For a century outsiders arrived in Abkhazia, found Black villagers on the Kodor and announced a discovery. Each generation read them differently. The villagers spoke Abkhaz, farmed, and said their ancestors came from somewhere in Africa they could not name.

A traveller came into Adzyubzha, twenty-two versts from Sukhum on the bank of the Kodor, and stopped to look. Wooden huts roofed with reeds stood against a wall of green forest. Children were playing on the ground. A woman walked past with a load on her head. Everyone in sight was Black and dressed in white against the sun, and he wrote afterwards that the place resembled nothing so much as a picture of an African village.

Villages on the Kodor

The people that photograph belonged to lived in a few villages on the lower Kodor, south of Sukhum. Adzyubzha, Kyndyg and Tamysh are the three usually named. Nobody agreed on how many of them there were. The naturalist Vyacheslav Vradii, who went looking in 1912, counted twenty to thirty households in Batumi province. A rival investigator named Elius put the figure at two hundred. Lily Golden-Hanga wrote in 1966 that several hundred remained in Abkhazia. Published estimates run from a few families to several villages, and they never converged.

What can be stated plainly is what those households were like by the time anyone wrote about them. They spoke Abkhaz and no other language. Most were Muslim, which is to say they held the faith of their neighbours; one Russian traveller who hired a boy as a servant in 1887 discovered afterwards that the boy was Roman Catholic. They farmed. Some had worked the tea and citrus plantations of the princely estates. They carried Abkhazian surnames, Abash and Chamba among them, and married into Abkhazian families.

The names outsiders used for them varied more than anything else about them. Around Batumi, Vradii was told that they were sometimes called Arabs and sometimes Lazs or Adzhars, the latter two being peoples long settled in the district who had intermarried with them. The label ‘Arab’ seems to have been kept for those whose features looked wholly foreign to the area. Golden-Hanga noted that nineteenth-century Russian statistical returns entered them as Arabs or as Jews. Imperial Russian writers had a small stock of words for them, arapy and negry among others, and every one of those words tied them to somewhere that was not here.

Slava Tynes, reporting for an American readership in 1973, recorded the local usage: the neighbours called them Black Abkhazians. They called themselves Abkhazians. The Abash family, Tynes wrote, spoke and thought in Abkhaz.

Four answers, none of them closing

Ask where they came from and the sources give four accounts, and none of the four shuts the question.

The first is the Ottoman slave trade. In this version a prince of the Shervashidze, or Chachba, house bought Africans at the Istanbul market and set them to work on the citrus plantations of his estate. The Abash family told a related story about themselves. Their forebears, they said, had been taken from Africa to Turkey and from Turkey to the estate of a Prince Abashidze in Abkhazia, and after emancipation the descendants cut the prince’s name down to Abash to be rid of it. Allison Blakely places the traffic broadly, between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, in slaves brought for Turkish and Abkhazian rulers. Golden-Hanga narrowed the heaviest flow to the sixteenth through eighteenth. The AbkhazWorld account puts the purchase in the seventeenth century.

The second is an accident. Sergey Arutyunov of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology in Moscow describes a ship sailing from Turkey, probably towards the Crimea, in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, carrying several dozen enslaved people, probably from Sudan or Somalia. A storm wrecked it off the Abkhazian coast. Russian soldiers from a fort on the shore appear to have taken the survivors off. They were freed, they settled among Abkhazians, they married Abkhazian women, and they took Abkhazian names.

The third is a legend about Peter the Great, who brought Africans to St Petersburg. Those who could not endure the northern climate, the story runs, were passed on to the Abkhazian princes.

The fourth is very old and refuses to die. Herodotus, writing around 450 BC, held that the Colchians of the eastern Black Sea were of Egyptian descent, and rested the claim on their dark skin, their hair and their practice of circumcision. In the fourth century AD Jerome and Sophronius called Colchis a second Ethiopia. Dmitri Gulia, the Abkhazian linguist and ethnographer, set Abkhazian place names and family names beside Abyssinian ones and argued for an ancient African origin, and he found black-skinned hosts in an episode of the Nart epic in which some of the visitors stay behind in the Caucasus. Patrick English gathered the classical and linguistic material into an article in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies in 1959.

English also made the obvious objection to the slave-import account. This coast exported slaves. It was famous for it. Importing them here makes little commercial sense. Blakely’s answer is that both explanations can be true at once, since an ancient presence would not prevent a later importation, and he notes that the Ottoman capture of Constantinople in the fifteenth century disrupted the Black Sea trade and pushed European buyers towards Africa instead.

The villagers themselves were consistent and unhelpful. Vradii’s informants near Batumi said only that they had been there since time immemorial. An old man remembered that when the region passed to Russia some households had chosen to move into Turkish territory, which is why there were also African families around Trebizond. The ethnographer Vianor Pachulia visited eleven villages and found the same answer in all of them: their grandfathers and great-grandfathers had come from Africa, and nobody knew from which part. In 1925 the young American communist Otto Hall spent several weeks in a village near Sukhum where the elder told him that they had been Sudanese mercenaries in the Ottoman army in the late nineteenth century, that they had deserted, and that he himself had gone on to serve with the Cossacks in the tsarist cavalry. The oldest man Professor B. Adler met in 1931 said he had been brought from Africa at the age of four, together with about three hundred others.

Each investigator arrived amazed, and most of them had no idea that anyone had arrived before.

Discovered, and discovered again

Vradii published his article in the Tiflis paper Kavkaz in March 1913, after his visit to Batumi the previous year. Elius published his in the magazine Argus. Letters followed, and the letters revealed further settlements around Sukhum. Then the two men fell to arguing about which of them had found the villages first, and about whether there were two dozen of these people or two hundred. Vradii collected the correspondence into a booklet the following year, printed in Batum by Tavartkiladze and running to twenty pages.

One of the letters, signed Markov, contains the passage everyone has quoted since. Riding through Adzyubzha on the bank of the Kodor, twenty-two versts from Sukhum, the writer found a tropical landscape, wooden huts roofed with reeds, and, as he put it, 'curly-headed Negro children played on the ground'. He noted that these people differed in no way from the Abkhazians around them, spoke only Abkhaz and held the same faith. He then explained them as an accident of the Turkish period, since the Turks had always brought African slaves from their colonies. Another correspondent, Lavrov, wrote in to remind readers that this was Colchis, and that Herodotus had described the Colchians as dark-skinned.

The war put a stop to the argument. In 1923 the journalist Zinaida Richter found a whole village of them near Sukhum and reported it as news in Izvestiia. Albert Parry wrote them up for the American magazine Opportunity in 1925. Abbott’s Monthly carried them in 1931, and in the same year the New York Times reported Adler’s fieldwork in Abkhazia and his small, isolated colonies. The Baltimore Sun ran a photograph of an Afro-Abkhazian family in February 1935. The Pittsburgh Courier followed in 1937. Golden-Hanga’s booklet appeared in 1966. Tynes arrived in 1973 and filed three articles.

Blakely’s summary of this pattern is the sharpest thing anyone has written about it. Each investigator arrived amazed, and most of them had no idea that anyone had arrived before. Tynes, for one, ran the 1913 articles and the Markov letter under a subheading promising new data on Africans in Abkhazia.

A case made for foreign readers

The Soviet state never made them a nationality. This was not a small omission. Between 1923 and 1938 the state demarcated autonomous regions and republics, set up quotas, and established presses and schools in nearly two hundred languages, and it extended nationality status to peoples who had no territory of their own, the Roma and the Jews among them, on grounds of linguistic, historical or cultural difference. On those grounds the Abkhazian villagers had no case to make. They spoke Abkhaz. They practised Abkhazian customs. Only colour set them apart, and colour was the one criterion Soviet policy could not use, because in official language the colour bar was a disease of capitalist colonialism and had no application at home. Kesha Fikes and Alaina Lemon draw the consequence in their 2002 review: no category existed under which these villages could constitute themselves as a group, and therefore no route existed by which they could publish anything of their own.

What could be published was individual biography, and the best example ran in wartime. In 1942 the journalist Isidor Schneider profiled Bashir Shambe in Soviet Russia Today, an English-language organ aimed squarely at American readers. Shambe had been born in Teheran to parents bought in a North African slave market by agents of the Persian nobility. A Georgian prince, Kimshiashvili, acquired him during a Russian campaign in Persia and took him to the Caucasus, where he was kept for amusement and mounted on a white donkey to sharpen the joke. After the Civil War he joined the Red Army, then the Tbilisi fire brigade. He entered the Komsomol in 1923, was elected to the Tbilisi Soviet, joined the Party in 1928 and received the Order of the Red Banner of Labour. The profile lingers on the respect of his white neighbours and on his son’s Young Pioneer tie.

The published material has one further feature worth noticing. Soviet culture was generous with Black individuals. Samuil Marshak’s Mister Twister, published in 1933, puts an African guest and an outraged American millionaire in the same Leningrad hotel. In Alexandrov’s Circus, released in 1936, an audience of Soviet nationalities passes a Black baby from hand to hand and sings to it in their own languages. Fikes and Lemon point out that stories of this kind always trace the African in Russia back to an origin somewhere else, and never to a settled community with a past on Soviet ground. Yelena Khanga records that African Americans in the USSR who heard about the Abkhazian villages and tried to reach them found that officials made the meetings difficult.

The Abash brothers of Adzyubzha had comparable careers, and theirs were not written for export. Shaaban was conscripted into the tsarist native division during the First World War, met revolutionary politics in the trenches, and fought with the Abkhazian Red Mounted Regiment. His honorary certificate was signed by Sergo Ordzhonikidze. He was elected to the Central Executive Committee of the Abkhazian Soviet. His brother Shirin, who had been a shepherd on the Abashidze estate, became the first chairman of the collective farm board in Adzyubzha, was decorated for labour, and died in 1958 at the age of seventy-five.

In 1963 Shirin’s daughter Nutsa published a short piece in Pravda headed ‘In Defence of My Sisters’. She wrote that reports of racist violence in the United States made her blood boil, that her skin was the same colour as her sisters’ in America, that she had been born under Soviet power and had never met so much as a hint of discrimination, that her higher education had cost her nothing, and that she had lately been made head doctor of a district hospital. Ten years later Tynes found her working as a gynaecologist at the maternity hospital in Sukhum. She had entered the Tbilisi Medical Institute in 1949. Komsomolskaya Pravda printed her photograph as a model student, congratulatory letters arrived from across the country, one of them from a Russian technician near Ryazan named Semyon, and after four years of correspondence they married.

These were real careers and real lives. They were also being put to work in an argument aimed abroad, and both things are true on the same page.

What Bertha found

Svetlana Allilueva, Stalin’s daughter, gave a different account of the same villages in a book published in the West. Her source was a friend she called Bertha, a scholar at the Africa Institute who had visited them while researching a book on Africans in Russia. Blakely identifies the book as Golden-Hanga’s.

Bertha found dire poverty and near-total illiteracy. She was told that the other local peoples had refused to mix and had driven the villagers back towards the mountains. She could not speak to them directly, because they had only Abkhaz and she had none, so she worked through official interpreters. Even so, she understood that they believed her arrival meant they were all to be moved somewhere else. Some of the women began to wail. A few young men with some Russian calmed them. They told her they wanted schooling, and that their race was dying out.

The fear had a basis. Within living memory the Chechens, the Ingush and the Balkars had been deported wholesale from the Caucasus, and Blakely reads the villagers’ reaction as evidence that they had already seen relocations at close range. None of this appears in Africans in Russia. That book was printed for distribution abroad.

“In one bizarre twist in the tragedy the three villages of Adziuzhba, Kindigh (Georgian Kindghi) and Tamsh (Georgian Tamishi), which housed the only population of African descent in the entire former USSR, were destroyed by Georgian troops as part of the operation to besiege Tkvarchel. The fate of these unique Afro-Abkhazians has yet to be determined, though at least one survivor has been seen.”

— Abkhazia by John Colarusso (Central Asian Survey (1995), 14(1), 75-96)

1992

In the war of 1992 and 1993 the Georgian side held the coastal strip and pushed inland to cut off the mining town of Tkuarchal. The Kodor villages lay across the line of that operation.

John Colarusso, writing in Central Asian Survey in 1995, recorded that the three villages of Adziuzhba, Kindigh and Tamsh, which held the only population of African descent in the entire former Soviet Union, were destroyed by Georgian troops as part of the operation to besiege Tquarchal. Their fate, he wrote, ‘has yet to be determined, though at least one survivor has been seen’.

Further reading

+ Afro-Abkhazians

+ African Presence in Former Soviet Spaces, by Kesha Fikes and Alaina Lemon

+ Scientists explain story of ‘Afro-Abkhazian’ from 19th century photo

+ When Did Africans Get To Soviet Union? (Part - 1 of 3)

The sea was warm that Friday. Children were swimming. Naira Malijapha had taken her little ones down to the shore at Mayak, just outside Sukhum, the way any mother does on an ordinary August morning when summer is in full swing and the mountains hold the heat softly against the coast. Then the helicopter came in low over the beach and began to fire on the apartment blocks behind them, and the sky that had been impossibly blue a moment before was filled with the sound of automatic weaponry. Someone shouted that tanks had entered the city. The summer ended in that instant. So did a good deal else.

Thirty-four years on, this is the image that springs first to the mind of anyone in Abkhazia old enough to remember 14 August 1992, not the dates, not the politics, not the geopolitics of a collapsing empire, but the disbelief of an ordinary afternoon turning into something none of them had thought possible. Ludmila Sagaria put it most simply: ‘No-one expected that such a thing could happen at all, that a war could happen.’

But the war had been a long time coming. Since 1988 a kind of nationalist fever had been blowing through Georgia, the cry of "Georgia for the Georgians!" appearing on city walls, shouted at rallies, settling into the rhetoric of the streets. First in the manifestos of Giorgi Chanturia's National Democratic Party, then in the speeches of Zviad Gamsakhurdia, a man capable of declaring outright that no Abkhaz nation existed, that slogan became the name attached to a slow, deliberate reimagining of a multinational republic as the property of a single people. In Abkhazia, among Armenians, Russians, Greeks, there were those who knew what such an atmosphere tended to mean. Since the Abkhaz Supreme Council had adopted the Declaration on State Sovereignty in August 1990, relations with Tbilisi had ground on through what historians now call the "war of laws", two parliaments passing measures each declared null and void by the other, a slow procedural deadlock that ran for nearly two years. On the morning of 14 August, the Abkhaz Supreme Council was due to convene to debate a draft federative treaty with Georgia. The session never happened. Before the deputies could gather, a mechanised battalion of the Georgian Army, a thousand men, five tanks, a helicopter, ten artillery pieces, crossed the Ingur River and rolled north along the coast through Gal, Ochamchira and Gulripsh. The official pretext, broadcast within hours by Tbilisi, was that hostages from the Georgian State Council were being held somewhere in Abkhazia and had to be rescued. There were no such hostages in Abkhazian hands. There never had been.

Years later, in the 2009 documentary Absence of Will, Eduard Shevardnadze smiled faintly into the camera and answer, when asked whether the war could have been prevented, that of course it could. Then he added: ‘Defence Minister Tengiz Kitovani should never have sent troops to Sukhum. That,’ he said,’ was our biggest mistake’. Those words placed on the record, belatedly, a truth that had been denied for years; but they could not give back anything to a grave in Tamsh, or to anyone whose life ended on the road to Sukhum airport beneath the rotors of a helicopter.

Unfortunately, we entered Abkhazia in a very disorganized way. We didn’t even have a specific goal and we started looting villages along the way.As a result, in the space of a month we managed to make enemies of the entire local population, especially the Armenians.

— Gia Karkarashvili [General - Army Commander of the State Council of Georgia]

The dispatches filed from the field by Russian correspondents that day, radio bulletins from Moscow, ITAR-TASS wires, Interfax cables, read with a kind of grim simultaneity. By the early afternoon, the Gal district was under Georgian control. Soon afterwards a Mi-24 gunship was circling the suburbs of Sukhum and firing rockets into the airport. The parliament’s press service was reporting that helicopters were hovering directly above the building. By thirteen hundred hours an airborne assault had taken Sukhum airport itself. By fourteen hundred the Supreme Soviet building was being shelled from the sea. That same afternoon Vladislav Ardzinba went on Abkhaz television and told his people to defend their homeland; the Presidium ordered the general mobilisation of every adult between eighteen and forty.

What followed in the city over the next four days has rarely been described with the candour Georgia’s own interior minister offered at the time. By his own account there was virtually no fighting when the armour rolled into Sukhum on 18 August. The Abkhaz Guard pulled back to the suburb of Lechkop and then towards the Gumista River; Ardzinba and a remnant of deputies moved forty-five kilometres up the coast to Gudauta, which would become the wartime capital. The Georgian flag went up over the parliament. And then, very quickly, within hours, by the account of Abkhaz parliament press releases that began circulating from Gudauta on 19 August, hundreds of flats and practically every shop in the city were plundered. The report issued in November by the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation made plain that what happened in the city in those first days did not affect Abkhazians alone: Georgian soldiers attacked non-Georgian civilians, Abkhazians, Armenians, Russians, other minorities, beat them, killed many, looted their houses and their shops. The slogan “Georgia for the Georgians“ had been scrawled for years on the walls. Now it had come down into the streets.

From the Report of a UNPO mission to Abkhazia, Georgia, and the Northern Caucasus.Central Asian Survey Volume 12, 1993 - Issue 3

A week later the commander of Georgian forces in Abkhazia, Giorgi Karkarashvili, appeared on Sukhum television and delivered the sentence that has defined the war in Abkhaz memory ever since. He would, he said, sacrifice 100,000 Georgians to annihilate 97,000 Abkhazians, which was in essence the Abkhazians in their entirety. He promised, in the same breath, to leave the entire Abkhaz nation without descendants. The figure 97,000 was not rhetorical exaggeration; it was, in essence, every Abkhazian resident on the territory of Abkhazia. Months later, in Le Monde diplomatique, the Georgian state minister for Abkhazian affairs Giorgi Khaindrava would put a similar number on it from a different angle: kill fifteen thousand of their young, he told the French paper, and the genetic stock of the nation would be destroyed, adding: ‘We are perfectly capable of doing this.’

This is the sentence that, more than any tank or artillery piece, told Abkhazia in what kind of war it was now engaged.

