 10 ymlaen i, cyfnodd yma gweithio'r cyfnodd yma'r Gwyrdddon yn yr ysgol, ac yn yr ymlaen i'r region Arferfyn, y bydd yna'r ysgol i'r Ymlaen i'r Ymlaen i fynd. Cyfnodd yma'r cyffredin sydd wedi'u gweithio'n cyfrannu ar mennyddoedd, ymlaen i,serau'r cyfrannu cyfrannu yn yr ysgol, a gynnalol yn gwneud yn yr ysgol, gyda'r cyfrannu cyfrannu'r cyfrannu, yw'r cyfrannu cyfrannu yn Gwrthog. A os ydw'rán te mae'r ddweud yn ein cyffredig, sy'n cyfrofi'r ein ddeidwyd o'ch cael eu gofyn ar gyfer ychydig o'i gynhygrifiadau. Ac rhywbeth yw'n cyfraddraeth os ym橫odd o'i ddweud i ddod i eich ddioddau. A yn yma, oes ydych yn ei ddweud o'i trebwch ar gyfer y ddod o'i ddod o'i uneisio ac diodd yn credu eu ddod o'i ddod i ddod i ddod i ddod i'm gwybod yn George. it's good to try and see where Georgia has come from in the last 10 years, and then to ask ourselves where perhaps is it going. I think the historian would like to highlight the certain cyclical nature of Georgian history, and I'll just move on to the first slide here. The cyclical pattern to the history of independent Georgia. When Georgia was trying to get independent from the Soviet Union, a man Gam Securdia, as we had Gam Securdia, became president, and he was considered pro-western simply because to be anti-communist at the time was considered to be synonymous with pro-western. He also turned out to be very authoritarian and quickly became unpopular and was overthrown in a violent coup d'etat. Georgia was recognised, shortly after this, and Shevart Nadze came to the helm, also considered pro-western. He was very popular, particularly in Germany, the man who facilitated the reunification of Germany, and for a time brought reforms, brought stability, but ultimately again became unpopular, became increasingly authoritarian, and was overthrown in a relatively peaceful event, which I've already referred to, the Rose Revolution. Then we have Saakashvili, his replacement, also considered pro-western. A poster boy of reform, his cabinet is made up of young, very young sometimes, they had a 27-year-old minister for defence, western educated with a very strong geopolitical orientation towards the west, and now we see he's being replaced. Every time that Georgia has these changes, they move a little bit forward, and there's a little bit more progress. Certainly if you look over the 20 years, it's good that these parliamentary elections took place peacefully, there was a peaceful transfer of government. It's a huge step forward from previous changes. However, there remain many challenges, and I will be referring to these throughout this brief talk. Just firstly, the Rose Revolution itself, and the character of the Saakashvili presidency. These were young men in a hurry who really believed that they had brought about and were embarking upon a new epoch in Georgian history. That 2003 was year zero, and they were going to inaugurate an economic, a political, a social, a moral and mental transformation of Georgia. Even the fact that Saakashvili chose the burial place of David the Builder, the last great monarch of Georgia who had brought Georgia to unprecedented heights in terms of prosperity and territorial size, that he had the inauguration there. He was more or less making a pledge that I will return Georgia to its great period. I will unite the territories that have been lost within my presidential term, which of course didn't make conflict resolution efforts easy when you start saying that it's personified in a way. It's connected with your presidency. The UNM flag, the United National Movement flag of which Saakashvili was head, became the national flag. EU flags proliferated. Anybody who visits Tbilisi sometimes might be forgiven for mistaking that it's not a member of the European Union. So great are the volume of flags that are there, and every time you saw Saakashvili giving a ministerial address, a rather presidential address, always the EU flag was behind him. He did enjoy widespread popularity at the beginning. There's no question there. He won the presidential elections with 96% of the vote, which was kind of central Asian and a little bit worrying perhaps. It tells you something about the bandwagoning nature of the Georgian electorate. In the parliamentary elections of 2003, the ones that Schevert Nazi tried to rig, his party got 25%. But once it became clear that he was the victor, Schevert Nazi was gone, and a new era was coming about, a large amount of Georgians switched their allegiance and came out openly for him in the presidential election of January 2004, and as I said, he got 96% of the vote. So the only way was down really after that. You can't maintain 96%. And it also meant that a lot of his support was quite shallow. It was based on unrealistic expectations, which he was never going to meet. And so you see throughout the last decade an erosion of that support, he barely scrapes in in the presidential elections of 2008, and these occurred after violent demonstrations on the streets of Tbilisi in November 2007. These were premature elections. His critics referred to his administration as one marked by liberal Bolshevism. In other words, it was liberal in its intentions, but Bolshevik in its means, that it was authoritarian and anti-descent. For a long time, there was no coordinated opposition in Georgia. That didn't mean that people were supremely happy. It meant that it was just difficult to organise. Not in the central Asian sense of the word, where you simply can't really register a political party legally, an opposition party. But it was very difficult to mobilise. Access to the media was very difficult. And that's why, as we'll see, when it took somebody like Bidzina