Strongman

by Roxburgh, Angus

  Mikheil Saakashvili, re-elected as president of Georgia the previous month, was sitting in the audience, and gulped hard as he heard the Russian accuse Western governments of a grave miscalculation: ‘This is a stick with two ends, and that other end will come back and knock them on the head one day.’ In a separate meeting on the margins of the summit, Putin tried to reassure Saakashvili: ‘We’re not going to ape the Americans, and recognise the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia just because Kosovo was recognised.’ But Saakashvili did not believe him, and in any case he was as aware as Putin was of the precedent set by Kosovo, and knew his own breakaway provinces might follow suit if he did not act quickly. His attempt to move against South Ossetia in 2004 had failed. Since then, with American help, he had transformed his military into a much more capable force. But if he was going to use it to retake Abkhazia and South Ossetia – risking confrontation with Russia – he would need much more than just logistical support from the Americans.

  Speaking nine days after Kosovo’s declaration of independence, Saakashvili explained why Georgia was now keener than ever to join NATO. ‘Why do we need NATO membership?’ he asked. ‘We need it because Georgia should be strategically protected in this very difficult and risky region, and receive its share of security guarantees.’ A crucial NATO summit was approaching – in Bucharest in April – at which the alliance would consider whether to allow Georgia and Ukraine to embark on a Membership Action Plan or ‘MAP’, considered the first concrete step on the road to membership. To garner support, Saakashvili flew to Washington in March to flash his democratic credentials around the corridors and committee rooms of Congress and the White House.

  He was not short on flattery, telling George Bush in front of the television cameras: ‘What we are up to now is to implement this freedom agenda to the end, for the sake of our people, for the sake of our values, for the sake of what the United States means to all of us, because the US is exporting idealism to the rest of the world.’

  Bush could not suppress a smirk of delight; no one in the world supported him like this guy did. Damon Wilson, the president’s adviser on European affairs, recalls: ‘He was terrific, he was on message. He came into the president with a message about the importance of recognising that his legacy was building a democratic Georgia. This was music to our ears, this was the right message.’1

  And Saakashvili got exactly the answer he was hoping for. ‘I believe Georgia benefits from being a part of NATO,’ Bush told reporters. ‘And I told the president it’s a message I’ll be taking to Bucharest.’

  Not all the allies were so convinced, however, especially the French and the Germans. When Saakashvili arrived in Washington – before he even reached the Oval Office – he received a call from the German chancellor, Angela Merkel. Saakashvili says the first thing he told Bush was, ‘I just had a call from our common friend, Angela Merkel, and she said, “I know you are going to meet with Bush to discuss the pending NATO summit, and I wanted you to know from me that our German position is that you are not ready for membership, and we will not support it.” ’2

  According to eyewitnesses, Bush smiled and told Saakashvili there were big players and small players in the alliance: ‘You take care of Luxembourg and leave Angela to me. I’ll take care of her.’

  That was easier said than done, however. Both the French and the Germans had two reasons to doubt Georgia’s fitness for NATO membership, and neither had to do with ‘appeasing Russia’. Firstly, they felt it was dangerous to admit a country with ‘frozen’ internal conflicts, such as South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Secondly, they were worried by Saakashvili’s personality and recent signs that he was far from the democrat George Bush saw in him.

  In November 2007 police had violently broken up huge anti-government demonstrations in Tbilisi. Saakashvili closed down an opposition television station, Imedi, which had extensively covered the violence, and declared a nationwide state of emergency, accusing Russia of plotting a coup d’état against him. Even the White House had been appalled, and Condoleezza Rice dispatched her assistant, Matthew Bryza, to Tbilisi to read Saakashvili the riot act.

  But Washington and Berlin had a tacit agreement not to air their doubts in public, and the Americans were furious when Merkel went to Moscow, just days before Saakashvili’s meeting with Bush in March, and stood side by side with Vladimir Putin to denounce Georgia’s (and Ukraine’s) NATO aspirations.