The personal ledger of those thirteen months and twenty-three days is impossible to render in numbers, although of themselves they are stark enough: about two thousand Abkhazians killed out of a tiny nation, seven thousand wounded, every family bereaved. But the testimonies gathered later carry the truth more honestly than cold statistics. Tamara Avidzba-Ezugbaya lost four of her five sons; her mother was paralysed by the shock, her husband grieved himself into his grave. Asta Ardzinba, two years old when the war began, still cannot speak easily about the aunt taken from a psychiatric hospital and buried in a common grave near Kutaisi, whose remains the family was only able to recover in 2005. Adgur Gulia was fourteen when his elder brother came home that afternoon from Sukhum, picked up a hunting rifle and went to war; his cousin did not come back. Maxim Gvindzhia speaks for almost everyone when he says, plainly, that: ‘Many loved ones were lost.’ ‘There is.’ says Londa Adlejpha, ‘no family the war did not touch in some way or other.’ And in the most ordinary households you find the most uncommon things: a young water polo player who had once represented the Soviet Georgian national team, lying wounded on the Gumista front, his playing hand ruined for the rest of his life.

While they buried their dead, the world looked elsewhere. The North Caucasus rose to help, as the appeal from the Confederation of Mountain Peoples brought volunteers down through alpine passes from Adyghea, Kabarda, Chechenia, Yusup Soslambekov, Musa Shanibov, Yuri Kalmykov being among the names that recur in every honest account, but the United Nations and the CSCE accepted only invitations from Tbilisi. Mission after mission visited Abkhazia at Georgia's request, whilst Abkhazia's own appeals went unanswered. Of the major international bodies, only the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation declared what was self-evident from Karkarashvili's broadcast and from the smoking ruins of the State Archive, which Georgian forces burned to the ground on the night of 22 October along with the Institute of Language, Literature and History, ninety-five per cent of the documentary memory of an entire people, reduced to ash in a single night, while desperate Sukhum residents were held back at gunpoint as they tried to rescue what they could from the flames. The UNPO said what almost no government would: that the Abkhazians were fighting not only for their land, but for their very survival as a people.

They fought for thirteen months on three fronts. On 2 October 1992 the Abkhaz militia retook Gagra in an operation that at last gave them a coastline and a corridor to the Russian border. Then came a long and brutal winter on the River Gumista. On the morning of 5 January 1993 Abkhaz units crossed the icy river and tried to fight their way into Sukhum; thirty-seven of them died there, more than a hundred were wounded, and the corpses lay on the battlefield for days. Only on the fifth day did the Georgian side hand over twenty-three of the bodies in exchange for prisoners. Some of those bodies, as the commanders who carried them home would remember, were still warm. The March offensive went worse, over two hundred young men remained over the Gumista. But these lost battles became the lessons that would lay the ground for the ultimate victory; they provided, as General Sultan Sosnaliyev later put it, the dress rehearsal for September. On the night of 1–2 July 1993 came the amphibious landing at Tamsh; then the September offensive itself. On 27 September at three minutes past three in the afternoon, Abkhaz fighters took the Government House in Sukhum. Three days later, at eight in the evening, the Abkhaz state flag was raised on the River Ingur. The war had lasted 413 days.

It is a strange thing to commemorate a beginning. Victories are easier; they have an ending, and an ending invites celebration. But the date the 14th of August has no ending. It is the morning the helicopter came in over the beach. It is the moment Naira’s children stopped swimming, and Adgur’s brother picked up his rifle, and a thousand families began the long process of totting uo the number of those who would not be coming home. It is, as Kan Tania says, the historical milestone that cleaved the fate of a nation into a before and an after, and there is no third state to which any of them can return.

What the 14th of August asks of those who remember it now, thirty-four years on, is not anger. The dead are not served by anger; nor is the country they forged. What it asks is something quieter and harder: that the truth of what happened on that warm Friday morning be kept as a unified whole, not only the tanks and the helicopter and the shelled parliament, but also the children on the beach, the fathers reaching for hunting rifles, the mothers who learned in that hour to pray. To remember it like that, without sloganeering and without forgetting, is the small dignified act that a small country can still perform for itself. Abkhazia has always been good at small dignified things. It is one of the reasons it still survives.

First published on AbkhazWorld

Vozba, S., ‘Terroristicheskii faktor v gruzino-abkhazskom konflikte’ [The Terrorist Factor in the Georgian-Abkhaz Conflict], in Abkhazovedenie: Arkheologiya. Istoriya. Etnologiya [Abkhazology: Archaeology. History. Ethnology], Issue VIII to IX, ed. O. Kh. Bgazhba (editor-in-chief), Sukhum: Abkhazian Institute of Humanitarian Research named after D. I. Gulia, Academy of Sciences of Abkhazia (AbIGI), 2013, pp. 182 to 192.

International terrorism is one of the gravest problems facing the contemporary world. Yet a scientific definition of international terrorism, whether criminological or grounded in international law, is difficult to establish, since no generally accepted legal definition of the concept exists. Attempts to define the term were made as far back as the League of Nations and later the United Nations, but persistent disagreement and debate meant that neither body succeeded in doing so.

Thus, under the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, terrorism is defined as ‘the perpetration of an explosion, arson or other act creating a danger to human life’, provided that such acts are committed with the aim of undermining public security, intimidating the population, or influencing the decisions of the organs of state power, and also encompasses the threat of committing such acts for the same purposes (Article 205.1). The United States Department of State, for its part, defines terrorism as ‘premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience.’[1]

It should first be noted that the problem of international terrorism is directly bound up with the principal spheres of activity of the world community: politics, relations between nations, religion, the environment, organised crime and the like. This is in turn reflected in the existence of various types of terrorism, among them political, state, national and religious terrorism.

Political terrorism occurs mainly in Europe and also in the Caucasus. On one hand, it takes the form of a struggle waged by various groups against the existing order: the Ulster Defence Association in Northern Ireland, the White Legion, the Forest Brothers, and Monadire in Abkhazia (Gal district, upper Kodor Valley). Members of groups that carry out political terror aim, above all, to bring about political, social or economic change within a given state, as well as to undermine relations between states and the international legal order.

On the other hand, there is state terrorism. This may take the form, firstly, of states employing methods of total suppression of civil society and mass repression, of which the Stalinist and Hitlerite regimes are striking examples. State terrorism must also be taken to include actions by state structures aimed at suppressing the resistance of nations, settlements or individuals marked for destruction, in order to clear space for their own activities. State terrorism naturally has its own particular character. What distinguishes it from other forms of terrorism is the absence of a ‘demonstration effect’: that is, the security services and states implicated in terror attempt not to publicise their activity, although they do not always succeed in this. State terrorism therefore amounts to the preservation of power by a political elite that has seized power unlawfully in a given country and has lost the support of the population. In order to preserve that power, the so-called political elite naturally resorts to various methods of intimidating the population, the physical elimination of undesirable persons, and mass killings.[2] The clearest example of such terrorism is furnished by the Shevardnadze regime in Georgia, in its conduct towards Abkhazia and the Abkhazian people.

National terrorism is a method by which peoples struggle to create their own state, and it takes two forms. In the first, peoples who lack a state of their own demand independence and take up arms, as in the case of the Kurdish struggle to create Kurdistan. In the second, peoples fight for independence in order to restore what they regard as historical justice: examples include the struggle of the Basques, who live in southern France and northern Spain (historically, the Basques sought full independence), and the campaign of the IRA (Irish Republican Army), which used acts of terrorism in Britain to secure the independence that Northern Ireland had once possessed. It often happens, however, that national terrorism runs alongside state terrorism, becoming a response to it, as illustrated by terrorism in Northern Ireland. It is clear that, in most cases, people resort to terrorist methods because they have no legal means of upholding their views or pursuing them through peaceful political methods. A desperate situation, unresolved problems and the absence of anyone to turn to in a dispute with the authorities are the principal cause of national terrorism.[3] It is commonly assumed that Catholic nationalists are the chief instigators of terrorist acts, although Northern Ireland has also seen a large number of Protestant terrorist organisations with ties to British circles. Acts of violence carried out by Catholics are a response to the actions of Protestant extremists. Protestants, who form the majority, have an interest in preserving the status quo, that is, in keeping Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom. The Catholic population, a minority in Northern Ireland throughout the existence of the autonomous state since 1921, sought the unification of Ireland, and republican nationalists, resorting to extremist, terrorist methods, gave expression to these interests.

Many nationalist terrorists maintain that they are not terrorists but freedom fighters for their people. A typical example is the Irish Republican Army, which declared in the 1990s that it was renouncing terrorist methods of struggle. The fight for territory and enhanced status, whether autonomy, federalism or an independent state, is the most enduring factor behind terrorist violence, since it inherently makes compromise between the parties to a conflict harder to reach. A stereotype of the Irish as a people prone to violence took hold in the British press. In August 1969, for instance, the Daily Mirror wrote: ‘the Irish have a sad tendency, in periods of political trouble, to use guns and explosives instead of ballot boxes.’[4] In truth, the violence in Ireland, and the terrorism that followed from it, was a great tragedy for the Irish people, one fomented by Britain itself. If the Irish terrorist deserves unqualified condemnation for his actions, then Britain bears collective responsibility for the policy against which those actions were directed. The violence that took root in Ireland became the seedbed of retaliatory violence, giving rise to a commitment to armed methods of struggle and a conviction of their historical justification. Nor does responsibility for all these years of violence, fear and lawlessness in the region rest with Catholic extremists alone.

Clashes between extremists, and above all between deeply hostile young people from the two communities, continue to this day on the boundary between two districts in the east of the city: the Protestant Newtownards Road and the Catholic Short Strand. These clashes between young people generally take the form of street fighting, including the throwing of petrol bombs. According to police figures, around seven hundred people took part in clashes that began on 20 June 2011.[5]

Religious terrorism, too, deserves mention, and may be called the most dangerous form of terrorism, being founded on religious intolerance. It occurs when armed groups or communities, professing one religion or another, such as the Catholics and Protestants of Northern Ireland, wage a struggle against the state.

Regrettably, terrorism has today become one of the symbols of the modern world. At the same time, every society has its own understanding of the phenomenon of terrorism. What is an obvious crime to some may therefore appear to others as an act of heroism and the purpose of an entire life. In the case of the Irish, or Catholics, their actions are regarded by Britain as terrorist even though they were fighting to create a unified state, whereas the actions carried out by the British administration towards the people of Northern Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s might equally be classed as terrorist. The actions of Georgian terrorist organisations on the territory of Abkhazia, which have carried out and continue to this day to carry out subversive activity and the abduction of people, are regarded by the Abkhazian side as terrorist.

It can certainly be said that terrorism poses a threat to every aspect of contemporary life, and that it is, more often than not, wholly innocent people who suffer.

This brief preamble is necessary in order to show the full complexity and many-sidedness of the problem, and the numerous aspects requiring resolution. My own task is quite specific: I wish to use the example of the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict to approach a small part of the complex of problems connected, in one way or another, with political or state terrorism.

One notable manifestation of this phenomenon was Georgian terrorism, which was especially evident during the years of the Georgian-Abkhaz war (1992 to 1993) and in the years that followed. The attack by Georgia, with a population of five million, on sovereign Abkhazia is contrary to the Charter of the United Nations, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1974. In the words of Taras Shamba, ‘Georgia’s aggression against Abkhazia was the result of the planning of a war of aggression (paragraph 4, Article 3), given the manner in which it was unleashed and waged on a full scale on the territory of another state, namely through offensive action and attack (paragraphs 7 and 9, Article 3), using aircraft, missiles and other heavy equipment.’[6] One of the clearest examples of the policy pursued by the Georgian leadership was the following: at midday on 25 August 1992, Colonel Giorgi Karkarashvili, commander of the Georgian occupying force in Abkhazia, declared in a broadcast on the captured Abkhazian television station in Sukhum that he would not spare 100,000 Georgians in order to destroy the entire Abkhazian people, then numbering 97,000, and that the Abkhazian nation would be left without descendants.[7] This statement was followed by the destruction and expulsion of the population from the occupied zone of the Republic of Abkhazia, and by the destruction of homes and of historical and cultural sites of great importance to the country.

Gogi Khaindrava, the Georgian minister for Abkhazian affairs, told the French weekly Le Monde diplomatique that resistance in Abkhazia could be broken by ‘destroying 10,000 Abkhaz, all the young men.’[8] The purpose of this aggression was the physical extermination of Abkhaz and of citizens sympathetic to Abkhazia, the deportation of the country’s non-Georgian population, and the abolition of Abkhazian statehood.

Following its military defeat in Abkhazia, the Georgian leadership, adhering to the same ideology, further intensified its terrorist, or partisan, war against Abkhazia and its people. In doing so, members of Georgian paramilitary formations called themselves partisans, seeking thereby to lend their activity a legitimate character, since, under the Martens Clause contained in Article IV of the Hague Convention, partisan warfare is regarded as lawful.[9] This was precisely what the Georgian leadership sought to achieve. The actions of these saboteur-terrorists cannot, however, be regarded as elements of a partisan movement, since they were directed against the local population and served only to intensify destabilisation and tension within the republic. In order to assess the lawfulness of the actions of Georgian forces on the territory of Abkhazia, it is necessary to examine the meaning of the terms ‘partisan warfare’ and ‘terrorism’ as they apply to the actions of Georgian armed groups against Abkhazia.

Terrorism is often regarded as synonymous with partisan warfare, and not without reason. Partisans quite often employ the same tactics as terrorists, killings, abductions, the bombing of public buildings, the taking of hostages and so forth, in pursuit of the same aims: intimidation and coercion, that is, influencing people’s behaviour through fear. Moreover, like terrorists, partisans wear no special uniform or insignia and are therefore frequently indistinguishable from ordinary civilians. Yet, despite the tendency to lump the two together into a single category of criminals, fundamental differences exist between them.

Paul Wilkinson draws a clear distinction between terrorism and partisan warfare in terms of the harm each inflicts on the civilian population: ‘Guerrillas may fight in small numbers and often with inadequate weapons, yet they can, and often do, fight according to the traditional rules of war, taking and exchanging prisoners and respecting the rights of the non-combatant population. Terrorists make no such distinction in the means they employ, and frequently resort to large-scale killing, spreading “universal terror” among the local civilian population and even killing innocent foreigners who may never even have visited the revolutionaries’ own homeland...’[10]

As the Abkhazian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has observed, ‘since the end of the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict, the Georgian leadership has continued openly to support terrorism.’ One instance cited is that of the president of Georgia personally decorating the Georgian terrorist Levan Mamasakhlisi with a state award after he had been released from prison in Abkhazia at the personal request of the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights.[11] Speaking at the Federation Council on 18 September, the minister of foreign affairs, Sergey Lavrov, referred to ‘the readiness of certain foreign patrons to prepare sabotage and terrorist groups in Georgia for the continuation, so to speak, of the restoration of constitutional order.’[12]

Temur Shashiashvili, the president’s plenipotentiary for the Imereti region of Georgia, once declared: ‘We do not rule out a forcible resolution of the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict, but there are other paths too, we have money. We have sent sabotage groups into Abkhazia, we have people on the ground, and our first task is to set the Abkhaz against one another: they will fight, they will beat each other quite thoroughly, their strength will run out, and then we will arrive with our own ancient word, gamarjoba (’hello’)!’

As the chairman of the Union of Warriors, Ruzgen Gogokhia, remarked in conversation with Rezonansi, ‘If we want to get back the lost territories, we need to kill at least two or three “Apsua separatists” a day, to make the enemy abandon his intentions and realise that you are the stronger side. Once that happens, he will never come to the negotiating table. Only what is already an accomplished fact is settled peacefully.’[13]

Georgian terrorist activity aimed at retaking Abkhazia by force thus grew in scale from 1996 onward. Being too weak to take Abkhazia outright, these groups instead destabilise the situation and undermine the peace process.

Mkhedrioni earned a bad reputation by terrorising the population of western Georgia, and confidence in the group was weakened still further by its defeat in Abkhazia. The organisation finally fell apart, however, when its members were accused of an attempt on the life of Eduard Shevardnadze in August 1995.

Over the course of the conflict, influential Georgian terrorist organisations came into being, and from 1998 they intensified their attacks still further, particularly in the Gal district and in the upper Kodor Valley. These were Monadire, the Forest Brothers and the White Legion. The conflict also saw the presence, on the Georgian side, of foreign mercenaries such as the Balts, mainly women snipers known as ‘white tights’,[a] and later Ukrainians, volunteers from the extreme nationalist Ukrainian organisation UNA-UNSO, specifically its ‘Argo’ volunteer corps. What attracted them, in the first place, was the money the Georgians offered military specialists prepared to take part in the Georgian-Abkhaz war, promising them 60,000 roubles and 60 dollars a month. The second attraction was a desire to fight against Yeltsin’s Russia.[14] Speaking of the Georgian terrorist organisations, it should be noted that they were united by a single common goal: the restoration of Georgian jurisdiction over Abkhazia.

Monadire (Georgian: მონადირე, ‘Hunter’) was an armed formation established in the Upper Kodor Valley by the Svan Emzar Kvitsiani in 1992, during the Georgian-Abkhaz war, as a people’s militia unit. The tactics employed by its fighters were marked by particular cruelty towards the Abkhaz. This cruelty towards the civilian population also expressed itself in looting, itself a consequence of the presence within the unit of convicted criminals, the unit otherwise being made up of ethnic Georgians. The unit, which later took the name of a battalion, came under the command of the Georgian Ministry of Defence from 25 July 1998, drawing its pay from the ministry’s budget (on average around 160 lari).[15] In April 2005, however, the Georgian Ministry of Defence ceased to fund the unit and disbanded it, which ultimately became one of the causes of Kvitsiani’s conflict with the government, a conflict that culminated in a special operation conducted by Georgian troops and police in the Kodor district in July and August 2006.

