It just seemed the natural thing to do. As discredited officials from the old government began leaving their posts last week, the victors in Georgia's popular uprising began appointing friends and relatives to their places.
A father-in-law of one became the Tbilisi city prosecutor. The brother of another leader's husband got the coveted job of customs director. A crony was appointed first deputy general prosecutor.
That is how government jobs are distributed in Georgia, and a culture of corruption this thoroughgoing is hard to uproot.
On the latest annual survey of 133 nations compiled by the anticorruption group Transparency International, Georgia was just five places from the bottom in its list of perceived corruption.
Local good-government groups were stymied under the former president, Eduard Shevardnadze, who was forced to resign a week ago. Now they see a chance to push for change. When some of these independent groups got wind of the new appointments, a delegation demanded a meeting with the three leaders of Georgia's new interim government.
"We said, `Remove them tomorrow or we'll start a huge campaign,'" said David Usupashvili, the head of an anticorruption commission. "`You must not do this just after the revolution.'"
Abashed, the three leaders agreed. It was, after all, these same groups that helped bring the new leaders to power a week ago.
Usupashvili said he had drawn two lessons from the encounter. The first was the realization that the public has gained a voice. The second, he said, was, "these people need to be closely watched."
Most people here believe that although corruption under the old government was crippling, Shevardnadze was not venal for his financial gain. He has not been accused, for example, of hiding billions in Swiss banks as other corrupt leaders have. But the breadth of corruption makes the challenge of rooting it out more difficult.
Georgians honed their black markets during the austerity of Soviet times when they became skilled at beating the system, wheeling, dealing, hustling and getting rich.
Breaking the rules was the smart thing to do. It was the people who crossed at the red light who got ahead. By the time it gained independence in 1991 Georgia had become a scofflaw state.
When he took power in 1992, Shevardnadze, who had been foreign minister during the last years of the Soviet Union, was schooled in the ways of his country.
According to a number of experts, he harnessed the widespread corruption as a method of government. They said he apportioned favors, bought loyalty and used the criminal secrets of his associates as a sort of blackmail.
As the years passed, criminal syndicates flourished, and laws and regulations were ignored, these experts say, and shady deals replaced the normal workings of state, so that government institutions withered.
In 1999, the UN surveyed the nation's school system as a representative branch of government to measure national corruption, said Levan Ramishvili, director of the Liberty Institute, a local human rights group.
The survey found that of every 100 lari budgeted by the government, only 20 reached the intended destination. (The lari, the Georgian currency, is worth a little under US$0.50.)
First, the survey found, the local governor skimmed off 40 percent. Then the education department diverted 20 percent more. Then the school principal took 20 percent for himself. School operations got what was left over.
Schools are a good example of the texture of life here. Teachers supplement their small salaries, which often go unpaid, by requiring their pupils to take private lessons and pay for them.
Then in the universities, which, students say, sometimes demand thousands of dollars in bribes for admission, professors insist that students buy textbooks that they have published and bring them for autographs as proof, outsiders say.
"That's the atmosphere in the universities, which are supposed to have the highest moral standards," Usupashvili said. "There's no sense in fighting against police corruption when a professor in a university is forcing students to take private lessons and to buy their textbooks."
If someone important calls a professor and says, "This is my relative; you've got to give him special marks," Usupashvili said, only 5 out of 100 professors would refuse.
Three years ago Shevardnadze commissioned an anticorruption action plan that was published under his name and contained the following exhortation: "If we fail to avoid this national disaster, if we fail to cure the nation, public and state from the horrible, poisoning malady of corruption, Georgians as a civilized nation and Georgia as an independent, democratic state will have no future."
Usupashvili, an author of the report, said none of its recommendations were carried out.
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