On the eastern shore of the Black Sea, in the wine-soaked country where Jason and his Argonauts sought the Golden Fleece and Stalin felt his first dark impulses, a stark battle between the forces of good and evil has entered its second year. On one side, a charismatic young lawyer leads a government of idealistic young people committed to ending their country's age-old domination by an unholy alliance of criminals and corrupt officials. On the other side, a cabal, for whom their chosen ends justify any means, including violations of virtually every precept of the rule of law, controls all levers of power. It is a classically Manichean struggle in which both the United States and Europe have committed enormous resources to help the heroes prevail. But alas, there's an unhappy catch: In this drama the heroes and villains are the same people, and the forces of light and of darkness are two sides of the same crusade.

Mikheil Saakashvili was lifted to the presidency of Georgia in January 2004 on a tide of frustration with the status quo under Eduard Shevardnadze. Since the country's independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, networks of crime and corruption permeating every level of society had kept most of the country's 5.4 million people unhappily toeing the brink of penury. Saakashvili announced that his administration would focus on two priorities: restoring Georgia's territorial integrity (by reasserting government control over three break-away regions) and establishing the rule of law.

Both the United States and the European Union have responded with millions of dollars in support of Georgia's reform process, particularly the rule-of-law effort, which both see as key not only to Georgia's stability but to the security of the wider region and the vital pipelines that run through it. The U.S. Agency for International Development invested $2.6 million in Saakashvili's campaign in 2004 to support rule-of-law efforts and will spend the same amount again this year. And for the first time in its history, the European Union has sent a mission devoted solely to supporting reform of the criminal justice system. Fourteen experts are now working alongside Georgian officials to devise a strategic plan for reforming everything from prisons to the education of lawyers to the management of judges. Yet despite the lofty rhetoric and strong Western support, many legal experts in Georgia, both local and foreign, say the level of justice in Georgia has seriously deteriorated since the Rose Revolution.

A Culture of Crime?

It is difficult to do justice, so to speak, to the role of crime and corruption in Georgian history. Ruled for more than 15 centuries by a succession of imperial overlords--Byzantine, Persian and Soviet--Georgians have traditionally viewed breaking the law as an almost patriotic duty. Experts on organized crime say the Georgian mafia is probably the best organized and most effective in the former Soviet bloc. This culture was carried over into government as well. Last October, Transparency International's corruption index ranked Georgia 139th out of 146 countries. Before the Rose Revolution, police officers considered it beneath their dignity to collect the pittance they received as a salary. Any self-respecting cop would support himself and his family exclusively from what he could make in bribes. In all spheres of state administration, lower-level officials passed a portion of bribe earnings to their superiors and on up the pyramid to the ministers themselves. Crime is not a parasite feeding off Georgian society; it is part of its social DNA.

Western rule-of-law programs emphasize reforming the machinery of justice: the police, lawyers, courts and prisons--the equivalent of boosting the body's immune system. Saakashvili has instead pursued the political equivalent of gene therapy, focusing on the criminals and corrupt officials themselves and the passive public support that allows them to thrive.

Last summer the Georgian government summarily dismissed all police patrolmen. For two weeks while a new force was being recruited, there were no police on the streets at all. The new force received just two weeks training and were equipped with 130 Volkswagen Passat patrol cars. All of them gathered in Tbilisi's Freedom Square, and the president declared them ready for service, grandly dispatching them to patrol the various districts of the capital. The new force includes few veterans of the old force and many more women. They wear new uniforms modeled on those of American police officers. They earn between 400 and 500 lari ($230-$300), a huge increase from the previous rate.

So far, most seem to be walking the straight and narrow. Drivers say that in the old days, traveling between Batumi or the Armenian-Georgian border and Tbilisi, one would be stopped by police and forced to pay a small bribe 15 times or more. Now such petty shakedowns have virtuallystopped. Driving some 200 miles back and forth between Tbilisi and the Black Sea coast in December, my driver and I were stopped just once by police--to insist that we put on snow chains. Everyone agrees, however, that the new police need more training, particularly to inculcate a new service-oriented ethic. A human rights specialist working at the Ministry of Justice told me that in the space of five minutes, he'd seen five incidents of the new police beating demonstrators--at a celebration of the anniversary of the Rose Revolution in Freedom Square! Despite the increase in salaries, some of the new officers have already been dismissed for corruption. And yet, the facts that a Justice Ministry official would criticize the police and that some police officers would get dismissed for corruption are hopeful signs.

