|
Bush to meet with new georgia preisdent { February 25 2004 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.newsday.com/news/politics/wire/sns-ap-us-georgia,0,4217649.story?coll=sns-ap-politics-headlineshttp://www.newsday.com/news/politics/wire/sns-ap-us-georgia,0,4217649.story?coll=sns-ap-politics-headlines
Bush to Meet With New Georgia President
By BARRY SCHWEID
AP Diplomatic Writer
February 25, 2004, 3:15 AM EST
WASHINGTON -- President Bush is playing host to the new president of Georgia at a White House meeting designed to support the young lawyer's drive to expand democracy, improve the economy and fight corruption in the former Soviet republic.
Elected in January with lopsided support, Mikhail Saakashvili said before seeing Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell that he was committed to resolving disputes with secessionists without force and to turning Georgia's government into "the most democratic government in Europe."
It is a tall order.
Social services and medical care collapsed and pensions plummeted or vanished before President Eduard Shevardnadze, a former Communist party chief and Soviet foreign minister who served as the new republic's president for 11 years, was forced by widespread street protests to resign last November.
With construction of an oil pipeline under way, and the promise of a surge of investments in about a year, Saakashvili, 36, appealed on Tuesday for money to tide his country over.
He said he had no doubt that his popularity would slip from its current heights, and "we must move swiftly to take advantage of political support."
Saakashvili said he knew "the values of freedom and democracy are not established by grants and loans."
Speaking at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, he said authorities would go after police who take bribes, and his government would not use force in trying to resolve differences with secessionist movements in various parts of Georgia.
Since taking office, Saakashvili has overseen the arrest of several ministers from Shevardnadze's government on corruption charges.
Last Friday, Georgian prosecutors boarded a plane that was to leave for Paris and arrested Shevardnadze's son-in-law, Gia Dzhokhtaberidze, on tax evasion charges.
The U.S.-educated Saakashvili, speaking in nearly flawless English, said he had told police not to spare Shevardnadze if reason arose to arrest him. He said Shevardnadze's family had become in the last four years the richest in the former Soviet republic. He said, however, if the former president were arrested, he would ask the Georgian parliament to grant amnesty.
Saakashvili has been criticized at home for how authorities arrest suspects without warning. He said Tuesday, "Corruption was so rampant we had to do so."
As popular as Saakashvili is at home, he has faced critics in other areas. Journalists from a major Georgian television station marched down the main avenue of Tbilisi, the capital, last week carrying a coffin they said represented the demise of a free press.
Saakashvili dismissed the criticism. Pointing to the Georgian camera crews that crammed the Massachusetts Avenue auditorium where he spoke, Saakashvili said with a broad smile that 50 percent of the country's journalists oppose him 50 percent of the time, and the other 50 percent oppose him all the time.
Copyright © 2004, The Associated Press
|
|
