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  • A Federative Georgia?

    A FEDERATIVE GEORGIA?
    Eduard Popov

    http://en.fondsk.ru/article.php?id=1580
    31. 08.2008

    For Georgia, the consequences of the aggression against South Ossetia
    and of the attack on Abkhazia which was about to be launched are
    going to be felt not only in geopolitics but in domestic politics as
    well. The less-than-excellent show of the pro-presidential National
    Movement Party in the parliamentary elections last May and the rather
    unconvincing victory of M. Saakashvili in the presidential elections
    were among the factors behind the Georgian invasion of South Ossetia
    as the planned snap offensive was supposed to improve Saakashvili's
    domestic political standing. In reality, the intervention in South
    Ossetia ended with a complete debacle and is sure to echo with a drop
    of the Georgian President's popularity. The opposition in Georgia
    has the impression that its time is coming.

    Though opposition leaders invariably reiterate at public gatherings
    that they are united with the authority in the confrontation "with the
    common enemy", the struggle over the popularity in the Georgian society
    is bound to intensify. A few days ago one of the opposition leaders
    Koba Davitashvili said Georgia needs a national unity government and
    expressed the view at a media conference that at the current period
    which is extremely difficult for the country the opposition should take
    on a part of the responsibility. The patriotic rhetoric should breed
    n o illusions - the goal of the opposition is to topple Saakashvili's
    regime which it hates and to prove to both the population of Georgia
    and to the West that only the leadership whose authority is truly
    delegated by the nation can efficiently counter Russia. No doubt,
    the coming political changes will, among other things, affect the
    relations between the central authority in Georgia and its regions.

    While the opposition in Georgia seeks to be admitted to running
    the country, Georgia's regions demand (or are going to demand in
    the nearest future) a bigger role in the currently centralized
    decision-making process and, most importantly, a certain extent of
    autonomy from Tbilisi. Though the majority of Georgia's opposition
    movements are nationalistic in character, a tactical alliance between
    the opposition and the autonomists is nevertheless possible. Such
    alliance will not necessarily be public, yet behind the scene the sides
    interested in each other will attempt to cooperate in accomplishing
    their priority objective which is the ouster of the Saakashvili regime
    or at least a limitation of its political monopoly.

    The threat separatism allegedly poses to Russia may be a staple of
    the Georgian propaganda, but in reality the thesis mostly reflects
    the wishful thinking on the part of the Georgian officialdom, while
    the country faces the same problem in much greater proportions. As
    for Russia, Georgia's invasion of South Os setia not only angered the
    nations of the North Caucasus but also instilled a stronger sense of
    togetherness in the ranks of the nations of the Russian Federation. A
    comparable level of unity is unattainable for Georgia which is in fact
    organized as a "small empire" and has to deal with a highly volatile
    situation in its ethnic provinces.

    Historically, Georgia used to exist in the form of a loosely knit
    federation of small counties. Abkhazia, for example, was subordinate
    to Georgian rulers in some epochs but managed to expand its authority
    beyond its original confines and to seize control over originally
    Georgian territories in others. It was incorporated into the
    Russian Empire as an independent county in 1810 with no reference to
    Georgia. Ossetia has put to practice the same pattern even earlier,
    in 1764, and also separately from Georgia. Georgia's claims on
    the "separatist regions" can only be traced back to the formative
    phase of the USSR whose heritage the ideologists of the Georgian
    independence chose to renounce with utmost radicalism already in the
    late 1980ies. Therefore it is J. Stalin, the man who established
    Georgia in its current formal borders, who should be regarded as
    Georgia's father-founder rather than M. Saakashvili whose escapades
    jeopardize what Georgia used to have. And by this we mean not only
    Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

    What exactly the so-called Georgian territories are is not such an
    easy question. Quite a few of the scholars studying the Caucasus
    contest the broad interpretation of the term "Georgian" pointing
    to the fact that at least two Kartvelian peoples - the Mingrelians
    and the Svans - have languages distinct from that spoken by other
    groups of Georgians and differ from the overall Georgian population
    culturally. In the political sense, the Mingrelians and the Svans are
    also fairly distanced from the Georgian central authority. The Svans
    are a mountain people which has always lived in a de facto autonomy
    from Tbilisi. Their relations with Georgia have been strained in
    the recent years when the Svan-populated Kodor region was occupied
    on Saakashvili's order and their local leader Emzar Kvitsiani was
    expelled. As for the Svans' neighbors - the Abkhazians - the relations
    between them have for the most part been complicated rather than marked
    by downright hostility. The Svans typically adopted a friendly-neutral
    stance during the conflict between Abkhazia and Georgia which unfolded
    in the post-Soviet period.