The Forest Brothers were the largest unit of Georgian terrorists, operating from the forests of the western Georgian region of Mingrelia, in close proximity to the administrative border with Abkhazia. This armed formation was founded by Dato Shengelia. Another, no less significant, terrorist organisation was the White Legion, led by Zurab Samushia. Both were created with the direct involvement of the Georgian side. Funding came from various sources, including the state budget of Georgia itself, though this was conducted in strict secrecy. The Georgian authorities subsequently distanced themselves from the White Legion, however, because Zurab Samushia himself became unmanageable. It is worth noting that Zurab Samushia had at one time served within the structures of Georgia’s Ministry of Defence before leaving the armed forces. The principal aim of these groups was the restoration of Georgian jurisdiction over Abkhazia. Observers noted an improvement in the coordination of combat operations and in the quality of weaponry among the terrorists from 1997 onward. The intensification of terrorist, or partisan, activity in early 1998 was an important factor in the non-resumption of military operations in May 1998.[16][b]

As is well known, the Forest Brothers and the White Legion were directly involved in the events of May 1998, which claimed a large number of lives and produced yet another mass exodus of refugees from the Gal district. The conflict is also known as the Six-Day War in Abkhazia (20 to 26 May 1998). According to Abkhazian sources, approximately 300 Georgian terrorists, or partisans, moved illegally into the Gal district of Abkhazia and began preparations for a large-scale sabotage mission. On 25 May, however, a protocol ‘On the Cessation of Fire, the Separation of Armed Formations and Guarantees against the Resumption of Hostilities’ was signed in Gagra, providing, among other things, for the disbandment of the White Legion and the Forest Brothers.[c] In order to monitor compliance with the obligations assumed by the parties, special groups were to be formed from representatives of the two sides, the UN Military Observer Mission and the CIS Collective Peacekeeping Force. The Abkhazian side also undertook not to permit unlawful armed action against the civilian population of the Gal district, while the Georgian side undertook to take effective measures to prevent the infiltration into Abkhazia of terrorist and sabotage groups, armed formations and individuals.[17] The Georgian side, however, did not depart from its usual practice and once again violated the terms of the agreement. Barely six weeks later, following a fresh terrorist attack on Russian peacekeepers, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs declared that, should such actions be repeated, it would consider the expediency of the continued presence of the ‘blue helmets’ in the zone of the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict. The Russian Foreign Ministry also criticised statements by leaders of the Georgian parliament in support of White Legion fighters who had threatened Russian peacekeepers, and described as ‘wholly at odds with reality’ attempts to present the White Legion or the Forest Brothers as organisations ‘unconnected with and not directly controlled by the Georgian special services.’[18]

No official investigation was ever conducted into the suspected complicity of Georgian officials in arming and training these groups, nor were any measures taken to detain known persons implicated in the affair.[19]

The Abkhazian leadership repeatedly drew the attention of the United Nations and of mediators to the principal destabilising factor in the region: the actions of Georgian terrorist formations. Yet the international community took no measures whatsoever to condemn the Georgian leadership. On the contrary, Georgia was admitted to the Council of Europe while actively preparing to join the North Atlantic Alliance.

The inaction of the international community can thus be regarded as tacit encouragement of Georgian terrorism, or partisan warfare.[20] It should be noted that Georgia pursued a policy of state terrorism in a manner that was practically open, yet this was never reflected in UN reports, which ought to have led to the application of specific sanctions against Georgia. A policy of double standards is plainly at work here. The United Nations is, as is well known, the principal centre of global resistance to terrorism, yet this resistance is not always and everywhere in evidence, appearing only in those cases where it suits the United Nations, in the person of the United States.

As is well known, on 25 July 2006 a large-scale operation was launched in the upper Kodor Valley under the command of Georgia’s ministers of internal affairs and defence, in gross violation of the 1994 Moscow Agreement on a Ceasefire and Separation of Forces.[21] Not all of Georgia’s terrorist groups supported the country’s central authorities, however. For instance, the terrorist organisation Monadire, under the command of the Svan Emzar Kvitsiani, opposed this operation.[d] Kvitsiani was even put on a wanted list by the Georgian authorities, with a reward of 55,000 dollars placed on his head.

The Prosecutor General’s Office of Georgia opened a criminal case against Emzar Kvitsiani, the former presidential plenipotentiary in the Kodor Valley, who was also charged with forming an illegal armed group and with the acquisition and use of firearms.[22]

Sergei Shamba, the minister of foreign affairs of the Republic of Abkhazia, meanwhile declared that the Georgian authorities had begun hunting down inconvenient political figures under cover of an operation to detain Emzar Kvitsiani, the rebel leader in the Kodor Valley.[23]

In a video address to the population of Georgia, broadcast on Abkhazian state television, the Svan rebel leader declared: ‘I appeal to Saakashvili and to all those who deceitfully sent troops into the Kodor Valley to withdraw them from there in order to avoid bloodshed, or else they will be carried out of there.’ Turning to the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict, Kvitsiani said that he himself had fought against Abkhazia in 1992 and 1993, and now recognised this as a mistake. ‘Relations with the Abkhaz and the Ossetians must be regulated exclusively by peaceful means,’ he declared. The Georgian authorities, he said, were nonetheless ‘actively preparing for a war that could turn out to be the worst possible outcome, both for the current authorities and for the Georgian people.’[24] On 27 July 2006, however, the president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, announced the completion of the special operation and the relocation of the Tbilisi-based government of the Autonomous Republic of Abkhazia to the upper Kodor Valley. The problem of the rebellious Svans led by Emzar Kvitsiani had been used as a pretext. One of Georgia’s principal aims, of course, was to secure the actual return of at least a small part of Abkhazia, complete with an ‘Abkhazian government in exile’. On 26 December 2006, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Abkhazia issued a statement calling on the international community to pay attention to the terrorist threat emanating from Georgia. As was to be expected, however, no effective measures were forthcoming from the United Nations with respect to Georgia.

It is worth noting that, from 10 April 2007, the Abkhazian government in exile in the Kodor Valley (Upper Abkhazia) had at its disposal 300 police officers, former servicemen of the Georgian interior troops.[25]

The problem of Georgian state terrorism on the territory of Abkhazia and South Ossetia occupies a particular place in both the foreign and domestic policy of the Saakashvili regime. As noted above, terrorism is one of the most dangerous and unpredictable phenomena of the present day, one that in the twenty-first century is assuming ever more varied forms. In this instance, however, what is at issue is specifically Georgian state terrorism directed at Abkhazia and South Ossetia, as the principal factor ‘in creating fear and horror among the Abkhazian and South Ossetian populations’ and destabilising the situation in the two republics as a whole.[26]

As the head of the Caucasus department at the Institute of CIS Countries has observed, ‘fighting in the Gal district has, in essence, never really stopped. It comes, as it were, in waves. Earlier the fighting was in the Kodor Valley. Then it died down.’[27]

In June and July 2008, a series of explosions occurred in the zone of the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict, resulting in the injury and death of several civilians.

Confronted with such a brutal form of arbitrary rule as state terrorism, a state has, under international law, the possibility of employing certain measures to defend itself and its citizens. In doing so, however, it must observe certain limits, so as not to sink to the level of the terrorists themselves. Counter-terrorist armed operations must be conducted using the minimum degree of force necessary. Perhaps the principal requirement governing the use of force by liberal states is the doctrine of minimum force, which is precisely what the Abkhazian leadership applied to Georgia’s terrorist organisations until August 2008. Today, however, against the backdrop of the fight against terrorism, one can observe states struggling to resolve this question on their own, since their powers are constrained by both international and domestic law, whereas no such constraints exist for those who carry out violence, at least not for terrorists.

Nobody, of course, is born a terrorist: terrorists are bred by tyrants and dictators sheltering behind sovereignty. For many rulers, sovereignty serves as a kind of cover, behind which they do whatever they please to their own peoples and to states they find inconvenient.

That is to say, the ruler establishes his own ‘special order’, within which dissidents are pursued by special forces, pressure is applied to those who disagree, and social protest is suppressed besides. Meanwhile, the world community, in the person of the leading powers, fails to react in any way to such events whenever it is not in their interest to do so, displaying the well-known policy of double standards. One need only recall the situation in Northern Ireland, where the British leadership pursued a policy of destroying and oppressing the Irish people, a policy against which absolutely no measures whatsoever were taken. The justification for this was precisely that same sovereignty which, under international norms, does not permit interference in the internal affairs of states, at least whenever such interference is inconvenient and unprofitable for the leading powers.

It must nonetheless always be remembered that terror breeds terror in response.

Any hopeless situation pushes people towards actions capable of leading them out of the impasse. Lacking any means of standing up to dictators who have subjugated every sphere of a country’s life, people begin to resort to terror as a means of resolving their political, religious or ethnic problems.

One particular cause that gives rise to terrorism is the national liberation struggle of ethnic groups. A state’s refusal to recognise such peoples’ right to self-determination leads to conflicts that may ultimately give rise to terrorism, as with the Ulster Irish or the Croats of Yugoslavia, ethnic groups that were forced to take up arms in order to resolve all their problems.

In the light of the foregoing, the terrorist acts carried out, and still being carried out, in the form of bombings of public places and the abduction of people, at the instigation of the Georgian state, can confidently be classed as state terrorism.

Under the Incident Prevention and Response Mechanism (IPRM), regular meetings are held in the town of Gal between the Abkhazian and Georgian sides, in the presence of international observers.

This inevitably raises the question: how, then, can one combat a phenomenon such as terrorism?

It is clear that humanity must unite its efforts in combating the danger of terrorism, and that this requires, first and foremost, combating every manifestation of dictatorship. The only way out of so difficult a situation is probably the adoption of a concept of limited sovereignty, meaning that the principles of human rights and freedoms must be elevated to a transnational status and observed by absolutely all states without exception. A state is sovereign in everything except matters concerning respect for human rights and freedoms. Where mass violations of human rights occur, restrictions, including military measures, should be applied by the international community against the governments of the countries concerned. Today, as always, the right of every person to be free, to express his opinions openly, and to choose his own government must be placed at the very centre of things. This is the only real way to put an end to the threat of international terrorism.[28] But the most important thing, in my view, is for the permanent members of the UN Security Council to abandon their policy of double standards; only then, perhaps, will we be able to fight this phenomenon of terrorism in a coordinated way. The degree of success of the fight against terrorism depends on the interests of the leading geopolitical powers, which must change their policies in line with a dialogue of civilisations and the adoption of the goals of sustainable development.

Footnotes

[1] US Department of State, definition of terrorism under 22 U.S.C. § 2656f(d)(2), as published in the annual ‘Patterns of Global Terrorism’ reports; the author cites http://ftp.eurasia.org.ru

[2] http://fictionbook.ru/author/andreyi_vladimirovich_snegirev/osnoviy_zashitiy_ot_terrorizma_uchebnoe_posobie/read_online.html?page=3

3] http://www.iicas.org/page.php?id=54

[4] http://revolution.allbest.ru/political/00096532_1.html

[5] http://newsru.com/world/22jun2011/fight.html

[6] Nezavisimaya Abkhaziya: problemy i resheniya [Independent Abkhazia: Problems and Solutions], ed. Taras Shamba, 2007, pp. 208 to 209.

[7] Otechestvennaya voina Abkhazii i ‘gruzinskie bezhentsy’. Dokumenty i materialy, Vol. 1 [The Patriotic War of Abkhazia and the ‘Georgian Refugees’. Documents and Materials, Vol. 1], compiled with an introduction by Teimuraz Achugba, Sukhum, 2003, p. 217.

[8] Khvartskia, M., Ot lzhi k pravde ob Abkhazii [From Lies to the Truth about Abkhazia], Sukhum, 2008, p. 163.

[9] Mezhdunarodnoe pravo: Uchebnik [International Law: A Textbook], ed. F. I. Kozhevnikov, 4th edn, revised and enlarged, Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniya, 1981, p. 416.

[10] Wilkinson, Paul, Terrorism and the Liberal State, 2nd edn, Basingstoke and London, p. 54.

[11] http://journal-neo.com/?q=ru/node/6894

[12] http://www.paricom.ru/index.php?p=MC83&id=29904

[13] http://www.abkhaziya.org/books/polit_stud/terror_gruziya.html

[14] Zhidkov, Sergey, Brosok Maloi Imperii [’Adygeya’] [The Charge of the Little Empire (’Adygeya’)], p. 223.

15] http://www.rosoomedi.info/?p=227#more-227

[16] Accord: Problema suvereniteta: gruzino-abkhazskii protsess mirnogo uregulirovaniya [Accord: The Problem of Sovereignty: The Georgian-Abkhaz Peace Process], Conciliation Resources, London, 1999; Moscow: Globus, 2000, pp. 113 to 114.

[17] http://www.mfaabkhazia.net/ru/node/268

[18] http://www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/msg/2004/08/m30973.htm

[19] Accord: Problema suvereniteta: gruzino-abkhazskii protsess mirnogo uregulirovaniya [Accord: The Problem of Sovereignty: The Georgian-Abkhaz Peace Process], Conciliation Resources, London, 1999; Moscow: Globus, 2000, p. 114.

[20] Vneshnyaya politika Respubliki Abkhaziya v period postroeniya nezavisimogo gosudarstva (1990 to 2000 gg.) [The Foreign Policy of the Republic of Abkhazia during the Building of an Independent State (1990 to 2000)], http://www.abkhaziya.org/books.html

[21] Konflikty v Abkhazii i Yuzhnoi Osetii: dokumenty 1989 to 2006 gg. [Conflicts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia: Documents, 1989 to 2006], compiled and annotated by M. A. Volkhonsky, V. A. Zakharov and N. Yu. Silaev, Moscow: NP ID Russkaya panorama, 2008, p. 496.

[22] http://www.newsru.com/world/26jul2006/4hours.html

[23] http://www.newsru.com/world/31jul2006/kod.html

[24] http://www.newsru.com/world/01nov2006/kwitziani.html

[25] Tsyganok, Anatoly, Voina na Kavkaze, 2008: russkii vzglyad. Gruzino-osetinskaya voina 8 to 13 avgusta 2008 goda [The War in the Caucasus, 2008: A Russian View. The Georgian-Ossetian War of 8 to 13 August 2008], Moscow: AIRO-XXI, 2010, p. 60.

[26] http://journal-neo.com/?q=ru/node/6894

[27] Ibid. [28] http://www.iicas.org/page.php?id=54

First published on AbkhazWorld

ANKARA — A press conference has been held as part of the campaign run by the ‘End the Isolation for Abkhazia’ Initiative, formed around the demand for direct transport links to Abkhazia and for its recognition.

A joint parliamentary declaration against the isolation of Abkhazia

At a press conference held on 5 August under the roof of the Grand National Assembly of Türkiye (TBMM), with the participation of MPs from a range of parties, concrete steps towards lifting the isolation of Abkhazia were announced for the first time in a joint declaration at parliamentary level.

Those taking part were DEM Party MP Özgül Saki; Labour Party (EMEP) Istanbul MP İskender Bayhan; Workers’ Party of Türkiye (TİP) Istanbul MP Ahmet Şık; New Party Ankara MP Okan Konuralp; DEVA Party Mersin MP Mehmet Emin Ekmen; DEVA Party Ankara MP İdris Şahin; Yeni Yol Party Deputy Group Chair Selçuk Özdağ; and representatives of the Felicity Party (Saadet Partisi) and of the ‘End the Isolation for Abkhazia’ Initiative.

The statement, read out by the journalist and TİP MP Ahmet Şık, opened by describing Abkhazia as ‘a Black Sea country, our maritime neighbour only a few hours away, with which we have historical and social ties and to which some of our citizens have family connections’. It recalled that, in the aftermath of the genocide in the Caucasus in the nineteenth century, a significant part of Abkhazia’s population was exiled to what is now Türkiye. Stressing that more Abkhazians live in Türkiye today than in Abkhazia itself, the statement continued:

‘Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Abkhazia, which Georgia sought to occupy, resisted that assault and won its independence in 1993. From that point on, however, and particularly after 1996, it became the target of isolation policies.’

Noting that Abkhazia, although independent de facto, is unrecognised by all but Russia and a small number of other states, the statement said: ‘Abkhazia is therefore held in isolation. One of those implementing these policies of isolation is our own country, Türkiye. Direct transport between Türkiye and Abkhazia, which continued for three years after the war, has been closed for 30 years; Abkhazian passports have been rendered invalid; and humanitarian, cultural and commercial relations between the two countries remain far short of their real potential.’

‘There can be no excuse for a violation of human rights, nor for knowing of it and failing to act at once to bring it to an end’

The statement stressed that the isolation violates the right to life of patients whose treatment has been left unfinished; the right to education of students unable to reach the institutions where they wish to study; and the right to respect for private and family life of relatives who wish to be together in good times and bad, as families should be, but who are prevented from doing so by these policies. It underlined that declaring an identity document and a passport invalid on purely political grounds effectively destroys the right, guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, of everyone to leave any country and to return to their own.

The statement went on: ‘Denying the civilian population of Abkhazia their right to freedom of movement is a form of punishment that has no legal legitimacy whatsoever and that offends the international conscience. As set out above, many fundamental rights enshrined in universal human rights declarations have in practice been destroyed. The time has now come to put a stop to these violations. For there can be no excuse for a violation of human rights, nor for knowing of it and failing to act at once to bring it to an end.’

The demands

The way to end the violations produced by the policy of isolation, the statement said, is for Abkhazian passports to be accepted as valid identity and travel documents at Türkiye’s border crossings, and for direct sea and air links between Abkhazia and the Republic of Türkiye to be opened. These, it emphasised, are the shared demands of every section of society in Türkiye that holds human rights in respect.

Underlining that certain quarters seek to portray these as ‘demands that cannot be met’ by claiming they run counter to international law, the statement pointed to the examples of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus and Taiwan, adding: ‘The methods used to overcome comparable isolation policies show that this is not the case.’

The statement closed as follows: ‘In the light of the points set out above, and in order to bring an end to the isolation of the Republic of Abkhazia, with which we share historical, legal, sociological and family ties, we hereby declare that we call upon the present government:

‘to accept Abkhazian passports as valid identity and travel documents at Türkiye’s border crossings;

‘to begin direct transport to Abkhazia from Türkiye immediately, by both sea and air.’

After Ahmet Şık had read the statement, the MPs present, Selçuk Özdağ, İskender Bayhan, Mehmet Emin Ekmen, Okan Konuralp, Özgül Saki and İdris Şahin, each took the floor.

See also:

+ A Turkish MP Puts Abkhazia’s Isolation on the Parliamentary Record

+ The Container Crosses, the Passenger Cannot: Türkiye’s Abkhazia Policy and Its Own Citizens

+ Realistic approach in Türkiye-Abkhazia relations

Nauru’s withdrawal has revived an old argument in Sukhum about what a recognition is worth once given. Akhra Bzhania’s answer is that it matters rather less than the state itself, and he sets out what should follow from that.

Nauru’s decision to withdraw its recognition of Abkhazia, taken on 21 July and made public by the Georgian Foreign Ministry on 29 July, has reopened a familiar argument in Sukhum about what a recognition is worth once it has been given. Writing on his Facebook page shortly after the announcement, the Abkhaz public figure Akhra Bzhania sets the loss aside and turns to the larger question behind it: what a foreign policy doctrine for Abkhazia should actually consist of. His answer places the emphasis on the quality of the state rather than on the number of states willing to name it, and it ends with two concrete proposals, on passports and on shipping routes, that will be familiar to readers of our coverage of the Türkiye campaign. He has a personal stake in the story he is commenting on, having received a Nauruan parliamentary delegation in Sukhum in 2017. His text is translated in full below.

Bzhania writes:

‘Some 230,000 irregular migrants alone crossed the borders of the EU in 2025 and 2026. All of them fled countries that are broadly recognised by the international community. Why did these people rush to storm Ceuta, why did they not stay and live in Morocco, Mali or Afghanistan? Presumably because having a flag in front of the headquarters in Manhattan does not automatically mean that you live in a state of your own. In a country where you can influence public life, where your voice carries weight and where your dignity will never be trampled.

