Word: tbilisi
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Fred Woodruff was just another diplomat until he died. But when CIA director James Woolsey flew to Tbilisi to collect his body last week, it was not hard to deduce that Woodruff was actually a U.S. spy. His death dramatized America's increasing involvement in the volatile remnants of the old Soviet empire. As Washington tries to boost its ties with these disorderly states, even to mediate their conflicts with Russia, Woodruff's slaying raises a sharp warning: these lands are increasingly chaotic, and chaos has its perils...
...MANY TBILISI RESIDENTS ESCAPE to dachas in the hills above the Georgian capital during summer weekends, but not Eduard Shevardnadze. For the former Soviet Foreign Minister and current chairman of the republic's provisional State Council, affairs of state continue nonstop. Seven days a week, from 8:30 a.m. until well after midnight, Shevardnadze is on the job, working the battery of telephones on his desk beneath a silver icon of the madonna and child. On Monday fighting broke out again in the secessionist region of Abkhazia. On Tuesday Russian forces killed several Georgian guardsmen in the Abkhazian capital. Wednesday...
...fire-blackened walls of Tbilisi's Government House are a grim reminder of the street battle last December that toppled Gamsakhurdia, Georgia's first popularly elected President. The fervently patriotic Georgians had been quick to follow the lead of the Baltic republics in breaking away from Moscow early in 1990, but the majority admit they were duped by the charismatic nationalist, whose dictatorial policies turned democratic forces against him. * Gamsakhurdia instituted no economic reforms and left the state bureaucracy in a shambles. His worst legacy, though, was to set his compatriots on a collision course with ethnic minorities who felt...
Meanwhile, Georgian leader Eduard Shevardnadze put down a coup attempt in Tbilisi and arrived several hours late for still another peace negotiation in Sochi. He and Yeltsin signed an agreement to end the fighting in South Ossetia, a part of Georgia where secessionists demand union with North Ossetia, a part of Russia...
During the republic's campaign for independence, the erstwhile friend of Mikhail Gorbachev was branded a "top Kremlin agent." But in the wake of ousting dissident turned despot Zviad Gamsakhurdia in January, Tbilisi leaders took a more benign view of the onetime Georgian Communist Party boss and last week appointed him to chair the new State Council, effectively giving Shevardnadze stewardship of his mountainous homeland. The veteran diplomat now faces pressing tasks: staving off economic collapse, healing the divisions created by months of civil strife and ending the isolation into which Georgia was pushed during Gamsakhurdia's flirtation with dictatorship...