conquer it. But we endure.”

By tradition, no one drinks wine without making a toast. The toasts are elaborate affairs -- mini-speeches, really -- and fall into definable categories: There are toasts to parents, to siblings, to the dead, to love and to peace, global and local. Nationalist toasts like Shota’s are common, too, and understandably so: In a place with this much history and this much pain, the past is very much alive.

Saakashvili, who styles himself a latter-day David the Builder – he took an oath on the great king’s tomb the day before his inauguration -- has pledged to restore Georgia to glory, and to return the breakaway regions to the fold. Using a combination of conciliatory words and bull-in-a-china-shop bluster, he’s had some success. Shortly after assuming office in 2004, Saakashvili brought down Aslan Abashidze, the strongman of Ajaria, which had been independent in all but name for years. Judging from the recent firefights on the South Ossetian border, that renegade republic is next on the list. For that, though, Georgia will need help.

At the Hangar Bar in Tbilisi, 50-Cent drawls from the loudspeakers. A large man in a tight black t-shirt, a pistol on his hip, guards the door. Out on the patio, US soldiers drink at tables covered in stars-and-stripes tablecloths, as SUVs with tinted windows kick up dust in the gravel strip separating the bar from a sixth-century church across the alley. It is a holy day – Georgia is one of the oldest Christian nations in the world -- and parishioners come and go. The church bells ring madly, competing against the music next door.

American troops have been in Georgia since 2002, ostensibly to train Georgia’s notoriously ill-disciplined army in counterterrorism techniques. That only tells part of the story, however. While Chechen guerrillas – and, allegedly, Al Qaeda-connected terrorists -- have used Georgia’s remote Pankisi Gorge as a staging ground for attacks on Russian forces in neighboring Chechnya, no one believes that’s the only reason for the US presence. Instead, the US has a number of interlocking military, economic and political interests here on Russia’s southern flank. In addition to chasing terrorists and guarding the massive Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, the US also wants to boost its influence in Russia’s backyard.

“A guiding principle of US policy over the last decade has been to enter into the security space of the former Soviet Union, and to discourage the Russians from asserting themselves,” says John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a Washington-based strategic research institute. Add in oil politics and the global war on terrorism, he says, and you have a potent brew. In Georgia, he says, “It all kind of comes together.”

Back at the bar, Oscar Alva, a 25-year-old Marine corporal from New Jersey, finishes his third glass of mango juice and explains what he’s doing in Georgia. He doesn’t mention counterterrorism; rather, it’s all about professionalizing the Georgian army, which is plagued by desertions and corruption – military equipment, for instance, regularly goes missing from Georgian bases. In a recent incident, three soldiers were caught substituting stones for hand grenades and putting sand in cartridges in weapons shipments destined for the Ossetian front. All of that, Alva says, is changing. “We teach them the pride of belonging – that Georgia’s them and they are Georgia. They’re not just representing themselves, but the millions of Georgians they’re fighting for,” he says.

Many of the men he has trained, Alva says, are already in Iraq (Georgia is part of the US-led coalition), and many of them have been fighting on the front lines of the increasingly hot conflict with South Ossetia. Indeed, the pockmarked highways are full of troop conveys, most of them on the way to bases near the makeshift border with South Ossetia. Heading back to Tbilisi one day, we stop to pick up three Georgian soldiers, members of the US-trained Vazianai commando batallion, on leave from the Ossetian front. They’re quiet for a while, but after we stop for cigarettes and soda they loosen up a bit. We ask about the Ossetian situation, and they laugh. They’re convinced that with their new president’s savvy and their American training, they’ll soon be drinking Ossetian vodka in Tskhinvali, the breakaway region’s capital. “South Ossetia is a one-day job if Russia doesn’t interfere,” one says, and the others nod in agreement.

If Saakashvili plays it right, he might take South Ossetia back. If things go wrong, though, Georgia could be drawn into open conflict with Russia – especially after September’s horrific Beslan terrorist attack, which prompted Russia to revive its charges that Georgia shelters Chechen terrorists. Georgia may be America’s most important ally in the Caucasus – and, as such, a kind of American outpost – but US protection only goes so far. If war with Russia comes, all bets are off.

“We understand pretty well that America and Russia are engaged in a high-level global game,” Rondeli says, “in which Georgia is just a 25-cent coin, not a $100 bill. We understand that Americans will not fight for Georgia. Russia understands that too.”

