Authors: Neal Ascherson
All multi-ethnic landscapes, in other words, are fragile. Any serious tremor may disrupt them, setting off landslips, earthquakes and eruptions of blood. The peoples themselves know this, and fear it. But nationalism, when it breaks out around the Black Sea, is usually a plague which has arrived from somewhere else, and against that plague there is no known serum. This was the fate of Abkhazia.
This little region of coast and mountains, stretching from the Russian border at Sochi in the north down to the Inguri River in the
south, was precisely one of those mingled Black Sea societies. The Abkhazians themselves, speaking a pre-Indo-European language, were already there when the first Greek colonists arrived in the sixth century BC. But by
1992
they had become a minority in their own land, less than
20
per cent of the population. Russians, Pontic Greeks, Armenians and migrants from the northern Caucasus had all settled in Abkhazia during the nineteenth century, while the biggest single group of inhabitants —
4 5
per cent — was Georgian, or rather Georgian-Mingrelian.
They were relatively recent immigrants. After
1864,
when Russia annexed this part of the Caucasus, many Moslem Abkhazians fled into the Ottoman Empire. Their lands were taken by Christian Mingrelians from across the Inguri River in Georgia, a process which continued fitfully until
1949
when Mingrelians were com-pulsorily moved into Abkhazia to take over the farms and houses left by the deported Pontic Greeks. Here began a resentment which was soon to seem ancestral. While the Abkhazians speak a north Caucasian language, the Mingrelians belong to the Kartvelian linguistic family which also includes Georgian, Svanetian and Lazuri. To the Abkhazian villagers, the Mingrelian presence seems to convey an unspoken threat. There were only about half a million people in all Abkhazia, while Georgia had five million. After the Revolution, Abkhazia had been declared a full republic of the Soviet Union, but in
1931
Stalin - the great Georgian - had demoted the land to a mere 'autonomous republic' within Georgia.
The first shocks which began to release the landslide came with Georgia's move towards independence between
1989
and
1991.
Georgian nationalists, obsessed with the danger of Russian interference, took a harsh line towards their own non-Kartvelian minorities. In South Ossetia, where descendants of the Sarmatian Alans live, there was fighting. In the summer of
1989,
the Georgian government decreed that a branch of the University of Tbilisi should be set up in Sukhum, the Abkhazian capital, alongside the recently established University of Abkhazia. This provoked student riots, which soon spread into ethnic street battles in Sukhum and the southern town of Ochamchira,
Under the pressure of distant events in Tbilisi and Moscow, the whole social structure of Abkhazia began to buckle. The Soviet Union itself fell apart in
1991.
Civil war broke out in Georgia. The Abkhazian leaders opened discussions with other northern
Caucasian peoples about forming a confederation and a military alliance, and declared that they wished to restore the semi-independence of the
1920s.
Then, in August
1992,
Georgian forces attacked and occupied Sukhum. The Georgian National Guard was called to arms throughout the territory. The Abkhazian government escaped arrest in the capital and fled north along the coast to Gudauta, where they called for resistance. Volunteers from the armed hill peoples of the northern Caucasus - Kabardians, Chechens, Adygheans, Daghestanis - arrived to support the Abkhazians. So did contingents from the big Abkhazian diaspora in Turkey. The war began.
The Abkhazians were backed not only by the volunteers but by most of the non-Kartvelian population, but it was covert Russian intervention which decided the outcome. With the apparent aim of crippling the reality of Georgian independence and reasserting Moscow's hegemony in the northern Caucasus, the Russians supplied the Abkhazian side with heavy weapons and supported their ground troops with air strikes.
The Georgians were finally driven back over the Inguri River in September
1993.
In the first phase of the war, Georgian and Mingrelian militias massacred or expelled Abkhazians in the districts they controlled; later, when the counter-offensive began, the advancing Abkhazians drove before them a mass of some
150,000
desperate Kartvelian refugees. There were atrocities on both sides. The towns were wrecked and often looted. In the south, the Georgians destroyed villages as they fell back, and sowed the fields with mines. The dead - killed in battle, murdered in their homes or victims of hunger and cold as they sought to escape across the mountains - have never been reliably counted but certainly numbered many thousands.
The Abkhazians had become 'masters in their own house'. But the house was roofless, and they wandered lonely through its desolate rooms.
Nine months after the Georgian troops had been driven from the land, the Abkhazian Minister of Information sat in her tiny, shabby room and still seemed astonished to be there. Dr Natella Akaba used to be a historian; she wrote her doctoral thesis on 'Colonial Policy and British Imperialism in Qatar'. She said thoughtfully, in the Brezhnev days, I was one of those who listened
to Radio Liberty and thought that democracy would be such a natural, simple thing. Now I realise that in real life matters are much more difficult.'
Her door was broken and splintered; the original lock had been wrenched off by marauding soldiers and replaced by a handle picked up in some nearby ruin. She was, on this point, luckier than the Minister of Education, a few streets away. His method of entering his office was to put his hand through a rent in the door-panel and pull. Once inside, he kept the door shut with a wedge of paper tied through the hole with string.
Only the Minister of Economics, who had commandeered a room in the old university building, possessed a real lock: an impressive modern thing with a number-coded button-panel. This did not mean that he kept money in his office. There was no money. Dr Akaba and her ministerial staff of fifteen boys and girls received no salaries at all. They were entitled to one free canteen meal and a loaf of bread each day. As a special privilege of office, the minister was given an expense allowance of fifteen dollars a month for her official duties.
