Authors: Neal Ascherson
A few yards away, there was a fresh grave. Cousin Z., a young schoolteacher, had been killed in the war against Georgia. The tomb-stone bore his portrait in relief, and beside it was a full-length oil painting showing him in camouflage fatigues, grasping his Kalashnikov. Over the grave, in the Abkhazian custom, a sun-roof had been erected so that the family could sit and keep the dead man company.
On the way back to Sukhum, a few miles down the valley, we passed a row of empty houses. The orchards round them were green, but the walls were scorched black by fire. Mingrelians had lived here since
1945,
when they were resettled from western Georgia. But there had been no battles in this valley. Peaceful families had been driven from their homes by the Abkhazians simply because they belonged to the culture of the invaders.
A voice from the back of the car said, They shared our land, and they were our neighbours. But then they made war on us ... '
It was more than a decade before the war began that Fazil Iskander wrote his novel
Sandra ofChegem.
It is more a series of connected tales about Abkhazian lives and fantasies, done in the manner of a volume of Isaac Babel stories, than a conventional novel. And in most of the
Sandra
tales there recur mentions of another, different people who live among the Abkhazians. Iskander called them the 'Endurskies'. In a foreword, he suggested that Enduria, their land of origin, was a 'fictitious district', and that 'the Endurskies are the mystery of ethnic prejudice'. But nobody in Abkhazia has any doubt about who is meant. What Iskander wrote about the 'Endursky'-Mingrelians, or rather about Abkhazian attitudes towards them, belongs in any manual of ethnic tensions, in any aetiology of the symptoms of group prejudice.
In 'The Tale of Old Khabug's Mule', the mule - a suitably sardonic and detached observer — remarks that the Abkhazians have a very complicated attitude towards the Endurskies. The main thing is that no one knows exactly how they got to Abkhazia, but everyone is sure they're here to gradually destroy the Abkhazians. At first the hypothesis was developed that the Turks were sending them down .. . The Chegemians [from the village of Chegem] put forward a different version of the story. Their version is that somewhere deep in the dense forest between Georgia and Abkhazia the Endurskies had been spontaneously generated from wood mould. Very likely that was possible in Tsarist times. And later they grew into a whole tribe, multiplying much faster than the Abkhazians would have liked . . .
Some older Chegemians, the mule recalls, say that there was a time when Endurskies did not live in Abkhazia and only came to the village in small parties to hire themselves out for seasonal labour. Now they were a permanent, yet never fully accepted, part of the landscape.
In Tali, Miracle of Chegem', the narrator mocks:
The Chegemians were sure that all Abkhazians dreamed of becoming related to them. Not to mention the Endurskies, who dreamed not so much of becoming related to the Chegemians as of subjugating them, or not even subjugating but simply destroying the flourishing village, turning it into a wasteland . . . so that they could go around saying that there had never been any Chegem . . . None of this would prevent [the Chegemians] from maintaining quite friendly relations with their Endursky aliens in normal times.
On the Black Sea coasts, there have lived many Chegemians and many Endurskies. They inhabit Crimea under the names of Tatar and Russian Ukrainian, filling their pails at the same pump and then going home to wonder what 'they' are really plotting. They used to live in the Empire of the Grand Comnenians, when Greek, Turkish, Hebrew, Italian and Kartvelian were spoken on the streets of Trebizond, or in nineteenth-century Odessa where nobody was a native but everybody agreed that the Jews were Endurskies. They live in Moldova now, upstream from the estuary of the Dniester, where the Chegemians are the Moldovans of Romanian speech while the Endurskies are the Slav settlers of 'Transdniestria' in the east of the country. In Moldova, just as in Abkhazia and Chechnia
in the northern Caucasus, the end of empire - the Soviet eclipse -meant the beginning of war between neighbours.
Independence always has an aspect of amputation. Old but still living connections are cut through. The majority celebrates, but a minority always mourns when a customs barrier shuts the familiar highway to yesterday's capital, when certain medals become impossible to wear at parades, when a much-loved newspaper in a metropolitan language is no longer delivered daily. Neighbours depart, with dignified regret or in panic. There is always loss.
The amputation of Abkhazia was brutal and untidy, and the loss was very great - not only the physical loss of human lives, burned houses, broken bridges, but also the huge cultural impoverishment inflicted by the flight of the Mingrelians and Georgians. Some of them, just possibly most of them, will find their way back. But the country will never be the same again. They were a part of Abkhazian society, and their intimacy with the other communities there - even if that intimacy was superficial and mistrustful - can never be reconstructed.
Abkhazia also lost its history. More accurately, it lost the material evidence of its own past, the relics and documents which any newly independent nation needs to re-invent and reappraise its own identity. This was not an accidental consequence of the fighting for Sukhum. It was, in part, a deliberate act of destruction.
The National Museum was not burned, but it was looted and devastated. In its dim halls, stuffed bears and spoonbills lean over torn cartons of Greek pottery shards. The huge marble relief of a woman and her children, found on the sea-bed off the site of Dioscurias, was spared because the staff (several of whom were Georgians) hid it behind boards. But the Georgian soldiers took the coin collections and even replicas of gold and silver vessels whose originals were already in the museum at Tbilisi. The cases containing Abkhazian finery, inlaid muskets and jewelled daggers and decorated wedding-dresses, were broken and emptied. Soldiers do this everywhere in occupied cities — it was no worse than the plundering of the Kerch museum in the Crimean War. But the fate of the State Archives was different.