In fact, America has good reason to wish for stability in Georgia: the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline. Running west from Azerbaijan’s oil fields in the Caspian Sea, across the mountains of Georgia and on to the Turkish port of Ceyhan, on the Mediterranean, for shipment to the West, the $3.6 billion pipeline is far and away the biggest development project the country has seen since independence. Run by BP on behalf of a consortium of oil companies (called the BTC Pipeline Company) and financed partly by the World Bank, the pipeline is slated to wrap up construction in the spring of 2005. When it’s fully operational, it will carry a million barrels of crude each day for the next 40 years.

Seen through American eyes, the project’s attractions are obvious: with just about any other route, the oil would have to pass through Russia, to the north, or Iran, to the south, before it reached Europe and America. And with Iraq in chaos, oil from the Caspian basin – estimated at between 3 and 4 percent of the world’s supply – is looking better and better. “Our common security interests, our commercial interests, and our interests in peace and prosperity will be strengthened with each length of pipe laid along this line,” George W. Bush said in a 2002 statement.

For Georgia, the benefits are a little less tangible, though no less real. Besides the security – however great or small – afforded by Washington’s protective umbrella, the pipeline is expected to revive the country’s lifeless economy and spur Western investment. If the project is successful, boosters say, it will signal to the world that Georgia is open for business. As Saakashvili put it in a BBC interview, “Georgia is benefiting hugely from [the pipeline] and we’re going to stick to our commitment, that’s a matter of our survival as well.”

Georgia is willing to sacrifice a lot to get the oil flowing across its borders. In order to avoid areas of Georgia in which Russia still garrisons troops, the pipeline was routed – at Shevardnadze’s and maybe Washington’s insistence -- through the Borjomi region, in western Georgia. Home to a nature reserve comparable to Yellowstone National Park, Borjomi is also the source of the country’s largest single export, Borjomi mineral water, a strangely salty brand of mineral water that’s popular all across the former Soviet imperium.

Badri Japaridze, vice president of Georgian Glass and Mineral Water Co., calls the decision to route the pipeline through Borjomi a “big mistake.” Japaridze’s company, which produces Borjomi mineral water, accounted for 7 percent of Georgia’s total exports in 2003. With a 35 percent annual growth rate, it is one of the most successful private companies the former Soviet states have produced. Though he’s careful to praise the new government’s handling of the situation, Japaridze worries that the very idea of an oil spill – never mind an actual one -- will hurt his company’s bottom line. “The mineral water business is a perception-based business,” he says. “In general, when you are seeing on TV that the pipeline will endanger this pristine area, it’s not nice.”

By many accounts, the pipeline should never have been built here. A series of Dutch studies commissioned by Georgia’s Ministry of Environment was severely critical of BP’s environmental and social impact assessment, concluding that alternative routes hadn’t been properly explored, and the potential damage to Borjomi hadn’t been analyzed adequately. Many of the commission’s concerns, however, were dismissed out-of-hand by the government and the oil consortium, citing time constraints. “This is the procedure that should be followed according to international standards,” the commission wrote, referring to the route selection process, which called for more extensive study. “However, the Commission observed that as a result of the strict planning … a decision on the routing should be taken in the short term.” In other words, time is money.

BP asserts that it has done everything by the book, and that Borjomi is in no danger. When asked if BP would build the same pipeline in Europe or America, the project’s Georgia Manager Ed Johnson says “Why not? This pipeline is built to the highest technical standards.” The pipeline itself may be state-of-the-art, but it runs through a lawless place. The village of Dvgari offers a good illustration of the troubles of doing business here.

The road to Dvgari, in the mountains above Borjomi, is muddy and deeply rutted, churned to paste by a summer storm. The evening light, vibrant after the rain but cut by clouds, skates across the log cabin-style houses and weathered A-frames that cluster along the roadside. Dvgari is falling down the mountain, a little bit at a time: it sits smack in a landslide area, and little slides shake the town with frightening regularity, collapsing walls, pulling window frames apart, cracking floors. The slides didn’t used to be much of a problem, but everyone says they’ve gotten worse in the last few years.

The pipeline, still unburied when we visit, is easily visible from the village; the sleek tube clings to the mountainside about half-a-mile above the village, as it snakes its way through the green-carpeted hills and valleys on its journey west.

