The rose revolution shows its thorns.

• Author: Mairowitz, David Zane
• Position: Georgia (Nation

Early May 2005. In a few days the first visit of an American president to the small Caucasian country of Georgia will be the main event. Building facades along Bush's motorcade route are being repainted in gaudy pastels, the gaping potholes in the roads filled with cement and tar. Huge billboards are going up in town with the smiling faces of the Georgian and American presidents.

A private company has made the city of Tbilisi a gift of thousands of Bush posters, which are pasted up everywhere (luckily, because these would be otherwise difficult for the administration to afford). The schools are closed and the TV stations exhort Georgians to turn up in masses to greet Bush when he speaks in Liberty (formerly "Lenin") Square. Georgians are generally thrilled to be receiving so much attention, but are worried about whether he'll like their food and their country. My taxi driver practices his two words of English--"Georgia, good?"--and a local website's reporter gets so carried away that he proclaims, "U.S. President Georgia Bush." For those who know what is on the other side of the facade in this impoverished country, a joke is making the rounds: If only Bush would turn up twice a year.

It's now more than a year and a half since Georgia's much vaunted "Revolution of Roses." It isn't so much that the rose has faded, but rather that well-hidden thorns are beginning to draw blood. While Bush hails Georgia as a "beacon of liberty," alarm bells are already sounding amongst civil libertarians. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, young and Western-trained, darling of the European media, is beginning to display autocratic tendencies that go even beyond those of his deposed predecessor, Eduard Shevardnadze.

Saakashvili holds nearly all the cards in the Georgian deck. His party won almost every seat in the last parliamentary elections, and he can still claim unparalleled popularity. His challenge to the dinosaur Shevardnadze, effectively ousting him after fraudulent elections and literally chasing him out of parliament in the middle of a speech, made him a national hero at thirty-six. Yet, while Saakashvili makes the rounds of European capitals, brandishing the word "revolution," many of the social evils he inherited are still in place while others have worsened. The ex-mayor of Gori, Paata Tckheidze, believes the time has come for the president to "drop the word 'revolution' and get the country back to work."

It is true that the country Saakashvili...