    The Mingrelians are a people residing in the western part of Georgia,
    south of the Svan-populated region. Their status in Georgia is an even
    more intricate issue. On the one hand, the Mingrelians have typically
    been radical Georgian nationalists. Two notorious butchers - chief of
    Stalin's secret police L. Beria and the first (and extremely radical)
    Presi dent of the post-Soviet independent Georgia Z. Gamsakhurdia -
    were Mingrelians. On the other hand, the Georgianization implemented
    by Georgian leaders of Mingrelian descent has always been a disguised
    Mingrelianization.

    When L. Beria led the Georgianization campaign in Abkhazia which
    took the lives of practically all Abkhazian communist leaders and
    prominent intellectuals, the new population poured into the region
    was predominantly Mingrelian.

    The objectives of Tbilisi and Zugdidi (the center of Mingrelia)
    are not necessarily identical. The Mingrelian elite would be
    happy to see the authority of Georgia over the two breakaways -
    Abkhazia and South Ossetia - reinstated but it also aspires to
    rule Georgia. Mingrelians resisted more than any other group to
    the Shevardnadze-Ioseliani-Kitovani triumvirate which toppled
    Z. Gamsakhurdia. By the way, at that time the Mingrelian march to
    Tbilisi was stopped by the Russian troops at the behest of Tbilisi.

    It is unrealistic to expect that the Mingrelians with their manifest
    nationalism and belief in their elite status in the Caucasus are
    going to miss the opportunities opening as a result of the weakening
    of the central authority in Georgia. The opportunities may be ample -
    even the US advisers admit that the counterattack by the Russian army
    has destroyed not only the Georgian military infrastructure but also
    the country's state control system as a whole.

    It is difficult to track20the developments in the potentially
    separatist regions of Georgia such as Svanetia and Mingrelia given
    the informational blockade organized by Tbilisi. But the information
    does spread in some amounts. Clashes between the Georgian police and
    Mingrelian youths in Zugdidi, the "capital" of the Mingrelian province,
    have been reported. Bloodshed was prevented only by the intervention
    of the Russian peacekeepers. Accounts of the activization of Ajarian
    autonomists are also available. In one of the episodes, they attempted
    to open fire on a US warship entering the Batumi seaport.

    The list of Georgia's defiant territories is not limited to Mingrelia
    and Svanetia. The list also includes Ajaria and the Armenian-populated
    Javakheti.

    The top priority of Georgia, the country which has just lost a war and
    is plagued by a whole range of problems, should be not the rearmament
    with the US assistance (the result may be another lost war and the
    irreversible demise of the Georgian statehood) but the formation of a
    more democratic and responsible regime capable to reform the Georgian
    state system model.

    Historically, Georgia has always been a federation. A unitary Georgia
    invariably troubled its neighbors and proved unsustainable. Georgia
    has no chance to survive as a political entirety unless it reverts
    to some form of a federative model.

    Abkhazian President's foreign politics adviser B. Chirikba says:
    "The remaining part of20the "small empire" created by Stalin (Georgia
    minus the now independent Abkhazia and South Ossetia) should be
    transformed into a federation by instituting the following autonomies:
    the Mingrelian autonomous province, the Svanetian autonomous province,
    the Ajarian autonomous province (an already existing de facto autonomy
    populated by Muslim Georgians), the Javakheti autonomous province
    (with a mostly Armenian population), and the rest of Georgia. Only
    such truly federative Georgia can function as a stable state as
    this political and administrative structure would be adequate to
    the country's ethnic composition and traditional statehood based on
    federalism and decentralization". The point of view is absolutely
    logical. Of course, nobody has the right to impose any forms of
    political organization on the peoples of Georgia. The type of conduct
    practiced by the US - imposing on the whole world its value system
    as the only appropriate - is unacceptable as it discredits the very
    concept of democracy. But life itself compels the peoples of Georgia
    to rethink their historical experience, to identify the mistakes made
    in the recent past, and to adopt some form of federalism.

    In the Soviet era, Georgia was jokingly referred to as the Federal
    Republic of Georgia, invoking the analogy with Germany. Currently,
    Georgia needs a genuinely democratic formula of federalism.

    Russia and other neighbors of Georgia in the Caucasus ar e interested
    in its being a prosperous and democratic country, a country best
    known for people like the famous philosopher M. Mamardashvili, not for
    militarists like its current President M. Saakashvili. Federalization
    would help to revive Georgia, which has often been unlucky in its
    choice of political leaders, as a country of high culture.
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