Georgia’s breakaway enclaves. After Aslan

Ajaria, a Georgian success story

"FOUR minutes," says Levan Varshalomidze proudly, as a car zips across what was once a frontier between the Soviet Union and NATO, and is now the border between Turkey and the republic of Ajaria in Georgia. Under Aslan Abashidze, Mr Varshalomidze's predecessor as Ajaria's boss, the crossing often took an hour and several bribes.

Mr Varshalomidze bears little resemblance to the grizzly strongmen who have usually run mini-fiefs in the Caucasus. A young protege of Mikhail Saakashvili, Georgia's president, he was installed after street protesters had forced Mr Abashidze, who ruled Ajaria as a quasi-independent state, to flee to Moscow last year. Where Mr Abashidze was habitually accompanied by a phalanx of black-clad toughs, Mr Varshalomidze strolls around Batumi, Ajaria's capital, with a lone bodyguard.

Even more than the rest of impoverished Georgia, sub-tropical Ajaria ought to be prosperous. Mr Varshalomidze talks wistfully of times before the Russian revolution, when Batumi had 18 foreign consulates. To recapture its lost glory, he plans a clutch of new hotels, with perhaps a golf course on the site of a big Russian military base, which the Russians are quitting. Failing state-owned enterprises will be privatised for nominal sums. There will be a new dolphinarium, the dolphins having been lost from the old one.

Mr Saakashvili needs Ajaria to prosper as an incentive to Georgia's two remaining Russian-backed breakaway regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Both fought their way to de facto secession in the early 1990s (refugees from Abkhazia's war still live in high-rises on Batumi's seafront). Mr Saakashvili has proposed a new reconciliation plan for South Ossetia; but after renewed fighting last year, he is distrusted. Abkhazia this week held Lilliputian but provocative military manoeuvres, and its leader said that almost all its inhabitants would take up Russia's offer of citizenship.

Neither is likely to be impressed by Ajaria's limited "autonomy". Still, Mr Varshalomidze and Mr Saakashvili do seem to have brought some benefits to Ajaria, including a mini-influx of Armenian tourists, who, says Mr Saakashvili, no longer face extortion by the "old, big-bellied traffic policemen" whom he sacked en masse. Visiting Batumi this week, Mr Saakashvili took a chaotic stroll along the seafront and opened a cinema, co-opting a photogenic child to cut the ribbon. "Is there popcorn?", he demanded of Mr Varshalomidze.

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