GEORGIA: THE IGNORED HISTORY
By Robert English
The New York Review of Books
November 6, 2008
Zviad Gamsakhurdia, Georgia’s first post-Soviet president, from
1991 to 1992, has been dead for fifteen years. But in view of his
responsibility for initially provoking the South Ossetian campaign
to secede from Georgia–the conflict that set off last month’s
war with Russia–his brief but tumultuous reign merits some fresh
scrutiny. Trying to understand the Ossetian, Abkhazian, and other
minorities’ alienation from Georgia without reference to the extreme
nationalism of Gamsakhurdia is like trying to explain Yugoslavia’s
collapse and Kosovo’s secession from Serbia while ignoring the
nationalist policies of Slobodan Milosevic. Yet in all the debate
over the causes of the Russian-Georgian war, Gamsakhurdia is rarely
even mentioned.
Instead, when those responsible are cited, Vladimir Putin invariably
comes first. As Russian prime minister he ordered Moscow’s brutal
offensive into Georgia, and earlier, as president, he tacitly supported
both the South Ossetian and Abkhazian secessionists. Next comes
Mikheil Saakashvili, the impetuous and vocally pro-American Georgian
president who gambled on a lightning strike to retake South Ossetia
under pressure of escalating artillery fire from the separatists there.
Others fault President George W. Bush for championing the further
expansion of NATO–already viewed by Moscow as hostile, as well as a
violation of an implicit promise made at the end of the cold war–to
include its strategically vital neighbors Georgia and Ukraine. And
then there is Josef Stalin, the Soviet dictator who as nationalities
commissar in the early 1920s laid the foundation for post-Soviet
conflicts by pitting subject peoples against one another ("planting
mines," as Georgians say) to strengthen the Kremlin’s control.
But lying between the immediate and the distant past is the
Gamsakhurdia era, beginning in the late 1980s, the years of
Soviet liberalization and the rise of assertive nationalism that
did much to shape subsequent Georgian politics–right up to the
present. Gamsakhurdia, then mainly known in the West as a scholar and
dissident, was also a fiery Georgian nationalist who, like Serbia’s
Milosevic, rode to power on a wave of chauvinist passions. Both were
demagogues who manipulated justified popular grievances and crude
popular prejudices to demonize "enemies"–a tactic that soon became
a self-fulfilling prophecy.
While Milosevic’s "Greater Serbia" was to be built with territory
seized from neighbors Croatia and Bosnia, where Serb minorities were
supposedly in mortal danger, Gamsakhurdia’s "Georgia for the Georgians"
would be established by curtailing the rights and autonomies enjoyed by
Georgia’s internal minorities, privileges he saw as divisive vestiges
of the Soviet system.[1] And as he acted on that program–rising
between 1988 and 1991 from opposition leader to parliamentarian
to president, Georgian relations with the republic’s Abkhazian and
Ossetian enclaves went from being strained to being violent.
Gamsakhurdia’s rhetoric provoked fear among all Georgian
minorities–Adjars, Armenians, Azeris, Greeks, Russians, Abkhazians,
and Ossetians. The latter two were especially concerned to protect
their cultural rights and self-rule by means of the new opportunities
offered by Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika. These included free speech,
multiparty elections, the devolution of power to local parliaments,
and in 1991 an invitation to redraw the USSR’s constitutional basis
in a new union treaty.
Gamsakhurdia and his allies responded with fury. Large rallies in the
Georgian capital of Tbilisi denounced the Abkhazians and Ossetians as
"traitors" and "pawns of the Kremlin" while groups of angry Georgians
took their protests directly to the Abkhazian and Ossetian capitals
of Sukhumi and Tskhinvali. The resulting confrontations often turned
violent. A 1989 move by officials in Tbilisi to shut down part of the
university in Sukhumi and replace it with a branch of the Georgian
State University set off more bloodshed. In response to this clash–and
the Abkhazians’ declaration of sovereignty–Georgian nationalists
began an anti-Abkhazian rally that grew into a weeklong protest
in downtown Tbilisi. That demonstration was violently suppressed
by Soviet troops in April 1989 at a cost of twenty Georgian lives,
further fanning Georgian passions and prompting a series of fateful
steps by the Georgian parliament.