Sukhum was once a pretty, lazy southern town. Its climate is sub-tropical; its parks and esplanades are sweetly scented by white and pink oleanders, framed in alleys of palms, shaded by banana leaves and enormous eucalyptus trees. Until the war with Georgia, its population was as much of a mixture as it had been when the Greek colony of Dioscurias stood there and — so it was said — nine different languages could be heard in its market-place. The largest group (after Stalin had expelled the Greeks) was Mingrelian or Georgian; there were Abkhazians too, of course, but they were a minority in Sukhum as they were in Gudauta, Gagra, Ochamchira and all the other towns. The Abkhazians were thought of as a village people. Their strength was not on the coast but inland, in the villages up against the first foothills of the Caucasus.
Remembering all this, I walked through the streets of Sukhum nine months after the end of the war and felt a new silence, like a sort of deafness, pressing on my ears. Where had everyone gone? Here and there a few people walked across empty streets, or stood waiting outside the offices of some international aid agency. Behind the oleanders and palms, the houses were gutted and the dead walls were stained black by smoke. The tarry smell of burned timbers, the marzipan scent of burned plaster, still hung in the air. In the park, the bronze busts of Abkhazian poets and sages were pocked with bullets, and the central lawn had become a small military cemetery.
More than half the population of Sukhum had fled, during the thirteen months between the arrival of Georgian troops in August
1992
and the town's recapture by the Abkhazians. Sukhum had been shelled and bombed, attacked by aircraft with rockets and finally taken by storm. Many of the remaining Greeks were evacuated to Greece in 'Operation Golden Fleece', when a ship brought them off from Sukhum harbour in the middle of the war. An aircraft came from Israel to rescue the Jews. Almost all the Georgian and Mingrelian inhabitants abandoned their homes and followed the retreating Georgian forces, or were chased out by the Abkhazians and their ferocious allies as they reoccupied Sukhum.
The airport was unusable; the railway to Russia, running north along the Black Sea coast to the frontier on the Psou River, had been wrecked. No merchant ships dared to put in at Sukhum until the Turks resumed an occasional ferry service from Trabzon. In June
1994
the Russian Army re-entered Abkhazia as a peace-keeping force and deployed some
3
,000
men in the south to keep the Georgians and Abkhazians apart. But the Russians did little to reconstruct the country.
A year later, Abkhazia remains unrecognised. Under United Nations auspices, negotiations are dragging on between Georgia and Abkhazia to arrange the return of refugees and to settle Abkhazia's international status. The Abkhazian government would now consent to a 'confederation' with Georgia which recognised their country's right to sovereignty and independence. The Georgians, however, continue to claim that Abkhazia is an integral region of the Georgian state.
Achandara, under the foothills of the Abkhazian Caucasus range, was spared the fighting. It is a rich village, on good soil, and the sons and daughters of Achandara who have to work in Sukhum are nourished by parcels of maize-meal, fruit, honey and bread from their families. Along the road leading inland from the coast wander mares with young colts and herds of buff-coloured cattle.
Not far away is Lykhny, with its sacred tree where thousands of Abkhazians gathered in June
1989
to proclaim the 'Lykhny Declaration', demanding the restoration of full republican status within the Soviet Union. Trees matter to Abkhazians. Their two conversions to world religions, to Christianity in the sixth century and then to Islam under the Turks, have been less enduring than older ways of reverence for natural objects and for the dead. The Minister for Ecology, a young marine biologist, told me that older Abkhazians preserved a healthy 'culture of using nature’, by tradition never killing more than one animal on each hunting expedition. But it goes deeper than that.
As we approached Achandara, a young woman in the back of the car asked, 'Do you see that mountain?' Behind the village rose a steep conical hill, covered with dark-green forest and capped with thunder-cloud.
'That one?'
In mild alarm, she said, 'Don't point at it. We do not point at it.' What was its name?
'It has a name, but we must not say it.' She explained that it was forbidden to cut wood on the mountain. Once, in spite of their warnings, a tsarist general had forced an Abkhazian work-party to fell timber there, but as the first tree bowed and crashed, the general too fell paralysed to the ground.
At her parents' house, her father and his neighbours, wrapped in veils, were taking honey from the hives. The family had not been warned of our visit, but soon we were sitting down to a meal on the grass: maize bread, hard white cheese, cucumbers, little dumplings fried to celebrate the honey harvest. Then came clear red wine from grapes in the arbour,
chacha
eau-de-vie, and finally the main course: stiff maize porridge eaten with slices of cheese and spoonfuls of spicy
akhud
(bean stew with pepper paste). In front of us, women carried cloth-covered trays across the lawn as they prepared the marriage feast for one of the sons of the house.
Afterwards, we walked among orange and pear trees to see the family graves in the orchard. Here within a square of iron railings lay Grandfather. He had been arrested in
1947,
for nothing more than being a prosperous peasant, and sent to a Siberian labour camp. When he felt that he could bear exile no more, he had written a letter — one page for his children, the other for his wife — and slipped it into a bottle which he hid in the grave of another Abkhazian comrade, knowing that sooner or later his friend's people would come to find his bones and bring them home. Then he cut his own wrists and died. Many years later the letter in the bottle was delivered, and in turn his own family set out for Siberia to fetch
his body back to Achandara to lie beside his wife. Standing in the sun, with the unnameable hill behind her, his daughter-in-law said to me, 'You know, there was a Russian woman there who asked us why we wanted him. She said that he was just a dead body, nothing worth having. Can you believe that?'