CAMPBELL: It was a revolution that stunned the world. Last November, an angry crowd stormed the parliament of the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. Their leader, a thirty-six year old American educated lawyer, names Mikhail Saakashvili. Their target? Georgia’s seventy five year old President and former Soviet Foreign Minister, Eduard Shevardnardze. But as the crowd filled the Chamber, his body guards carried him away. Within hours he resigned and a regime that had become a byword for corruption, fell into the dustbin of history.
Today there is still a sense of disbelief that it all happened so quickly and easily. The people who stormed into this Chamber achieved something that had never happened in the former Soviet Union - a genuinely popular revolution to sweep out the corrupt successors to communism and bring true democracy. But now comes the even harder part - rebuilding a country shattered by crime and poverty and civil war. Georgians have done the impossible once. Can they do it again?
The man who has since been elected President, is in a hurry to do just that.
SAAKASHVILI: It’s very hard. I mean it’s like, we cannot do miracles but at least we have to get very close to being able to doing miracles. Maybe it’s possible after all. We are going to look into it. I’m going to look into it.
TEXT: Mikhail Saakashvili is Europe’s youngest president. His country is Europe’s second poorest. Unemployment is more than 40%. More than half the population lives below the poverty line.
CAMPBELL: Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi is a beautiful but miserable place. Once known as the Paris of the Soviet Union, it was renowned for good food, good wine and love of life. Since independence, it has become the heart of a Third World nation. Its Soviet-era industry has collapsed and almost nothing has taken its place. The drains on its potholed streets don’t even have covers. They’ve been stolen to be sold for scrap.
Anzor Lotsulashvili lives in a one room slum with his two sons, Irakli and Ealiko. He’s a qualified builder but it’s been years since he’s even found labouring work in Georgia’s ruined economy.
ANZOR LOTSULASHVILI: There is nothing here, there are no plants, no factories. Two or three plants function here. Only two or three and very small ones at that, with five hundred people, a thousand people.
CAMPBELL: His sons play with toys made from pieces of rubbish, somehow building a make believe world in Dickensian poverty. All they have to live off is a pension of three US dollars a month but in the last months of Shevardnardze’s reign, even that stopped.
ANZOR LOTSULASHVILI: It’s good that my neighbours help me. The school director dropped in today, he gave me some money. I bought some food, oil. In a week I have to buy textbooks for them for the second semester but I have no money. I’m waiting for the allowance but whether it comes or not no one knows.
CAMPBELL: The man Georgians blame for their misery was not just supported by the West, he was hailed as an international statesman.
[Shevardnardze showing Campbell photographs] This is Bush senior?
SHEVARDNARDZE: Yes. This is Bush senior.
CAMPBELL: He was your friend, wasn’t he?
SHEVARDNARDZE: Yes he was.
CAMPBELL: And Bush Junior?
SHEVARDNARDZE: Yes he is too. Yes he is. After my resignation I received a letter from him. It was a really unique letter, really unique. I'll publish it one day.
CAMPBELL: In the late 1980’s, Shevardnardze worked with Mikhail Gorbachev to end the Cold War and lift the yoke of Soviet dictatorship.
SHEVARDNARDZE: You know, all of them are my friends. We had been working with him for a long time. We started together with Shultz. He is my close friend. I stayed with his family for several days. This is Reagan. I met Reagan twelve times. Twelve times. He is an interesting man. Well he understands politics but he used to tell us lots of jokes.
CAMPBELL: Since his overthrow in November, he has lived with his memories and a conviction he did nothing wrong.
SHEVARDNARDZE: I wish them success and what is more important, for the people to be calm and if they need me, my advice or recommendations and so on, I will be ready. There is nothing else I can do.
CAMPBELL: But he’s the last man Georgians would ask for advice. The Makharashvili family were once in the Soviet middle class. All of them doctors, professors and engineers. Before independence they enjoyed modest prosperity in the Soviet Union’s richest republic. They remain fiercely proud and embarrassingly hospitable, spending everything they had on a banquet for our visit but the generosity masks a deep and humiliating poverty. Irina is a teacher surviving on a salary of seven US dollars a month.
