Ghost of Gamsakhurdia Continues to Haunt Georgia
By Maria Trombly
(Guardian, Feb. 14, 1993)

JIKHASKARI, Georgia --  By all accounts, Georgia's first democratically-elected post-Soviet president is dead and buried near the west Georgian village of Jikhaskari.

    But Zviad Gamsakhurdia isn't about to let a little thing like death slow him
down.

    "He said that even if he were to die he would continue to fight from beyond
the grave," his wife, Manana Archvadze-Gamsakhurdia, said in an interview at
the end of January at her home in exile in the nearby Chechen Republic.

    "He said: 'I will do even more for Georgia then than I do now.' "

    Her husband killed himself on December 31, she said, after the rebellion he
led in the Mingrelia region of western Georgia was defeated by government forces
backed by the Russian military.

    But because the body has never been found, many Georgians believe that the
man whose nationalist policies and opposition fighters set off three civil wars
in three years may still return.

    "If he was dead, they would have found the body a long time ago. So he is
alive," said Alexander Chikvaidze from the western province of Mingrelia,
echoing many Georgians.

    To those who believed in his vision of a Georgia free of Russian control,
the lack of any final evidence is reason to hope that he may yet reappear to
overturn the current government's co-operation with Russia.

    But most Georgians, according to the referendum that overwhelmingly
confirmed Eduard Shevardnadze as head of state over a year ago, see Gamsakhurdia
as a symbol of civil strife and economic ruin.

    "The reason it is so bad here now is because of Zviadism and the civil war,"
said Kalistrand Chikovani, aged 75, a school director in the pro-Gamsakhurdia
village of Mukhuri in Mingrelia. "If he does return and finds support, it will
be a catastrophe."

    Gamsakhurdia is reportedly buried in Jikhaskari, a tiny village about 12
miles from the Mingrelian capital Zugdidi - supposedly in the yard of one of his
supporters, although police could find no signs of a grave.

    Residents say that he arrived in a Red Cross vehicle, conspicuous in a
village where horse-drawn wagons are the dominant mode of transport.

    But now, with the Georgian government investigating the circumstances of his
death, people are afraid to talk. The village headman, Megona Margia, said the
Georgian security ministry, the successor to the KGB, had questioned all the
known Zviadists.

    So is there anyone who knows where Gamsakhurdia is buried?

    "We know where the body is," said Merab Kiknadze, his right-hand man.

    Gamsakhurdia's family would be willing to return to Georgia and identify the
burial spot so that the body could be identified, he said - but only with
guarantees of safety from the Georgian government, although he added that the
widow was opposed to an autopsy on religious grounds, even though one would be
mandatory by law.

    "We have to establish the reason for Gamsakhurdia's death so that in 10, 15
years there will be no questions," said a prosec utor's representative who
arrived in Chechnya to meet the family.

    Last week foreign representatives who had arrived in Tbilisi and Chechnya to
help identify the body returned home after negotiations broke off.

    Meanwhile, accounts of Gamsakhurdia sightings continue to come in. The
president who would not go away has wandered through Turkey, dropped into Spain,
and stopped in to talk to old friends in Finland.

    As his friend Mr Kiknadze said: "The life of such a man as Gamsakhurdia
begins after his death."