BY
The former Georgian president takes on Ukraine’s most
corrupt region. He’s got his work cut out for him.
Odessa, Ukraine
— Mikheil Saakashvili — exiled president of Georgia, newly minted Ukrainian
citizen, and recently appointed governor of Ukraine’s Odessa region — jumped
out of a public bus with a broad smile on his sweaty face, pulling up his tight
Hugo Boss jeans. He had just arrived in the remote village of Tatarbunary,
where most of the residents live on $100 or less per month. As locals crowded
around him, he was ebullient — and full of promises. He vowed to fix the
bumpy highway that passes through the village on its way to nearby Romania, in
the European Union. He also pledged to take on an allegedly corrupt political
boss in the regional capital (also called Odessa).
Saakashvili, a man
who loves to grapple with political problems, had clearly come to the right
place.
One local woman,
clearly gratified to have the ear of a high-ranking official, didn’t mince her
words: “Odessa businessmen grab our beaches and take over the seashore,” she
complained. “And the one who sells our land is standing right next to you!” She
pointed at local official Igor Belinsky, who was there to escort the governor
around. Belinsky stared blankly, unsure how to respond. Yet Misha, as
Saakashvili likes to call himself, wasn’t paying attention. Instead, he
launched into a monologue about democracy and the need for reform, brushing
away the awkward moment.
In the month since
he was appointed to his new
job by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, Saakashvili has been working hard
to establish his reputation as the man who’s going to clean up one of the most
corrupt regions in this corrupt country. He has yelled at prosecutors and sent
top bureaucrats packing. He has chewed out members of the business and
political elite. And he has unveiled sweeping plans to fight
corruption and revitalize Odessa’s sagging economy.
In the process
he’s received the wholehearted support of the political leadership in Kiev and
the backing of the United States,
which has evenpromised to loan members of the
California Highway Patrol to support his plans for police reform and to pay the
salaries of some of his staff. Many Odessans clearly look to him with hope,
seeing a wholesale housecleaning of the old guard as the solution to their
problems, and Misha as the one with the chops to do it. During his five years
as Georgia’s president, he fired more than 200,000 former KGB officers, policemen,
bureaucrats and university professors. On July 13, true to form, he announced a decision
to sack 377 employees of the Odessa regional administration.
But to those who
have known him for years,
Saakashvili looks
today less like a fearsome figure and more like a tragic one. In his
homeland, where he once rode a revolution into power, he is now a pariah,
facingcriminal charges for, among
things, dispersing an opposition protest with excessive force in 2007 (charges
he dismisses as politically motivated). And in Odessa itself — a once glamorous
but now dilapidated seaport famous for its organized crime, smuggled goods, and
prostitutes — his fate will hinge on a multiethnic, predominantly
Russian-speaking population, many of whom are less than enthusiastic about
living under Kiev’s rule.
Odessa politics
suggest that Saakashvili faces a steep uphill climb. The party of ex-President
Viktor Yanukovych ran the city for years, and his
followers remain largely in control. The Yanukovych-era “feudal leaders and
their vassals” are still the real power in Odessa, local businessman Boris
Khodorkovsky told me.
A few weeks ago,
at the Odessa Literature Museum, I watched as Saakashvili met with
representatives of the region’s civil society organizations. “We need to fire
everybody!” he declared, lecturing the audience on the need to clean up the tax
police, the court system, and the port authority. His listeners welcomed every
word.
Who can really
dispute, after all, that Odessa needs reform like oxygen? Yet seated not
far away, silent and gloomy, was the city’s mayor, Gennady Trukhanov,
universally known as “Gena Kapitan,” a nickname that, by all accounts, goes
back to his days as a local racketeer. (Unlike Saakashvili, who was appointed
to his job by the president, Trukhanov was elected.)
Not present was
Sergei Kivalov, long one of the most powerful figures in the city’s
law-enforcement agencies, and reputed to be a major backer of the local Russian
nationalist movement. Running on his openly pro-Moscow views, the influential
businessman was elected to the Ukrainian parliament last December. But he’s
still said to wield considerable influence over his Odessa supporters from his
new office in Kiev.