First, it passed a law making Georgian the sole official language,
a measure blatantly discriminatory toward the republic’s non-Georgian
minorities.[2] Later in 1989, it banned parties that operated only
"regionally" from participating in general elections in the Georgian
republic, a transparent ploy to disenfranchise Abkhazian and South
Ossetian voters.[3] In 1990, as the Ossetians moved toward secession
from the soon-to-be-independent republic of Georgia, a newly
elected Georgian parliament, led by Gamsakhurdia, simply revoked
their autonomous status altogether. In March 1991, Gamsakhurdia
banned Georgians from voting in Gorbachev’s USSR-wide referendum
on preserving the Soviet Union. The Abkhazians defied this ban and
organized their own balloting for the referendum, while Gamsakhurdia
held a separate vote on Georgia’s secession from the USSR.
Some 90 percent of Georgians voted for independence, and the Abkhazians
voted even more overwhelmingly to preserve the union –which
they saw as the only guarantor of their autonomous rights–and,
notably, were joined by large majorities of all the region’s other
non-Georgian peoples as well. A month later, Gamsakhurdia was elected
president–he received 86 percent of the vote on a turnout of 82
percent. Almost immediately he dispatched handpicked "prefects"
to take over the authority of locally appointed officials, a blow to
democracy criticized even by many of his Western admirers. Large-scale
interethnic violence was not far behind.
All this is a matter of record, though still little known in the
West. Even less understood is the intensity of Georgian nationalism
at that time. Escape from the USSR was the primary goal, accompanied
by a romanticized idea of a unitary "Georgian national state." The
dark side of this vision was a desire to settle scores with
minorities, chiefly the Abkhazians and Ossetians, who were seen
to have benefited at Georgia’s expense from a Kremlin policy of
"divide and rule." These groups were scorned by Gamsakhurdia as
"ungrateful guests in the Georgian home." His nationalist ally,
Giorgi Chan- turia, called for creation of a "theo- democracy" under
which one house of parliament would be composed of the Holy Synod
of the Georgian Orthodox Church. The Church’s patriarch, Catholicos
Ilya II, was given to incendiary rhetoric such as his claim that the
1990 flooding that devastated another minority region, Adjaria, in
the southwest of the country, was God’s revenge for their ancestors’
conversion to Islam.[4] Gamsakhurdia, for his part, slandered Georgia’s
Muslim communities as "Tatardom" and also criticized Georgians’
intermarriage with non-Georgians.
