TBILISI, 8 January 2004 — Eduard Shevardnadze putters around his house on the hill with little left to do but plan his memoirs. They haven’t taken away the house, at least. Or the pictures on the wall.
There he is, laughing with Ronald Reagan at the White House; shaking hands with George H.W. Bush; visiting the Wyoming ranch of James A. Baker III, Bush’s secretary of state; sharing a chat with Jacques Chirac of France. There he is, too, in a half dozen paintings: Shevardnadze as a young man, Shevardnadze staring meaningfully into the distance, Shevardnadze as head of state.
They are the memorabilia of a man of history, a man credited with helping to bring down the Berlin Wall and ending the Cold War. Nowhere are there keepsakes marking how his own history concluded, the ignominious end six weeks ago when an estranged protege half his age, along with tens of thousands of his countrymen, forced him to give up the presidency of his native land after a decade in office.
“Although we managed to put an end to the Cold War and build an independent democratic country, there are still too many unresolved problems that still wait for resolution,’’ he said Monday, a day after the leader of the “rose revolution’’ that deposed him was elected president. “It was impossible to solve these problems within 10 years.’’
In an interview at the government residence he has been allowed to keep, Shevardnadze expressed no regrets for his inability to halt Georgia’s drastic decline in recent years, a failure that dulled his luster in Washington. He said he could not think of anything he would have done differently and portrayed his ouster as a final act of heroism and self-sacrifice in which he stepped down to avert violence.
Shevardnadze, 75, appeared at peace with his fate. Laughing at many of his own answers, his face ruddy with humor, he expressed no bitterness toward those who had forced him out and confirmed that he even voted for the revolution’s leader, Mikheil Saakashvili, in Sunday’s special election.
“There was no one better to vote for,’’ he said. “Even if I were angry, it wouldn’t last for a long time. And I can never feel hatred toward a person no matter how bad he might be.’’
Even if Shevardnadze has put his anger behind him, many Georgians have not and want him prosecuted. But Saakashvili, 36, a former justice minister under Shevardnadze, promised to spare his predecessor any retribution. Zurab Zhvania, a former Parliament speaker who will serve as Saakashvili’s prime minister in a restructured government, said in an interview that despite public anger, “the present government will create guarantees for his physical security and his life conditions. The rest is up to him.’’
Some who have visited lately said Shevardnadze still refuses to understand what happened, how he lost touch with the people. “He was very warm, he hugged me. He was emotional, an old man,’’ said Tedo Japaridze, who was Shevardnadze’s national security adviser. “We sat down, talking about different issues. And suddenly he started reflecting on the events and he was still in this serial world of his own, created by his inner circle. It was complete hallucination.’’
Saakashvili cruised to victory Sunday against token opposition as a national hero for putting an end to Shevardnadze’s reign. With a quarter of the ballots counted, authorities said he had 96.7 percent of the vote.
Bruce George of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe hailed “notable progress’’ from the “appallingly bad election system’’ used two months ago in a parliamentary vote that touched off street protests.
“It is clear that the Georgian people have spoken and they support Mikheil Saakashvili’s plan to reform Georgia,’’ J. Adam Ereli, a State Department spokesman, said in Washington. For years, Shevardnadze was the American favorite that Saakashvili has become. As Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s foreign minister, he worked closely with Baker, his US counterpart, facilitating the end of the Soviet empire. He returned to newly independent Georgia to lead it through a decade of civil war, gangland crime and economic collapse.
His final days in office demonstrated how isolated he had become. Japaridze said he discovered his direct telephone line to the president cut off, so he wrote a memo urging Shevardnadze to nullify the marred election and call a new vote. When the president did not respond, Japaridze said, he marched four floors up to Shevardnadze’s office, only to be refused entry.
Finally he went public with a televised statement, hoping Shevardnadze would hear it. “It was my last attempt to get the message across, because communications with him were dead,’’ Japaridze said. Instead, Japaridze was fired.
Shevardnadze called a state of emergency, including, Zhvania said, ordering tanks into the streets to break up the protests. At the same time, US Ambassador Richard Miles was urging ministers not to resort to violence. “No shooting,’’ he told them, according to a Western diplomat. The defense minister defied the order to deploy tanks, Zhvania said. Shevardnadze denied issuing such an order, but agreed that his emergency decree could have led to tanks in the streets. He said he decided to step down after a restless night mulling the costs.
At home and abroad, Shevardnadze has been praised for that decision. President Bush sent a letter of thanks. Rather than evict him from his residence, Saakashvili moved into another government residence next door. Shevardnadze has decided to stay put.
“I avoided bloodshed from conflicts and I saved people from the consequences,’’ he said. “So why should I think of fleeing from my own country?’’
