Eight Pieces of Empire (10 page)

Kitovani’s men ditch their railroad-guarding mission and angrily march into the regional capital, Sukhumi. The predictable wave of looting and revenge against some ethnic Abkhaz, and other local non-Georgians, ensues. The Abkhaz flee north for the coastal town of Gudauta, where they set up their own administration.

It’s a mere few days after the war’s start. I wander the halls of the parliament and strike up a conversation with Eduard Shevardnadze, the effective “head of state” of the new Georgia. (At the time, he is officially known as chairman of the State Council; later, he’d opt for the title of president. At this stage in Georgia’s statehood, “Shevy” has but one bodyguard, and security is almost nonexistent.) To many in the West, he’s the Man Who Ended the Cold War as Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet foreign minister. He’s on his way to a raucous parliamentary session. Shevardnadze smiles and rattles off a few platitudes to me about how there is still “hope.” In other words, it’s not too late to stop the conflict in Abkhazia.

Shevardnadze has problems: The “head of state” is clearly not calling the shots. He is not even formally commander in chief of the National Guard. The dim-witted loudmouth Kitovani is.

Kitovani is one of the warlords who brought Shevardnadze back to Georgia as a fig leaf for their questionable legitimacy. Because they have the men and the guns, they are in control, at least for now. The Abkhaz don’t buy it: They are convinced Shevardnadze’s behind the war. Shevardnadze tries to reach Kitovani by phone or military radio. The rabble-rousing artisan Kitovani, once inside Abkhazia, even refuses several times to take phone calls from the “head of state” as he helps lead Georgia into its latest disaster.

I wander down the street from the parliament.

It’s a molten August sky, as if dripping hot lead. Armed men are milling around in a downtown park, near Tbilisi’s Central House of Chess. The air is a simmering pot boiled over. These fighters belong to yet another
parliamentary group, the Mkhedrioni (“Knights”), and the Chief Knight is about to speak. His name is Jaba Ioseliani, and he is a smiling man with a dramatic aura. In the sixty-seventh year of his life (born 1926), Jaba (Georgian men, even presidents, are referred to by their first names, preceded by “Batono,” a term of respect roughly meaning “Sir”) is well preserved, dapperly dressed (he prefers bow ties), and armed with a deceptively warm smile. By age sixty-six, most paramilitary leaders have well-established military careers. Jaba’s, by contrast, is about two years old. He helped topple the erratic elected president, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, over the winter. Now he, together with the big-canvas painter Kitovani, is the other main protagonist in Georgia’s newest war, against the Abkhaz. Life imitates art. Jaba’s current “official” job description? Dramatist, playwright.

An earlier job of Jaba’s came as a student in Leningrad. In this case, a woman’s finger was allegedly chopped off in order to make it easier to steal a ring she wore. Toss in a second jail stint for manslaughter, and all in all Jaba earned more than fifteen years in a Soviet (Russian) prison before reclaiming his status as a dramaturge in Georgia, just when the place was falling apart. And now as a warlord.

Hundreds of armed men have shown up to hear the Great Man, who is pontificating from a stage inside the House of Chess. The gathered are an eclectic lot, and they and the Great Man seem props in a grand show. Uniforms? The favored dress code is a T-shirt and jeans, preferably baggy ones. Dark sunglasses, worn night and day, sun or clouds, also seem obligatory. Oh, and make sure you bring your own Kalashnikov, or share one with a friend.

Jaba’s speech is a colorful rant about pride and honor, or at least his interpretation of such values. Loud chatting among the crowd of fighters drowns him out. Many are sprawled out between theater chairs. The rabble is nonstop, extemporaneous; Georgians have a habit of talking all at the same time, and this is no exception, especially since many of the “Knights” are inebriated.

The Knights are accountable only to themselves and, occasionally,
Jaba, who is accountable to no one. They make sure everyone understands that. The license plates on their automobiles are uniquely personalized: Often they have none.

Jaba jumps into a waiting car, followed by me and the makeshift army of men in cars with no license plates. The several hundred fighters head for the airport.

The Knights have no planes, and the government has no real air force, even troop transports. Odd aircraft on the tarmac (usually Tupolev-154s, the standard Soviet passenger planes) are commandeered on the spot and converted for use in minutes.

