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Abkhazia's Dream Of Freedom

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  • Abkhazia's Dream Of Freedom

    ABKHAZIA'S DREAM OF FREEDOM
    by Thomas de Waal

    Open Democracy, UK
    May 10 2006

    Abkhazia's case for independence from Georgia is no less compelling
    than Kosovo's from Serbia, reports Thomas de Waal from the Black
    Sea territory.

    A mile from the Black Sea in central Abkhazia you can see the
    crimson-and-mustard striped domes of New Athos, a grand 19th-century
    monastery built at the height of the czarist empire. Nearby is a
    green-roofed wooden building camouflaged by the bedraggled palm trees
    into the hillside, a house that you would only spot if you knew it
    was there. It is Joseph Stalin's dacha - or rather one of them,
    because this small strip of enchanted coastline was his favoured
    holiday destination.

    When I visited in February 2006, the dacha was shut up, but you could
    peer through the crystal-paned windows to see a long oblong table and
    sixteen chairs in a meeting room, a cinema booth with the reels of
    film still stacked there and a billiard table with dusty white balls.

    The rest of the grounds had gone to ruin as surely as Stalin's Soviet
    Union and we clambered through broken walls and decades of matted
    leaves to an eyrie, where the generalissimo would have taken his
    evening stroll and looked out across the Black Sea.

    As I wandered round this forlorn estate, I wondered what the ghost of
    Stalin would make of it. Not only has his superpower fallen apart,
    but even tiny Abkhazia, his favourite holiday spot, is a destitute
    territory detached from Georgia and outside international jurisdiction.

    Yet his affection was one of the reasons for the disaster that has
    befallen Abkhazia. It was fated to be perhaps both the most privileged
    and most cursed part of the Soviet Union. Privileged, because everyone
    from Leon Trotsky to Mikhail Gorbachev, but especially Stalin, came
    and rested here; cursed, because although the Soviet elite loved
    Abkhazia it did not necessarily care about its inhabitants.

    A twilight country

    Abkhazia was one of those once-cosmopolitan Soviet territories all
    too vulnerable to the jealousies and rivalries produced by what Terry
    Martin has called "the affirmative-action empire". In the 1920s it was
    a thoroughly multi-ethnic land with trading links across the Black Sea,
    a thriving tobacco industry and Turkish the lingua franca.

    The Abkhaz, who are ethnic kin of the Circassians of the north
    Caucasus, were the largest ethnic group but not the majority.

    By 1991 the Abkhaz comprised less than one fifth of the population,
    thanks in large part to mass settlement by ethnic Georgians in
    the mid-Soviet period, encouraged by Stalin and his chief Georgian
    henchman, Lavrenti Beria. The Abkhaz resented the Georgianification
    brought by the incomers, while the Georgians resented the way the small
    "titular" minority dominated all major positions in the republic.

    That is all a distant memory. The Georgians are gone, driven out at
    the end of the bitter war of 1992-93. Abkhazia's population, once half
    a million, is now less than half that. Sukhumi, once a city of Greek
    tobacco-merchants, then of Georgian workers, is still half-ruined,
    grass growing in the streets.

    Abkhazia has become one of those twilight territories that exist on
    the map and have a functioning government, parliament and press, but
    are international pariahs, unrecognised, told by visiting dignitaries
    that they are actually part of Georgia.

    Yet virtually nothing is left to remind you of Georgia and the younger
    generation does not even understand the Georgian language.

    Instead the Russians have adopted Abkhazia and are gently annexing
    it. The currency is the rouble, Moscow pays Russian pensions and gives
    out Russian passports, the Russian tourists have started coming back
    and Russian companies and ministries are renting out guest houses and
    sanatoria. Above the resort town of Gagra stands the elegant Armenia
    Sanatorium, an illustration of Abkhazia's bizarre history. Chechen
    warlord Shamil Basayev got married here in 1992 - he was part of the
    broad anti-Georgian alliance of Cossacks, north Caucasians and Russian
    special forces that helped the Abkhaz - and now the sanatorium is
    leased out to the Russian defence ministry.

    Yet it would be a mistake, one most distant observers make, to regard
    Abkhazia merely as some kind of rogue Russian puppet-state. In terms
    of democracy and civil society, it is no more criminal or corrupt than
    any other part of the Caucasus. Its black economy is more developed
    because all transactions are done in cash, but it is also a lot poorer
    so there is less to steal than in Georgia, Armenia or Azerbaijan.