  Merkel was hardly a member of the Putin fan-club. A year earlier, during talks in Sochi, she had been horrified when Putin brought out his dog, Koni, and allowed her to sniff around the chancellor’s legs, knowing she was terrified of dogs. (One of Merkel’s senior aides told me they regarded this as ‘typical KGB intimidation’.) Having grown up in communist East Germany, she knew at first hand what totalitarianism meant and what Putin’s background, working hand in hand with the Stasi secret police, said about him.

  But Merkel did agree with Putin that if Georgia and Ukraine began the process of joining NATO, it would steeply raise tensions with Russia. At a joint press conference in Moscow, Putin pointed out that a majority of Ukrainian citizens did not want to join NATO, and added: ‘Ultimately, each country decides for itself how best to ensure its security, and we will most certainly accept whatever the Ukrainian and Georgian peoples decide, but this has to be the decision of the people and not the political elite.’ Merkel concurred that ‘it is important that the public in all future NATO members support their country’s membership’, and added: ‘One of the obligations of NATO member states is that they be free from conflicts. This is something we must reflect upon in our discussions, and it is also something we will be discussing at the upcoming summit in Bucharest.’

  Two days later, in Berlin, addressing a meeting of Germany’s military top brass, Merkel again went public with her doubts: ‘I mean this seriously – countries ensnared in regional or internal conflicts cannot in my view be part of NATO. We are an alliance for collective security and not an alliance where individual members are still looking after their own security.’

  According to Bush’s Georgia adviser, Damon Wilson, the president realised he would have to work ‘personally and privately’ on Merkel to bring her round. ‘He decided the pivot point was the chancellor herself and that if he could help get her on board that he could help close the deal across the alliance.’ Bush and Merkel held a series of video conferences in the run-up to the Bucharest summit. ‘And the remarkable thing is,’ says Wilson, ‘that when you listened to her articulate her concerns, they actually weren’t very different from President Bush’s concerns. In Ukraine, we were concerned about the lack of coherence in governance, the lack of popular support for NATO among the population. In Georgia we both shared concerns about the durability, the depth of democratic institutions.’ The big difference lay in how to move forward. Bush argued that giving Georgia a MAP for NATO membership would encourage them to ‘do their homework’, but Merkel was sceptical about even beginning the process. ‘She wasn’t convinced that Saakashvili was a democrat,’ says Wilson.

  In their final video conference there was deadlock. For Bush it was a matter of principle to be supporting fragile democracies, and he told Merkel he would go to Bucharest to achieve that. ‘OK,’ Bush told his aides afterwards, ‘we’re headed for the OK Corral – guns drawn.’

  Bush also put in calls to other allies. The British prime minister, Gordon Brown, indicated support for the American position. But the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, was another matter. The feedback the Americans were getting from Sarkozy’s advisers had put them on guard. A member of Bush’s National Security Council recalls: ‘Many of them had argued to us that they were sceptical that Georgia was even a European country, much less that we should be willing to begin this conversation about them moving towards alliance membership eventually.’

  When Bush got through to Sarkozy personally, he felt the Frenchman was ‘gettable’: he talked of Ukraine and Georgia having a ‘European and Atlantic voc
ation’. But Sarkozy also wanted Bush to think about Russia. According to the French president’s diplomatic adviser, Jean-David Levitte, Sarkozy ‘tried to get him to understand that in this situation, we were side by side with the Germans, in an approach which aimed to give Russia time to understand that its future was actually bound with that of Europe and its security should not be something that separates us, but rather something that brings us together, and that this vision meant that we shouldn’t try and push too quickly to obtain a MAP, though we should give a positive signal in Bucharest to our partners in Ukraine and Georgia.’3

  And Sarkozy made a forceful new point to the American president about what exactly NATO membership would mean for Ukraine and Georgia. MAP was a ‘foot in the door’, an irreversible step that would lead to full membership of NATO – and then you had to think about Article Five, the alliance’s mutual defence clause. ‘How many troops,’ Sarkozy asked, ‘would we be willing to send to assist our new members in the case of an attack?’ That was why France preferred to make a partnership with Russia the real priority, ‘so that everybody within the continent had the same vision of security’.

