Saakashvili tours Georgia before taking oath
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TBILISI, Georgia (Reuters) -- Three months after storming Georgia's parliament at the head of a crowd armed only with red roses, Mikhail Saakashvili stands outside the same building on Sunday to take his oath as president.
The 36-year-old U.S.-educated lawyer who led the ex-Soviet state's bloodless revolution assumes responsibility for a nation where one in two live in poverty, corruption has engulfed almost every walk of life and separatism has threatened to tear the place apart.
The small Caucasus nation is also at the crossroads of U.S. and Russian interests -- the former mindful of a strategic oil pipeline and the latter delaying the closure of two military bases in its ex-Soviet sphere for ostensible security reasons.
In an effort to maintain momentum from winning 96 percent of the vote in an election this month, Saakashvili has turned his inauguration ceremony into a weekend of touring the country and preaching reconciliation.
"Certainly it's very different from many inaugurations in Georgia, this is something extraordinary for us," he told reporters late on Saturday, after flying back from an ancient monastery where he vowed at the tomb of a 12th century king to unite his country.
He is to fly to two of Georgia's Black Sea ports, Poti and Batumi, at the crack of dawn before returning to Tbilisi where he will be sworn in on the steps of parliament.
Keeping a watchful eye on proceedings will be two men Saakashvili says he would like to be equal friends with -- U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and Russian Foreign Minster Igor Ivanov.
"We are a very small country and we need to survive in a very complicated geopolitical environment. I don't want to turn this country into a battlefield between different superpowers," he said.
"I am not pro-American or pro-Russian, I am pro-Georgian."
Nevertheless, Powell, who has promised to urge Russia to close the military bases when he visits Moscow, is to spend much of the day at Saakashvili's side while no formal talks have been scheduled with Ivanov.
Saakashvili said he was ready to make concessions to Moscow, which has accused Georgia of harbouring Chechen guerrillas, but repeated the military bases should already have gone and, in any case, mostly employ ethnic Georgians.
"We're talking about a few hundred (Russian) soldiers and officers with old fashioned tanks, metal scrap that is useless for Russian security. They have symbolic importance to bolster the self-confidence of some people in Moscow," he said.
The president-elect, who says he believes in the power of symbols, will take power on the 76th birthday of the man he toppled, Eduard Shevardnadze. He had been opening parliament when Saakashvili stormed it, accusing him of rigging a November poll.
Copyright 2004
Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
