Joseph L. Kagle, Jr. Essays

Let Freedom Ring

“President Eduard Shevardnadze has resigned”, I heard on national television. What a wonderful sound that makes for freedom and the democratic process. Since 5:30 a.m. this morning, I have been in contact with friends in Georgia. At the crack of dawn, a close journalist friend wrote: “It is amazing and inspiring to see people rise up and try to take control of their lives.” This was written after he drove home with an opposition leader (who does not want violence but justice in a country with a history of injustice). The flag waving from the window of the automobile was not of National Party (the opposition to Shevardnadze) or Georgian. It was Guns ‘n Roses. Earlier, Shevardnadze had given a statement from his office: “The armed attack on the president has ended without casualties. President Shevardnadze is alive. An armed coup has occurred in Georgia.” The only trouble with that statement is, as another journalist relates, “it occurred on live television, and everyone saw it. No arms. Not even remotely a question of casualties.” The army and the police had guns but not the protestors. When the unarmed protestors asked to be heard in Parliament, the police divided, let them in, and then melted away and went home. This is a protest against Shevardnadze-fixed elections and a history of bad government. You might think that we were in California.

As the journalist and his wife went down to the Georgian Parliament, there were people with babies, mothers as well as students, intellectuals and workers. There were over 30,000 marchers in a country of only 4.5 million people (today, since one million had left since the census in 1991 to send money home to needy families). As Mikheil Saakashvili, interviewed by Ryan Chilcote of CNN, describes the scene: “This is a velvet, bloodless revolution. I have never seen the Georgian people so united. We are destitute; we are desperate; we are poor.”  But now, they are also without the constant tie, Eduard Shevardnadze, to the Soviet past: both physically and mentally..

Shevardnadze had been in power since 1992 (one year after the revolution ended). He had been the head of the Communist Party for the Soviet Union. He thought and ruled in those terms. His newly-created villa in Baden, Germany is being built for $13,090,000 US dollars, at a time when Georgia has no electricity, no workable infrastructure, no gas, no jobs and each worker’s salary per day is one dollar and a pension pays seven dollars per month.

When I was there in November of 2001, the people peacefully surrounded the Parliament, after a Shevardnadze-controlled government directed the military to storm an independent television station for speaking out against their policies. They shut it down temporarily. Then it was but 10,000 who stood in the cold for two weeks until the legislators promised to resign for their anti-free speech actions. They all did and two week after that Shevardnadze reinstated his people to office without a vote. In 2003, Georgian people did not believe hollow promises. Today, 70-80% of Georgians oppose  Shevardnadze. With those odds, I would resign too. The US and world observers who witnessed the recent elections call them “corrupt” and “a fraud”. 

Now, here is a description of what my journalist friends saw in Georgia, leading to the resignation: “Buses, cars and motorbikes have formed a column beginning in Kutaisi (about 200 miles west of Tbilisi); in the rain, and have made their way across the country. At 7:00 p.m. local time (today), there was a line four kilometers long making its way from Gori to Tbilisi. People were standing four and five deep along the route, cheering, laughing, waving flags, blowing kisses, and holding up their children. The contrast between these people, who must be frightened of what they are moving toward but who are going there with joy, and the goons who are waiting for them, tells it all.” It is a contrast between free people and those who support Shevardnadze, wanting him in power so that the pattern of corruption will last. Hopefully, the goons and these politicians and their relatives who live in their million dollar homes overlooking the poor city will lose power or not be reelected. As freedom rings and the people are heard, there was another story that thankfully did not play out.  I got an email that a Tbilisi citizen heard a policeman say: “If we just shoot a hundred of them, they’ll go home.” The new regime will have to change that way of thinking as the process of democracy in Georgia continues.