The Abkhazians and Ossetians, predominantly Orthodox Christians, were
increasingly reviled for their defiance of Georgia’s efforts to unify
the country under a strong nationalist regime. The Ossetians were even
accused of "bringing Bolshevism to Georgia" in the first place.[5]
Russian critics of Gamsakhurdia–among them the human rights activist
and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei Sakharov–were savaged as "agents
of Moscow." (Sakharov, who supported independence movements from the
Baltics to Armenia, saw something different in Georgia. There the
Soviet empire was being replaced, under Gamsakhurdia, by a "Georgian
empire.") As Gamsakhurdia’s megalomania grew, journalists who dared
criticize him were subject to intimidation or even arrest (and their
newspapers subject to censorship or closure), while Georgian state
television fostered a cult of Gamsakhurdia as the national savior. And
as ethnic tensions worsened and secessionist forces became stronger
with each new incident of violence–for which most Georgians blindly
believed their side was entirely blameless–Gamsakhurdia ranted that
subversive minorities
should be chopped up, they should be burned out with a red-hot iron
from the Georgian nation…. We will deal with all the traitors,
hold all of them to proper account, and drive [out] all the evil
enemies and non-Georgians…!"[6]
In 1990 my wife, a Newsweek correspondent, was declared
"an enemy of the Georgian people" for an article critical of
Gamsakhurdia. Meanwhile, as an academic working in Tbilisi, I followed
the denunciations and ostracism that hounded my host–the eminent
Georgian philosopher Merab Mamardashvili–to a premature death later
that year. Merab’s "sins" included criticism of hysterical Georgian
chauvinism and also of the insulting, one-sided portrayal of Russia
(and of the reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev) in the Georgian
press.[7]
As a student of Yugoslavia as well as Georgia, I was struck by
Gamsakhurdia’s autocratic behavior and his crackdown on liberal dissent
at precisely the same moment that Serbia’s Milosevic was repressing the
liberal, antiwar Serbian opposition. Both Milosevic and Gamsakhurdia
soon alienated many urban-educated voters and came to rely on angry
rural mobs (Milosevic had his slivovitz-fueled "rent-a-crowds";
Gamsakhurdia had his so-called "black stockings," legions of adoring,
middle-aged women). Both demagogues persecuted their domestic critics
and blamed minority conflicts on foreign "enemies" (for Milosevic it
was Germany and the Vatican, for Gamsakhurdia it was Russia).
Certainly Gamsakhurdia was nowhere near as vicious as his Serbian
counterpart. Nor was he anywhere near as competent. While Milosevic
effectively managed the "socialist" system for the benefit of himself
and his cronies, Gamsakhurdia proved ineffective at managing even the
most basic tasks of government. While Milosevic organized a corrupt
economy and employed paramilitary warlords for his own nefarious
purposes, Gamsakhurdia quickly lost control of both a collapsing
economy and Georgia’s increasingly powerful mafiosi-warlords
(such as Jaba Ioseliani, a convicted bank robber and murderer). In
search of both pride and plunder, the paramilitary groups of the
warlords–including Ioseliani’s Mkhedrioni, or "Horsemen," the Society
of White George, and several others–instigated numerous clashes
with Georgian minorities. Even the official Georgian National Guard
(led by Gamsakhurdia ally Tengiz Kitovani, a professional artist)
proved an undisciplined force that engaged in wanton destruction and
civilian killings during a bloody but unsuccessful effort to suppress
the South Ossetian separatists.
Kitovani and Ioseliani soon rebelled against Gamsakhurdia himself,
deposing their president in a coup in January 1992. That summer, in
the shadow of a gathering effort by Gamsakhurdia loyalists to regain
power, the two warlords launched a violent assault on Abkhazia that
backfired utterly. After a swift and devastating initial advance
the invasion bogged down, distracted by Gamsakhurdia’s growing
insurgency. Meanwhile, with Russia now providing large-scale aid
to the outgunned Abkhazian fighters, the latter quickly routed the
Georgian National Guard–along with the Mkhedrioni and other Georgian
paramilitary marauders–and eventually forced over 200,000 ethnic
Georgians from their homes in Abkhazia.[8]
It hardly mattered that Eduard Shevardnadze, internationally admired
as Gorbachev’s liberal foreign minister, had returned from Moscow in
March of 1992 to head a provisional Georgian government. It took many
months before he was able to gain some measure of control–struggling
simultaneously with an inherited war in Abkhazia, a renegade army
and warlords, and Gamsakhurdia’s attempted revanche. By the time of
Shevardnadze’s own election as Georgian president in 1995, Abkhazia
and South Ossetia had long since achieved de facto independence.[9]
All this is especially tragic because it could have been avoided. Many
Russians, including then-president Boris Yeltsin, were sympathetic
to the non-Russian republics’ desire for independence from the
USSR. And many Abkhazians and Ossetians were initially hopeful of
their prospects in a free, democratic Georgia. "We could have left the
[Soviet] Union together, as brothers," one Ossetian leader told us
in Tskhinvali in 1991. But Gamsakhurdia’s aggressive nationalism and
strident denunciations of "devil Russia" and its "traitorous" allies
within Georgia pushed moderate Abkhazians and Ossetians into support of
outright secession and of an unholy alliance with reactionary elements
in the Russian military (who began arming them behind Gorbachev’s and
Yeltsin’s backs as they struggled with their own hardliners between
1991 and 1993).[10] By the time of Putin’s rise in 1999, Gamsakhurdia’s
rhetoric had long since become a self-fulfilling prophecy–both the
Abkhazians and Ossetians had voted overwhelmingly for secession.[11]
And by 1999, of course, Russian policy toward Georgia, and the broader
Caucasian-Caspian region, had also become part of a larger contest
for influence with the West.