Of course, the anti-corruption campaign is not limited to beat cops. Arresting officials of the old regime and their cronies has been a hallmark of Saakashvili's tenure. So too has been the practice--which the government refers to as "plea bargaining" and Transparency International calls "ransom"--in which those arrested are offered an opportunity to "buy" their freedom by paying some of their presumably ill gotten gains into the state treasury. According to the Georgian General Prosecutor's Office, property worth a total of 55,703,573 lari (approximately $30.9 million) was confiscated between January and November 2004. The confiscated assets include about fifty apartments and houses, shares in different companies, land, 27 cars and the contents of various bank accounts.

Saakashvili has repeatedly responded to concerns about this practice by saying that he'd rather see these ex-officials walking free with some of their ill-gotten gains transferred to the state budget than have them in prison with the money still in their private bank accounts. While pleased to see corrupt former officials getting soaked, the public recognizes this practice as a form of massive official corruption in its own right. Whether because lawmakers had seen the error of their ways or because they knew that all good things must come to an end, the Georgian parliament approved a draft law on tax and financial amnesty for those who evaded taxes and hid property and other assets before January 1, 2004. All property must be declared by the end of 2005 and will be legalized only after owners pay 1 percent of its value to the state. The amnesty will not apply to those suspected of terrorism, arms smuggling, or trafficking in drugs or human beings.

What may be even harder than persuading criminals to part with their hard-stolen money is persuading ordinary Georgians to cooperate with legal authorities in providing information against criminals. "Even law-abiding citizens won't cooperate with the police", says Levan Ramashvili, head of the Liberty Institute, a local think tank. The public views the justice system as thoroughly corrupt and the police as a legal mafia in competition with organized crime. Legislation creating a witness protection program to encourage people to testify against criminals is still pending in parliament. Ramashvili hopes that public attitudes will change if a constitutional amendment to introduce jury trials is adopted. Moreover, Saakashvili has promised to decentralize the police and make them accountable to locally elected authorities.

But while the police still are viewed with suspicion by many Georgians, the "thieves-in-law" can still count on the passive loyalty of many others. Formed during the 1920s, thieves-in-law evolved into a recognized caste in the 1930s and 1940s in Stalin's gulags and operated throughout the USSR. They were particularly strong in Georgia. In the Soviet period, thieves-in-law controlled prisons and penal camps. Outside of prison they acted as mediators in their neighborhoods, and many law-abiding citizens looked to them for protection. For many young people in Georgia, the thieves-in-law became symbols of freedom and independence. Their popularity mirrored the near-universal contemptfor state authorities.

In the early 1980s, thieves-in-law realized that they were missing opportunities to make a lot more money in the burgeoning black market. In 1982, according to Roman Gotsiridze of the Transnational Corruption and Crime Center, one of them, Dzhaba Ioseliani, called a meeting to suggest updating the thieves' traditional code, which prohibited "active work." This opened the door for the thieves to enter all aspects of black-market business and even to infiltrate the government. By 1989, Ioseliani was able to create an organization (Mxedrioni), with approximately 5,000 members. He even served as a deputy in the Georgian parliament from 1991 to 1995, until he was imprisoned for twelve years for organizing an attempt on Eduard Shevardnadze's life.

Saakashvili's government has implemented a massive clamp-down on the thieves-in-law, claiming that all of them are either in prison or outside the country. The government is building two new prisons that will contain special blocs for thieves-in-law in which their contact with one another and the outside world will be severely curtailed. The immediate result of taking the thieves-in-law out of circulation, however, has been a rise in petty crime. They had ridden herd on hoodlums for years, and the new police don't yet have the experience to take their place.