  Even within the US administration, there were doubts. Defence Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice shared some of the Europeans’ concerns about democracy in Georgia and Ukraine. Gates recalls: ‘It seemed to me that in terms of the progress of the reform effort, there was still a distance to be covered by both countries.’4 But it was the ‘freedom agenda’ advocates that won the day. ‘If the United States were to back down in the face of Russian pressure and not give them MAP,’ national security adviser Stephen Hadley remembers, ‘then actually that in itself could be provocative, by suggesting to the Russians that they could permanently keep Georgia and Ukraine out of NATO. And that was not a prescription for stability in Europe, that was a prescription for continued tension.’5

  The Bucharest summit, held on 2–4 April in the bombastic palace built by the former Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, turned out to be as dramatic as any in the alliance’s history, with a good deal of undiplomatic mud-slinging passing between the Americans and East Europeans who broadly supported Ukraine and Georgia, and the French and Germans who found themselves cast as ‘appeasers’ of the Russians. On the first evening, foreign ministers had discussions over dinner and failed even to come close to a wording that the summit would be able to approve. The Polish foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, said he had the impression that ‘some allies’ (meaning the Germans) had made commitments to the Russians that MAP would not be granted to Georgia and Ukraine.6

  Condoleezza Rice says she had the feeling that some of the East Europeans were coming rather close to saying to the Germans that ‘you of all people should not be standing in the way of countries that suffered under tyranny thanks to what the Germans did in the 1930s and 1940s’.7

  The German foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, was simply insulted. He had tried to argue that there was a conflict situation in the Caucasus region and NATO risked getting drawn into it. But, he says, ‘things were said that I never want to hear again, where people who were against NATO enlargement were compared to [the appeasers of] Munich in 1938. Absolutely inappropriate.’8

  The plenary session of NATO leaders was due at nine the following morning, but the Americans decided to try to sort it out over an early breakfast beforehand – with officials from the US, the UK, Germany and France, plus Poland and Romania. Damon Wilson admits it was a case of gathering reinforcements: ‘We decided we needed to invite the Romanians as host of the summit and the Poles as big players within the alliance. Obviously, these are two countries that were quite supportive of our position.’

  Jean-David Levitte, the French national security adviser, recalls: ‘At one o’clock in the morning and again at three o’clock I was telephoned to make sure I fully understood at what time and where the breakfast meeting was being held.’ But it turned out not to be an intimate, friendly breakfast, says Levitte, ‘but more like a tribunal’. A text was cobbled together which foresaw a period of ‘intensive engagement’ by NATO towards Georgia and Ukraine, with another assessment of progress in December.

  When the text was distributed just before the full session at nine o’clock, some East European leaders were furious. The presidents of Lithuania, Poland and Romania all made it clear they found the wording ‘not even close to what we expected’. ‘They went ballistic,’ says Stephen Hadley. ‘They thought the document was a capitulation to Russian pressure and Russian veto, and they wanted changes made.’ NATO adopts its decisions by consensus, but as the leaders settled around the huge round conference table, there was no sign of one. Frantic efforts continued to broker a compromise, but not at the main table. Behind the heavy curtains draped around the hall, small constellations of advisers and foreign ministers gathered for ad hoc negotiations.

  In an interview, Stephen Hadley recalled the remarkable scene that followed. ‘All the foreign ministers get up and go to the back of the room, all men in grey hair and suits. And then Angela Merkel gets up, in a nice lime-green jacket, and goes back and sits down with these grey-haired men from Central and Eastern Europe. And soon Condi goes back too, dressed to the nines, and joins them too. And what language are they using? Of course it’s Russian! The language Angela learned in her youth in East Germany and Condi knows from her time as a Russian scholar.’