Being a recognised country and being a country you want to live in and one worth dying for are, as they say in Odessa, “two big differences”. You may get the first and never reach the second. And if you have the second, if there are young people who see a future in their country, who want to live in it, to reform it and, if necessary, to defend it, then you have done the most important thing. You have built a country that belongs to its citizens. That is what a modern state is. And that is precisely the fact we must make our main instrument for Abkhazia’s integration into the international community.

We must convey clearly to world opinion the message that, despite sanctions, isolation and the military threat, the citizens of Abkhazia have built a law-governed and free society. Without being members of international institutions, we have put into state practice the main provisions of the international conventions on personal and political rights and freedoms. We have managed to create a country attractive not only to its own citizens but to thousands of foreigners, who feel comfortable and safe in multicultural Abkhazia.

We consider ourselves part of the world community and we should rightfully hold a worthy place in it. For that, our diplomacy must become more flexible, even aggressive. It should be oriented not towards expecting and holding on to acts of recognition, but towards a comprehensive demonstration of our legal personality and the widening of our foreign policy contacts. No one is obliged to do this for us. Russia, by recognising our sovereignty, effectively made Abkhazia a subject of international law, but it cannot solve our problems for us.

Everything must be brought into play to reach the goals we need. The resources of the diaspora, cultural, trade, sporting and personal ties, migration policy, the levers of regional logistics. In this game you have to keep raising the stakes, not sit on fifteen and wait to go bust.

Today there is a window of opportunity for such an active policy. It is no secret that relations between Georgia and the West are at their lowest point since the 1990s. There are two main reasons for this: Georgia’s systematic drift towards an authoritarian state, and the position of Ivanishvili’s government on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. In Brussels the latter caused bewilderment at first and then irritation, and in Kyiv open hostility. Not because of the supposed refusal to open a second front, which was in fact a Georgian Dream election fake, but because of the extraction of profit from the troubles of recent allies. Pirouettes of that kind in foreign policy are markers of reliability, and they are not forgotten quickly.

So those on whom Tbilisi relied in promoting its anti-Abkhaz agenda are disappointed in Georgia, and this moment can be used. That includes reviving the active dialogue with European countries that took place in the late 1990s. All the more so since the hopes the West entertained about Georgia as a bastion of the free world in the Caucasus have been realised to a greater degree precisely in Abkhazia. Yes, life is full of surprises.

Another crucial lever, one that remains almost entirely outside our foreign policy activity, is the Circassian diaspora. Four million people in fifty countries, drawn from every stratum, from hereditary military families to politicians. This is a powerful reserve we can genuinely lean on, but the main thing is to offer them the prospect of political cooperation. Abkhazia can and should become the centre of the Circassian world as the only independent state of this ethnic community. Our country can become the same kind of sheltering home for the Circassians of the world that Israel became for all Jews. If every Circassian, wherever he lives, in Egypt, Türkiye, Jordan or Germany, knows that in Abkhazia he will find protection and the advancement of all his interests, from cultural to legal, and that in our common home he will receive every possible privilege as part of the Abkhazo-Adyghean world, that alone will create a powerful foundation for representing our shared interests. First the recognition of our passport as a means of travel in countries with an Adyghean diaspora, then the legalisation of transport routes to the countries of the Black Sea and Mediterranean basins.

This will probably not happen tomorrow, whatever efforts we make here, but it will happen within a foreseeable perspective if those efforts are constant and systematic.

In 2017, on behalf of the People’s Assembly, I had the honour of receiving a delegation of the Parliament of Nauru in Abkhazia. Wonderful, lovely people. Unfortunately, at sea ships do not only come together, they also part. Today Nauru has set a course away from Abkhazia, and evidently they considered it the safer one. May good luck go with them. As for us, we will carry on along our own course.’

Akhra Bzhania, Facebook. Translated from the Russian for AbkhazWorld.

Recent updates on AW:

• Everyone Found the Afro-Abkhazians First

• The Georgian Occupation Regime in Abkhazia, 1918 to 1919, by Stanislav Lakoba

• Documents on the History of Abkhazia: 1917 to 1931 | Chapter 1. Political Questions

• Carrying the Abkhazian Flag Across Europe: An Interview with Zeki Kapba

Hours after announcing a ceasefire on live television, Georgia’s president ordered the bombardment of Tskhinval. The EU’s own inquiry, the OSCE’s monitors, leaked American cables and Tbilisi’s own contradictions all point the same way: Georgia began the war, then rewrote its story. Abkhazia was never in doubt.

At ten past seven on the evening of 7 August 2008, Mikheil Saakashvili went on Georgian television to announce that the shooting would stop. He had ordered his forces to cease fire, he said. Tbilisi was ready to offer South Ossetia unrestricted autonomy. And in a proposal never made publicly before, he invited Russia to guarantee it. “Georgia is a natural ally for Russia… We need a real mediator,” he told his viewers. He’d even issued an order, a very painful one by his own description, for Georgian units not to return fire.

The ceasefire lasted a little over four hours.

At 23:35 that night, by the Georgian government’s own later account, the president gave the order to begin what officials would call a defensive operation. At 23:35, OSCE monitors stationed inside Tskhinval reported the town coming under Georgian bombardment. Their observation reached an American diplomat and went into a confidential embassy cable, word for word: “the Georgian attack on Tskhinvali began at 2335 on Aug. 7 despite the cease-fire.” The weapons were Grad rockets and heavy artillery. Area weapons. Fired at night, into a town where people were asleep.

In Sukhum, two hundred kilometres up the coast, the news broke the next morning. People started packing suitcases. Some left for Russia that day. One woman, who had refused to leave her home through the whole of the 1992 to 1993 war, told her daughter that this time she would go. She could not live under a Georgian occupation twice.

The war lasted five days. The argument about it has lasted eighteen years, which is strange, because the central question was settled long ago, and settled against Tbilisi. The European Union’s own commission of inquiry settled it. The OSCE’s monitors settled it. Senior UN mission officers settled it. Even the leaked cables of Georgia’s closest ally settled it, without meaning to. What kept the argument alive was never the evidence. It was a story, told well and revised often. Watching those revisions happen, one after another and in plain sight, is the best education available in how a war gets sold.

The story that kept changing

Nobody caught Saakashvili’s government in a contradiction. It caught itself, repeatedly, in public, on the record. Lay the statements side by side and they do all the work.

Version one, 7 August, evening. Peace. A unilateral ceasefire, unrestricted autonomy, talks in any format, and Russia as mediator and guarantor. Hold on to that last detail. Whatever Tbilisi believed at 19:10 that evening, it did not believe a Russian invasion was under way. You do not invite the invader to arbitrate.

Version two, 8 August, morning. With the assault apparently succeeding, Saakashvili went back on television. Georgian troops had gone on the offensive, he now explained, because South Ossetian militias had answered his peace initiative by shelling Georgian villages. He announced that Georgian forces controlled most of South Ossetia, that whole districts were “already liberated”, that fighting was under way in the centre of Tskhinval. Russia appeared in the speech only as that morning’s problem, its warplanes in Georgian airspace. There was no claim, not a word, that Russian ground forces had entered South Ossetia before his attack. This was a victory speech, and its justification was Ossetian shelling, nothing more. The source for all of this is not a Russian outlet or an Abkhazian one. It is Civil.ge, Georgia’s own news service, whose archived reports from those two days now read like exhibits.

8 August 2008: Before changing his story, Saakashvili gave a victory speech on television on the first day of the war. When Saakashvili realised his war was not going as planned, he changed his narrative.

Version three, late August. By then the Georgian army had been routed and the victory speech was an embarrassment. A bigger justification was needed, and it duly appeared, first in interviews with the Western press, then in briefings to NATO delegations: Russian armour, the new story ran, had been rolling through the Roki tunnel before the Georgian operation began. The attack on Tskhinval had really been a defence against an invasion already in progress. In September, Tbilisi produced telephone intercepts said to prove it. Nobody has ever explained the obvious problem. If Saakashvili knew a Russian armoured column was already on the road south, he chose that moment to throw his army into a race he had lost before it started, and then forgot to mention the invasion in two televised addresses.

Version four, 23 September. In the Washington Post, under the headline “Answering Russian Aggression”, the war reached its final form for Western readers: a small democracy overwhelmed by tens of thousands of Russian troops, standing for the free world against “Moscow’s violent attempts to roll back democracy”. The article does not mention the bombardment of Tskhinval at all. By this point the night of 7 August had simply been written out of the war that began on it.

There was one more revision, and it happened in real time. In the first minutes of the assault, the Georgian peacekeeping commander, Brigadier General Mamuka Kurashvili, announced on television that the operation’s aim was to restore constitutional order in South Ossetia. Days later the government disavowed him. His statement was unauthorised, it said. The operation had been defensive all along. The general had apparently attacked the wrong war.

What the monitors saw

Against the four versions stands the testimony of the people whose job was to watch.

Ryan Grist, a former British Army captain, was the senior OSCE official in Georgia that night. Stephen Young, a former RAF wing commander, ran the organisation’s military monitoring. Their teams’ conclusion, when it finally surfaced in the Sunday Times that November, was that before any Russian bombardment began, Georgian rockets and artillery were hitting civilian areas of Tskhinval “every 15 or 20 seconds”. And there was a second finding, quieter and more damaging: the monitors could not corroborate the shelling of Georgian villages that Saakashvili had given as his reason for attacking. The OSCE observers inside the town, quoted in the American cables, reported hearing no Ossetian artillery in the hours before the assault. Grist briefed European diplomats in Tbilisi to this effect within days of the attack. Then he resigned. His testimony reached the public fifteen weeks after the story had already set.

Christopher Langton, the British colonel who served as deputy commander of the UN observer mission, needed one sentence: “I remain convinced that the Georgians attacked Tskhinvali before Russian units moved” from North to South Ossetia.

And then there is the EU’s own verdict. In 2009 the European Union did something unusual: it commissioned an independent inquiry into a war involving a state it supported, led by the Swiss diplomat Heidi Tagliavini, and gave it a year and full access. The report, published on 30 September 2009, found that open hostilities began with the Georgian operation against Tskhinval on the night of 7 to 8 August. It found the operation opened with “a massive Georgian artillery attack”. It found Georgia’s use of force unjustified under international law. And it found the Georgian claim of a prior Russian invasion, the claim on which versions three and four entirely depend, could not be substantiated. Tagliavini has since put it more plainly: her mission asked the Georgian side for evidence of the invasion it alleged, and received nothing that stood up. The shelling of Tskhinval, in the formula she has repeated ever since, was the trigger that led to the invasion.

Even Washington’s own paper trail refuses to cooperate with the official story. The embassy cables published by WikiLeaks show no American foreknowledge of an invasion and plenty of American surprise. On the afternoon of 7 August, a Georgian deputy defence minister assured the ambassador that troops would not deploy, while the embassy’s own people counted the buses of soldiers heading north past their windows. The cables show something more uncomfortable than conspiracy: an embassy so committed to its ally that on the morning of 8 August, hours after the OSCE had timed the Georgian barrage against the ceasefire, it was still assuring Washington that all available evidence supported Saakashvili’s version. It did not. The evidence was sitting in the OSCE’s logs across town.

One more voice belongs here, because it answers the question of planning. Irakli Okruashvili was Georgia’s defence minister from 2004 to 2006 and, in those years, one of Saakashvili’s closest allies. In September 2008 he told Reuters that he and the president had worked together on military plans to take both South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Not a contingency. Plans. The August war was not an improvisation that went wrong. It was a project that went wrong.

The view from Sukhum

In most of what was written about August 2008, Abkhazia barely appears. It turns up as a second name in Russia’s recognition announcement and then vanishes. But nowhere outside South Ossetia was the war lived more intensely, and no part of the story explains more about why the conflict looks the way it does today.

Abkhazia had been expecting this war for two years. In 2006, Georgian troops had entered the upper Kodor valley, the one corner of Abkhazia outside Sukhum’s control, in violation of the 1994 ceasefire accords. Tbilisi called them police, installed a “government of Abkhazia in exile” in the valley and renamed it Upper Abkhazia. From that moment, in the words of the Sukhum newspaper editor Inal Khashig, a new war hung over the region “like the sword of Damocles”. The only question people debated was who would be attacked first, South Ossetia or Abkhazia. In the spring of 2008 came the drone shoot-downs and months of alarm. And in late July came a visitor. The American envoy Matthew Bryza, meeting Abkhazian officials in Sukhum on 25 July, told them Washington feared hot-headed men in Tbilisi might act, and that without immediate talks “August would be hot“. He reportedly added a reassurance: it would not be hot in Abkhazia. People drew the obvious conclusion about where it would be.

So when the news from Tskhinval arrived on the morning of 8 August, nobody in Abkhazia needed it explained. The suitcases came out. Holidaying families left. The panic deepened when the families of vacationing Russian officers departed abruptly, which everyone read as inside knowledge of a Georgian move on Abkhazia next. The anthropologist Paula Garb, who had worked in Abkhazia since the 1970s and whose account of these weeks remains the essential record, describes people who had sat out the entire first war now preparing to run.

The war returned in people’s bodies too. Arda Inal-Ipa, one of Abkhazia’s few clinical psychologists, normally saw three or four patients a month. Through August and September 2008 she saw one or two a day. Some came with reawakened trauma from the first war. Others came with anxieties that had no name, only a date. On 14 August, the anniversary of the day Georgian forces entered Abkhazia in 1992, the authorities declared a day of mourning for the dead of South Ossetia. One war’s anniversary, observed as another war’s funeral. That is what solidarity between Sukhum and Tskhinval actually looks like, and it owes nothing to instructions from Moscow.

That point matters, because the laziest idea in Western coverage of these conflicts is that Abkhazians are pawns who refuse Georgia because Russia tells them to. The people concerned have been answering that for years, to anyone who asked, which was almost no one. Liana Kvarchelia, a leader of Abkhazia’s strongest civil society organisation and a veteran of fifteen years of dialogue with Georgian counterparts, put it to a Western journalist that August: there had been endless attention to Georgian-Russian relations and almost none to “why we don’t think it’s safe for us to live in a Georgian state”. She is nobody’s instrument. In 2004 she and Abkhazia’s small civil society faced down Moscow’s preferred candidate in Abkhazia’s own presidential election, and won.

The war’s second front did come, in reverse. Between 9 and 12 August, Abkhazian forces cleared the Georgian contingent out of the upper Kodor valley without the loss of a single life. What the departing units left behind told its own story: dozens of truckloads of arms and ammunition, howitzers, grenade launchers, armoured vehicles, American-made ammunition. The Abkhazian government’s man in the valley put the question to a visiting American reporter better than any communique could. Do police need bunkers, grenade launchers and howitzer batteries?

Then came the night of 26 August. Dmitry Medvedev finished announcing Russia’s recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia just after three in the morning, Sukhum time. Within ten minutes the streets of the capital were full. Cars flying the flag, horns, gunfire into the sky, the leadership out among the crowds on the square, in front of a parliament building still ruined from the first war. After fifteen years of unrecognised statehood, not even senior officials had believed Russia would actually do it.

And here is the detail that the pawn theory cannot survive. Inside the celebration, Abkhazians were already worrying about the rescuer. Garb’s interlocutors, watching Russian armour roll down their own coastal highway in the very days it protected them, confided mixed feelings at the sight. The agreement on Russian bases ran for ninety-nine years, and people did the arithmetic out loud: ninety-nine years earlier, a Russian government had barred the descendants of Abkhazia’s deported muhajirs from coming home. That December, Russia and Georgia signed a memorandum reallocating electricity from the Ingur plant, the plant standing on Abkhazian ground, without consulting Sukhum at all. A woman told the writer Neal Ascherson that summer that everyone had been thinking “we are next”, that the relief when the Russians came was overwhelming, and that everyone knew perfectly well Russia cares nothing for small countries and acts in its own interest. All three things were true at once. They still are. Puppets do not count the years on the base agreement.

The war the newsrooms wanted

Georgia lost the war on the ground and won it in print, for a while, and the mechanics of that second victory deserve a hard look because they are reusable.

The story was written before the war started. George W. Bush had stood in Tbilisi in 2005 and called Georgia a “beacon of liberty”, and by August 2008 the frame was fixed: plucky democracy, resurgent empire. The news of 8 August was simply poured into it. Coverage opened with Russian columns crossing the mountains and treated the night before as too murky to judge, even as the OSCE’s own monitors were telling European diplomats it was not murky at all. Footage of Tskhinval, wrecked by Georgian bombardment, circulated in Western outlets captioned as Russian destruction in Georgian Gori. And when the Tagliavini report landed in September 2009 and knocked the foundations out of a year of coverage, the correction lasted about a day before settling into a mumble: Georgia started it, but. Within a few anniversaries the standard Western shorthand had become “Russia’s invasion of Georgia”, full stop, as though the EU’s own inquiry had never sat.

Nobody censored anything. That is the unsettling part. A story strong enough gets its confirmations delivered at speed while its corrections need a commission, a year, three hundred pages, and even then bounce off. Abkhazians recognised the mechanism. Their own war had gone largely unreported in 1992 and 1993. Watching the machinery work on South Ossetia in real time, they drew the conclusion that has governed their politics since: Western opinion is not a court where their evidence will ever be weighed.

The honest ledger

An argument this strong can afford honesty, so here is the rest of the record, stated without flinching.

The same EU inquiry that convicted Tbilisi’s story convicted others too. It found Russia’s mass distribution of passports in the two territories contrary to international law. It judged that Russia’s counter-offensive, once it rolled past South Ossetia into Georgia proper, to Gori and Senaki and Poti, went far beyond anything defence could justify. It documented the ethnic cleansing of Georgian villages in South Ossetia by irregulars whom Russian forces did not restrain. And the first casualty figures out of Tskhinval, some two thousand civilian dead, were grossly inflated; the careful count runs to hundreds, and the whole war killed about 850 people. Hundreds, not thousands. That is quite bad enough, and pretending otherwise serves nobody.

Nor does any serious Abkhazian case deny the catastrophe of 1993, when some two hundred thousand Kartvelian residents fled Abkhazia at the war’s end, most never to return. That displacement is real, condemned in international resolutions, and it remains Georgia’s strongest card against Abkhazian statehood. The fuller ledger has to be read with it. The 1992 war began with Georgian forces entering Abkhazia. The Abkhazians buried four per cent of their entire nation and watched their national archive burn. Tens of thousands of Georgians have in fact returned to Abkhazia’s Gal district, a return without parallel anywhere in the post-Soviet conflicts. And the moral argument cuts in a direction its users do not intend. A Georgia that answered 1993 with 2008, with Grad fire on a sleeping town after years of invasion planning attested by its own former defence minister, has shown the smaller nations concerned exactly why they will not put themselves back under its authority on trust. The displaced of 1993 are owed return and restitution. They were not owed a second war, and it was the second war, not the first, that closed the question of reintegration for good.

