Turmoil in Georgia

I would like to comment on your editorial, “Reforming Georgia” (BDN, Jan. 13). I have just returned from spending a year teaching and writing in Tbilisi, the capital city of Georgia, and I can tell you that indeed, many of the Georgian people are acutely disappointed today. They are disappointed not, as your editorial implies, because one “dictator” has been replaced by a worse group, but because their freely elected president, Zviad Gamsakhurdia — a good man in a difficult job — was literally bombarded out of office by a small group of armed men who were elected by nobody.

This unelected opposition now in control of Georgia is made up of three major groups: 1) the ex-communists, who are backed by such former party bosses such as Edward Shevardnadze, 2) a group which calls itself the “intelligentsia” (many of whom are KGB agents), and 3) part of the Georgian national guard. It remains to be seen whether the military or civil arm of this opposition will take charge in Georgia, although since they are already firing into crowds of Gamsakhurdia supporters, it is clear that whoever is in charge is not particularly concerned with human rights.

We Americans want very much to believe that there aren’t any more communists, and that the new commonwealth led by Russia is going to be different from the old Soviet Union. But I think that we shouldn’t be so naive — you may make the Communist Party illegal, but the folks who kept it running for 75 years are still there, and still doing things their way. They just don’t use the world “communist” any more.

It is too bad that the western press, influenced by disinformation coming from Moscow, so blackened Gamsakhurdia’s name during the past few months, and thus allowed the opposition tacit support of its undemocratic takeover of the government house in Tbilisi — which, ironically, was the same way the communists took power over Georgia in 1921 — by shooting their way in.

But the western press was given much of its disinformation about Gamsakhurdia by its sources in Moscow. The Russians were very much opposed to the Georgian president because he advocated Georgia’s complete independence from the former Soviet Union. Shevardnadze and Gorbachev, both communist bosses for 99 percent of their political lives, also opposed Gamsakhurdia, who had fought against the Communist Party and was even imprisoned by them. He spent a year in solitary confinement, and even today one side of his face is paralyzed by a beating he received at the hands of communists.

Perhaps Gamsakhurdia was not an ideal president: He was fighting an uphill battle against a failing economy in a country used to bureaucratic rule, and opposed by a virtual army of ex-communist bureaucrats who wanted their old jobs and “perks” back. He didn’t get much support from the west (just a visit from Richard Nixon last summer). So it is probably no surprise that his government was unequal to the task.

But no country deserves to have its elected president forced out of office by heavy artillery, and its beautiful downtown streets, museums and schools destroyed by an opposition that calls itself “democratic.”

I am afraid that Georgia’s brief taste of independence is over and that those men who are no longer calling themselves communists are those who will continue to rule that ancient embattled country. Patricia E. Hall Surry