The shell of the building stands down by the sea. Its roof has fallen in, and the interior is a heap of calcined rubble. One day in the winter of
1992,
a white Lada without number-plates, containing
four men from the Georgian National Guard, drew up outside. The guardsmen shot the doors open and then flung incendiary grenades into the hall and stairwell. A vagrant boy, one of many children who by then were living rough on the streets, was rounded up and made to help spread the flames, while a group of Sukhum citizens tried vainly to break through the cordon and enter the building to rescue burning books and papers. In those archives was most of the scanty, precious written evidence of Abkhazia's past, as well as the recent records of government and administration. The Ministry of Education, for example, lost all its files on school pupils. The archives also contained the entire documentation of the Greek community, including a library, a collection of historical research material from all the Greek villages of Abkhazia and complete files of the Greek-language newspapers going back to the first years after the Revolution. As a report compiled later in Athens remarked: 'the history of the region became ashes'.
The young official in Sukhum explained to me the national symbols of his country. Here was the state flag: the white hand on a red background stood for the ancient Abkhazian kingdom; the star for the Absilian ancestors; the seven green-and-white stripes for the traditional tolerance of the Caucasian peoples among whom Islam and Christianity existed together in peace. Here was the national coat of arms, devised from an Abkhazian epic legend. A horseman riding the winged steed Arash shoots his arrow at the stars: at a large one representing the sun, and at two smaller ones which are tokens of 'the union of the cultural worlds of East and West'. . .
All this is the normal kitsch of nationalism, with an element of modern high-mindedness: the allusions to 'traditional tolerance' (not always so traditional in the northern Caucasus), or to 'the union of cultural worlds'. But the ethnic mythology of the Abkhazian minority dominates both flag and crest. Every nationalism has to answer the question 'Who belongs? Who is an Abkhazian — or a Scot or a German?' These national symbols seemed to suggest a narrow, ominous
definition.
When I came to Abkhazia, it seemed to me natural territory for 'Pol-Pottery'. A small, village people, regarding itself as the original and native population of the land, had conquered the towns and put most of their non-Abkhazian inhabitants to flight. It seemed likely that a dramatic ideology of ruralism would be imposed, insisting
that the 'true' Abkhazian identity was to be found in the countryside while the towns were dangerous, cosmopolitan places in which that identity would always be dissolved. In the same way, I expected that the new government would reassemble loyalty to the new state around the Abkhaz language, forcing it on all its subjects as a condition of citizenship. There were enough melancholy precedents in the history of modern nationalism.
But, surprisingly enough, no such mood is to be found in the new Abkhazian government or among its supporters. They recognise the diversity of Abkhazia, and have no intention of forcing a single culture on its peoples. There is a coherent effort to rescue and reorganise the teaching and practice of Abkhazian culture, above all in music and dance. But members of the government in Sukhum insist that Greek, Armenian 'and even Georgian' culture would be developed as well: 'we do not blame the whole Georgian people, and we appreciate their traditions.' No special primacy will be given to the Abkhaz language. It will be one of the two official languages, with Russian (spoken in practice by everyone in the country) as the other. But the pre-war balance of languages used in schools as the medium of instruction is to be restored as far as possible, assuming that the refugees and exiles return (there used to be a hundred schools teaching in Abkhazian, seventy in Russian and a hundred and fifty in Georgian). All non-Abkhazian schools will continue to study the language, as they did before the war, but there is to be no pressure to give it more prominence in the curriculum.
This moderation has several sources. One is common sense. Abkhazia's wealth has depended upon beach tourism from Russia and Georgia and upon the insatiable Russian and Ukrainian demand for Abkhazian fruit and vegetables. Even if a combination of state terror and isolationism was used to 'Abkhazianise' the land, it would end in ruin. But nationalism can be immune to common sense, and a more important reason for tolerance is the personal origins of the new leadership.
They are sophisticated, professional men and women, often educated in Moscow or Leningrad. Several were senior officials in the old Communist Party. A good many of them speak little or no Abkhaz, which they regret but do not regard as disabling. After all, they reassure themselves, even Fazil Iskander writes in Russian.
They are not villagers, though most of them have village relations. Neither are they plebeians who have risen to power as officers in an insurrectionary army - that element which has so often overturned the first, more worldly generation of liberators (men like Ben Bella in Algeria, for example) and diverted a country towards peasant-worship and religious fundamentalism. Such people exist, angry and disoriented, in Abkhazia during this aftermath of war. But for the moment they have not found their way to challenge the urban intellectuals who are in charge. For the latter, with their mixed cultural inheritance, an Abkhazian is simply somebody who lives in Abkhazia and is committed to Abkhazia: nothing more ethnic or exclusive than that. It is a Black Sea solution, worthy of the Spartocids who ruled the Bosporan Kingdom and all its peoples two thousand years ago.
Natella Akaba said to me, 'We must not become a conservative rural community. There has to be a balance between past and future, country and town. Some Georgian scholars wanted the Abkhazians to become like aboriginals living in a native reserve, and that must not be allowed to happen.
'We can survive for some time like this. Perhaps the world will alter its view of us, if we can hang on. And a change must take place at the beginning of the twenty-first century, a change in political mentality, or everyone will perish in these little local wars. I don't think the aim of the Ossetians or the Abkhazians or the people of Karabagh is to isolate themselves from the world. We want to enter it, while keeping our own identity. Maybe, one day, that will be understood.'
Chapter Eleven