+ Documentary: Crisis in the Caucasus (2008) By Journeyman Pictures

+ Documentary: Absence of Will, by Mamuka Kuparadze | Conciliation Resources

What August left behind

Eighteen years on, the war’s furniture is still where it fell. The Geneva discussions grind on without producing the one document forever on the table, a treaty on the non-use of force. The UN mission that watched the Ingur line since 1993 was voted out of existence in 2009 in a quarrel over what to call the place it watched. EU monitors patrol lines they are not allowed to cross. Abkhazia gained what it wanted most, security and the end of the reintegration question, and paid for it in the currency it feared most, dependence on a single patron, deepened year by year precisely because the West’s answer to everything remained isolation. The buffer state Abkhazians said they wanted to be, between two larger neighbours and belonging to neither, takes two open shores. Only one ever opened.

And the wider world got its warning and filed it. A short war on Europe’s edge established that borders there would be contested by force and that the response to a fait accompli would be a monitoring mission and a return to business. Six years later came Crimea. Fourteen years later, the catastrophe. August 2008 was the rehearsal, and the audience applauded the wrong scene.

In Sukhum, that August, there was a suitcase standing packed by the door of half the homes in the city. Through the middle weeks of the month, slowly, people unpacked them. That suitcase is the war’s truest Abkhazian monument. It holds both halves of the experience at once: the certainty of being next, and a clear-eyed knowledge of what the rescue would cost. The woman who said “we are next” was right. So was she when she said, in the same breath, that Russia acts only for itself. Eighteen years have confirmed both sentences, together, which is the kind of truth the official story of August 2008 was built to avoid. The record is all still there: the timestamps, the cables, the monitors’ logs, the four versions. Anyone can read it. On each anniversary, as the same story is retold, someone should.

First published on AbkhazWorld

Two blackouts hit the Georgian-Abkhazian conflict zone in the last week of July, prompting an investigation from Tbilisi and a statement from Sukhum. In this commentary, Sergey Markedonov takes the incident as a starting point to look at the Ingur hydroelectric power station, the one piece of shared infrastructure that keeps Georgia and Abkhazia cooperating despite forty years of unresolved conflict. He sets this alongside a wider point, drawn from historian Modest Kolerov’s work on the post-Soviet states, about the gap between a country’s actual national interests and its pursuit of Western approval.

The piece was first published on Markedonov’s personal Telegram channel. This English translation is by AbkhazWorld.

Power, Security and National Interests

1. Last week the Georgian-Abkhazian summer turned hot for reasons that had nothing to do with temperature. Two major blackouts occurred. Georgia’s State Security Service announced it was opening an investigation into the causes of the outages, though no official cause has been named. For its part, the press service of Abkhazia’s Ministry of Energy stated that the republic had lost power because of an accident at the Ingur hydroelectric power station.
   

2. A brief disclaimer. Not being a specialist in energy security, I have no wish to multiply hypotheses without cause or pass judgement on the various versions of events doing the rounds. I will simply note one important ‘political-economic’ storyline.
   

3. The Ingur hydroelectric power station is not simply the largest in the Caucasus. It is a unique cross-border energy complex whose operation depends entirely on cooperation between the Georgian and Abkhazian sides. The station strengthens the energy security of both republics while at the same time binding them into a serious mutual dependency. What makes the complex distinctive is its geographical division. The dam and reservoir sit on territory controlled by Tbilisi, while the underground machine hall and switching equipment lie in Abkhazia’s Gal district, which the Georgian government does not control, though it never tires of asserting its claim to ‘restore the country’s territorial integrity’. True, within the borders of the Georgian SSR as they stood in 1989, borders set not by the Georgian authorities but by the Soviet leadership.

   
   The Ingur HPP began operations in 1978. Situated at the heart of the Georgian-Abkhazian conflict zone, it is jointly controlled: the reservoir, dam, and a section of the diversion tunnel lie within Georgian territory , while the remaining tunnel section, the hydroelectric power station building, and four differential hydroelectric plants are on the Abkhazian territory.
   

4. The Georgian-Abkhazian conflict (counting from the last years of the Soviet Union’s existence, and setting its longer prehistory aside) is now some forty years old. There is no hint of compromise, and the ethnopolitical standoff has long since become firmly ‘geopoliticised’. Yet there is one place where Tbilisi and Sukhum (and, naturally, Moscow) do cooperate: the Ingur hydroelectric power station. This holds whatever is said about the collapse of yet another round of the Geneva discussions, and whatever philippics against ‘occupation’ Georgian politicians choose to deliver. What is more, this kind of cooperation, conducted above unresolved status disputes, will be badly needed in the future too. Ageing infrastructure creates additional risks for Georgians and Abkhazians alike, and the station is certainly not going to grow any younger. Which means the two sides will simply have to go on working together.
   

5. That said, this pattern needs extending and building upon. Again, none of this is new, it is all in plain sight. Both Abkhazia and Georgia would benefit from restoring full rail links (and from unblocking transport communications more broadly). Incidentally, given the political will, such a project would be far more realistic to carry out in practice than the much-discussed TRIPP.
   

6. And here we run up against a fundamental point once again. Twenty years ago the well-known Russian historian Modest Kolerov gave a fascinating public lecture titled ‘What Do We Know About the Post-Soviet Countries’. In it he identified a basic contradiction: the sovereignty of the new states may have begun with the words ‘We are the people’, but in practice it rested on the principle ‘We were given permission’. Under this approach, the genuine national interests of independent post-Soviet entities remained overshadowed by the will and aesthetic preferences of their new ‘patrons’. It is not an idle question which mattered more for Georgia: solving pressing national transport and logistics problems, or top marks from NATO and the EU, awarded without any guarantee of membership in either body and without any real work done to secure the Caucasian state’s safety. All this, however, bundled together with an escalating confrontation with Moscow.
   

7. The upshot is that the conflict with Russia remains unresolved to this day, and the pressing questions of economics and security remain unsettled along with it. The constraints on the Georgian authorities ‘here and now’ are all clear enough. Domestic public sentiment is too important a factor to ignore. But nor is it in Tbilisi’s interest to keep putting off a normal dialogue with Moscow, Sukhum and Tskhinval. One can, of course, repeat the mantras about ‘occupation’ or ‘European values’ for the thousandth time, but the problems of power, transport and logistics will not disappear because of it. It may be pleasant enough to dream of France as a neighbour. But no amount of dreaming will move Verkhny Lars to the Champs-Élysées!

Sergey Markedonov
PhD in History, Head of the ‘New Role of Post-Soviet States’ Programme, Leading Researcher at the MGIMO Institute for International Studies, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of International Analytics

In the book “Ответ историкам из Тбилиси (документы и факты)“ (English: “A Response to Historians from Tbilisi: Documents and Facts”), Abkhazian historian Stanislav Lakoba addresses critical issues surrounding Georgian-Abkhazian relations. Drawing on extensive research and documentation, Lakoba examines the intricacies of historical narratives and their role in contemporary conflicts. The first response from this book was published on AW under the title “Rewriting History? A Critique of Modern Georgian Historiography on Abkhazia“ (pp. 3 to 7), the second under the title “Challenging Georgian Narratives (Response 2): A Further Exploration on Abkhazia“ (pp. 7 to 18), the third under the title “Not a Hint of Autonomy: Abkhazia and Georgia, 1917 to 1918“ (pp. 18 to 28), and the fourth under the title “The Treaty That Never Was: Forgery, Occupation and June 1918“ (pp. 28 to 39).

Below, you will read the fifth response from the same book (pp. 39 to 55), which follows the consequences of that clause. Lakoba argues that the landing of 17 to 19 June 1918 was an occupation, that Abkhazia at the time was still treated as part of the Republic of the Union of Mountain Peoples of the Caucasus, whose foreign ministry protested to Tiflis and to the German mission over the ‘Georgian bands in Abkhazia’, and that the machinery of annexation followed within days: Samurzakan quietly subordinated to the Kutais commissar on 18 June, in breach of the February agreement on a single and indivisible Abkhazia; General Mazniashvili appointed governor-general in Tiflis on the same day, before he had even reached Sukhum; and Abkhazia declared a governor-generalship by his own order of 23 June. Reading Varlam Shervashidze’s protest of 4 July alongside Simon Basaria’s account of the demand that the Abkhazian People’s Council certify Tuapse as Abkhazia’s border, the census figures Menteshashvili prefers to the imperial and Soviet returns, and the record of the Ekaterinodar conference of 25 September, where Evgeni Gegechkori conceded that no precise borders of Georgia had ever been fixed, he arrives at the question the section ends on: what autonomy could a state that nobody recognised grant to anyone?

Rounding Out the Borders: The Occupation of Abkhazia, 1918

Taking advantage of the so-called agreement of 8 June 1918, the troops of the Georgian Republic, backed by German military force, landed at Sukhum as early as 17 to 19 June and occupied the country. Alexander Lukomsky wrote of this: ‘With Germany’s support, Georgia occupied Abkhazia and the Sochi district against the will of the population...’⁵⁶

By that time Abkhazia was in a difficult position, since it had lost any real support from the Republic of the Union of Mountain Peoples of the Caucasus (the Mountain Republic) on account of the turbulent military events in the North Caucasus. In that troubled period priorities changed daily, the interests of different states collided, fresh whirlpools of political life kept forming, and anarchy and chaos prevailed. Abkhazia was cut off from its natural allies. Left alone with Georgia and Germany, and despite an attempt to defuse the situation by diplomatic means, it was subjected to military intervention. The government of the Mountain Republic did not, however, remain indifferent to Abkhazia’s fate, and it condemned the invasion by Georgian troops. In June 1918 the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Mountain Republic, under its minister Haydar Bammate, lodged a protest with the government of Georgia and with Count Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg, head of the German government’s diplomatic mission in the Caucasus, over the entry of German troops into Sukhum and ‘the presence of Georgian bands in Abkhazia’⁵⁷.

The documents of the Mountain Republic show convincingly that Abkhazia continued to be part of the North Caucasian state, which did not recognise Georgia’s claims to Abkhazia. This is why Akaki Menteshashvili’s reasoning appears altogether too superficial: ‘The Caucasian confederation did not come about, and therefore Abkhazia’s entry into Georgia in June 1918 had a basis in international law’ (p. 264). But could anyone in June 1918 say with confidence that the Confederation would not come about? Even General Otto von Lossow did not know that. The Georgian historian knows it now, after the event. It is perfectly clear that he is entirely unacquainted with the documents that empty his conclusions of any meaning.

Even several months after the occupation of Abkhazia, in August 1918, the chairman of the Mountain government, Abdul-Majid ‘Tapa’ Chermoev, again protested to Germany over the invasion of Abkhazia by Georgian troops with the support of regular units of the German army. At the same time he warned that the peoples of the North Caucasus, bound to Georgia by ‘a unity of race and long-standing sympathies’, ought not to allow any political complications in their striving for ‘the closest possible allied ties, up to and including confederation‘ (emphasis added, Stanislav Lakoba). The document went on: ‘On behalf of my Government I protest in the most categorical terms against Georgia’s conduct in Abkhazia, a constituent part of the federative Republic of the Union of Mountain Peoples of the Caucasus (emphasis added, Stanislav Lakoba), and in order to avoid the grave complications that may follow from the stated policy of the Georgian Government, my Government considers it necessary to withdraw Georgian troops, officials and emissaries from Abkhazia immediately’⁵⁸.

It was in this period, in June to August 1918, that Alexander Shervashidze (Chachba), Tatash Marshania (Marshan), Simon Basaria and other influential Abkhazians appealed for help to the Abkhaz mahajirs living in Turkey, whose ancestors had been forced to leave their homeland in the nineteenth century as a result of the Russian-Caucasian war.

The people and many deputies of Abkhazia’s parliament regarded Georgia’s use of force as an armed invasion of the territory of the Mountain state. Noe Zhordania, chairman of the government of the Georgian Republic, recalled how representatives of the North Caucasus presented an ultimatum at the time: ‘Abkhazia is ours, get out of there!’⁵⁹ The Turks, for their part, also dreamed of Sukhum, and planned to ‘defend Abkhazia from the Georgians’⁶⁰ with Chechen help.

On the night of 27 June 1918 an Abkhaz armed landing party (not a ‘Turkish’ one, as Menteshashvili writes, pp. 267 to 268) came ashore from Turkey at the Kodor river. This was a response to the Georgian occupation of Abkhazia and to the proclamation on 23 June of Giorgi Mazniev (Mazniashvili) as governor-general of Abkhazia. At the official level Turkey did not intervene in the conflict. The landing party was in essence an armed force of the Mountain state. German sources also show that in June to August 1918 the Mountain government continued to claim Abkhazia and the port of Sukhum. It is therefore no accident that in those same months Abkhaz mahajirs landed by sea in Abkhazia on several occasions. Such aspirations, however, ran counter to the interests of German policy in the region⁶¹.

The government of the Mountain Republic continued to regard Abkhazia as part of its own state, notwithstanding the Georgian occupation. In 1919, to the order of the Mountain delegation, a colour ethnographic and political map of the Republic of Mountain Peoples of the Caucasus⁶² was printed at Lausanne, in French, for the Paris peace conference. (A representative of Abkhazia was included in the Mountain delegation⁶³.) On this brightly coloured map not only Abkhazia but South Ossetia too lies within the borders of the Mountain state.

Irritated by these and other obvious facts, against which they have nothing to set, a number of Georgian scholars are indignant at the publications of Abkhazian historians. That anyone answers them at all strikes them as odd. And so they resort to devices of this kind. ‘Abkhazian historians hold’, writes Menteshashvili, ‘that the treaty of 8 June did not grant Abkhazia autonomy within Georgia. They need this assertion in order to support the well-known thesis of the ideologist of the Abkhaz separatists, Stanislav Lakoba, that Georgia, having helped Abkhazia in the struggle against Bolshevik detachments and Turkish bands which were attempting to seize Sukhumi and the territory of Abkhazia, then itself established an “occupation regime” on that territory... Such a position is no accident, since the mention of Abkhazia’s autonomy within Georgia makes absurd the separatist ideologists’ assertion that Georgian troops established an occupation regime on their own territory’ (Menteshashvili, p. 266). In the heat of it he went so far as to make me a defender of the ‘Soviet empire’, because in his view only a supporter of empire could ‘keep harping on the “occupation” of Abkhazia by Georgia in 1918 to 1921’ (p. 267).

This is very strange logic, dictated by the weakness and helplessness of a whole series of positions. As for the term ‘occupation’ applied to Abkhazia, it was first used in that same year of 1918, when Georgian troops invaded Abkhazia, which is to say long before I was born. More will be said about this below, although a great deal has already been published on the subject.

In the days of the ‘Soviet empire’ Menteshashvili studied the daily life of the Kurds and wrote about the October revolution and the national movement, and then, under the influence of Zviad Gamsakhurdia, he turned to the Abkhazians and the Ossetians. I have no wish to pin on an eminent scholar the label of an ardent representative of Georgian colonialism, the more so as it would not be true.

In connection with certain of the scholar’s pronouncements, I shall cite the view of Georgia’s policy at the time held by Carl Eric Bechhofer, who travelled in the Caucasus in 1919 to 1920. ‘The free and independent social-democratic government of the state of Georgia’, he noted, ‘will remain in my memory for ever as a classic example of an imperialist “small nation”. Both in the matter of external territorial seizures and in bureaucratic tyranny within the country. Its chauvinism knows no bounds’⁶⁴.

Georgian troops under the command of General Mazniashvili occupied not only Abkhazia but, by 26 July 1918, had seized the territory along the Black Sea coast as far as Tuapse. They were very soon driven out by the Volunteer Army and fell back to the Bzyb. They lost no time, however, in placing all the seized countries and regions on a map of ‘Greater Georgia’, which they intended to present at the Paris peace conference. Their actions in the Black Sea region they explained as a struggle against the Bolsheviks, which in Evgeni Gegechkori’s words was a question of ‘our life and death’. But, Anton Denikin observes, ‘the categorical nature of this statement was, however, immediately weakened by an explanation’ that the task was being set only on the ‘Black Sea coast’⁶⁵.

A great deal was said on this subject by Generals Mikhail Alexeyev, Anton Denikin and Alexander Lukomsky, by Nikolai Vorobyov of the Kuban government and by others, who in the course of 1918 to 1919, and afterwards in émigré publications, reported repeatedly on events in Abkhazia and did not recognise it as part of Georgia. I shall not quote their testimony here, since much of it is in print, Nikolai Vorobyov’s among it⁶⁶, and it greatly irritates certain Georgian historians.

Many soldiers and politicians demanded at the time that Abkhazia be cleared of Georgian troops and administration, and proposed to the English that the territory of Abkhazia be declared neutral⁶⁷.

Georgia’s seizures abroad were also described in the memoirs of so objective a witness as Boris Baykov. He noted that imperialism ‘is the distinguishing feature of the foreign policy of all the new state formations’ of Transcaucasia, which began to advance territorial claims against one another. It was imperialism that pushed ‘Georgia into taking possession of Samurzakania and Abkhazia’⁶⁸.

Here is a typical example, and it concerns Samurzakania. On 18 June 1918, at the same time as the Georgian troops landed at Sukhum, a telegram arrived at the Abkhaz People’s Council from Tiflis. In it the Georgian Ministry of Internal Affairs announced that the Samurzakan district was temporarily subordinated to the Kutais provincial commissar ‘in matters relating to the maintenance there of state order and public safety’. Samurzakania was being incorporated directly into Georgia. This was a flagrant breach of point 1 of the Agreement of 9 February 1918 on ‘a single and indivisible Abkhazia within the boundaries of the Ingur and the Mzymta rivers’. Simon Basaria, acting commissar of the Sukhum district, was alarmed by the telegram and referred the document, ‘in view of the importance of what it sets out’, to the Abkhaz People’s Council⁶⁹. As it turned out, the deputies of the APC knew nothing whatever of what was going on, while the Georgian government was acting through its placeman Vasily Shervashidze, who as early as 12 June 1918 had secretly applied to the war minister in Tiflis ‘for the restoration of order’ in Samurzakan⁷⁰. It was an old and well-tried device, making policy with other people’s hands...

A little more time passed and General Mazniashvili, by his own order of 23 June 1918, declared Abkhazia a governor-generalship and himself its governor. Such openly high-handed conduct by the government of Georgia produced an explosion of indignation in Abkhazia. Now even Vasily Shervashidze, chairman of the APC, was outraged: he was being openly stripped of even the formal authority of Abkhazia’s leader. On 4 July 1918 he sent a protest in the name of the APC to the government of Georgia and to the chairman of the National Council of Georgia. It said, in part:

‘In full consciousness of its responsibility the Abkhaz People’s Council entered into negotiations with the Government of the Georgian Democratic Republic with the aim of establishing mutual understanding and friendly relations. The Government of Georgia, likewise conscious of the full responsibility of the moment, signed with the Abkhaz People’s Council the treaty of 11 June of this year (emphasis added, Stanislav Lakoba); and in execution of point 6 of the treaty (emphasis added, Stanislav Lakoba), on 11 June the Government of Georgia sent military units to Abkhazia to assist the Abkhaz People’s Council and to be at its disposal under the command of General Mazniashvili.