The lucky get seats, if they haven’t been torn out. No seat, no problem. Stand in the aisles, in the cockpit, in the toilet. Some men pile into the cargo hold along with a new supply of artillery shells. Everyone poses for pictures, partaking in this moment of history.

“Gamarjos Sakartvelos!”
“Long Live Georgia!”

The empire is dead and the pent-up emotions of hundreds of years under foreign tutelage boil over in a paroxysm of nationalist fervor. The result is a ruinous, pointless, internecine bloodletting pitting Georgians against Ossetians and now Georgians against Abkhazians and finally Georgians against Georgians, during which most of the original objectives (such as independence) get lost in the mayhem.

The Knights have vague notions about their upcoming mission in Abkhazia. “We are going to fight for the Motherland” is a typical refrain. Blank stares greet me when I ask what that means in practice.

Well, it’s only been going on for a week. So, is it really a war? Well, people have been killed, so let us call it a “conflict,” but not a “war” yet. We can reserve that designation for another year, by which time there will be ten thousand dead and hundreds of thousands homeless.

I’M READY TO
make my way to the “front,” if there is one. Groups of Georgian fighters are still clamoring to get there too. Miraculously, some commercial flights are still flying! I buy a twelve-dollar ticket on a
twenty-six-seat Yakovlev-40 plane. I seem to be the only paying passenger, however. The rest are either Batono Jaba the dramatist’s “Knights,” or Kitovani’s National Guardsmen. Why is it that paramilitary gurus around these parts all seem to be led by artists of one ilk or another?

It is hot on the asphalt. Burning hot. Shoes sink in the half-melted tar. The flight was supposed to leave at three p.m., but now it is four and then five, then six. “We’re waiting for a VIP,” blurts out an airport official. Who? No one will say. We take refuge from the heat by sitting on our bags underneath the wings of the little plane. Three fighters are next to me, along with a lamb on a tether. They do their best to show me the legendary Georgian hospitality, pouring shot after shot of
chacha
, or hard-core Georgian moonshine made from grapes, into a common glass and down shot after shot. Sweaty with gregariousness, they act like they’re going to a party. Or a funeral pyre for the empire. They drink to my health, even as they slowly ruin theirs, and insist I join them in the festivities. But I’m in no mood for this and turn down their entreaties until someone reminds me that snubbing a toast is an offense to Georgian honor, an issue that is treated with infinitely more gravity than the newly ignited war.

Finally, the pilot appears. After some two dozen men with their sundry weapons board, I climb up the stairs followed by my three fighter friends and the lamb. It bleats and baahs the entire way to Abkhazia. So does one of the liquored-up fighters, chattering away in Georgian in my ear the whole flight, which I don’t understand a lick of yet. That fact does not trouble him.

It’s dark by the time we land in Sukhumi, and I can’t see a thing from the air. My fighter friends disappear with their bleating future dinner into the chaos on the tarmac. As the reinforcements have arrived, other armed men fight for seats for the flight back to Tbilisi. Across the runway, a much larger passenger jet is getting ready to fly a scheduled route to Moscow. Most of the would-be passengers are Georgian men, dragging enormous bags filled with produce to sell in Russia. They make their way toward the plane but are stopped by furious fighters who charge
the merchants with desertion of the Motherland. “Stay and fight!” they scream at the perceived turncoats, firing their weapons in the air. The war that nobody started does not seem to be going well.

I make my way through the throng to the road outside the terminal and try to find a lift into the city, some twelve miles away. There are no cars on the road. Another fighter approaches and introduces himself as “Commander Dato,” the Georgian short form of the name David. He is tall and his head droops toward me, like an overripened sunflower. With him is a local woman, Irina. “I’m a Jew,” she says, out of the blue. For the next two hours, Dato talks up a storm. He’s already called HQ, he says. Every so often he promises a car is on the way. “Ten minutes,” he says for the thirteenth time.

Later, instead of a fourteenth broken promise, he admits, “No more cars tonight,” and points in the direction of a forlorn barrackslike shack. I stumble in the dark and enter. The floor is a mixture of concrete and dirt. A bunch of grunts snore away on cots. I find a free one and pretend to sleep. At dawn, I leave the slumbering paramilitaries and wander onto the long airport access road, which leads to the main highway.