Twenty-five or 30 people gather to meet us. The mood here is one of unfocused rage – at BP, at the government, even at us. A few days earlier, a small landslide forced the village’s poorest family out of its flat, in a ramshackle wood-and-stone house just off the road. The villagers have heard of the promises – compensation, water treatment, new roads – made to other villages along the pipeline route, and they’ve asked to be resettled. After all, they reason, if a big landslide brings the hills crashing down on their heads, the oil will come rushing down too.

While an oil company study dismissed the landslide danger to the pipeline (but not the village), one of its scientists offered a significant dissent. “It will not be possible to fully stabilize the landslide,” the dissenter wrote. “The landslide will pose a threat to BTC pipeline as well.” Some in the Georgian government, too, have their doubts about the pipeline’s safety here.

It’s hard to say exactly who’s responsible for what, though. For reasons unknown, Dvgari wasn’t even mentioned in BP’s original environmental and social impact assessment, so technically it doesn’t qualify for compensation. While the landslides aren’t BP’s fault, the oil company has told the villagers it’s willing to consider helping the village out if the government comes up with a plan. The government, however, has been slow to move, and the people of Dvgari are tired of waiting. “Nobody helps, nobody hears, nobody cares,” says Mzia Gogoaldze, our tour guide for the family’s ruined flat. Inside, rubble from a caved-in wall sits heavily on a sagging bed.

Recently, the villagers threatened to blockade or sabotage the pipeline, an increasingly common tactic all across the pipeline route as the project nears completion and poor villagers find themselves with nothing to show for it. The villagers of Dvgari guess that corruption lies at the root of their troubles, and though they’ve got no proof, they’ve got good reason to be suspicious. The project has been plagued by bribery and theft from the start: Village headmen have run off with hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation money, go-betweens have fleeced would-be pipeline workers for “hiring fees” and just about everyone, it seems, has lined their pockets along the way.

For an hour or so, the villagers hurl their concerns at us, mixed with reproaches against journalists who come and ask questions but never make anything any better. “We are tired of telling you these things,” one of the village men says, spitting the words. There isn’t much we can say to this, so we mumble a few inanities about raising awareness – they’re all true, but the words just hang there in the rapidly cooling air. As we’re getting ready to leave, Gregory Gogoladze, a stocky older man with a red face and stark white hair, offers up a poem:

“My beautiful country,
Who fooled you?
Shevardnadze sold us,
And cheated us all.”

So how did this happen? Washington exerted heavy pressure -- especially following September 11, when energy security became a higher priority -- to get the project built. And activists charge that BP has routinely violated its own standards, World Bank guidelines, and even the fairly lenient rules established by the host governments to cover the project. Like everything else here, though, the pipeline bears the scars of the Shevardnadze era.

Natalia Antelava, the Georgian journalist who has covered the project in the greatest depth, says that, in the end, it all comes back to the Georgian government. “BP was definitely dealing with the Georgian government as anyone would deal with a reckless, irresponsible government that’s trying to make money off anyone it possibly can,” she says. “The Shevardnadze government was so desperate for this to happen,” she continues, “that they simply didn’t care how it was done, as long as it was done.”

Zaal Lomtadze, the deputy minister of environment and the man who works most closely with BP, concedes the point. While he clearly isn’t pleased with the pipeline’s route or with the way BP has conducted business, he also says there isn’t much that can be done about it now. “The route is not the best one,” he admits. “But it should have been [decided] six years ago. So today, unfortunately, it is fixed, and you cannot go back.” Moreover, he notes glumly, his ministry never really had much of a say in it anyway. “The decisions were taken before the environmental side of this project was even explored.”

The new government, despite some populist posturing, appears to be similarly committed to the pipeline – and similarly cavalier about the damage it might do to Borjomi. But it’s not like Saakashvili really has a choice. As Antelava observes, the government wouldn’t risk jeopardizing the project in any way. “Georgia could not possibly afford to lose this pipeline,” she says. “To lose this pipeline would be to lose everything.”

***

Catastrophe, if it comes, lies somewhere in the indefinite future. For now, there is just day-to-day life. At the Hotel Iveria, government-issued trucks idle in the parking lot. Inside, men and women emerge in waves from the decrepit elevators, carrying their possessions in boxes and bags and wedging them into the waiting trucks. In her room on the eighth floor, Nazi Janashia sits surrounded by cardboard boxes. Her grandson, David, leans against the doorframe smoking a cigarette. She looks around, then shrugs. “With God’s help, we will return home,” she says. Her grandson agrees: “Someday we will go back to our homes in Abkhazia and be happy.”