IRINA: I am poor. I work but I am poor. I am not in the middle. I am poor.
CAMPBELL: And all your friends are poor professional people?
IRINA: Yes, everyone. In my family and in my neighbourhood. When you have no money, you have resource and no medicine and nothing, you think that your President is the leader of corruption. I think so.
CAMPBELL: Georgia has been showered with foreign aid and western loans. The United States gave it more aid per person than any country except Israel and there is little to show for it except crippling debt. Despite this Shevardnardze insists he is not to blame.
SHEVARDNARDZE: There were some ministers that which were really involved in corruption. They were dishonest people. I knew about it and had I remained the President I would have sacked them.
SAAKASHVILI: He had himself of course, encouraged very openly, not only his corrupt ministers. Most of them have been arrested now and they are pointing at him and saying he was our boss. We received orders from him.
CAMPBELL: Most of the money disappeared offshore but there’s the odd trace of stolen loot. This luxury estate outside Tbilisi is the preserve of former Government officials. Bureaucrats on declared salaries of less than seventy US dollars a month built themselves palaces by Georgian standards. This sprawling home belongs to the former Custom’s chief. The grandest buildings belong to Shevardnardze’s family. His daughter Manana is building a three thousand square mansion surrounded by five metre high concrete walls. His son Paata is building an identical mansion across the street. The two linked by an underground tunnel. It’s just the tip of their wealth.
SAAKASHVILI: His family owns the biggest telecommunications company, they have controlling stake in a big steel factory in western Georgia. They control the main port here. They use to control the gasoline imports into Georgia.
CAMPBELL: Saakashvili served as Shevardnardze’s Justice Minister before being forced out over his attempts to prosecute corrupt ministers. It made him the natural leader of last November’s mass protest that became known as the “Rose Revolution”. The daily demonstrations were sparked by the Government’s rigging of parliamentary elections. Tens of thousands stood outside parliament from early morning to late at night. Irina was one of them.
IRINA: Everybody in our town have hope of good life in our future and if we don’t change anything we can’t have this life so we decide to join them and to show that we are with them.
CAMPBELL: Shevardnardze insists he stepped down to avoid bloodshed.
SHEVARDNARDZE: My supporters, serious people were standing by the Parliament building. It could have started from all corners, confrontation between supporters and opponents. It would have been civil confrontation and therefore a civil war. This is why I decided to cancel this decree on the state of emergency.
SAAKASHVILI: He gave all the orders to fire on people and to get me. First of all he wanted the revolutionary leaders to be arrested, then they wanted to, in my case, to kill me but it didn’t work.
CAMPBELL: Shevardnardze gave orders to kill you?
SAAKASHVILI: Definitely he did and we have documented proof to that but it didn’t work you know because once he did it, it was already too late for him. The people were so much well mobilised and organised and he was panicking and I don’t know if he himself understood properly what he was doing. And in the end, he shouldn’t merit himself for not shedding blood. In the end he didn’t shed blood because he couldn’t shed blood, because nobody wanted to listen to him anymore.
CAMPBELL: Shevardnardze’s supporters denounced the revolution as a coup. While the US have long supported Shevardnardze, in the end it lost patience and switched to the opposition.
Whether it was a coup or a genuinely peaceful revolution, the people soon gave it their assent, electing Saakashvili with an astonishing 97% of the vote.
SAAKASHVILI: This present Government is very young and of course they lack experience but sometimes in our situation, most of the case, lack of experience itself is an asset because if you’re looking to what kind of experience people have here, this was experience from old Soviet regime. We have to take care of our own destiny.