Ivenishfili, a man who has huge resources, whose personal fortune is greater than that of the Georgian national budget, who's in the Forbes top 200 wealthiest men, personal fortune of 6.4 billion at last count, took somebody like that with deep pockets to, you might say, finance an opposition which could take on the administrative resources that Sakishfili had at his disposal. Many people, before Ivenishfili came onto the electoral scene, thought that Sakishfili would, as they say, pull a Putin on it. That he was more or less going to, he was changing the constitution. Now we're seeing Georgia shifting as of next October. We'll shift to a parliamentary system where the Prime Minister will be the dominant figure. And they thought that this was being done, the constitution was being tailored, Sakishfili would vacate the presidency in October and then become Prime Minister. And then he would have a new lease of political life. You have to remember Sakishfili's only 45 years of age, despite being in power for almost a decade. He's a man with a long life ahead of him. So many people suspected that. So this, if that was the plan, it didn't go according to plan. And we're left with a new dispensation, which is a first for Georgia, one of cohabitation where we have a president whose term of office expires in October, who is of one political party and a real genuine rival who has, you might say, the majority of the power now being Prime Minister. He doesn't have it formally yet because I said that the constitution changes only kick in after the presidential elections in October. But de facto he has the power now in Georgia. He appoints the ministers, he decides who will be ambassadors, for example. Just today I read as I was coming in that Sakishfili recalled 12 ambassadors. That wasn't his choice. Even Ashfili simply said, these are your guys. I want my guys, they're going to go and they're gone. So more or less Sakishfili remains president. He does have formal constitutional powers, which are quite impressive, but he's not going to utilise them because he knows that he's a parliament against him and it would be ultimately counterproductive. The next question really is who is even Ashfili? I mean, if you were to ask this question a year before the elections, very few people would have been able to tell you. Certainly there weren't even many photographs circulating on the internet. And yet he had this huge mansion on the hills of Georgia, something out of James Bond with a helicopter pad and a stainless steel. He was a reclusive philanthropist and that's how he was primarily known in Georgia. A man who helped renovate churches, who was from a small village, a self-made man who made billions in ways which will never probably fully divine in Russia in the 1990s, as did many people. Russia certainly was a place to make a lot of money very quickly in the 1990s. That in itself was used to imply, to heavily imply, that he was more or less a Russian stooge, that he was a puppet of the Kremlin. And to be honest, no evidence was ever produced to verify that. If there was a smoking gun, I think it would have been produced. The state-run media had a year to come up with something solid, other than that he made a lot of money in Russia, which again a lot of people did in the early 1990s. He does have a lack of political experience. This is quite obvious. Anybody who has seen some of his press conferences, he has often made statements which would be difficult to stand over and he has withdrawn later and apologized for. There have been inconsistencies. He reminds me of the Ross Perot figure of the early 1990s. You might remember in America if we challenged a George Bush senior and Bill Clinton. And whose main kind of election point might have been, I made a lot of money for myself. I can do the same for the nation. I'm a self-made man, you know, vote for somebody like me. Ross Perot got 20% in America, but even if he has now taken, you might say, Georgia, I have to confess a lot of people in Georgia and outside of Georgia had mixed feelings about even Ashfili's candidacy. On the one hand, as I implied earlier, only somebody with even Ashfili's resources could have challenged Sakish Fili. That's clear. On the other hand, a man who has such immense personal wealth conjures up the risk of state capture, that essentially someone is buying a state when he has more money than the state coffers. And how do you prevent even a more authoritarian and potentially authoritarian figure developing who has not only the state resources, but such huge personal resources as well. But his party, which he formed very, very quickly, George and Dream, is not really a party. It's more a coalition of six parties, many of whom have widely divergent objectives and political points of view and personalities. And as I would suggest, I guess, that its lifespan is not indefinite for sure. I think it will fragment over time, but the one thing that's going to keep it together in the foreseeable future is the fact that Sakish Fili is still president and if they fragment, they only make his life easier and that UNM is still a force in Parliament. I mean, this is an important point of stress that Sakish Fili's UNM may have been defeated, but they were not eliminated. They got 40% of the vote. That's not insubstantial. And they still are a force in Parliament. They still are a force in the country. Now, when he put forward his candidacy, well, actually not his candidacy, but the candidacy of his party, George and Dream for the elections, even if he was immediately subjected to a lot of harassment. Some of this may be familiar to some of you. For example, his citizenship was taken from