Word: gamsakhurdia
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...hear Georgian president Zviad Gamsakhurdia tell it, conspiracies seethe around him. At the national level, Mikhail Gorbachev is scheming to "create a civil war" in the southern republic with the help of "40,000 KGB agents," while fellow Georgian Eduard Shevardnadze, the former Soviet Foreign Minister, is a "provocateur." At the state level, Tengiz Sigua, the Georgian prime minister until six weeks ago, is "a liar and a criminal" who, Gamsakhurdia says, "is making a coup against me." At the grass-roots level, the thousands who now take to the streets daily demanding Gamsakhurdia's resignation are all "plotters...
With each new charge, Gamsakhurdia sounds increasingly paranoid. True, he legitimately has much to fear. Many of the very same Georgians who elected Gamsakhurdia president of their republic just last May are now demanding his ouster. The republic's prime minister and foreign minister have quit the president's cabinet, accusing him of dictatorial practices that block democratic and market reform. And tensions in South Ossetia and Adzhar, two Georgian regions where ethnic populations are demanding autonomy, threaten Gamsakhurdia's vision of a unified, independent state. Just one month after the entire Soviet Union rocked with revolution, Gamsakhurdia...
...devoted to democracy; some may even be declaring independence in order to avoid it. The leaders of Belorussia are widely suspected of seceding so that they can keep the republic under the tight control of the Communist Party -- under a new name, to be sure. Zviad Gamsakhurdia, president of Georgia, seems quite genuine in his fierce desire to escape control by Moscow, but within his republic he has curbed the opposition press and has been accused of putting political opponents in jail...
...recalled the scene last week, when Gamsakhurdia became the first popularly elected president of a Soviet republic. Georgia has much to fear from diehard imperialists in Moscow, but there is another, internal menace -- a growling presence in the garden. The republic is cursed by its own demography. In that sense, it is a microcosm of the U.S.S.R. More than 80 nationalities share a territory half the size of Arkansas. The new, breakaway leadership tends to behave toward its minorities the way the Kremlin -- starting with the Bolsheviks' first commissar of nationalities, the Georgian Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, alias Stalin -- has treated...
...months ahead, the Kremlin is more likely to succeed with provocations and splitting tactics in Georgia. Gamsakhurdia has wasted no time in curbing the press and making it a criminal offense to insult him or his office. If he continues to personify the violent, authoritarian and repressive streak in Georgian nationalism, he may get the civil war he predicted -- inside Georgia itself...