None of this is to defend Moscow’s manipulation of post-Soviet
conflicts to dominate its neighbors–though it is vital to discern
the difference in motives behind an offensive, "neo-imperial"
strategy and a defensive, "anti-NATO" tactic. Nor is it to justify the
devastating attack on Georgia–though Moscow was also clearly lashing
out at the West, with pent-up fury for what it sees as an American
strategy of isolating and encircling Russia (the attack was also, in
effect, a preventive strike against two NATO bases-in-the-making in
Georgia). What is important, however, is to highlight the Georgians’
own initial victimization of others in a tragedy in which they
ultimately became victims themselves.
Of course it is "unfair" that Georgians today reap the bitter fruits
of what Gamsakhurdia sowed in years past–just as it is unfair that
today’s Serbs still pay for the sins of Milosevic. And certainly
Gamsakhurdia was far from the coldblooded killer that Milosevic
was. Yet consider the roughly one thousand South Ossetians who died
resisting efforts to impose central Georgian control in 1991 and
1992; for a population of under 100,000 this represents a per capita
death toll over twice as high as that which Milosevic inflicted on
Kosovo. (Milosevic’s Kosovo savagery took some 10,000 lives, out of
a Kosovo Albanian population of nearly 2,000,000.)
Consider, too, that one of Saakashvili’s first acts as president in
2004 was to ceremoniously rehabilitate Gamsakhurdia, hailing him
as a "great statesman and patriot." Many in the West criticized
Saakashvili’s 2007 crackdown on opposition politicians and the
press, but few noted this earlier insult to Georgia’s restive
minorities. Nor are most aware of the continuing tensions between
the Tbilisi government and the country’s Armenian, Azeri, and other
non-Georgian peoples–many of whom sympathized with the Ossetians,
not the Georgians, in the recent war–over ongoing linguistic,
economic, and even religious discrimination. Certainly Saakashvili
is not the extreme nationalist that Gamsakhurdia was. And along with
some provocative steps, he has also made notable efforts toward
reconciliation. But his purge of senior Georgian officials from
the previous government, and his replacement of them by ministers
and ambassadors who in some cases were barely in their teens during
the Gamsakhurdia era, seems also to have purged valuable assets of
experience, caution, humility, and even recent memory.
We must hope that urgent diplomatic and economic support from
abroad, together with some self-critical reflection by Georgians
at home, will yet help this proud, long-suffering people escape the
humiliation and the debilitating cult of "innocent martyrdom" that
has plagued post-Kosovo Serbia. But the Western media that blindly
follow the Georgian nationalist line in discounting Ossetian and
Abkhazian grievances–viewing their separatist aspirations as largely
illegitimate or a Russian invention and casting the entire conflict
as the Georgian David vs. Russian Goliath–serve neither the cause
of truth nor reconciliation. And American officials who embrace this
simplistic narrative–and who reflexively call for Georgia’s rapid
rearming and accelerated accession to NATO–risk further inflaming
confrontation with Russia to the grave detriment of both Western and
Georgian interests.