him on a technicality. He had multiple citizenships and technically he should have asked for his George's citizenship back. He should have given it back and then reapplied. He didn't do that and because of that he was taken from him. But it was very, very selective and then he appealed and he waited to the very last day of a three-month appeal process to say that his appeal was unsuccessful, so slowing down his campaign. He was given multiple fines, disproportionate to the crimes, alleged crimes, administrative crimes that were being committed, like, for example, spending too much money on the campaign or receiving in-kind donations which were not declared. He was fined over $100 million for these relatively small administrative crimes. When he refused to pay, his bank which he owned in Georgia, Cartu Bank, was seized from him. Eventually he paid the fines, but now that he's become Prime Minister, he's actually taken them back again. It's one of the virtues of being Prime Minister. He quite cleverly actually paid the fines because there was a natural disaster in Caheti, a region in eastern Georgia, and he said, I'm paying the fines as long as the government gives the money that I am giving now to this disaster area, which put him in a wonderful position because if they did that, it would be considered even Ashfili's money, not the government money. And if he didn't do that, people in the region would say, well, why haven't you given us all this money? Even Ashfili said he's giving to you for us. So it was a very good move, but a lot of harassment, a lot of obstacles placed in his way. He tried to establish a TV station, Global 9 TV. He initially received a lot of obstacles, but the most important thing really was the very intensive campaign to discredit him, his personality and his motives, particularly implying that he was more or less fulfilling a Russian plot in Georgia. The interesting thing about the election campaign itself was that even though Sakishvili and even Ashfili were the two names everybody was talking about, they were not contesting in this election. This was not a presidential election. This was a parliamentary election. So they essentially had proxies, and their proxies were their parties. Even Ashfili's money was the glue that kept Georgian dream together. Sakishvili, of course, had the incumbency effect. He had the administrative resources. And now that these two have accumulated a lot of bad blood, a lot of things were said and done during the election campaign, the real question is going to be whether they can cohabit. But I want to show you just briefly the election results, if I can just move this a little bit forward. So there's the actual results itself. As you can see, the collective opposition increased their vote really from 17% to 54%, 55%. United National Movement, which is Sakishvili's party, decreased from about 60% to 40%. So it's a very clear erosion of UNM support. But it's not, as I said, a catastrophic elimination either. It's not, for example, anything like Fina Foll suffered in 2011. What this election did, though, is it completely polarized Georgian society. None of the other parties got representation. There's a 5% threshold in Georgian elections, so if you don't get more than 5%, you don't get representation in Parliament. No other party except UNM and Georgian Dream got representation in Parliament. The turnout was higher, significantly higher, in 2012. And there's the way the seats turned out. 85 for Georgian Dream, 65 for UNM. It's important to say it's, well, some UNM majoritarian deputies have switched sides. Rather opportunistically saying that they've now seen which way the people have voted. They have a duty to follow the people. So they have moved from UNM to Georgian Dream. There are generally people who are, as I said, not elected on the list system, because Georgia has a mixed electoral system, half on the list, more or less half on the list, half majoritarians. Those who are majoritarians tend to be self-made men in the regions, and they have more or less said that, well, we only gave our allegiance to UNM because they were the governing party. Now we go with the new governing party. So UNM's support is now below 60. They have an effective control of about 50, 55, 56 deputies. And there's how the country voted. You notice that there's some quite obvious divisions in the way the country voted. In the southern part of Georgia, you notice that it's been voted for UNM. These are areas primarily populated by ethnic Armenians and ethnic Azeris, and they tended to always vote with whoever was in power. Like often minorities do, their attitude is, we don't want to annoy the people who are in power. Also they received some benefits under the last government. They did have quite a strong policy of encouraging a civic concept of citizenship and nationality, rather than an ethnic one. So the Armenians and the Azeris, Robert Nadze, in his time, they delivered the vote for UNM. Also in the west of Georgia, those closest to Abkhazia, you tend to find again strong UNM support, primarily because of the fact that many people appreciated development in the area, but also a strong line in Abkhazia. And on South Osseti was appreciated by many there. But some surprising votes. I mean Cuta Isi, for example, the parliament is supposed to be moved to, voted against the government, but to me, which was the showpiece for the UNM government, so much money was put into the Radisson hotels, Marriots, Trump Towers. This was supposed to be the showpiece, an international airport established there, and they voted against UNM. You might ask why do these regions which receive so much investment vote