Gentle Tyrant

Excerpts from Igor Giorgadze’s open letter to Eduard Shevardnadze, published in Sovetskaya Rossiya, 26 September 1995, No. 114 (11244), p. 2. The letter is dated 21 September 1995. 

“A vast number of documents show that the overwhelming share of the nearly one billion dollars in economic and humanitarian assistance received by Georgia from the West over the past three years ended up in the pockets of just a few families, above all the Shevardnadze clan. Georgia’s material and natural resources were squandered on an unprecedented scale. You know perfectly well that there are people in your circle known in the West as ‘Mr. 25 Per Cent’—the share they demand from every transaction for themselves. You know that one of the heads of the republic’s grain industry spent two weeks in Atlantic City without leaving the roulette table, losing tens of thousands of dollars. And this man, vested with authority by you, is not from Switzerland or Kuwait, but from Georgia, where most of the population is starving and people faint from hunger in bread queues.

You are consciously and deliberately creating a criminal-mafia state, and in conversations with foreign partners you declare with an ironic smile: ‘America, too, was built by grasping opportunists, bandits and robbers, but their children studied at universities.’ You know that this is a blatant lie! America was not built by grasping opportunists, robbers and bandits, but overwhelmingly by law-abiding citizens who recognised and shared the basic principles of democracy.

You are the person who, by your own example, ‘inspires’ your subordinates to new ‘exploits’ in the field of corruption.”

[…]

“When Khabeishvili, the head of the so-called Shevardnadze Fund, was killed, the operational-investigative team of the security service was denied access to that fund, which serves your personal interests, for two weeks. Two weeks was sufficient time to remove and destroy all the documents incriminating the Head of State. At Khabeishvili’s funeral you shed crocodile tears, vowing to find and punish the hired killers. In fact, you knew perfectly well who had commissioned and paid for the murder, and for what purpose it had been carried out: the right hand cut off the left.”

[…]

“You know, of course, the ‘great deeds’ for which Georgia’s current Minister of Internal Affairs, Shota Kviraia, has become known. With your tacit approval, he personally shot six detained residents of Khobi in the Zugdidi district, before dozens of witnesses. These people had been tied up and laid on the ground, and each in turn watched the person before him die in convulsions, foaming at the mouth. It was Shota Kviraia who ordered a young man named Ramishvili to be thrown from a sixth-floor window because, during questioning, he refused to say that he had killed Khabeishvili on the instructions of the special services. Shota Kviraia’s men shot Dvalishvili, the former head of the Central Bank. It was then announced that, after six hours of questioning in the Ministry of Internal Affairs building, he had shot himself on the sixth floor of the Ministry. A man who had never possessed a weapon or held one in his hands.

You know, of course, that the current Minister of Internal Affairs of Georgia, after committing a series of crimes in Moscow, was effectively appointed to his post by the well-known thief-in-law Givi Shalvovich Beradze, nicknamed ‘Givi Rezany’, who put him in contact with Jaba Ioseliani—if asked, he will confirm it. Shota Kviraia, Georgia’s Minister of Internal Affairs, is a mentally ill man with severe psychological abnormalities, a pathological sadist and an alcoholic.

I reported to the Prosecutor General materials showing that the Minister of Internal Affairs had demanded that one of the commanders of Eliava’s armed Zviadist formations, a participant in the civil war, have me killed in exchange for full rehabilitation. I reported this to the Head of State—that is, to you personally. But you did not even want to hear about it.”