In 1989, when the USSR was still a one-party state, many environmentalists and any ‘Soviet’ Greens were in the Ecological Union, which met in Moscow; thus I befriended the soon-to-be founder of the Georgian Greens, Zurab Zhvania.  In 1990, he invited me to give a press conference (in Russian) in Tbilisi on power-sharing; the local coverage was good, but when Georgia became independent one year later, the people elected Zviad Gamsakhurdia, a majoritarian.  So, majority rule.  Hence the ethnic wars in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, followed by a civil war.  Eduard Shevardnadze then took over, with Zurab now an MP in support, until 2004, when the so-called Rose Revolution saw Mikheil Saakashvili become President, Zurab the PM, and Nino Burjanadze the Speaker.  One year later, Zurab was dead, supposedly from a gas leak, but many think he was murdered on the orders of Saakashvili who, in 2008, when Vladimir Putin was in Beijing for the Olympics, started the war against Russia.  Putin was not the only guilty party of that war.

I was an OSCE election observer in Georgia’s elections in 2004 and 2012, a Russian/English interpreter in the EUMM 2008-9, a visiting lecturer in 2017 and 2019, and I've just been awarded an honorary doctorate by Tbilisi’s new International University of Peace.

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