“I feel sorry for
Saakashvili,” another Odessa businessman, Vladimir Rondin, told me. “He can
tear himself apart but Gena Kapitan and many others will still have more power
here.” Even members of Saakashvili’s current team concede the point. As
Alexander Borovik, one of the governor’s business advisers, explained to me
over a cup of tea on a recent evening, Odessa’s businesses, courts, and seaport
are all under control of city hall, which is still firmly in the mayor’s hands.
“Saakashvili doesn’t have much power here, because everything is run by
bandits,” Borovik told me. “He’s just here just to change the equilibrium.”
Borovik admitted that Trukhanov had a good chance of being reelected in next
October’s election.
Governor Misha
doesn’t seem worried — and he’s full of plans. Apparently brimming with
self-confidence, he fired dozens of top regional bureaucrats and police
officials before his first month was out. He’s also secured a promise from Kiev
to support his plan to build a highway from Odessa to the Romanian border town
of Rani, in line with the promise he’d made to residents on his Tatarbunary
road trip.
In late June,
Prime Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk made the unusual decision to let half of the
revenues from
Odessa port
customs be spent on the construction of the highway. (The rest will go to the
budget of the central government.) In the tradition of his Georgian reforms,
Saakashvili aims to set up a one-stop shop to simplify the registration of new
businesses and a new logistics center for three Odessa seaports that will
include a computerized customs system for greater transparency.
In Tatarbunary I
overheard two older men discussing the new governor. “He’ll scream and make
many enemies, but nothing is going to change,” one of them said. To be sure,
Saakashvili was a highly controversial figure back home in Georgia, but he was
also an insider and a winner of elections. In Odessa he is neither.
Odessans are
already making fun of him. In one popular Facebook group, participants
debated whether Saakashvili had been drunk or stoned at a recent public
meeting. (He had made a somewhat absent-minded impression.) In late June,
Saakashvili failed to show up at a ball thrown in his honor by over 100 prominent
Odessans — needlessly offending, at a stroke, a whole series of potential
allies among the local elite. Earlier this week someone released a balloon with
the inscription “Misha, go home!” in front of his office.
The government in
Kiev has already fired some of Saakshvili’s critics. But that might not be
enough to protect him. The reforms he’s pushing to achieve in the course of the
next year — the time frame he’s given himself — would be hard enough even for a
politician deeply rooted in local realities.
Saakashvili has
made it clear that his success hinges on finding “quick win” projects to shore
up support for reforms. Yet there’s a clear risk that, in the process, he might
turn a deaf ear to the concerns of local people. Last spring, 39 people, most
of them pro-Russian demonstrators, died in a fire at the Trade Union Building
in central Odessa after a street clash with pro-Kiev protestors. The building
has become something of a local shrine for pro-Moscow groups. Earlier this
month, Saakashvili offered the building
to the Ukrainian Navy as its new headquarters. The move may have endeared him
to Kiev, but it seemed hardly calculated to win over his reluctant foes in
Odessa.
Odessa —
thoroughly multicultural, romantically disreputable — has always reveled in its
ability to defy those in the far-away imperial capitals who claim to rule its
fate. As governors have come and gone, as governments have fallen, as wars have
begun and ended, Odessa has lived on, cracking a wry political joke or two
along the way. Appointing Saakashvili was certainly a great way to draw the
attention of the outside world to the city. But if Odessa’s history is any
indication, it will do its best to shrug off the former Georgian president and
go on with its business.
No one should
dismiss Saakashvili, either, of course. A man of astounding energy and
determination, he could yet pull off the miracle that Odessa, and Ukraine, so
badly need. Yet he can only do so by remaining firmly rooted in the complicated
realities of his new job. In this respect, it seems an ominous sign that he
continues to talk of an eventual return to Georgia, perhaps even by sailing
from Odessa across the Black Sea to his former residence in Batumi. To the
gloriously cynical and practically minded Odessans, such talk is the sure sign
of a dreamer — and they have little tolerance for dreamers. “It would be a
disaster both for Odessa and Ukraine if he misses this opportunity to achieve
real reforms,” Khodorkovsky, the local businessman, told me. “I hope he won’t let that happen.”
No comments:
Post a Comment