On arriving at Sukhum General Mazniashvili published order no. 1 of 23 June of this year for the Sukhum governor-generalship, by which Abkhazia, in accordance with a telegram from the Minister of War, was declared the Sukhum governor-generalship and General Mazniashvili its governor-general. In order no. 3 the general, now entering the field of political relations between Georgia and Abkhazia, declares himself the representative of Georgian authority and demands of the population unconditional obedience to all the laws of the Georgian Democratic Republic, by which point 8 of the treaty is violated (emphasis added, Stanislav Lakoba)...

The Abkhaz People’s Council requests an instruction rescinding the order of the Minister of War by which General Mazniashvili was appointed governor-general of Sukhum without the knowledge or consent of the People’s Council. I would further bring to your attention that the Abkhaz People’s Council did grant General Mazniashvili broad powers, extending to the right to declare a state of siege, but solely in the conduct of military operations.

I ask that it be pointed out to the general that the sole source of authority and of extraordinary powers on the territory of Abkhazia is the Abkhaz People’s Council...

The actions of the governor-general in Abkhazia set out above are in essence creating among the mass of Abkhazia’s population a mistrust of the Government of the Georgian Republic...’⁷¹

Vasily Shervashidze’s protest thus recorded the accomplished fact of the occupation of Abkhazia by Georgian troops, following the detachment from Abkhazia of Samurzakan (now the Gal district), the very thing Simon Basaria had feared... In Denikin’s apt phrase, Georgia had set about ‘rounding out its borders’⁷². The chairman of the APC, it appears, had no notion that the ‘treaty’ had been substituted, and cited its text of 11 June 1918 rather than that of 8 June, as was discussed in detail above. He referred to point 6 of the ‘treaty’, on the strength of which the troops had been brought in, and also to point 8, which stated that social reforms were to be carried through by the Abkhaz parliament ‘on the basis of the general laws issued by the Transcaucasian Seim, but as applied to local conditions’ (compare point 6 of the ‘treaty’ of 8 June, which says that social reforms in Abkhazia are carried out by the APC ‘on the basis of the general laws of Georgia with account taken of local particularities’).

Nor did Vasily Shervashidze know that Mazniashvili had been appointed governor-general of Abkhazia in Tiflis on 18 June 1918 by order of Georgia’s minister of war. In other words, he became the effective ruler of Abkhazia before he even appeared in Sukhum, where he arrived on 19 June.

After Georgian troops were brought into Abkhazia the situation deteriorated sharply. Already in July 1918 ‘the people thought the Georgians had come to occupy Abkhazia’⁷³. Speaking at a session of the APC on 18 July 1918, Isidore Ramishvili was obliged to admit: ‘The minds of the Abkhaz people are set against Georgian democracy and its representatives, about whom the rumour has been put about that they supposedly bring slavery and subjugation to the Abkhaz people... The situation appears such that the Georgian troops must undoubtedly be withdrawn from here, and he is therefore going to Tiflis to report on the matter, since it is better to withdraw the troops in good time than to wait for bloodshed’⁷⁴.

The government of Georgia, however, could not restrain its imperial ambitions, and the troops were not only not withdrawn from Abkhazia but went on occupying fresh territory in the direction of Tuapse. The cause of this advance, in Denikin’s words, was the weakness of the Black Sea region; the pretext was the struggle against the Bolsheviks; the guarantee was the consent and support of the Germans, who had occupied and fortified Adler.

The Georgian government did not keep anyone waiting long, and set about ‘substantiating’ its claims to this advantageous stretch of the Black Sea with the help of scholars, Pavle Ingorokva among them⁷⁵, and of generals. A document submitted later by General Ilia Odishelidze to the Paris conference on 1 May 1919 asserted that the entire coastal strip as far as Anapa and the mouth of the Kuban had belonged to Georgia in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. Wholly absurd was the claim that ‘in the course of the fourteenth century the borders gradually receded to the Makopse river, and from the fifteenth century to the nineteenth, that is until this part of Georgia was annexed to Russia, the border was always the Makopse river (south of Tuapse)’. The historian Menteshashvili is in full agreement with such inventions⁷⁶, savouring this forgery at length and with relish.

In the memorandum of General Odishelidze just mentioned there is an obvious confusion between the political borders of Georgia in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries (it was then a federative state) and its ethnic borders proper. In the eighth to tenth centuries the political borders of the Abkhazian kingdom likewise extended as far as Ereti (to the border of present-day Azerbaijan) and were far wider than the ethnic ones. But nobody argues on that basis that Imereti, Kakheti and Kartli were settled by Abkhazians in that period, or that this is Abkhaz land. Though one could arrive at that conclusion by following the logic of the Georgian general and of the historian Menteshashvili. Is the Georgian scholar unaware that from the earliest times the Abkhaz-Adyge peoples inhabited the whole area from the mouth of the Kuban and Anapa to the Ingur?

General Odishelidze went so far as to declare Sochi ‘a purely Georgian town’ and the whole Black Sea district ‘an ancient Georgian province’. He also claimed that the tsarist minister Yermolov ‘handed out the land of the Georgians to Russian officials and generals’⁷⁷.

Incidentally, I recall how aptly Zurab Achba put it in 1990: ‘Some Georgian scholars claim that the territory from the Kuban to the Ingur is their land. But let them name, within that territory, so much as one Georgian or Mingrelian prince or nobleman who held ancestral estates and lands of his own, in Abkhazia among other places. There simply are none’⁷⁸.

The Black Sea territory, as is known, occupied the area from Anapa to Gagra, and until 1864 it was populated throughout by kindred peoples: the Adyge (Natukhai, Shapsug, Abadzekh and others), the Ubykh and the Abkhazians (Sadz, Akhchipsou). After the end of the Russian-Caucasian war in 1864 the indigenous population of the territory was forced to move to Turkey. The Sochi area, where the Ubykh had lived, was left empty altogether. Colonists began to settle the abandoned lands: Russians, Poles, Estonians, Germans, Armenians, Greeks and Moldovans. The first Georgians moved into the Sochi district from Kutais province in 1881 to 1882 and settled mainly in the village of Plastunskoye⁷⁹. From that time, it would seem, Sochi became a ‘Georgian town’.

As far back as 1991, on the appearance of the politicised volume ‘Iz istorii vzaimootnosheniy gruzinskogo, abkhazskogo i osetinskogo narodov’ [From the History of Relations between the Georgian, Abkhazian and Ossetian Peoples] (Tbilisi, 1990), I made a particular point of noting: ‘When you read Menteshashvili’s little book, you cannot help arriving at a very simple thought: this work is a political commission and a vivid expression of those imperial ambitions which today have once again come openly and aggressively to prevail in Georgia’⁸⁰.

The Georgian historian attempts to reduce the already small Abkhaz population to a negligible figure, citing biased and secondary Georgian sources and ignoring altogether the returns of the first all-Russian census of 1897 and the first all-Union census of 1926. For 1917 he gives the following figures for Abkhazia in ‘Razyskaniya’ [Investigations] (p. 268): Georgians 74,846 (42.1 per cent), Abkhazians 38,121 (21.4 per cent), Russians 20,893 (11.7 per cent), Greeks 20,673 (11.7 per cent), Armenians 18,219 (10.2 per cent) and others 5,087 (2.9 per cent)⁸¹. It has to be borne in mind that the ‘Georgians’ referred to include every last Samurzakanian and Mingrelian. Yet the authoritative census of 1897 gives 58,697 Abkhazians (55.3 per cent) and 25,875 Georgians, mostly Mingrelians (22.4 per cent); only in the census of 1926 do the Georgians reach 67,494 (31.8 per cent) against 55,918 Abkhazians (26.4 per cent)⁸².

It is interesting that even the Georgian Minister of Internal Affairs Noe Ramishvili, whose words Menteshashvili quotes⁸³, puts the number of Georgians in Abkhazia in 1919 at 60,000 (!). I do not suppose that he was unaware of the fantastic figure for Georgians in the Georgian agricultural census of 1917, and that two years later, in negotiations with the English of all settings, he thus ‘understated’ the numbers of his own ‘kinsmen’ in Abkhazia. The reverse is more likely: Noe Ramishvili inflated their numbers as far as he possibly could. But unlike Menteshashvili he knew the real state of affairs in Abkhazia perfectly well, and 75,000 Georgians there in 1917 was impossible: neither the English nor General Denikin would ever have believed such an inflated figure. The more so as Denikin had quite different figures, relating to 1916: ‘Abkhazians 56 per cent, Georgians 18, Russians 11, Armenians 10, others 5’⁸⁴. Even in 1926 the Georgians, chiefly Mingrelians, numbered fewer than 70,000. Menteshashvili then cites figures from another source⁸⁵, published in Tiflis in 1927, in which 36,000 Abkhazians already appear. In other words, over ten years from 1917 the number of Abkhazians did not grow but fell, on the Georgian figures, by more than two thousand. It is remarkable that the Abkhazians have survived to the present day in Georgian statistics at all!

Men like Menteshashvili were answered as early as 30 March 1920, in the Abkhaz newspaper ‘Apsny’, by one of the finest authorities on Abkhaz life, Dmitry Gulia. In an article entitled ‘The Truth Benefits One Man and Harms Another’ he observed: ‘For many years running now, at crowded gatherings, at “meetings”, in speeches, one constantly hears that some 33,000 Abkhazians live in Abkhazia. How is this to be understood? According to Florenty Pavlenkov’s encyclopaedic dictionary, 70,000 Abkhazians lived in Abkhazia in 1910; according to Konstantin Machavariani (1912) the figure was 82,900; according to the statistics for 1916 it was 91,000. At present it is about 100,000. What sort of people are these, who cannot tell 100,000 from 33,000? If they do not know, why not ask some Abkhazian, or look into the literature? Why are they not ashamed of a deliberate lie?’⁸⁶

The methods by which the government of Georgia acted in 1918 to establish itself on the seized territory cannot be passed over in silence. Simon Basaria left a very important and interesting account of it.

‘The following monstrous and incredible fact’, he wrote, ‘finally revealed to the population that the Georgian imperialists were up to something nightmarish, equally shameful for the Abkhaz and for the Georgian nation. Specifically, they demanded from the Abkhaz People’s Council a written document stating that Tuapse was the boundary of Abkhazia and that Abkhazia had the right to occupy the Black Sea coast up to and including Tuapse. The whole manoeuvre was required because Mazniashvili’s army, having taken Sochi, was already approaching Tuapse, while General Friedrich Kress von Kressenstein, the German protector of Georgia, had pointed out to the Georgian government the awkwardness of occupying somebody else’s territory. So they needed to secure a document from which it would appear that Tuapse was being occupied at the request of the Abkhaz people, who supposedly had a historic right to it. The Abkhaz members of the People’s Council protested against this demand and pointed to Georgia’s imperialist designs and so on, but the majority of the Council, made up of appointees (appointed to the APC by the occupation authorities, Stanislav Lakoba), together with its new chairman (Vasily Shervashidze, Stanislav Lakoba), who shared the policy of the new authorities, got their way. Evidently, as with all builders of empires, there rose up before the Georgian government a vision of an enormous state, a state of grandeur, which is what the “democratic republic” was to become’⁸⁷. Such are the facts.

In mid-September 1918 an Abkhaz delegation arrived to see General Mikhail Alexeyev⁸⁸, and on 25 September the well-known conference took place at Ekaterinodar, at which the Abkhazian question was among the matters considered. At the very outset the generals of the Volunteer Army made no secret of their suspicions about the joint Georgian and German incursion into the Black Sea region, and asked whether Georgia was ‘taking part, in alliance with the Germans and the Bolsheviks, in a scheme to encircle’ General Alexeyev’s army. Gegechkori rejected the suggestion⁸⁹. It is interesting that he then told Alexeyev: ‘the question of relations between Abkhazia, Georgia and the Kuban must be settled not here but elsewhere’⁹⁰. That is, Gegechkori acknowledged, if indirectly, that the Abkhazian question was still open.

On the Sochi to Gagra territory occupied by Mazniashvili, General Alexeyev said: ‘Can one speak of these districts as Georgian at all, when a whole district, Abkhazia, lies between them and Georgia?’⁹¹ Nikolai Vorobyov of the Kuban government spoke still more sharply at the conference: ‘If we are to speak of Georgia’s border, then it must be set only as far as Abkhazia...’⁹² He went on: ‘Beyond the Gagra district there is also Abkhazia, which we cannot hand over to be devoured. Georgia’s borders must begin beyond Abkhazia...’⁹³

General Lukomsky gave a concrete assessment of Georgia’s actions and of the situation on the Black Sea: ‘...In this period the Georgian Government had to act at the dictation of the Germans and, finally, the Sochi district was of enormous importance to Georgia as a zone separating from the Volunteer Army the Sukhum district, inhabited by the freedom-loving and warlike Abkhaz people, who had no wish to submit to Georgia. The Georgian Government feared that if the Sochi district were to become part of the Black Sea province, the immediate proximity of a district subordinate to the Volunteer Army to the Sukhum district might contribute to Abkhazia’s falling away from Georgia and to Georgia’s loss of its ports on the Black Sea’⁹⁴.

At the September conference in Ekaterinodar General Alexeyev stated that Abkhazia’s future position had not been determined at all⁹⁵. A very interesting position was taken by the well-known Russian political figure Vasily Shulgin. Turning to Gegechkori, he asked: ‘...We may be entirely competent in our own decisions on the Abkhazian question as well. Under article 13 of the supplement to the Brest treaty, Georgia is recognised as independent, and if Abkhazia wished for the same, I think that on the same grounds it could obtain independence. I ask you to answer this: if borders were discussed at the conclusion of the Brest treaty, were the borders of Georgia established?’

The question came so unexpectedly to Gegechkori that he was obliged to admit: ‘No, no precise borders were fixed. A special decree stated that borders are established by time’⁹⁶. But if ‘Georgia considers itself an independent republic’, the diplomat from Tiflis was told, then ‘let it allow Abkhazia too to have a view on its own fate’⁹⁷.

As the document shows, even at the end of September 1918 Georgia’s borders had not been established, and its ‘statehood’ was so unsteady that claims to Abkhazia looked unserious. The more so as the chief ally of social-democratic Georgia, imperial Germany, was living out its last months and, together with sultanate Turkey, was receding into the background. As their international positions weakened sharply, the hopes of the Georgian government collapsed with them. Germany was suffering a crushing defeat in the First World War, and ‘Denikin and his government did not recognise Abkhazia as part of Georgia’ even in 1919, as is shown by the note from Denikin’s representative at the Paris conference, Sergey Sazonov, formerly foreign minister of tsarist Russia, to Lord Curzon (Menteshashvili, pp. 280 to 281). With this fair observation of Menteshashvili’s one cannot but agree.

It should be borne in mind that from the autumn of 1918 the Volunteer Army of Russia was the main political force, reckoned with above all by its ally England, while Georgia decided practically nothing and to all intents did not exist as a state. Thus, in citing the minutes of the meeting of 23 May 1919 between the Georgian delegation, Evgeni Gegechkori and Noe Ramishvili, and Denikin’s representative General Briggs, Menteshashvili notes that the document plainly attests to Denikin’s plans to seize ‘the whole of Abkhazia and detach it from Georgia’ (p. 273). For all the grandiloquence of the Georgian delegation’s talk about the state border, about how ‘for 2000 years Georgia existed as an independent state’ and so forth, it is perfectly clear that the government of Georgia was seeking international recognition, which England resisted in every way. ‘Our international position has still not been finally clarified, and we are waiting for the question to be resolved’ (p. 276), Gegechkori exclaimed in exasperation. It was May 1919. Nobody recognised Georgia as a state. What autonomy, then, could it grant Abkhazia?

References

Archival references follow the Russian convention: F. (fond, collection), d. (delo, file), l. (list, folio), ll. (folios), ob. (oborot, verso). TsGAA is the Central State Archive of Abkhazia. Several short titles used here were given in full in the notes to earlier responses: *Arkhiv Russkoy Revolyutsii*, *Soyuz obyedinennykh gortsev*, Denikin’s *Ocherki*, Menteshashvili’s *Iz istorii*, *Dokumenty i materialy po vneshney politike*, Lezhava’s *Iz istorii rabochego klassa Abkhazii* and Achugba’s *O natsionalnom sostave*.