CAMPBELL: His swearing in was a striking symbol of his aim to bring Georgia out of Russia’s shadow, with the European Union’s flags and western ceremonial music. Saakashvili has already made progress on his inauguration vows. An anti-corruption body has arrested senior officials of the former regime and even charged Shevardnardze’s son-in-law. But for all the popular support in Tbilisi, Georgia remains a divided State. Huge areas of the country are simply beyond his control. Saakashvili’s authority meets its first challenge just outside the capital.
We’ve just driven an hour and a half outside Tbilisi and while we’re technically still in Georgia, in reality this is the border of the self-styled independent State of South Ossetia. Cars with Georgian number plates can’t go past here, nor can any of the new President’s decrees.
The Ossetians split from Georgia during a brutal civil war in the early 90’s. At the same time, the northeast region of Abkhazia declared independence, routing Georgian troops. Today, both operate as de facto separate States.
The only authority South Ossetia recognises is its bullet holed Parliament and the regional president, former rebel commander Eduard Kokoity.
EDUARD KOKOITY: Of course, for fourteen years, South Ossetia has not been a part of Georgia. Since the moment the Soviet Union collapsed and the moment the Georgian Soviet Republic ceased to exist, the people of South Ossetia made their choice, and at the referendum they voted for independence. And now we are an independent State.
CAMPBELL: No country in the world recognises their independence, not even Russia but Moscow’s tacit sponsorship can be seen everywhere. Police and soldiers wear Russian uniforms, cars have Russian numberplates. Ninety per cent of the population have Russian passports. The region even runs on Moscow time, an hour later than Tbilisi. The dependence on Russia suits many in Moscow’s nationalist elite keen to retain influence in the region. Kokoity warns he will have powerful backing if Saakashvili attempts to retake territory by force.
KOKOITY: This time, South Ossetia will not be alone. Very many people representing the north Caucasus have approached us and reassured us that in case of aggression, volunteers from the whole North Caucasus will be here to fight for South Ossetia. But we do not want this. We don’t want war.
CAMPBELL: The impasse means three hundred and fifty thousand people cannot return to their homes. Refugees from the fighting living in squalid slums across Georgia, dependent on charity for survival but it’s in many people’s financial interest to keep Georgia split.
SAAKASHVILI: Ninety five per cent of heroin consumed in Europe comes from Afghanistan and most of it goes through Georgia, which means that this lawless zone of Abkhazia with its access to the sea is a paradise for drug traffickers.
CAMPBELL: Russia is not the only great power vying for influence here. Under a programme began by Shevardnardze, US marines are training and outfitting elite Georgian troops. They are skills the separatist regions fear could be used against them but the marines insist it’s all aimed at a wider battle.
US MARINE: Well the purpose of the military here is to help train the Georgian army to fight the global war on terrorism. What we’re doing is taking a battalion size elements at a time, running them through infantry type training, teaching them how to teach themselves to prepare for the global war on terrorism. Georgia is connected to the war on terrorism simply by being a partner to the US. They have decided that they want to do their part in the global war on terrorism and they said that they needed help so the United States Marine Corps comes over here to help them.
CAMPBELL: Is there any guarantee that the troops you train wont be used against the separatist regions inside Georgia?
US MARINE: Well that I don’t really know anything about. What the Georgians plan on doing with their own troops is really Georgian business.
CAMPBELL: And the Americans have another interest here, the west’s main pipeline route for vast reserves of Caspian Sea oil will soon cross this country. Powerful forces will want to ensure the new President protects their interests.
SAAKASHVILI: We are a small country and we need to survive in a very complicated geopolitical environment and we don’t want to turn this country into a battlefield between the different superpowers and that’s, I’ll do whatever it takes not to alienate any of the countries. Especially our neighbours. We want good relations with Russia. I am not pro-American or pro-Russian. I am pro-Georgian.
CAMPBELL: There is much that could go wrong with Georgia’s revolution, an ocean of disappointment could lie ahead. Yet Georgian’s like Gurami Makharashvili and his family and friends have unshakable faith that this time life will improve.
GURAMI MAKHARASHVILI: Let God give his blessing to you. Let your visit here bring happiness to Georgia and let prosperity stay with it from now on.