against the government. Having gone to these regions and spoken to a lot of people, I guess I would say primarily because people didn't feel they were benefiting from the investment. If you take Batumi, for example, it's right beside Turkey. It used to be part of the Ottoman Empire. A lot of people feel that a lot of this Turkish money that's come in has not benefit locals that Turkish citizens are in a stronger position than Georgian ones. So there's a certain xenophobia, a certain localism that has developed there against outside investment. A lot of those that were in the construction industry weren't given to Georgians, it's felt. So some surprises, as you can see from the electoral map, and Tbilisi. If you look at the corner there, you'll see Tbilisi, all blue, all Georgian dream. This is one of the key features of the election. Those who were urbanized, those who were higher than average education, higher than average salary, they actually tended to vote against UNM in greater numbers, which means that UNM was doing more or less what Shepard Gnadzi was doing, of course, not to the same extent at the end of his time in office where he was relying on votes that could be easily delivered by, again, local governors, rather than actually appealing intellectually or to the minds of the people. So Tbilisi, which is the most urbanized, disproportionately strong in terms of population, I mean, it's like Dublin, really, in terms of its relationship with the rest of the country. So if you lose Dublin, you're in trouble. If you lose Tbilisi, you're very much in trouble in Georgia. And they didn't get, as you see, one single seat in Tbilisi. Now, I know the time is moving along, and I have no problem. Okay, that's good to hear. Just the next point I had to make there, if I go back, was why did UNM lose? Yes, why did UNM lose? And I phrased it that way, because I think it's an old truism that oppositions don't win elections, governments lose them. They have the initiative, and certainly in Georgia, where the government had control of the state TV, administrative resources. The question is what went wrong. Now, I spoke to UNM representatives about this, and generally they come up with three factors. They say even if Tbilisi's money was decisive, the role of the Georgian Orthodox Church, which has a position similar to what perhaps the Catholic Church had here until the 1980s or 1990s, and what you might call those prison videos. For those of you that are not familiar with this story, about 10 days before the election, videos were uploaded onto the internet and shown on state and national television, which showed torture in the prison system. And there were some particularly graphic images that were shown. And one with a broomstick. I mentioned that because the broomstick became then a symbol of the opposition. You have lots of people going to the streets of broomsticks. I won't go into detail of what was done with the broomstick, but you don't let your mind even go there. But the thing is that it swung the electorate, certainly a certain degree of the electorate in those last 10 days. Now, these videos had been taken in May. So the fact that they were released just before the elections means that somebody had a political plan with these videos, and there's all sorts of conspiracy theories. But the point I would make is this, is that if that's the lesson that UNM take away from this election, that it was just the prison videos that stole the election from them, and they point to very favourable opinion polls in August, where it showed that they were way ahead, that it was the videos and even Ishwili's money that was really what did it for them, I think that would be a mistake. I think it would insulate them from much deeper criticisms and perhaps postpone the necessary introspection, which all parties need to go through when they lose an election. Even Ishwili's money allowed him to compete, but it didn't buy the election. I mean, the government had enough administrative resources, as I said, they find him on multiple occasions when he moved a little bit outside the boundaries, allegedly. He couldn't just throw money at the election. It was much deeper than that. And those prison videos, again, they fit into a much larger discontent on the judicial system and about arbitrary arrests. George, for example, has the highest per capita prison population in Europe. It's one of the top five in the world. Again, as I said, the same population as Ireland, more or less. Ireland has approximately, I think, 3,000 prisoners. George, 24,000. Now imagine, George's sense of family is much stronger, actually, than that in Ireland. You have one person in prison, one family member, that's 10 or 12, at least people who are intimately interested in the fate of that prisoner. That's a huge chunk of the electorate. You're talking at least about 300, 400,000 people who know somebody very close to them, family member who's in prison. You can't underestimate the effect that that has on individual constituencies. So I think that, if that's the lesson, as I said, that would be a mistake. There were much deeper problems that people had. And ultimately, as I mentioned before, the smears didn't stick. These initiatives that were being taken against Ibn Esfili, the allegation that he was, essentially working for Russia, they didn't ultimately get traction, or sufficient traction, for most people to believe that they were taking a huge gamble geopolitically by voting for Ibn Esfili. He had far too many known, pro-western, liberal-orientated people on his campaign team. People like Iraqi al-Assani, for example, to kind of make that a credible accusation. And as one person