There are still no cars in sight, but the morning sun reveals a lush cover of palm trees, mandarin groves, and tea plantations along the main road. Cows wander through tea bushes. The Black Sea coast arcs on the left. On the right—the snowcapped peaks of the Caucasus. I’d heard of Abkhazia’s beauty but wasn’t prepared for the Malibu-at-war I’d entered.

A car stops along the road, another rattling, ubiquitous old Soviet Lada. The man behind the wheel is Aleksandr Berulava. He’s wiry, edgy, with ruddy cheeks. Although he claims to be a local journalist, he’s wearing military fatigues and is now doing PR for the Georgian war effort.

“They had all the best houses, all of the best jobs,” Berulava complains, insisting the Abkhaz and the Russians started the war through a carefully calculated set of “provocations.” He pulls up to the Georgian HQ, hastily set up in a palatial coastal mansion in a lush botanical garden that once served as summer digs for Uncle Joe Stalin. Peacocks strut about the yard, barking. Placards identify rare plants and flowers, visual
and olfactory sedatives for Stalin and other strongmen who’ve inhabited this piece of paradise.

We ascend the steps, and I am led in and introduced to Giorgi Khaindrava, the city’s “military commandant.” Just like Jaba the dramatist and the painter Kitovani, Georgi is yet another artistic figure—in this case, an actor by profession. The war is feeling more and more like a big stage production.

“Welcome, welcome to Sukhumi, my friend!” crows Commandant Khaindrava. He is boisterous, hosting—as if the mythology of Georgia’s endless wine- and feast-fueled bacchanalia is obligatory even in these difficult circumstances.

I mention to Khaindrava that the “Knights” and “Guards” have not ingratiated themselves with the local Abkhaz and non-Georgian population. They’ve accused them of looting, booze-fueled vandalism, and random violence.

He nods his head slowly. This is a problem among his men, he admits.

When the military commandant tells you he’s got a problem with random violence and uncontrolled marauding, you know there’s more trouble brewing. I ask about getting to the “front.” The problem is, there isn’t much of one. Most of the Abkhaz have retreated to the north of the region and are busy setting up an “army”—with the covert help of the Russians and some allies from ethnic brethren in Russia.

In the heady first days of the war, the Georgians demonstratively marched all the way up the coastal highway to the Russian border, planting Georgian flags, kissing the local women, and drinking with local men.

But marking territory is not the same as holding on to it.

Eighteen years later, in 2010, Giorgi Karkarashvili, a young Georgian top commander in the Abkhaz war who later became Georgia’s defense minister at the ripe age of twenty-six, makes a startling admission:

“We entered Abkhazia in a very disorganized way. We didn’t even have a specific goal, and we started looting villages along the way,” Karkarashvili says. “As a result, in the span of a month, we managed to make enemies out of the entire local population.”
With such sage military planning (more driven by testosterone than strategy), the end result of the War That Nobody Started would be predictable.

I ARRIVE BACK
at my apartment in Tbilisi from Abkhazia after midnight, covered in subtropical sweat and grime. Images of rare luxury swirl in my head. In this case, of hot water. One of the few perks central planning did offer was nonstop, almost-scalding tap water on demand. In urban USSR centers, one could take virtually endless free steam showers, the water pumped from giant central heating stations. Any American who grew up in a large family knows this is not something to be taken for granted.

I went to the shower and turned it on, but the water was an icy rain. I waited, but the stream remained glacial. The central hot water system never was switched back on again in Georgia; heating stations could no longer afford fuel—the end of another era.

I get a late-night phone call from a colleague. “Head of State” Eduard Shevardnadze was flying to New York the next morning to speak at the United Nations. I assumed it was already too late to sign up. “Come to the airport and just get on,” said the reporter, Zhorra Vardzelashvili.

“What do you mean ‘just get on,’ ” I countered. “We’re talking about the president’s plane. And he’s leaving in a few hours.”

“Just show up,” he said.

Rules of deference and feigned respect common to the rest of the governed world had yet to catch on. The Georgian officials were often embarrassingly deferential to foreigners. The guards at parliament barely bothered to emerge from a slouch when I passed through. There were metal detectors for show—usually switched off.

I got to the airport minutes before takeoff. Shevardnadze stands, waiting. The Man Who Ended the Cold War seemed a bit out of place in the VIP lounge, with its stained brown carpeting and sofas with cigarette holes, where cows often wandered near the molehill-bumpy runway.