–October 8, 2008
Notes [1]Georgian nationalists such as Gamsakhurdia simply denied
the Ossetians’ right to autonomous status, viewing them as recent
interlopers in a historically Georgian region whose real homeland was
across the border in Russia. And the Abkhazians, they noted, hardly
deserved special privileges in a region where they made up barely
18 percent of the population. "That’s just it," countered Abkhaz
leaders. After the Georgian tyrant Stalin decimated them in the 1930s
and 1940s, subsequent policies encouraging Georgians, Russians, and
Armenians to emigrate to Abkhazia had reduced the Abkhazians to such
a precarious position in their homeland that they required special
status and cultural protections. The parallels here with polemics
between Serbs and ethnic Albanians over the history and demographics
of Kosovo are worth noting.
[2]The Abkhazians and Ossetians naturally used their native languages
first and Russian, the Soviet lingua franca, second; only a modest
percentage spoke Georgian well enough to use it as the official
language.
[3]As a result of this ban, and also thanks to the minorities’ growing
boycott of official Tbilisi, the new Georgian parliament elected in
October 1990 seated only nine non-Georgians out of a total of 245
deputies–and this in a republic where minorities made up some 30
percent of the population.
[4]On Ilya II see Fairy von Lilienfeld, "Reflections on the Current
State of the Georgian Church and Nation," in Seeking God, edited by
Stephen K. Batalden (Northern Illinois University Press, 1993), p. 227.
[5]For more detail on this period see Robert English, "’Internal
Enemies, External Enemies’: Elites, Identity, and the Tragedy of
Post-Soviet Georgia," in Russia and Eastern Europe After Communism,
edited by Michael Kraus and Ronald D. Liebowitz (Westview, 1996).
[6]Stuart J. Kaufman, Modern Hatreds: The Symbolic Politics of Ethnic
War (Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 110.
[7]Gorbachev was widely blamed for the 1989 "Tbilisi massacre." In
fact, while guilty of fumbling the investigation that followed,
Gorbachev was not responsible for the crackdown. He was traveling
abroad when hard-line Politburo rivals acceded to the Georgian
Communist Party’s request for Interior Ministry troops to "restore
order," and the actual decision to use force was taken by the local
commander in consultation with the Georgian Communist Party boss.
[8]Thus the fate of these Georgian refugees is very similar to that of
the Serbian refugees from Croatia and Kosovo –the victims of savage
wars launched ostensibly to protect them.
[9]For further detail see Alexei Zverev, "Ethnic Conflicts in the
Caucasus, 1988-1994," and Ghia Nodia, "Political Turmoil in Georgia
and the Ethnic Policies of Zviad Gamsakhurdia," in Contested Borders
in the Caucasus, edited by Bruno Coppieters (Brussels: VUB University
Press, 1996).
[10]By and large, the Soviet military’s initial role was a fairly
evenhanded one–acting as peacekeepers between Georgian forces
and Ossetian/Abkhazian militias–and only tilted strongly in the
secessionists’ favor after the Georgian side’s major assaults
of 1991-1992. It also seems that this change resulted not from a
considered decision of Gorbachev or Yeltsin, but from commanders
taking advantage of the chaos that attended the Soviet collapse
to punish their Georgian antagonists. By 1994, support for the
Abkhazians and South Ossetians–who had repeatedly begged Moscow for
support–hardened into a consistent Russian policy. On Russian policy
see Svante E. Cornell, Autonomy and Conflict: Ethnoterritoriality and
Separatism in the South Caucasus-Cases in Georgia (Uppsala University,
2002), pp. 182-183.
[11]The Georgian nationalist view ignores the confusion and fluidity
of Soviet/Russian policy over the period of the USSR’s collapse, and
sees instead an early, consistent strategy of support for secession
in order to cripple Georgia. In this selective and self-serving
interpretation, Tbilisi’s inflammatory rhetoric and discriminatory
policies are absolved of blame for subsequent conflict because it
was all orchestrated by Moscow from the outset.