UNPO, Netherlands
Sept 2 2006
Abkhazia: Echoing Kosova?
2006-09-01
Abkhazia’s case for independence from Georgia has echoes of Kosovo’s
from Serbia, reports Thomas de Waal from the Black Sea territory.
Below article, written by Thomas de Waal, was published by Open
Democracy on 10 May 2006, titled "Abkhazia’s dream of freedom"
"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 at the Institute for War and Peace
Reporting in London.