Attack on Georgian Leaves Region Leery of Russia

The fragile calm of recent years is shattered: Russia’s volatile southern neighbors, which have been recovering from wars that devastated them after the Soviet collapse in 1991, are in uproar again over the latest failed assassination attempt against the region’s grand old man, Georgian President Eduard A. Shevardnadze.

The reason for Tuesday’s disquiet is the fear among political leaders across the former Soviet south that Russia, the region’s one big power, may have been behind the attack. They believe that Russia is trying to bring chaos back to its neighbor--to stop Georgia from taking the share of the region’s new oil finds that Moscow wants for itself.

The oil, just beginning to flow to the West from the Caspian Sea, is expected to make the poor south as fabulously rich in the next century as the Persian Gulf is today.

“Are There Traces of Oil in the Bloodshed in Tbilisi?” screamed the headline of the Moscow paper Izvestia, echoing the dark conspiracy theories bandied about all day by politicians in Georgia and other southern states.

Shevardnadze was the first to point the finger at Russia.

As soon as he escaped the Monday night onslaught in Tbilisi, the capital, by 10 to 15 men who pounded his motorcade with guns and antitank grenades for a dozen minutes and killed two of his guards, the president rushed to Georgian television to make his suspicions public.

After years of stabilization in his once-turbulent nation, Shevardnadze said, the local private armies that might once have been blamed for such violence no longer exist.

Post-Soviet Georgia fought and lost a conflict with Russian-backed separatists in its seaside region of Abkhazia in 1992 and 1993.

Since then, the 70-year-old Shevardnadze, a former Soviet foreign minister, has been painstakingly restoring order to his ethnic homeland.

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Georgia’s two most notorious former warlords were jailed after a 1995 assassination attempt against Shevardnadze. Russia is sheltering another Georgian, Igor Giorgadze, a former security service chief who was also implicated in that attack.

“There are practically no groups left in Georgia capable of carrying out this kind of attack,” Shevardnadze said. Monday’s violence must therefore have been organized from abroad, he concluded.

He recalled Georgia’s rivalry with Russia for a lucrative contract exporting Caspian oil.

The first oil is being exported down a Russian pipeline, but major U.S. oil firms in the international consortium extracting Caspian crude do not want to rely too heavily on Russia, since this route runs through the unstable separatist region of Chechnya. They want a second pipeline to be built across Georgia.

But Shevardnadze said, “Powerful forces have an interest in another solution to this question”--a suggestion that Russia was trying to squeeze Georgia out by fair means or foul.

He repeated his reproaches Tuesday on Moscow’s commercial NTV channel, saying the attack was not local but organized by “some third force capable of training professional assassins.”

Vakhtang Abashidze, Shevardnadze’s spokesman, underscored this suspicion, saying in an interview: “This assassination attempt coincided with recent regional developments including discussion of the pipeline question. . . . It may be a coincidence--and it may not--that last week [two Russian political scientists close to the Kremlin] . . . wrote in the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta that a policy of regional destabilization could be in Russia’s geopolitical interests in the near future.”

Such charges are not new. Russia has a documented post-Soviet history of stirring up local discontent by funding one side or another in ethnic conflicts--notably in Nagorno-Karabakh, Chechnya and Abkhazia--to keep the new regimes of the south weak and divided and to ensure its own continued dominance of the region it ruled until 1991.

On Tuesday, Russian officials, including President Boris N. Yeltsin, made statements deploring the attack and vowing to fight international terrorism.

But these remarks were not enough to satisfy furious Georgian lawmakers, who asserted that the mystery gunmen had escaped to a Russian military base in Georgia and demanded that all Russian bases be sealed off.

Movladi Udugov, the Chechen foreign minister and a leader of his region’s 1994-96 war for independence from Russia, also blamed “the long arm of Moscow.”

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Two other circumstances fueled southerners’ suspicion of Russia:

* The amount of weaponry used in the full-scale onslaught, which suggested that the gunmen were supplied from military bases; Russia keeps 18,000 soldiers at five bases inside Georgia.

* The Russian passport found on the one gunman who did not manage to fade away into the dark streets of Tbilisi after the attack failed. Killed by a shot in the back, presumably from someone in his own group, the man turned out to be carrying documents indicating that he was a Russian citizen and ethnically Chechen.

While Russian media made much of the gunman’s alleged Chechen ethnicity--as well as hinting that the assassination attempt could be a violent local response to Shevardnadze’s latest anti-corruption campaign--Georgian officials were skeptical of the passport. They believed that it could have been planted to divert blame to Russia’s object of hate in the region, the Chechens.

“Of course it looks pretty fishy for a terrorist to carry his passport during an assassination attempt on a state leader,” Abashidze said. “Investigators are treating this piece of evidence with open suspicion.”