Trotz Haft Befehl: Die Georg Soros Ratte: Mikheil Saakashvili taucht in Tirana auf
Saturday, September 20, 2014
Exile in Brooklyn, With an Eye on Georgia
Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s Ex-President, Plots Return From Williamsburg, Brooklyn
AT the Smorgasburg food fair in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Mikheil Saakashvili motored in fluorescent green sneakers among bearded men with tattoos and women in revealing overalls. They lined up for Cheese Pops, Dun-Well Doughnuts and other local delicacies. He ordered a fresh coconut.
“My friend, one of the biggest sheikhs of the United Arab Emirates, gave Georgia
20,000 palm trees,” Mr. Saakashvili, the former president of Georgia,
said as he dropped a straw in the machete-opened fruit and emptied its
water with a few deep pulls. “As a personal gift.”
Mr.
Saakashvili is in self-imposed exile on North Seventh Street — plotting
a triumphant return, even as his steep fall from grace serves as a
cautionary tale to the many American government officials who had hoped
he would be a model exporter of democracy to former Soviet republics.
Since
leaving office last November, this George W. Bush favorite — whose
confrontation with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia led to a disastrous war
in 2008 — has commandeered his uncle’s apartment in a tower on the
Williamsburg waterfront, where he luxuriates in the neighborhood’s
time-honored tradition of mysteriously sourced wealth. When not
lingering in cafes, riding his bike across the bridge or spending stag
evenings with friends on the Wythe Hotel
rooftop, Mr. Saakashvili seizes on the Ukrainian conflict and his
experience with Mr. Putin’s wrath as a lifeline back to political
relevance.
“It’s
the end of Putin,” Mr. Saakashvili, 46, said of Russia’s aggression in
Ukraine, the topic of discussion on Thursday as its president, Petro O.
Poroshenko, met in Washington with President Obama and congressional
leaders. Mr. Saakashvili called Mr. Putin’s actions “very, very similar”
to those in Georgia. “I think he walked into trap.”
BUT
Mr. Saakashvili, considerably plumper than when he was in power, argues
that the conflict should also mark a reappraisal of his own reputation
as a reckless leader whose peaceful Rose Revolution and commitment to
reform were eclipsed by years of riding roughshod over opponents,
bending the rule of law and provoking Mr. Putin into a war that resulted
in the death, displacement and impoverishment of thousands of
Georgians. “It should be revisited,” he said.
Mr.
Saakashvili said that while he had a “normal life” in Brooklyn, he
considered himself a big deal in Eastern Europe, pointing out that on a
recent trip to Albania “they shut down traffic for us and our 20-car
escort.”
Mr.
Saakashvili’s personal rehabilitation project is complicated by his
eroded popularity back home and charges filed against him by Georgian
prosecutors of human rights violations and embezzlement of government
funds. He shrugs off the prosecutors as politically motivated puppets of
his nemesis, the billionaire and former Prime Minister Bidzina
Ivanishvili. Some of Mr. Saakashvili’s critics agree that the charges
say as much about the current Georgian government’s hunger for revenge
as they do about him.
For
now Mr. Saakashvili is writing a memoir, delivering “very well-paid”
speeches, helping start up a Washington-based think tank and visiting
old boosters like Senator John McCain and Victoria Nuland, the assistant
secretary of state. He said he was in the process of changing his
tourist status here to a work visa and in the meantime is enjoying the
bars and cafes of his adopted homeland. On his roof deck, with sweeping
views of Manhattan, he has entertained David H. Petraeus, the former
director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and is expecting Nicolas
Sarkozy, the former French president, at the end of the month. Usually, a
cousin mans the grill, along with the chef from Fabbrica,
the neighboring Italian restaurant opposite a CVS. Like those chain
drugstores, glassy high-rises and Eurocentric nightclubs, Mr.
Saakashvili is evidence of Williamsburg’s steady transition to a
playground for moneyed out-of-towners.
“I
used to look at this place from Manhattan, it was such a pity, it was
mafia, a place where hit men dump bodies,” he said, recalling his time
in the 1990s as a Columbia University Law School student. Now he sees “a
jazzy atmosphere” rife with energy and new construction.
“Williamsburg is part of the democratic transformation,” he said.
Mr. Saakashvili tends to see a lot of things through the lens of democracy building. He calls the fashionable Cafe Mogador
“my absolute favorite cafe, because it’s very democratic.” And while he
complains about Williamsburg’s high cost of living (“I’m not poor poor,
but it really bites”), the champion of free enterprise admires the
social mobility of his new neighbors.
“They
are hipsters,” he said. “But they are still making tons of money, and
they live a pleasant lifestyle and make it in life. They are no longer a
marginal part of society.”
On
one of his first nights in Williamsburg, Mr. Saakashvili waited in line
with friends to get into the Wythe, but was turned away because he did
not have identification. “It’s O.K.,” he said. “It’s not a posh place
like in Manhattan.”
ON
a more recent weekend, the man the Secret Service once dubbed “the
Energizer Bunny” charged out of the food fair and into the Artists & Fleas
market, where he pulled Prada sunglasses from his graying sideburns and
went straight to a booth selling clocks made from retro hardcover
books. “I bought 50 of them and sent them back to my presidential
library,” he said. Five months before, he said, a woman spotted Leonardo
DiCaprio here.
Moments later, a Georgian living in Manhattan, Lali Lobzhanidze, approached him and asked, “Are you Mikheil Saakashvili?”
“My DiCaprio moment,” he said, delighted.
Mr.
Saakashvili is frequently noticed by his countrymen, whose opinions of
him vary. “He’s creating rifts in the diaspora,” said Vakhtang
Gomelauri, a critic of Mr. Saakashvili who organized a 2012 protest of
him at the United Nations after the revelation of rampant rapes of
inmates in Georgian prisons. But a group of Georgian students was eager
to pose with him on the Bedford Avenue subway platform. “It went viral,”
Mr. Saakashvili said.
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