56. Arkhiv Russkoy Revolyutsii [Archive of the Russian Revolution]. Berlin, 1922, vol. 6, p. 114.
57. Soyuz obyedinennykh gortsev [The Union of United Mountain Peoples], p. 132.
58. Ibid., pp. 133 to 135.
59. Noe Zhordania, My Life. Stanford, Mass., 1968, p. 98.
60. G. Avetisyan, ‘K voprosu o “Kavkazskom dome” i panturkistskikh ustremleniyakh’ [On the Question of the ‘Caucasian Home’ and Pan-Turkist Aspirations], in Etnicheskiye i regionalnyye konflikty v Yevrazii [Ethnic and Regional Conflicts in Eurasia], in three books: book 1, *Tsentralnaya Aziya i Kavkaz* [Central Asia and the Caucasus], general editors Aleksei Malashenko, Bruno Coppieters and Dmitri Trenin. Moscow, 1997, p. 140.
61. Stanislav Lakoba, ‘K voprosu o Kavkazskoy konfederatsii. Abkhaziya i Gruziya: vmeste ili vroz?’ [On the Question of a Caucasian Confederation. Abkhazia and Georgia: Together or Apart?], in Gruziny i abkhazy. Put k primireniyu [Georgians and Abkhazians: The Path to Reconciliation], general editors Bruno Coppieters, Ghia Nodia and Yuri Anchabadze. Moscow, 1998, pp. 157 to 158.
62. S. Kiladze, ‘Yedinstvo Kavkaza: popytka vykhoda iz krizisa’ [The Unity of the Caucasus: An Attempt to Escape the Crisis], in Tbilisskiy Meridian [Tbilisi Meridian], 1997, no. 1, pp. 20 to 22.
63. Soyuz obyedinennykh gortsev, p. 197.
64. Carl Eric Bechhofer, In Denikin’s Russia and the Caucasus, 1919-1920. London, 1921, p. 14.
65. Anton Denikin, Ocherki Russkoi Smuty [Sketches of the Russian Turmoil], vol. 3, pp. 49, 243, 241.
66. Nikolai Vorobyov, O neosnovatelnosti prityazaniy gruzin na Sukhumskiy okrug (Abkhaziyu) [On the Groundlessness of the Georgians’ Claims to the Sukhum District (Abkhazia)]. Rostov-on-Don, 1919.
67. Anton Denikin, Ocherki, vol. 3, pp. 242 to 243; *Denikin, Yudenich, Wrangel*. Moscow and Leningrad, 1927, pp. 96 to 97.
68. Arkhiv Russkoy Revolyutsii. Berlin, 1923, vol. 9, pp. 171 to 172.
69. TsGAA, F. I-39, d. 6, ll. 37 to 40.
70. Ibid., d. 7, ll. 1 to 2.
71. Ibid., d. 6, ll. 49 to 50.
72. Anton Denikin, Ocherki, vol. 3, p. 48.
73. TsGAA, F. I-39, d. 3, l. 20.
74. Ibid., ll. 7 to 9 and ob.
75. Pavle Ingorokva, O granitsakh territorii Gruzii [On the Borders of the Territory of Georgia]. Constantinople, 1918 (in Georgian).
76. Avtandil Menteshashvili, Iz istorii [From the History], pp. 34 to 39.
77. Ibid., pp. 37 to 38.
78. See Yedinenie [Unity], 1991, no. 3.
79. See A. Tulumdzhyan, Iz istorii revolyutsionnogo dvizheniya v Sochinskom okruge v 1905-1907 gg. [From the History of the Revolutionary Movement in the Sochi District in 1905 to 1907]. Sukhum, 1958, pp. 12 to 23.
80. See Yedinenie, 1991, no. 3.
81. See also Avtandil Menteshashvili, Iz istorii, p. 19.
82. See G. P. Lezhava, Iz istorii rabochego klassa Abkhazii [From the History of the Working Class of Abkhazia].
83. Avtandil Menteshashvili, Iz istorii, p. 31.
84. Anton Denikin, Ocherki Russkoi Smuty, vol. 3, p. 49.
85. Avtandil Menteshashvili, Iz istorii, p. 53.
86. Quoted from Teimuraz Achugba, O natsionalnom sostave [On the National Composition], p. 31.
87. Simon Basaria, Abkhaziya v geograficheskom, etnograficheskom i ekonomicheskom otnoshenii [Abkhazia in its Geographical, Ethnographic and Economic Aspects]. Sukhum-Kale, 1923.
88. Stanislav Lakoba, Ocherki politicheskoy istorii Abkhazii [Sketches of the Political History of Abkhazia]. Sukhum, 1990, pp. 68 to 73.
89. Anton Denikin, Ocherki, vol. 3, p. 241.
90. Dokumenty i materialy po vneshney politike [Documents and Materials on Foreign Policy], p. 411.
91. Ibid., p. 392.
92. Ibid.
93. Ibid., p. 408.
94. Arkhiv Russkoy Revolyutsii. Berlin, 1922, vol. 6, p. 105.
95. Dokumenty i materialy po vneshney politike, p. 413.
96. Ibid., p. 408.
97. Anton Denikin, Ocherki, vol. 3, p. 242.

First published on AbkhazWorld

SUKHUM / AQW’A — Sixteen and a half years after becoming the fourth UN member state to recognise Abkhazia, the Pacific island republic has ended diplomatic relations. Sukhum’s Foreign Ministry calls the decision forced. Nauru itself has said nothing, which is how these reversals have tended to happen.

Nauru has terminated diplomatic relations with Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The decision took effect on 21 July and was made public on 29 July by the Georgian Foreign Ministry, which said it welcomed the step and was ready to open relations with Nauru and to develop cooperation on shared interests. Tbilisi framed the withdrawal as evidence that international law remains the basis of orderly relations between states.

Nauru has said nothing. Its Foreign Ministry has issued no statement, and the government’s official Facebook page, updated regularly, carries no reference to the decision. Confirmation that the decision is real came instead from Sukhum, where the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Abkhazia issued the statement published in full in translation below.

Georgian Foreign Minister Maka Botchorishvili described the outcome as a significant success for the policy of non-recognition. She said Nauru’s original decision had breached international legal norms, that Georgian diplomats had worked continuously with partners to have it reversed, and that recent efforts in particular had produced the result announced this week. She added that Tbilisi would keep working towards the revocation of the remaining recognitions.

The Abkhazian Foreign Ministry said it noted the decision with regret and regarded it as forced, taken under systematic external pressure. It described a campaign of political blackmail, diplomatic pressure and financial and economic penalties directed at Nauru as bilateral projects moved from paper into practice. It cited public remarks by former Nauruan President Baron Waqa, made during his visit to Abkhazia, in which he spoke of the pressure applied to his country after recognition and of attempts to reverse the decision through direct inducement.

How Nauru came to recognise Abkhazia

Nauru is a phosphate island of roughly twelve thousand people in the South Pacific, a UN member since 1999. On 15 December 2009 its Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Kieren Keke, signed a joint statement in Sukhum with Abkhazian Foreign Minister Sergei Shamba establishing diplomatic relations. Nauru became the fourth UN member state to recognise Abkhazia, after Russia, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Recognition of South Ossetia followed the next day.

The Russian daily Kommersant reported at the time that Nauru had asked Moscow for fifty million dollars for projects on the island. Asked that month whether the sum amounted to payment for recognition, Shamba rejected the suggestion that diplomatic relations are established on that basis, while allowing that international practice contains a considerable element of bargaining. The figure has attached itself to Nauru’s decision ever since, and Georgian and Western commentary has rarely discussed the recognition without it.

The Pacific precedent, and what actually happened

The Pacific recognitions of 2009 to 2011 owed a good deal to the efforts of Juris Gulbis, the Latvian businessman who served as Abkhazia’s ambassador-at-large and worked the island capitals on Sukhum’s behalf. Vanuatu recognised Abkhazia in May 2011. Tuvalu recognised both republics in September of the same year.

Both are conventionally reported as having withdrawn that recognition, and the shorthand has passed into almost every account of Abkhazia’s diplomatic position, including the reporting of this week’s news from Nauru. The shorthand is inexact. Neither state issued a formal act of withdrawal. What happened in each case was that contact with Sukhum ceased and relations were opened with Tbilisi on terms endorsing Georgia’s territorial integrity. Vanuatu’s position unravelled through 2013 amid changes of government in Port Vila. Tuvalu established diplomatic and consular relations with Georgia in Tbilisi on 31 March 2014, affirming Georgian territorial integrity and describing Abkhazia and South Ossetia as Georgian regions. Viacheslav Chirikba, Abkhazia’s Foreign Minister from 2011 to 2016, records that when Tuvalu was asked directly about revoking its recognition, the answer was that no formal announcement would be made.

The distinction matters for reasons beyond pedantry. A recognition that is formally revoked is a decision a government has to defend at home and abroad. A recognition that is simply allowed to lapse costs nothing to make and commits no one to anything. It also leaves the record ambiguous enough that both Tbilisi and Sukhum can describe the same silence as vindication.

Nauru’s case is not identical. There does appear to have been a decision, communicated and dated, and Abkhazia’s Foreign Ministry has responded to it as such rather than disputing that it occurred. But Nauru has still not announced it. The public record consists of a Georgian statement and an Abkhazian one, with the state whose decision it was absent from both.

Twelve more years

Nauru held out longer than its neighbours. Baron Waqa travelled to Sukhum on 22 and 23 November 2017, becoming the first non-Russian head of state to visit Abkhazia, and met President Raul Khajimba. An Abkhazian delegation attended Nauru’s fiftieth independence anniversary in early 2018. Gulbis had said publicly in 2012 that Washington was withholding aid from the three island states over the recognition question; the State Department denied withholding aid while confirming that it had been clear about its position. In May 2017 the United States enacted a spending provision denying assistance to any government that recognises Abkhazia or South Ossetia or establishes diplomatic relations with them independently of Georgia. For a state dependent on external assistance and on multilateral institutions funded largely by Washington, the arithmetic of holding the line grew harder each year.

What remains

Four UN member states now recognise Abkhazia: Russia, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Syria. Syria’s position has been open to question since the fall of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024, and the transitional authorities in Damascus have given no clear indication either way. Lithuania has publicly urged Damascus to withdraw the recognition extended in 2018. Abkhazia is also recognised by South Ossetia and Transnistria.

The Abkhazian Foreign Ministry’s statement closed on the point that small states with limited resources are the most exposed to political, diplomatic and economic instruments of influence, and that the practice sits badly with the principles of sovereign equality and non-interference set out in the UN Charter. It said Abkhazia remains committed to strengthening its international standing and to cooperation with states that share those principles.

Statement of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Abkhazia on the decision of the Republic of Nauru to terminate diplomatic relations with the Republic of Abkhazia

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Abkhazia notes with regret the forced character of the decision of the Republic of Nauru to terminate diplomatic relations with the Republic of Abkhazia, taken under conditions of unprecedented and systematic external pressure.

From the day the Republic of Nauru recognised the Republic of Abkhazia on 15 December 2009 and diplomatic relations were established between the two states, a constructive political dialogue was formed and a foundation was laid for the development of treaty and legal cooperation. Mutual visits at the highest and senior levels became an important milestone in the development of bilateral relations, including the visit of the leadership of the Republic of Nauru to the Republic of Abkhazia and the return visit of an Abkhazian delegation headed by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Abkhazia. Following these contacts, the sides continued the consistent development of bilateral interaction, including the implementation of joint projects and initiatives intended to give the cooperation practical content.

The development of relations between the Republic of Abkhazia and the Republic of Nauru met with invariable opposition from Georgia and its Western partners. As joint initiatives moved into the practical sphere, a campaign of aggressive external pressure was unleashed against the Republic of Nauru. The full arsenal of impermissible methods of strangulation and coercion was brought to bear, from unceremonious political blackmail and crude diplomatic pressure to open financial and economic reprisals and punitive sanctions measures, all directed at overturning the sovereign choice of the Republic of Nauru.

A clear illustration of the methods of pressure applied is provided by the public statements of the former President of the Republic of Nauru, Baron Waqa, made during his visit to the Republic of Abkhazia. He stated openly that unprecedented pressure had been exerted on his country following the recognition of the independence of the Republic of Abkhazia, and that attempts had been made to force the Republic of Nauru to renounce its earlier sovereign decision through direct bribery and financial influence.

It should be noted that in the course of official contacts the previous leadership of the Republic of Nauru repeatedly confirmed its commitment to the principles of the sovereign equality of states and to the inadmissibility of interference in the independent formation of a foreign policy course.

The decision of the Republic of Nauru to terminate diplomatic relations is the direct result of prolonged and systematic political and diplomatic pressure aimed at restricting the international ties of the Republic of Abkhazia and at overturning an independent decision taken by a sovereign state.

For many years, states maintaining diplomatic relations with the Republic of Abkhazia have faced external influence intended to make them abandon a foreign policy course of their own determination. Small states, possessing limited resources with which to counter large-scale political, diplomatic and economic instruments of influence, are particularly vulnerable to pressure of this kind.

Such practice contradicts the fundamental principles of the UN Charter, including the principles of the sovereign equality of states and non-interference in their internal affairs. It testifies to disturbing tendencies in the contemporary system of international relations, in which political pressure is increasingly used in place of dialogue between equals, and in which geopolitical expediency begins to prevail over the principles of international law.

Historical experience shows that a policy of pressure, threats, economic coercion and attempted artificial isolation is not capable of altering existing political realities.

The Republic of Abkhazia remains committed to a course of strengthening its international personality, defending its national interests and developing mutually beneficial cooperation with states that share the principles of sovereign equality, mutual respect and international law.

First published on AbkhazWorld

ANKARA — Selçuk Özdağ, a member of parliament for the Gelecek Party, used a press conference at the Grand National Assembly to put Abkhazia’s isolation before the Turkish public and to ask the government for four specific measures. None of the four requires Ankara to change its position on recognition, and Özdağ said so at the outset.

‘Türkiye does not recognise Abkhazia as an independent state. It upholds Georgia’s territorial integrity, and the great majority of the international community takes the same position. That is the official policy, and it is well known.’ What followed was the distinction on which the rest of the statement turned. ‘But refusing to recognise a state’s status is not the same thing as treating the people who live there as though they did not exist.’

Özdağ paired Abkhazia with Gagauzia, framing both as small communities caught between larger powers, though the substance of his remarks concerned Abkhazia. He described a foreign policy that had come to consist of photographs with heads of state, and set against it a list of people who fall outside the frame: the student who cannot return to university because a passport is not recognised, the patient who cannot reach the country where treatment is available, the family with no school in which to teach its children their own language.

The passport as an instrument

The section of the statement most likely to be read closely in Sukhum concerned documents. Özdağ noted that the Abkhazian passport is accepted by a handful of countries, and that a considerable share of the population has therefore come to depend on a Russian passport in order to travel at all. That dependence, he argued, is not neutral.

‘When that Russian document is slow in coming, or is withheld, or is refused elsewhere on account of the place where it was issued, people’s lives are damaged by it. In this way Russia controls Abkhazia’s door to the outside world not only through its economic and military weight, but through the passport as well.’

He put the consequence plainly. ‘If the Abkhazian people pledge themselves to Russia and bow, all well and good; if not, they are stripped of every kind of basic human right.’

To that he added the restrictions arising from Georgia’s law on the occupied territories, while stating that Georgia’s sovereignty and security concerns were not being dismissed, and that neither the war of the 1990s nor the tens of thousands of displaced Georgians could be set aside. ‘But between security concerns and the right of people to reach education, healthcare and their own families, a humane path must be found.’

‘Today a freight container may cross to the far shore, but a human being may not. That the door thrown open to merchandise should be shut against a relative, a student, a patient is not acceptable.’

Freight and passengers

Özdağ returned to a point AbkhazWorld examined earlier this month in its analysis ‘The Container Crosses, the Passenger Cannot’. The airport at Sukhum, closed for three decades, resumed receiving flights from Russia in 2025. Aircraft can therefore land and passengers can be carried. There is still no direct flight from Türkiye.

‘Passenger ships once sailed from Samsun and from Trabzon. Today a freight container may cross to the far shore, but a human being may not. That the door thrown open to merchandise should be shut against a relative, a student, a patient is not acceptable.’

The observation is not rhetorical. Turkish goods reach Abkhazian ports; Turkish vessels work the coast; customs revenue is collected at the other end. The commercial route functions. What has not been restored since the 1990s is the passenger sailing.

Land, and the fear behind it

Özdağ also addressed the property question, and he addressed it accurately, which is uncommon in Turkish political commentary on Abkhazia. He recalled that the 2024 measure known as the apartments law, which would have opened residential property to foreign buyers, was withdrawn after mass opposition, and that the investment agreement understood to grant broad privileges to Russian investors was rejected in parliament after the same protests. He noted that the crisis ended in the resignation of the leadership of the day, and stated for the record that neither measure is in force.

He then explained why the matter has not closed. ‘A community of limited numbers fears becoming a minority on its own land before foreign capital whose purchasing power is many times its own. It asks whether it might one day lose its houses, its coastline and its soil piece by piece. To belittle that anxiety is to understand nothing of Abkhazian history and nothing of the memory of exile.’

On Moscow, he was direct. ‘Russia says that it recognises Abkhazia. But does recognition not also require respect for the will of a people?’ To convert economic support into political pressure, and dependence on energy and budget subsidy into a lever for concessions, was not friendship, he said. ‘It goes by another name: a relationship of dependency.’

Four requests

The statement closed with four proposals addressed to the Turkish government.

One. Without altering its position on Abkhazia’s political status, Türkiye should examine the legal means by which Abkhazian passports might be accepted, for limited purposes, as documents of identity and travel. Özdağ pointed to British administrative procedures for documents issued by authorities the United Kingdom does not recognise, to the Taiwan case, and to existing status-neutral travel documents. Where necessary, he said, Türkiye could devise a security-screened travel document of its own, or a form issued alongside a visa.

Two. Türkiye should establish, with the Georgian authorities and the relevant international organisations, a clear humanitarian exemption mechanism covering travel for health, education, scientific, cultural and family reunification purposes. He observed that Georgian law already provides for humanitarian assistance and special permissions. ‘Where there is political will, there is also legal ground for a solution.’

Three. Passenger sailings should be opened between Trabzon and Sukhum, and if possible between Samsun and Sukhum, on terms open to inspection and designed to meet the security and customs concerns of both sides. The conditions for a weekly or twice-weekly civil air link should be examined. ‘To say “it is legally difficult” is not a solution. It may well be an excuse for indifference.’

Four. A standing humanitarian dialogue table should be convened between Abkhaz civil society organisations in Türkiye, the relevant circles in Abkhazia, the Georgian authorities and international organisations. He was careful to define what it would not be. ‘That table is not a bargaining forum over political recognition. It should be a table for solutions.’

Where this sits

The four requests track closely with the campaign launched on 29 June by representatives of the Abkhaz diaspora in Türkiye, which asked Turkish citizens to file appeals through CİMER, the Presidency’s Communication Centre. That appeal sought recognition of the Republic of Abkhazia and, pending it, the acceptance of Abkhaz passports as valid identity documents for crossing the Turkish border and the opening of direct sea and air links through technical agreements with the General Directorate of Civil Aviation, on the model already applied to Taiwan and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. On 4 July the Labour Party, Emek Partisi, published a statement in support.

Özdağ’s intervention takes the same argument into the Assembly. He is not a member of the governing coalition, and no vote follows a press statement. What has changed is smaller and not trivial: the question of why a Turkish citizen of Abkhazian descent cannot board a boat at Trabzon has now been asked from inside the parliament, in terms that separate the humanitarian case from the recognition case and require no concession on the second in order to act on the first.

Türkiye has taken that route before. The precedents Özdağ cited are its own.

See also:

+ The Container Crosses, the Passenger Cannot: Türkiye’s Abkhazia Policy and Its Own Citizens

For three decades the leading newspapers of Tiflis debated who should occupy a country whose people had been deported. Their writers used the word colonisation. In 1869 the imperial authorities had tried to stop it.

They write to us from Sukhum

In the summer of 1884 a correspondent sent Droeba an account of the year’s work on the state lands of Abkhazia. Germans, Greeks and Mingrelians had been settled there. Many of the Germans died of the Sukhum fever and many of the survivors went home, but those who stayed cut the forest back so hard that in a single season they had ploughland where nothing had stood but trees. In the clearing something came out of the ground. ‘Ancient churches and burial places have come to light, thickly covered with inscriptions’, the letter says, and it asks that somebody take an interest in them, because the new settlers ‘are pulling them down and levelling them without mercy’.

Whose graves they were, the correspondent does not say. In 1884, near Sukhum, he did not have to.

How the country came to be empty

Two wars did it, thirteen years apart.