put it to me, now in the Georgian Dream Government, they put it quite well. They said, when they saw the prison videos, it wasn't that they really criticised the government so much, they were criticising themselves, because deep down most people knew these kinds of things were happening in the prison system. And it was kind of, they were rebuking themselves and saying the only thing I can do to change this, I've been quite about it, I've closed my eyes, is to go out and vote for an alternative. So again, it's not as simple as money and videos in terms of losing the election. And also you have to add into the fact that after nine years in power, there's a natural desire for change. And the fact that Ibn Esfili had been behind so many philanthropic endeavours in Georgia, also made it very popular. Georgia is a political environment where you have larger-than-life figures. Some might argue that there's almost a messiah complex. The leader has to be somebody who's going to revolutionise society, to change society. This always leads to the cycle of revolutions as well, where you get these dashed expectations. This romantic fear comes onto the scene saying he's going to solve all the problems, and then within a decade all those great expectations have been dashed, and you end up in that cycle that I mentioned at the very beginning. So where do we go from here? I'll move on to the what next section if I may, but before that I'll just go, on the slides that I had been shown, and they illustrate a story. Firstly, the most important issues in the elections. This is from a poll, several polls conducted by the National Democratic Institute in Georgia, which is the foreign policy wing of the Democratic Party in the United States. They do wonderful polls conducted by the CRRC, the Cox's Resource Research Centre, and here people are being asked simply what are the most important electoral issues for them. They're also applied to Ireland. Jobs and affordable healthcare certainly would be up there. But look at territorial integratories, number three. The issues of Aparzia of South Asetia, which the Georgian government has for quite some time now being going around the world saying our occupied territories occupied by Russia, this is still a very salient issue with the electorate. Relations with Russia, you can add to that territorial integrity, they're intimately linked. So about half the electorate are very much concerned with Russia and our territorial integrity. The other issue I wanted to raise here is how the election was perceived abroad. Look at this, from the Wall Street Journal. A Russian victory in Georgia's parliamentary election, billionaire, winner of Bidzina Ibn Esfili Ozi's wealth to the Putin regime in Moscow. Very effective lobbying I think was behind such headlines very quickly after the election. So there's now I think a more nuanced appreciation that this is not a Russian victory in Georgia. This government is just as geopolitically committed, at least rhetorically. Time will only tell how committed they are, but rhetorically they're just as committed to membership of NATO, membership of the European Union, and they're going to try and square that circle of balancing relations with Russia. The only thing I wanted to show you is this tale of two surveys. This says a lot. By the way, those of you that don't already know this, best website for news on Georgia, it comes out daily, www.civil.ge. Here is a story from August. It's the NDI poll showing UNM in a strong lead. This is the poll that UNM looked to and said, this is why we lost the election because of the videos. We were well ahead in August. Then you see, this shows you the bandwagoning in Georgia. Here is the same organisation conducting the same type of poll, again 3,000 respondents in November, which shows NDI poll show strong support for Georgian dream, and Georgian dream now has 63%, whereas it had 14% in August. How can we explain this? The one thing that NDI didn't really pick up on and international observers and a lot of people in Georgia was how many people refused to answer the survey requests. These are person-to-person surveys. People are being stopped in the street and asked or going into people's houses and being asked. 46% didn't answer the question. They refused to answer and therein lies the story. Why would almost half the population say I'm not answering your question about who I'm going to vote for? We've seen polls conducted by MRBI and Paddy Power and what not. You'll always get a small percentage who are, for whatever reasons, unable or willing to reply, but 46% is huge. That was something that was not picked up. A lot of people were going to vote for Georgian dream who weren't going to tell a stranger that they were going to vote for Georgian dream. The other thing is what I refer to as the bandwagon in the effect of Georgian politics. A lot of people, once they saw the wind that was blowing towards Georgian dream, once they won the election, now they're openly declaring that they were always Georgian dream people. It's the same as what happened with Saqrashfili in 2003. Why he got that 96% was because people knew he was already the man. Now the people know that he's the man who sees a huge amount of opinion moving in that direction. The real question that we are left with in the remaining part, which will be very brief, is what next? And then we can talk about the challenges in the questions and answer sessions, I hope. What next? Will this Georgian dream coalition stick together? As I suggested, it's deeply fragmented. It's ideologically incoherent. It doesn't have a natural cohesion. However, Saqrashfili's presidency will be the glue that