  It was Merkel who then grabbed the pen and wrote the deal-breaker sentence on a piece of paper: ‘We agree today that Georgia and Ukraine shall one day become members of NATO.’ No mention of MAP – just affirmation that the two countries will join NATO. The East Europeans then protested that the words ‘one day’ were as good as saying ‘never’, so the phrase was deleted. Condoleezza Rice, who had stepped away for a few minutes, came back and was pleasantly surprised: ‘It said Georgia and Ukraine will become members of NATO, and I thought, this is a pretty good deal, and I went to the president and said, “Take it!” ’

  When the whirlwind passed, and the document was adopted, Gordon Brown leaned over to George Bush and joked: ‘I’m not sure what we’ve just done. I know we didn’t give them MAP, but I’m not sure we didn’t just make them members!’

  It was a compromise whose consequences would only sink in later. Bush and the East Europeans were happy because it promised Ukraine and Georgia membership of NATO; Merkel was happy because it left it entirely open-ended as to when that might happen; Georgia and Ukraine were generally pleased, but unhappy to have their membership plans kicked into the long grass; and Russia was furious.

  Watching these events unfold, I found myself wondering: would it not have been better if NATO had taken Putin’s early innocent-sounding inquiries about joining NATO more seriously? Would it not make more sense for the allies to be taking decisions together with Russia – and Georgia and Ukraine – rather than cobbling together compromises explicitly designed to take Russia’s views into account while pretending they did not?

  The roots of the problem

  In the summer of 1991 I had spent several weeks in Georgia, and witnessed the first ethnic convulsions in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Georgia had just declared itself independent of the Soviet Union, under an earlier nationalist leader, Zviad Gamsakhurdia. Like Mikheil Saakashvili some 13 years later, Gamsakhurdia moved to restrict the autonomy of the two territories, both of which wanted to remain within the Soviet Union. It provoked a savage backlash.

  Abkhazia’s Black Sea beaches were once renowned as the Soviet ‘Riviera’, but now they were almost deserted, as Russians stayed away. The capital Sukhumi seemed to be braced for violence, and it soon came. The civil war of 1992–93 led to a mass exodus of a quarter of a million Georgians (almost half of Abkhazia’s population), leaving the 93,000 Abkhaz, who had accounted for just 18 per cent of the population, as the main group in their nominal national territory. The region now had de facto independence, supervised by Russian peacekeepers and United Nations monitors.

&nb
sp; In tiny South Ossetia, where Ossetians accounted for two-thirds of the almost 100,000 population, civil war had already begun. The Ossetians had tried to declare independence, and Gamsakhurdia sent in Georgia’s National Guard to restore order. It was my first experience of war. I remember the road leading into the capital, Tskhinvali, empty and blocked at either end by armoured vehicles and soldiers behind sandbagged barricades, as one of the bleakest places I had ever seen. Knots of Georgian refugees stood around, staring down the road to where their houses had burned down. Some were waiting for a military escort to accompany them through Ossetian territory to Georgian villages. In Tskhinvali, still full of the communist slogans already abandoned in the rest of Georgia, an Ossetian woman told me the kind of horror story that I would hear so often in other tortured parts of the former Soviet Union in later years: ‘Georgia doesn’t feed us. They just kill us. They pull out people’s fingernails, gouge their eyes out, burn their houses.’ I heard Georgians tell the same kind of hysterical stories about Ossetians. In one village I was shown a smoked-out bus in which, it was said, four Georgians had been doused with petrol and burned to death.

  In a Tskhinvali school, I saw a fresh graveyard for ‘the victims of Georgian fascist terror’. Ossetians now received all their supplies from North Ossetia, through the Roki tunnel. I wrote at the time that it was ‘hard to imagine how the two communities could ever again live at peace’.9

  For the next 17 years, Abkhazia and South Ossetia lived as separate entities, with tense and tenuous ties to Georgia, and a growing reliance on Russia. Under Putin their stateless citizens received Russian passports. Like Abkhazia, South Ossetia was patrolled by a Russian-led peacekeeping force. OSCE monitors tried to keep the lid on trouble.