Earlier this month, the ruling party in Georgia conceded defeat in parliamentary elections to the opposition Georgian Dream coalition, led by the reclusive billionaire businessman and philanthropist, Bidzina Ivanishvili. What caught my attention, was not the newsmaker, Bidzina, who is destined to become the new prime minister, but rather his bitter rival, the president, Mikheil Saakashvili, the man who who has lead the country ever since 2004.
Shortly after the fall of the former Soviet Union, I joined a small group of Cairo-based journalists on a tour of the former Soviet States of Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia. The purpose of the trip was to see how these three, newly independent countries were coping with their new found freedom after decades of Soviet oppression.
After spending a few days in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, and meeting various government officials, including the president, we drove to Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. We arrived early in the morning and our first order of business was to try and secure an interview with the newly elected president, Eduard Shevardnadze. During Soviet times, Shevardnadze held numerous governmental posts, including Minister of Foreign affairs under Mikhail Gorbachev.
Before leaving Cairo we had hardly prepared for the trip and rather than go through the official diplomatic channels to secure interviews, we chose instead to show up, unannounced and see where things would go from there. So far in Azerbaijan we had been lucky.
Fortunately for us, these newly independent countries were not used to dealing with an aggressive Western media and instead of kicking us out of the building, like would surely have happened in any Western country, we were always invited in and offered tea, coffee, sweets and on occasion, an aperitif.
Thinking back now it all seems so ludicrous how brazen we were going about our business. All we presented were our press cards, issued by the Egyptian Ministry of Information, and a piece of paper that stated we represented the Cairo Foreign Press Association. We had no appointment and not even a local fixer to help us find our way. In fact, when we arrived in Tbilisi, not only did we show up unannounced, we couldn’t even take showers beforehand.
After a 12-hour drive from Baku we arrived to Tbilisi in the middle of the night, to find every hotel closed. Not knowing what to do next, we stopped at a small restaurant where the proprietor was kind enough to let us sleep on the tables once we had finished eating.
The next morning, we went directly to the Georgian Parliament building and were in luck when some low-level clerk invited us in. Once inside we introduced ourselves and told the clerk what we were doing and asked if we could meet the president.
The clerk immediately made a telephone call, and in no time a second person, followed by a third person came down to meet with us. After making additional calls, the clerk was very apologetic and said it was very difficult for them to set up the appointment, with the president, at such short notice but there was an MP (member of Parliament) who had just arrived in the building who was willing to meet us right away.
As the clerk escorted us to the MP’s office, he turned and said that we were very lucky because this MP happened to be very close to Shevardnadze.
We entered the office and were met by a young, good-looking man with an impeccable command of the English language. He had nearly a dozen telephones next to his desk and while we sat patiently waiting he made one phone call after another, each time using a different telephone. In between speaking on the phone he took time to answer our questions and to tell us a little about his background. He said that he had received a graduate fellowship from the U.S. State Department and that during his time in America he had earned his Masters of Law degree at Columbia University. He also mentioned that was married to a Dutch women whom he met while attending a course on Human Rights in France in 1993.
As soon as he finished giving us his background the phone rang and after a short conversation he hung up and said that the president would be willing to meet with us the following day.
With nothing left to do until then, we decided to split up for the remainder day. The majority of our group went out to explore Tbilisi while a Dutch journalist and I stayed behind. My colleague worked for a Dutch magazine and he asked me to remain with him to take photographs, because he wanted to do a story about the MP’s Dutch wife for his magazine.
After everyone had left, the MP gave my colleague and I a tour of the parliament building and then he took us to his modest ground floor apartment not far from the city center to meet his wife, Sandra, and 1-year-old son, Eduard. Since the focus of the story was on Sandra, we left him and went with her to where she volunteered at the Red Cross. Later that evening we all returned to their home and enjoyed an evening of food, drink and laughter mixed with Georgian and Dutch folk songs. The whole time, I photographed their every move trying to get a good portrait of the family so that the Dutch readers could get a feel for how one of their compatriots was living in the newly independent country of Georgia, married to a young MP.
Back in Cairo, I developed the films, put together a nice series of photos and sent it off to accompany my colleague’s story. After that, I didn’t give the couple much thought until a decade later.
Six months before the Russian invasion of South Ossetia in 2008, I was going through a drawer stuffed full of paper at our apartment, in Beirut, Lebanon, when I came across a large enveloped addressed to someone I didn’t know. When I emptied the contents I realized the envelope contained photographs of the Georgian MP with his family, and a copy of the published article my Dutch colleague had written. Obviously, I had had good intentions, but had never bothered to mail it off. Now, over a decade later I sat staring at all these prints wondering what had become of the MP and his Dutch wife.
Six months later, at the beginning August, I was watching coverage on TV of the Russian military offensive in the Georgian breakaway region of South Ossetia. What really caught my attention was when the president of Georgia, dressed in a bullet proof vest, began speaking in English to the gathered press, in the town Gori, close to the frontlines, as gunfire and explosions could be heard in the background. Immediately I recognized him, but I didn’t know from where. Then, like flash it came to me. I went back to the drawer stuffed with papers, pulled out the envelope, dumped the contents on the table and noticed that the young MP who I had spend time with a decade earlier was none other than Mikheil Saakashvili, president of Georgia.
It’s been nearly two decades since my Dutch colleague and I were guests at Mikhail and Sandra’s home in Tbilisi. Their physical appearance hasn’t changed much. She still looks very attractive and so does he. I recently read somewhere that Eduard, their son, who I photographed as a baby, holds the world record for speed typing on an iPod.
I would like to return one day and try handing the envelope with all the photos over in person. I wonder what kind of a reception I would get now if stood at the doorstep of the parliament looking for an audience with the president? Would a clerk invite me in and offer me coffee, tea, a sweet or perhaps an aperitif? Or would I be kicked out on my backside, arrested and possibly interrogated?
I can only hope that after years of Soviet rule, the transition to a democratic and capitalistic way of life did not change the warm and welcoming character of the Georgian people. I will never forget the hospitality that greeted us when we entered the parliament building on a cold November morning nearly two decades ago.