will keep it together for the next few months. After that, it may be good if the party splits into different factions, because what Georgia ultimately needs, I think, is a multi-party democracy. Again, breaking the cycle of this catch-all, hegemonic party that emerges after elections, which is usually established just before elections, which wins, sweeps the board, everything before it is eliminated and then has hegemonic power for a decade and then is completely dissolved with no trace left behind and replaced by another hegemonic party. A multi-party democracy would be fitting a country which is now moving towards a parliamentary system. So if Georgian dream could ease its way into somehow fragmenting peacefully into nice factions, it would be very nice. I think it will happen anyway. At least the smaller constituent parts will break away because of the fact that I said there ideologically, I think, incompatible. What will happen to UNM? This is another question. Will they be able to attract supporters now that they have no power? Since so much of their support was based on jobs that they were giving in the civil service, investment in certain regions. They now have nothing in their gift to give. Is their brand strong enough to retain that 40% who voted for them in the election? A lot will depend, of course, on how they perform in opposition. A lot will depend on how Georgian dream performs. As I said, expectations are extremely high and they're already being disappointed. For example, there were promises made in the election of utility tariffs being cut in half, like electricity bills, which are high for most Georgian citizens. That's now being said. It can't be done. They've reduced it by a small amount, but nothing like half. Same with petrol prices. Again, there were promised huge reductions. Even Ashwili also said that he was going to step down within two years. In moment, he was saying, let me be a tool in your hands, you, the electorate. And I will break down this authoritarian dictatorship and I will then hand over power to the people. We've heard that story, I guess, in the hearts of the world. Now he's saying that he'll only step down when his work is done, which is rather open-ended. And that is not something that is disillusioned people immediately, but I think as time goes on, it may add to the reasons why people might be disillusioned. I think, though, he's probably realised that if he did leave too soon, Georgian dream would completely fragment. And his money, as I said, which is a large part of what keeps it together, would also accelerate an unhealthy fragmentation of the party, of the coalition. We also have to ask ourselves what happens to Ashwili after October. He's not going to stand for the presidency, obviously. He's only 45 years of age, maybe 46 next December. What's he going to do? Is he going to stay in Georgian politics? And how will he be perceived by the Georgian electorate if he does? I should also mention as well, I'm sorry that I didn't mention this, that he has been very critical of the wave of arrests that have occurred in Georgia after this election. And this is a question we can take on in the questions and answers session about whether this is selective justice or is this, as some in the government would now maintain, natural justice. This is a big question and he's been very critical also of the release of political prisoners who he seems not political. That's another question we can look at afterwards. But he's still very active. He's still an active president, but he's a lame duck president, very much so, with only a few months to go, and still, as I said, a very young man. The other question that people are probably interested in is will this mean anything about Georgia's geopolitical direction? Is it something that will bring Georgia into closer relations with Russia? Is it something that will somehow scupper attempts to join NATO or the European Union? As I said, I've met with different people in the New Georgian Government during the last couple of months. There's nothing in what they say, at least officially, that indicates there's any change on fundamentals. However, they're left with this circle to square which no previous Georgia government has been able to do. How to reconcile a geopolitical orientation that is very pro-western with good relations with Russia? Because, and I think this will become obvious to those who are Georgia watchers over the next months and years, is that the problem, despite the rhetoric that came out of the Kremlin occasionally, the problem was never really sacrosphilia. The problem never really was the United National Movement. The problem was Georgia's geopolitical orientation. Because, Shephard Nard's encountered the same troubles, those of you that remember, we'll say, 2002, 2001, there were bombings of Georgia in the Pankisi Gorge reason because, why? Shephard Nard's said that Georgia would be knocking on NATO's door in 2005. The problem is one of geopolitical orientation. The problem is Russia's inability ultimately to accept Georgia as a sovereign entity which is a right to decide its geopolitical destiny. Which is natural for post-colonial situations. It's not unusual and certainly would be familiar perhaps if you look at 1920s and 30s Irish history when people like Winston Churchill had very big difficulties in reconciling his idea of what Ireland was with the fact that it was now a separate independent state. I may finish on that note because I notice that I've definitely gone over time and I'm sure there are lots of questions and it seems like relations with Russia seems like a good place to call the line and go into informal discussions.