CAMPBELL: Despite a decade of war and hardship, Georgians have one resource that is always bountiful.
IRINA: We have hope. That’s the difference. Now we have very big hope and when people have hope I think that they can do everything.
Today there is still a sense of disbelief that it all happened so quickly and easily. The people who stormed into this Chamber achieved something that had never happened in the former Soviet Union - a genuinely popular revolution to sweep out the corrupt successors to communism and bring true democracy. But now comes the even harder part - rebuilding a country shattered by crime and poverty and civil war. Georgians have done the impossible once. Can they do it again?
The man who has since been elected President, is in a hurry to do just that.
SAAKASHVILI: It’s very hard. I mean it’s like, we cannot do miracles but at least we have to get very close to being able to doing miracles. Maybe it’s possible after all. We are going to look into it. I’m going to look into it.
TEXT: Mikhail Saakashvili is Europe’s youngest president. His country is Europe’s second poorest. Unemployment is more than 40%. More than half the population lives below the poverty line.
CAMPBELL: Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi is a beautiful but miserable place. Once known as the Paris of the Soviet Union, it was renowned for good food, good wine and love of life. Since independence, it has become the heart of a Third World nation. Its Soviet-era industry has collapsed and almost nothing has taken its place. The drains on its potholed streets don’t even have covers. They’ve been stolen to be sold for scrap.
Anzor Lotsulashvili lives in a one room slum with his two sons, Irakli and Ealiko. He’s a qualified builder but it’s been years since he’s even found labouring work in Georgia’s ruined economy.
ANZOR LOTSULASHVILI: There is nothing here, there are no plants, no factories. Two or three plants function here. Only two or three and very small ones at that, with five hundred people, a thousand people.
CAMPBELL: His sons play with toys made from pieces of rubbish, somehow building a make believe world in Dickensian poverty. All they have to live off is a pension of three US dollars a month but in the last months of Shevardnardze’s reign, even that stopped.
ANZOR LOTSULASHVILI: It’s good that my neighbours help me. The school director dropped in today, he gave me some money. I bought some food, oil. In a week I have to buy textbooks for them for the second semester but I have no money. I’m waiting for the allowance but whether it comes or not no one knows.
CAMPBELL: The man Georgians blame for their misery was not just supported by the West, he was hailed as an international statesman.
[Shevardnardze showing Campbell photographs] This is Bush senior?
SHEVARDNARDZE: Yes. This is Bush senior.
CAMPBELL: He was your friend, wasn’t he?
SHEVARDNARDZE: Yes he was.
CAMPBELL: And Bush Junior?
SHEVARDNARDZE: Yes he is too. Yes he is. After my resignation I received a letter from him. It was a really unique letter, really unique. I'll publish it one day.
CAMPBELL: In the late 1980’s, Shevardnardze worked with Mikhail Gorbachev to end the Cold War and lift the yoke of Soviet dictatorship.
SHEVARDNARDZE: You know, all of them are my friends. We had been working with him for a long time. We started together with Shultz. He is my close friend. I stayed with his family for several days. This is Reagan. I met Reagan twelve times. Twelve times. He is an interesting man. Well he understands politics but he used to tell us lots of jokes.
CAMPBELL: Since his overthrow in November, he has lived with his memories and a conviction he did nothing wrong.
SHEVARDNARDZE: I wish them success and what is more important, for the people to be calm and if they need me, my advice or recommendations and so on, I will be ready. There is nothing else I can do.
CAMPBELL: But he’s the last man Georgians would ask for advice. The Makharashvili family were once in the Soviet middle class. All of them doctors, professors and engineers. Before independence they enjoyed modest prosperity in the Soviet Union’s richest republic. They remain fiercely proud and embarrassingly hospitable, spending everything they had on a banquet for our visit but the generosity masks a deep and humiliating poverty. Irina is a teacher surviving on a salary of seven US dollars a month.
IRINA: I am poor. I work but I am poor. I am not in the middle. I am poor.