Institution-Building

While the government employs draconian measures, Georgia's friends in the West are busy encouraging and assisting with more traditional institutional reforms. In July 2004 the EU Commission dispatched a mission devoted solely to reforming the criminal justice system. A preliminary needs-assessment by the EU's rule-of-law mission found the judges poorly educated, underpaid, working in decrepit, often windowless courtrooms and offices, subject to intimidation and totally lacking in professional pride. Cases move through the court system so slowly that most of those arrested spend some eight months in pre-trial detention. Defense attorneys and prosecutors often agree on payments in lieu of other punishments, and the judge rubber stamps the deal--often without even knowing how much money has changed hands. The Ministry of Justice now wants to purge judges and prosecutors from the old regime, Jacobin-style; the EU mission is urging it instead to subject them to regular disciplinary procedures under a High Council of Justice. According to the head of the EU mission, Sylvie Pantz, the government's work on legal reform has been fitful. "When something isn't being done", says Ms. Pantz, "it's always hard to tell whether a Georgian lacks political will or is just negligent."

In the past, judges would receive a phone call telling them how to decide, and the role of prosecutors was limited to choosing the sentence. "Lately", says one highly placed Western official, "we're seeing a return to telephone justice." There are rumors that judges are taking more bribes than ever because they sense that their time is running out.

Last October a presidential decree created a nine-part working group to overhaul the criminal justice system. Influenced by those educated in the United States and anxious to raise the system's credibility in the public eye, the group introduced a constitutional amendment creating the right to trial by jury.

The American Bar Association's Central European and Eurasian Law Initiative (ABA-CEELI), the NGO that administers the U.S. government's rule-of-law program, is wrestling with Plato's famous conundrum, "Who will guard the Guardians?" The law faculty, where Georgia's jurists are born, is considered perhaps the most corrupt institution in the country. Generally, students just pay for degrees--and until now, this has been the only qualification for practicing law. To raise professional standards, ABA-CEELI has created a bar association along with a challenging entrance exam. Beginning in June 2006, only members of the bar will be allowed to practice. The first bar exam, administered in November 2003, the day after Shevardnadze resigned, was rife with cheating. Beating Georgians at cheating on exams is like beating a grand master at chess. ABA-CEELI has created a data base with 5,000 questions and a computer program to choose questions for the exam at random. Future exams will also reorder questions so they don't match practice questions in the study guide, which exam-takers used as a basis for quickly navigating through crib sheets.

The Georgian Dilemma

Despite these programs, Georgia's foreign friends remain uneasy about some of the extralegal methods the Saakashvili Administration uses to establish the rule of law. "The government urgently needed to consolidate power, real power--like 'pick up the phone and tell an official to get something done' sort of power", says a leading expert on corruption in Georgia. "When this government has had to choose between doing things legally and doing things quickly . . . it has chosen to act quickly."

Levan Ramashvili is concerned that the use of extralegal measures has created a dangerous precedent. "Up to 1,000 cases of maltreatment of prisoners were documented last year", he says. Media exposure has dramatically reduced the level of abuse--but by prompting police to arrest fewer people, not to switch to legal methods. There are also concerns that senior figures in the government are pushing police to arrest political critics and rivals. Claude Zullo, deputy regional director of ABA-CEELI, cites the case of a newspaper editor in the town of Gori on whom police had allegedly planted drugs. "The judge hearing that case received a lot of phone calls from people in power telling him which way it should go", says Zullo. Just after the Rose Revolution, police arrested former Deputy Defense Minister Gia Vashakidze and two associates. They allegedly took all three to a cemetery and beat the two associates, then took them to Tbilisi's central police station where the abuse continued. Saakashvili, then president-elect, held a press conference in which he praised the "brilliant operation" and asserted the guilt of the accused. At around the same time, approximately 200 peaceful demonstrators blocked the main east-west highway in the center of the country to protest the police having allegedly planted an illegal handgun on a local official as a pretext for arresting him. The police beat the demonstrators on national TV. Seven were arrested and spent three months in pre-trial detention. Rather than criticize the police department's heavy-handedness, Saakashvili denounced the protesters as "hooligans" and declared: "I want to tell everyone who is defending crime bosses that they will be dealt a very hard blow to the teeth."

