Alumnus speaks on Georgia's future

New Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili faces a variety of problems as he tries to forge a new path for his small Caucasus country, Richard Miles, IU alumnus and the U.S. ambassador to the Republic of Georgia, said in his lecture Friday in the Walnut Room of the Indiana Memorial Union. Miles was in town to receive IU's Distinguished Alumni Service Award and spoke to an audience of about three dozen in the IMU Friday afternoon about the challenges in Georgia and the U.S. involvement there.\n"(Saakashvili) has to do everything all over again," Miles said.\nMassive corruption, dilapidated schools and a poor health system, as well as little governmental control in autonomous areas, such as Abkhazia and South Ossetia in the north, all present challenges for Saakashvili.\n"I visited schools where there was no running water, outside toilets, no blackboards," Miles said. "How can you teach math without blackboards?" \nMiles said students would have to bring firewood along with their homework during the winter so they wouldn't freeze during class in the unheated buildings.\n"Georgia has sunk from a relatively well-off place (during Soviet times) to a place of abject poverty," he said.\nGeorgia plays a prominent role in U.S. foreign policy -- it receives more foreign aid per capita from the U.S. than any other former Soviet state, has a critical Caspian Sea oil pipeline under construction and is a neighbor to hot spots such as Chechnya and the Middle East, Miles noted in his lecture. \nLast November, non-violent protesters forced Eduard Shevardnadze, the now-former president of Georgia, out of power, ushering in the most free and fair Georgian election in years. Voters overwhelmingly chose the U.S.-educated lawyer Mikhail Saakashvili as their new president Jan. 4.\n"(The transition) was unique in its transfer of power from a pro-Western government to another pro-Western government," Miles said.\nThe U.S., while supportive of Shevardnadze, urged the government to conduct fair parliamentary elections last fall. When the U.S. saw how corrupt and unfair the election had truly been, it openly denounced the massive fraud that had taken place.\nMany audience members stayed behind after the lecture to ask the ambassador questions.\nDenise Gardiner, assistant director of the Russian and East European Institute at IU, appreciated Miles' clarity.\n"(Ambassador Miles) is very down-to-earth and incredibly knowledgeable about countries in the region," Gardiner said.\nThe speech went well, said professor David Ransel, director of REEI, which held the event.\n"(Ambassador Miles) is very frank and open. He's no longer a career diplomat, and as a political appointee, he has more flexibility (in what he says)," Ransel said.\nMiles graduated from IU in 1964 with a master's degree in political science and worked for the State Department from 1967 to 2002. When he retired in 2002, President Bush promptly appointed him ambassador.\nDodona Kiziria, an IU Slavics professor, agreed with the accuracy and openness of the speech. As a personal friend of Saakashvili and a prominent figure in Georgia, she herself was asked to run in the latest election, but she worries about the tumultuous situation in her country.\n"I am watching nervously … a lot hinges on (Saakashvili's) success," she said.\nMany audience members came to learn about the U.S. role in the overthrow of Shevardnadze. The Assistant Director of the IU Center for Languages of the Central Asian Region Daniel Zaretsky was one of them.\n"U.S. foreign policy is bashed all the time. Here we have a triumph of U.S. foreign policy," he said.\n-- Contact staff writer Charlie Szrom at cszrom@indiana.edu.