CAMPBELL: And all your friends are poor professional people?
IRINA: Yes, everyone. In my family and in my neighbourhood. When you have no money, you have resource and no medicine and nothing, you think that your President is the leader of corruption. I think so.
CAMPBELL: Georgia has been showered with foreign aid and western loans. The United States gave it more aid per person than any country except Israel and there is little to show for it except crippling debt. Despite this Shevardnardze insists he is not to blame.
SHEVARDNARDZE: There were some ministers that which were really involved in corruption. They were dishonest people. I knew about it and had I remained the President I would have sacked them.
SAAKASHVILI: He had himself of course, encouraged very openly, not only his corrupt ministers. Most of them have been arrested now and they are pointing at him and saying he was our boss. We received orders from him.
CAMPBELL: Most of the money disappeared offshore but there’s the odd trace of stolen loot. This luxury estate outside Tbilisi is the preserve of former Government officials. Bureaucrats on declared salaries of less than seventy US dollars a month built themselves palaces by Georgian standards. This sprawling home belongs to the former Custom’s chief. The grandest buildings belong to Shevardnardze’s family. His daughter Manana is building a three thousand square mansion surrounded by five metre high concrete walls. His son Paata is building an identical mansion across the street. The two linked by an underground tunnel. It’s just the tip of their wealth.
SAAKASHVILI: His family owns the biggest telecommunications company, they have controlling stake in a big steel factory in western Georgia. They control the main port here. They use to control the gasoline imports into Georgia.
CAMPBELL: Saakashvili served as Shevardnardze’s Justice Minister before being forced out over his attempts to prosecute corrupt ministers. It made him the natural leader of last November’s mass protest that became known as the “Rose Revolution”. The daily demonstrations were sparked by the Government’s rigging of parliamentary elections. Tens of thousands stood outside parliament from early morning to late at night. Irina was one of them.
IRINA: Everybody in our town have hope of good life in our future and if we don’t change anything we can’t have this life so we decide to join them and to show that we are with them.
CAMPBELL: Shevardnardze insists he stepped down to avoid bloodshed.
SHEVARDNARDZE: My supporters, serious people were standing by the Parliament building. It could have started from all corners, confrontation between supporters and opponents. It would have been civil confrontation and therefore a civil war. This is why I decided to cancel this decree on the state of emergency.
SAAKASHVILI: He gave all the orders to fire on people and to get me. First of all he wanted the revolutionary leaders to be arrested, then they wanted to, in my case, to kill me but it didn’t work.
CAMPBELL: Shevardnardze gave orders to kill you?
SAAKASHVILI: Definitely he did and we have documented proof to that but it didn’t work you know because once he did it, it was already too late for him. The people were so much well mobilised and organised and he was panicking and I don’t know if he himself understood properly what he was doing. And in the end, he shouldn’t merit himself for not shedding blood. In the end he didn’t shed blood because he couldn’t shed blood, because nobody wanted to listen to him anymore.
CAMPBELL: Shevardnardze’s supporters denounced the revolution as a coup. While the US have long supported Shevardnardze, in the end it lost patience and switched to the opposition.
Whether it was a coup or a genuinely peaceful revolution, the people soon gave it their assent, electing Saakashvili with an astonishing 97% of the vote.
SAAKASHVILI: This present Government is very young and of course they lack experience but sometimes in our situation, most of the case, lack of experience itself is an asset because if you’re looking to what kind of experience people have here, this was experience from old Soviet regime. We have to take care of our own destiny.
CAMPBELL: His swearing in was a striking symbol of his aim to bring Georgia out of Russia’s shadow, with the European Union’s flags and western ceremonial music. Saakashvili has already made progress on his inauguration vows. An anti-corruption body has arrested senior officials of the former regime and even charged Shevardnardze’s son-in-law. But for all the popular support in Tbilisi, Georgia remains a divided State. Huge areas of the country are simply beyond his control. Saakashvili’s authority meets its first challenge just outside the capital.