    As for the Russians, the Abkhaz are Caucasians after all and know their
    history, in which Russia has been the imperial overlord as much as
    Georgia has. Most people are grateful that someone is restoring their
    economy. But Abkhaz intellectuals are nagged by anxiety, worrying that
    they have broken away from what the Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov
    called the "little empire" of Georgia only to be swallowed up by a
    resurgent nationalist Russia that seeks to use Abkhazia for its own
    ends in its efforts to humiliate pro-western Georgia.

    In a small but brave act of protest in October-December 2004, the
    Abkhaz made it clear they were not Russian poodles. Moscow decided that
    it wanted former prime minister Raul Khajimba to be the next president
    and sent PR-experts, pop stars and Kremlin advisers to Abkhazia to
    make sure he was safely elected. But the opposition candidate, former
    energy boss Sergei Bagapsh, was declared the winner of the election
    and fought a desperate battle to have the result recognised. In the
    end, after weeks of failed intimidation and bullying of the Abkhaz
    opposition, Moscow climbed down and Bagapsh became president with
    Khajimba his vice-president.

    Bagapsh was in genial form when I visited him. I believed him when he
    said he bore no grudge against the Russian officials who had tried
    to destroy him but now greeted him amiably as though nothing had
    happened. Bigger things are on his mind. He wanted to talk about Kosovo
    and its status talks, which are expected to lead to full independence.

    President Vladimir Putin had deftly stirred things up on 31 January
    2006 when he said at a Kremlin press conference: "If someone believes
    that Kosovo should be granted full independence as a state, then why
    should we deny it to the Abkhaz and the South Ossetians?"

    Bagapsh argued fiercely that where Kosovo should lead, Abkhazia
    should follow. Bagapsh said: "If the issue of Kosovo is settled (in
    favour of independence) let's say, and not the issue of Abkhazia,
    that is a policy purely of double standards."

    It is an argument to which I am quite sympathetic. The Abkhaz are
    entitled to look around and see double standards: that the west
    wants to "reward" Kosovo for its loyalty after the Nato intervention
    against Slobodan Milosevic, while retaining a soft spot for Georgia
    by insisting that its territorial integrity is inviolable. Yet if you
    were on the receiving end of Georgian armed thugs threatening your
    existence rather than Serbian armed thugs, that distinction seems
    rather arbitrary. The two cases are certainly not so far apart to be
    judged by entirely different standards.

    That applies too to the counter-argument that Serbs or Georgians
    might wish to make. There is also the matter of those refugees. The
    Serbs comprised a far smaller proportion of the population of pre-war
    Kosovo. Thousands of them have left. They are the ones who have the
    right to set the Kosovo government an exam on whether it is fit to
    become a proper sovereign state that looks after its minorities.

    Sukhumi waits

    In Abkhazia that exam would be even harder. True, some 40,000 Georgians
    have returned to the southern district of Gali inside Abkhazia. But
    they live a precarious existence there, preyed on by militias and
    gangsters - Georgian as well as Abkhaz - and vulnerable to immediate
    expulsion should the Georgian-Abkhaz peace process break down.

    What about the remaining Georgians, I asked Bagapsh, estimated to be
    up to a quarter of a million and comprising half Abkhazia's pre-war
    population? If you followed the Kosovo model to its logical conclusion,
    then they should be allowed full right of return.

    Naturally, the president replied that Abkhazia should get its
    independence first, then invite the Georgians back. But he did at least
    concede that "there are more obligations sometimes than privileges"
    in being a sovereign state and that it was a tricky process.

    One thing is certain: there is something deeply unsatisfactory
    about the intellectual framework around the "frozen conflicts" of
    the Caucasus - Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Nagorno-Karabakh. The
    unrecognised separatist territories are told that the Soviet
    borders are inviolable and that in effect any moves they may make to
    democratise themselves are irrelevant. The Kosovo process is useful
    because it challenges those assumptions. Surely, now that the precedent
    has been set, the debate has to be about democracy and minority rights
    more than about territorial integrity.

    I remembered what a Nagorno-Karabakh Armenian had said to me,
    a question I found unanswerable at the time. "So we were inside
    Azerbaijan for seventy years. How many years do we have to spend
    outside Azerbaijan for the world to recognise that we have left them
    behind for good - twenty, thirty, seventy?"

    If the Abkhaz can put together a democratic case for greater
    recognition by the outside world, I for one will be glad. And if Stalin
    spins a little more in his grave on Red Square, so much the better.

    Thomas de Waal is Caucasus editor of the Institute for War & Peace
    Reporting in London. He is co-author (with Carlotta Gall) of Chechnya:
    Calamity in the Caucasus (New York University Press, 1998) and author
    of Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan through peace and war (New
    York University Press, 2003)

    http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-cauc asus/abkhazia_3525.jsp
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