The administration of U.S. President Barack Obama has a new headache to deal with today — Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. Washington’s tolerance for his violence and provocations is running very thin. The recent demolition of the World War II monument in Georgia may be the last straw.
“I wish we all could forget our past and look forward only,” Saakashvili said in a recent interview with state-run Rustavi 2 television. About 700,000 Georgian heroes fought in World War II. Nearly half of them never returned home. They sacrificed their lives to free Auschwitz and Dachau and save the world from national socialism.
Monuments serve as testimonials to the past, binding one generation to another. They serve as living, breathing reminders of what others sacrificed. Many surviving families of the war dead were never able to bury their loved ones. The razed monument was the only opportunity to pay their respects.
Obama clearly has other foreign policy priorities than dealing with Saakashvili at the moment. Every act of violence and provocation on Saakashvili’s part only isolates him further from Washington. Obama’s advisers are watching the situation in Georgia closely, hoping for any excuse to soften their support for him.
Most Georgians are terribly embarrassed by what Saakashvili has done to ruin the country’s global image. He clearly violated international law with his acts of aggression in the South Caucasus. Moreover, by curtailing civil rights in the country, he has embarrassed even his staunchest neocon supporters in the United States.
If Saakashvili sticks with the old plan of refusing to compromise with his opposition, cracking down on freedoms, imprisoning political opponents and blowing up World War II monuments, he will drive himself further into a dangerous corner of global isolation.
Saakashvili clearly is detached from reality and suffers from an acute illusion of grandeur. For example, he couldn’t understand for the life of him why Georgia, whose gross domestic product is less than the GDP of Gabon, Senegal and Zambia, was denied attendance at the Group of 20 summit in Pittsburgh in October.
Saakashvili is a political corpse with no chance of being revived. The sooner he is forced to accept this fact, the better it will be for the Georgian people.
Tsotne Bakuria, a former member of Georgia’s parliament, lives in Alexandria, Virginia.