We’ve just driven an hour and a half outside Tbilisi and while we’re technically still in Georgia, in reality this is the border of the self-styled independent State of South Ossetia. Cars with Georgian number plates can’t go past here, nor can any of the new President’s decrees.
The Ossetians split from Georgia during a brutal civil war in the early 90’s. At the same time, the northeast region of Abkhazia declared independence, routing Georgian troops. Today, both operate as de facto separate States.
The only authority South Ossetia recognises is its bullet holed Parliament and the regional president, former rebel commander Eduard Kokoity.
EDUARD KOKOITY: Of course, for fourteen years, South Ossetia has not been a part of Georgia. Since the moment the Soviet Union collapsed and the moment the Georgian Soviet Republic ceased to exist, the people of South Ossetia made their choice, and at the referendum they voted for independence. And now we are an independent State.
CAMPBELL: No country in the world recognises their independence, not even Russia but Moscow’s tacit sponsorship can be seen everywhere. Police and soldiers wear Russian uniforms, cars have Russian numberplates. Ninety per cent of the population have Russian passports. The region even runs on Moscow time, an hour later than Tbilisi. The dependence on Russia suits many in Moscow’s nationalist elite keen to retain influence in the region. Kokoity warns he will have powerful backing if Saakashvili attempts to retake territory by force.
KOKOITY: This time, South Ossetia will not be alone. Very many people representing the north Caucasus have approached us and reassured us that in case of aggression, volunteers from the whole North Caucasus will be here to fight for South Ossetia. But we do not want this. We don’t want war.
CAMPBELL: The impasse means three hundred and fifty thousand people cannot return to their homes. Refugees from the fighting living in squalid slums across Georgia, dependent on charity for survival but it’s in many people’s financial interest to keep Georgia split.
SAAKASHVILI: Ninety five per cent of heroin consumed in Europe comes from Afghanistan and most of it goes through Georgia, which means that this lawless zone of Abkhazia with its access to the sea is a paradise for drug traffickers.
CAMPBELL: Russia is not the only great power vying for influence here. Under a programme began by Shevardnardze, US marines are training and outfitting elite Georgian troops. They are skills the separatist regions fear could be used against them but the marines insist it’s all aimed at a wider battle.
US MARINE: Well the purpose of the military here is to help train the Georgian army to fight the global war on terrorism. What we’re doing is taking a battalion size elements at a time, running them through infantry type training, teaching them how to teach themselves to prepare for the global war on terrorism. Georgia is connected to the war on terrorism simply by being a partner to the US. They have decided that they want to do their part in the global war on terrorism and they said that they needed help so the United States Marine Corps comes over here to help them.
CAMPBELL: Is there any guarantee that the troops you train wont be used against the separatist regions inside Georgia?
US MARINE: Well that I don’t really know anything about. What the Georgians plan on doing with their own troops is really Georgian business.
CAMPBELL: And the Americans have another interest here, the west’s main pipeline route for vast reserves of Caspian Sea oil will soon cross this country. Powerful forces will want to ensure the new President protects their interests.
SAAKASHVILI: We are a small country and we need to survive in a very complicated geopolitical environment and we don’t want to turn this country into a battlefield between the different superpowers and that’s, I’ll do whatever it takes not to alienate any of the countries. Especially our neighbours. We want good relations with Russia. I am not pro-American or pro-Russian. I am pro-Georgian.
CAMPBELL: There is much that could go wrong with Georgia’s revolution, an ocean of disappointment could lie ahead. Yet Georgian’s like Gurami Makharashvili and his family and friends have unshakable faith that this time life will improve.
GURAMI MAKHARASHVILI: Let God give his blessing to you. Let your visit here bring happiness to Georgia and let prosperity stay with it from now on.
CAMPBELL: Despite a decade of war and hardship, Georgians have one resource that is always bountiful.
IRINA: We have hope. That’s the difference. Now we have very big hope and when people have hope I think that they can do everything.