Though the anti-corruption drive has violated Western notions of civil liberties, Georgians generally rank it as the government's greatest success so far. Most Georgians seem convinced that the ends justify the means. At the same time, the practice of "plea bargaining" is widely seen as a form of legalized corruption that may undermine public confidence in law enforcement officials.

Sources say the most important change is that there are no longer pyramids of corruption reaching to the top of the administration. One expert told me that the government is "99 percent cleaner at the top." Perhaps more importantly, this impression is shared by the Georgian public. In a recent poll conducted by Transparency International, 23 percent of Georgians say they expect corruption to be far less in three years time. (Just before the Rose Revolution, only 1 percent expected an improvement in three years, while 55 percent expected it to get worse.)

Perhaps the young crusaders will clean house and then trade in their draconian methods for Western approaches to governance. Or could Georgia be morphing into what Fareed Zakaria calls an "illiberal democracy", one of those proliferating "democratically elected regimes . . . [that] are routinely ignoring constitutional limits on their power and depriving citizens of their basic rights"? For now the question remains open.

One test case is how the Saakashvili Administration handles Ajaria. From the collapse of the Soviet Union until last May, this autonomous region was the personal fiefdom of a local autocrat, Aslan Abashidze. Ajaria paid no taxes to the central government, while Abashidze personally pocketed a fee for every shipment of oil that passed through the region's oil terminal at Batumi. After a tense stand-off last spring, Saakashvili succeeded in ousting Abashidze and reasserting Tbilisi's control over Ajaria.

Today, Ajaria remains autonomous in name only. All officials in Ajaria are now wholly subordinate to the administration in Tbilisi. The new head of the region's government as of July 30, 2004 is Levan Varshalomidze, a lawyer who studied with Saakashvili in Kiev. Although Varshalomidze was confirmed by Ajaria's assembly, he was effectively imposed by Saakashvili. The head of the Ajaria branch of the Interior Ministry, Giorgi Papuashvili, another official sent from Tbilisi, seems to be universally loathed in Ajaria. Rumor has it that he was appointed to the position because he is willing to use draconian or unethical methods that his predecessor was not.

In Ajaria, detained officials and their cronies are supposed to pay into something called "The Ajaria Development Fund." Authorities have refused to divulge any information about this fund, such as how much money it contains, how it's managed or what it will be used for. They say that they will reveal all once they have collected enough money--without saying how much "enough" is. The Transnational Crime Center offered to help Ajaria's regional government set up a body to monitor the fund, in order to bolster public confidence. The offer was rejected.

Western governments still hesitate to gainsay a smart, popular president who is a lawyer and is unshakable in his faith that he knows how to ensure the success of reform in Georgia. After all, Saakashvili entered office with an ambitious and praiseworthy goal: "In establishing a model of good governance, we have the ability to bring positive change to an entire region. Not through exporting revolutions, but rather by providing an example that democracy and stability, prosperity and respect for human dignity are possible in our region of the world." No one is prepared--yet--to write him off, but many are looking at his government's actions with an increasingly wary eye.

But what constitutes real reform? Beating crime once and for all? Or merely replacing one criminal elite with another? This question gains particular urgency in light of Georgia declaring itself a model for newly democratized Ukraine--itself coping with questions of official corruption. Given President Bush's second-inaugural pledge to promote liberty around the world, it is important to assess whether liberty can be promoted against fierce opposition without betraying the very values it purports to advance. Now that the Rose Revolution has faded, Georgia reminds us that the best intentions in the world can't dismiss such hard questions.

Georgia's Prime minister, Zurab Zhvania, was found dead on February 3, 2005. Though many Georgians are skeptical about the official cause of death--carbon monoxide poisoning due to a faulty heater--a team sent by the FBI has confirmed this preliminary conclusion. "The system of government of Georgia was specifically (and hastily) designed for Zura and Misha to rule", says Mark Mullen, the head of Transparency International Georgia. "With the great and sad loss of Zura, some might say it doesn't make much sense anymore."

Even before Zhvania's death, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe had criticized the constitution for concentrating too much power in the hands of the president. Without Zhvania, Saakashvili has become even more powerful. There are also concerns about his proposals to allow judges on the Supreme Court to serve two terms and to give the exclusive right to nominate them to--you guessed it--the president.