The Russo-Caucasian War ended in 1864, and with its end went the Sadz, the Akhchipsy, the Aibga and the Pskhu, some 25,000 people from the mountain districts, forced out to the Ottoman empire. The Russo-Turkish War of 1877 to 1878 finished the work. Adgur Agrba puts the whole of the deportation, across both wars and the risings between them, at roughly 135,000 people, which was most of the nation.

Sergei Meskhi, who edited Droeba from 1869 to 1881, printed contemporaneous figures. Writing in 1878 he recorded that more than 200,000 Circassians had gone to Turkey in 1864 to 1866, and that 50,000 Abkhazians had left that year, ‘according to official figures’.

Droeba had explained two years before the second war how the first one ended. A lecture on the Caucasus printed across two April issues in 1876 described a people of no more than a million holding off armies many times their size for thirty-five years, and losing because they would not combine. The Abkhazians and Circassians ‘would ordinarily fight the Russian army village by village’, and, having fought that way, ‘surrendered village by village as well’. The sequel came in one flat sentence: the Russians ‘soon became convinced that their Russification was impossible’. Withdrawal followed, and the settling of people from Russia’s interior provinces in their place.

Petre Charaia, writing an ethnographic description for Iveria in 1888, reckoned that fewer than half of those who went to the Ottoman empire had returned, and that the nation no longer amounted ‘to even a quarter of what it once was’. Konstantin Machavariani put the whole Abkhaz population at 52,000 in 1895, with Gumista almost entirely deserted. Iveria had been blunter in 1881, in a line that reaches us at second hand through Nazim Bagapsh: four years earlier, the paper observed, Abkhazians had lived in Abkhazia.

Returned to the chiefs of their own uezds

On 30 May 1869, Count Levashov, military governor of Kutaisi, wrote to the chiefs of the Zugdidi, Senaki and Lechkhumi uezds. Droeba printed the letter that year in its ‘Internal News’ column, in number 29. Mingrelians had been moving into the Ochamchira district holding certificates for resettlement in Abkhazia. There were, Levashov wrote, ‘few unoccupied places left in Abkhazia’, and those which remained ‘will be needed by the local landless inhabitants’. He had instructed the district chiefs ‘to return such settlers and hand them back to the chiefs of their own uezds’. The Sukhum military administrator asked, in addition, that permission to resettle in Abkhazia not be granted to Mingrelians at all.

The date is the whole value of the document. 1869 falls five years after the first emptying and eight before the second. The men writing are Russian officials; the people turned back are Mingrelian peasants with papers. The reason given is not political. It is that the land is spoken for, by inhabitants of Abkhazia who have none of it. Nothing in the letter suggests a movement that was old, or customary, or a matter of families going back to ground they had always worked.

There is an awkwardness here for anyone who wants a simple story, and it is better stated than managed. The empire that emptied Abkhazia also, at moments, obstructed the settlement of Georgians in it. The persecutor was for a time the shield.

Sorting people by soil

The argument for filling the country ran in public for close to thirty years, and its most careful statement appeared while the deportations were under way.

Between September and November 1877, across eight issues of the Russian-language Tiflis paper Tiflisskiy Vestnik, the educationalist Iakob Gogebashvili published a series titled ‘Who should be settled in Abkhazia?’. He began by removing any possibility that the question might not arise. The war had emptied one of the finest corners of the empire, and the departure was ‘not temporary, but irrevocable’. ‘Abkhazia will never see their sons again.’

What follows is a sorting exercise in the manner of a man matching crops to ground. Russia proper could not supply suitable colonisers, nor could most of Transcaucasia. Eastern Georgians from beyond the Suram Pass ‘very quickly become victims of swamp poison’; Armenians could bear the coast even less; the Rachans, Svans and Upper Imeretians had been tried and had died of malignant fevers. One people was left. ‘But the Mingrelians feel at home in Abkhazia.’

His reasons came in order: a constitution adapted to marsh air, a shortage of land at home severe enough to have produced agrarian unrest, a talent for productive labour, an aptitude for trade unusual among the Georgian tribes, and political reliability. On the last he was emphatic. In political terms the Mingrelians are ‘just as Russian as the Muscovites’. Settled along the coast they would also ‘present an insurmountable barrier to enemy invasion’. His conclusion was that the Mingrelians ‘should be the primary replacements of the evicted Abkhazians’.

He called the operation colonisation and the settlers colonisers, in a newspaper, in Russian, in the months when the people to be replaced were being put on ships.

Georgii Tsereteli had got there before him and stayed with it longer. In Droeba in 1873, in the column headed shik’rik’i, he observed that the soil on the Black Sea fringes yielded ten times what Upper Imereti and Racha yielded, and that his own people were doing nothing about it. Would it not be better to prepare at once, he asked, ‘before others seize the coastal territories and while land is still plentiful’? To a man who said he could not leave his own region he gave the answer that has been quoted ever since: ‘The entire Caucasus is our territory, our country.’

Six years later he set out the distribution. The lowland coast, from the port of Sochi through Abkhazia’s coastal zone to Batum and Kobuleti, suited Imeretians and Mingrelians, used to the sea, to trade and to fever-bearing air. The mountain slopes would take Rachans, Lechkhumians and Svans. The landless of Lechkhumi, Racha, Ossetia and Svaneti, he noted, came down to the valley towns every year ‘with a knapsack slung over their backs’. Then the summons: ‘it’s time that we grab new territories in the Caucasus where air and soil that suits us is indeed to be found’, and ‘Let’s spread out while we still have time, before foreign tribes arrive and take up settlement in our vacant Caucasian lands.’

Later that year, in number 47, he explained how it would be paid for. Men with money should form ‘a large stock-company’, buy up the empty lands, and settle on them ‘our lower-order people’. He gave the scheme fifty years. At the end of them the country from Anakopia, now New Athos, to the mouth of the Kura would have come back to life, speaking Georgian and Armenian, with the days of David the Builder and Tamar the Glorious living again.

Meskhi worked the same ground from the practical end. In July 1876 he reviewed Russian settlement on the coast and found it a failure: newcomers went home within a year or two, and much of the land had gone to ‘men of merit’, to generals who ‘never even set eyes on their plots’. Then the detail that gives his article its edge. Mikhail Katkov, who preached in his own newspaper that Russians must put down deep roots in the Caucasus, was at that moment selling the estate the government had granted him near Pitsunda. The coast, he concluded, should be settled by the peoples of the Caucasus, because ‘nature itself resists’ a people from another land.

Two years later, in number 24 of 1878, he narrowed it. Wheat does not grow on that coast, only maize, and men from flat treeless plains cannot manage a mountainous, forested, humid country. He endorsed articles published shortly before in Tiflisis Moambe which had named the Mingrelians, and added the Imeretians, on grounds he listed without embarrassment. Both can live without wheat, both are used to the climate, both need land, and ‘both are entirely reliable politically’.

By 1882 the thing had acquired a tone of celebration. I. Chichinadze, writing in Shroma, called the operation to move Mingrelian families out of the Zugdidi district one of the most beautiful features of the new life. Send more, he wrote in closing: Rachans, Lechkhumians, Upper Imeretians and Mingrelians from the mountain districts, ‘and you will see that these countries will be covered more blooming villages, fruits of the land, and cattle than in the days of the Circassians and Abkhazians’.

The comparison is with the people who had been there before, and it is offered in favour of the proposal.

In 1894 Iveria put the case in the government’s own terms: if the coast must be settled, why not by inhabitants of Georgia, people in whose ‘abilities and loyalty’ the state could have no doubt? A plot in Imereti or Racha could reach 300 tumans.

What the same newspapers also printed

The case against was made in the same papers, sometimes by the same men, and not quietly.

In 1878 Meskhi published ‘Abkhazians and Abkhazia’ in Droeba. The editor who that year endorsed settling Mingrelians and Imeretians on the coast also printed an account of how the coast had been cleared. Most of the Abkhazians put aboard the ships wept and stretched their hands towards the shore, and sent word back that they were being taken by force and should be reckoned ‘as prisoners of the enemy, but not as traitors’. Meskhi accepted it. A few had been set on freeing Abkhazia; the great majority had no other means of defending their families. From this he drew a conclusion no Georgian paper was obliged to draw: every Abkhazian who wished to return should be allowed back, as justice and practical interest demanded as much as humanity, since such peoples are better held as friends than as enemies.

Five years later Droeba printed a concession from Abkhazia itself. Its correspondent, writing from the country on 10 October 1883, opened with the sentence that has been quoted against Georgian claims ever since: ‘Abkhazia, as the name of the place itself shews us, belonged and belongs to the Abkhazians.’

He then described what had come in. Simon the Canaanite had been put to death here, he wrote, and Russian monks had lately been given leave to rebuild the ruined church on the spot, with a holding of over 4,000 desiatins and 150 monks now in residence; their missionary effort came to nothing. Every man who heard that land was being given away had come, so that within five or six years Greeks, Russians, Bulgarians, Germans, Mingrelians, Imeretians and Armenians had flooded in, and ‘the authorities refused none’. Most then fell to the fevers and either fled or died within two or three years. Hence his summary of the country: ‘Abkhazia for Caucasians is a compassionate mother, but for others it is a step-mother and an exceptionally evil step-mother too’. Hence also his recommendation, which was to admit nobody in future except Imeretians, Mingrelians and Greeks.

The sentence about whom Abkhazia belongs to and the advice about whom to let into it sit in the same letter, a few paragraphs apart.

Charaia’s ethnography of 1888 was written by a man watching a way of life go. Emigration had scattered the people, the clergy were at work among those who remained, and what he called ‘so-called civilisation’ was finishing the business, so that in Abkhazia little would be seen tomorrow of what had been seen before. His Abkhazian is lean and dark, quick-tempered, jealous of his honour, with a look in the eye he calls a little wild and mournful. No country in the world is better than Apsny in an Abkhazian’s understanding, he recorded, and ‘God preserve Apsny’ was on their lips in joy and sorrow alike. Then he took the name apart. Apsua means Abkhazian and an means mother, and the two contracted give the mother, or the homeland, of the Abkhazian.

The fullest of these counter-statements came in 1895, in Moambe, and it is not an editorial but a conversation. Konstantin Machavariani, writing as Abu-kino, met a friend of his youth at Ochamchira on the bank of the Galidzga and asked what had happened. What Murzakan Kodor-ipa told him fills four pages.

Samurzakano, Kodor-ipa said, is held by some to belong to Mingrelia because its people speak Mingrelian, and they are mistaken, and the surnames settle it: Emukhvari, Shervashidze, Marganiya, Chkhotua, Anchabadze, Kvablukho, Gedlach and the rest. The Abkhazians then numbered 52,000. Gumista was empty.

Then the military account. On 18 April the twenty-two Cossacks at Gudauta, the only harbour between the Bzyb and Sukhum, were recalled, leaving the district without a single soldier. Sukhum held two battalions, a Cossack regiment, militia and mountain artillery, no fewer than 4,000 men. Kravchenko withdrew them eight or nine versts to the Machara, then another thirty-five to Tsebelda, before an enemy had appeared. On 28 April two armoured vessels came up to Gudauta, and the whole of Upper Abkhazia gathered there without leaders and without weapons, having been disarmed years earlier.

‘What were they expected to do?’ Kodor-ipa asked. ‘How were they supposed to fight an enemy? With their bare hands? With their teeth?’

Before the war, he added, Reshid Gech, a prince of the Jikhs from beyond the Bzyb, had come to Sukhum to tell Kravchenko that the Sultan was preparing for war, that the first blows would fall on the coast, and that the Abkhazians must have either their weapons back or troops to defend them. Kravchenko sent him away.

Afterwards the country was divided into the guilty and the innocent. Those between the Bzyb and the Galidzga were the guilty: they kept the use of their plots for life and lost the right to inherit, sublet or sell them. Those between the Galidzga and the Ingur were the innocent and kept their hereditary rights. And people were arriving all the time, Kodor-ipa said, who worked to mislead the natives into leaving for good, so that the newcomers or the officials could take their places.

One more concession belongs here, and it is Gogebashvili’s. In 1907 the man who had proposed the settlement in 1877 wrote in protest at the distorting and altering of Abkhaz surnames.

Seven or eight villages

What actually arrived can be established, because the correspondents counted it.

Writing from Abkhazia on 13 November 1883, the Droeba correspondent reported the ruling that governed everything else. After the war, Abkhazians were not to settle between the Kodor and the Psyrtskha, and everyone else was granted the right to do so. By that November there were seven or eight Mingrelian villages and three or four Greek villages around Sukhum. At Merkheuli, fourteen versts out along the main highway, a church was being consecrated; at Abzhakva, close to the town, the Mingrelians were building one of stone and lime at their own expense. Other settlers, he had heard, were given up to fifteen chervonets to start their farms.

Fourteen years later Petre Charaia set out the land settlement in Kvali. His account of the prohibition differs from Droeba‘s in one particular: he gives the closed zone as the country between the Kodor and the Aabsta, and states its purpose plainly: to settle near Sukhum people the state thought more reliable. The Abkhaz consequently no longer lived as one body. The Abzhui were in the Kodor section, the Bzyb people in the Gudauta section, nearly two days apart on foot. Between them lay Gumista, the central and most favourable part of the old country, with not one Abkhaz community in it. On its state land sat colonies of Russians, Germans, Mingrelians, Greeks, Estonians and Armenians, among whom the Mingrelians stood first or second in number. The private estates had gone to men who had distinguished themselves in military or civil service.

In the following issue Charaia added a line about Dal, once thickly settled by Abkhazians and known since ancient times for the bravery of its people, and now so thoroughly depopulated that nobody lived there at all.

The clearest number of the lot was printed in Iveria in 1897 by Iliko Vermitsanashvili, who counted his township. In Gudauta there lived fifty Georgians, one an Imeretian, two Gurians and the rest Mingrelians; thirteen Greeks; eleven Russians; two Armenians; and five Abkhazians. The surrounding district, ninety versts long, held twelve Abkhazian communities, three Russian and one Armenian.

Ten years earlier the same paper had noted which settlers were doing best. Those from Racha, Imereti and Mingrelia had taken hold and the others could not endure the air, for the reason Gogebashvili gave in 1877 and Meskhi in 1878: the conditions of Abkhazia resemble those of Imereti and Mingrelia.

The idea acquires a state

None of what the correspondents were counting was a state programme. Much of the movement of the 1880s and 1890s was people looking for land, and the families who built the church at Abzhakva were agents of nothing. That distinction carries the weight of everything that follows.

It was collapsed by Gogebashvili’s own editors. When the 1877 articles were gathered into volume one of his collected works, published in Tbilisi in 1952, the editors noted, as George Hewitt records, that Gogebashvili’s ideas on settling Abkhazia’s empty territory with Georgians ‘achieved their actual realisation under the conditions of Soviet power’. They also felt obliged to gloss one of his words. Their footnote explains that Gogebashvili used ‘coloniser’ not in its modern sense but to mean the persons settled there.

The realisation they had in mind can be dated. In 1918 the leader of the Georgian Mensheviks, Noe Zhordania, stated the object without ornament: the tsarist government had not had time to Russify the Abkhazians, and Georgians, as a related tribe, must Georgianise them through their own culture. Menshevik forces entered Abkhazia that year. In 1919 Nikolai Vorobyov published a pamphlet at Rostov-on-Don charging that a Georgia preaching self-determination for small nations was making every effort to absorb the Abkhazian nation entire.

+ Three Extracts from the Georgian Newspapers Droeba and Iveria

+ Revelations of forgotten voices

+ Georgii Tsereteli (1879): It’s time that we grab new territories in the Caucasus

+ Part 1: The Nineteenth-Century Georgian Press on Abkhazia

+ Part 2: The Nineteenth-Century Georgian Press on Abkhazia and the Abkhazians

+ Part 3: The Nineteenth-Century Georgian Press on Abkhazia and the Abkhazians

The programme proper began in 1937, the year after Nestor Lakoba’s death in Tbilisi, under a trust called Abkhazpereselenstroi. Between the end of 1937 and 1 January 1940 it built 990 houses along the coast for 609 peasant families brought in from districts of Georgia. The new farms carried the names of the men who made them: a Beria farm at Kindgi, a Bakradze farm at Adzyubzha, an Ordzhonikidze farm at Bambora. When the vacant land ran out, more was taken from Abkhaz villages. By order number 9821 of 10 October 1941 the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR authorised the seizure of 4,544.69 hectares from twelve collective farms in the Ochamchira and Gudauta districts. Krasny Kindgi gave up 1,566.8 hectares of it.

The same paperwork records the failure. By 1 March 1942, 152 settler households had gone home, leaving a debt of 97,920 roubles and 46 tonnes of corn. Narsiya, who ran resettlement for the Georgian agriculture ministry, reported that the rules for selecting settlers were grossly violated and voluntariness often disregarded. Between 1937 and 1953 the state lent 191 million roubles for settler housing, and Abkhazpereselenstroi alone built 3,378 houses.

Two documents from the middle of it describe the ground being taken. A Gosplan report of 1940 has peasants from land-poor districts of Georgia taking possession of expanses ‘abandoned for centuries’. Konstantin Chichinadze, chairman of Abkhazia’s Council of People’s Commissars, told a jubilee session on 3 March 1941 that fertile lands ‘had lain uncultivated for centuries’. That ground had been cleared sixty-three years earlier, and there were men in Abkhazia in 1941 who had been children when it was.

Alongside the settlement ran the removal of what was being settled over. The Abkhaz alphabet was shifted to a Georgian base at the end of the 1930s. The Abkhaz-language schools closed in 1945 and 1946 and their pupils were sent to schools teaching in Georgian. Publishing and broadcasting in Abkhaz stopped, and Abkhaz place names came off the map. Pavle Ingorokva then supplied a history to match, arguing that the modern Abkhazians had come down from the north Caucasus in the seventeenth century and taken a Georgian tribe’s name.

In 1955 a new edition of Gogebashvili’s collected works appeared. The 1877 articles were not in it.

Sources

1. ‘Internal News’, Droeba [დროება] (Tiflis), no. 29, 1869, containing the letter of Count Levashov, military governor of Kutaisi, of 30 May 1869.

2. Georgii Tsereteli, shik’rik’i (Courier), Droeba (Tiflis), no. 399, 1873, p. 3.

3. ‘A Lecture on the Caucasus’, Droeba (Tiflis), nos 36 and 37, 14 and 16 April 1876.

4. Sergei Meskhi, ‘The Settlement of the Black Sea Shores’, Droeba (Tiflis), no. 74, 18 July 1876.

5. Iakob (Jakob) Gogebashvili, ‘Who should be settled in Abkhazia?’ [vin unda iknes dasaxlebuli apxazetshi?], Tiflisskiy Vestnik [Тифлисский вестник], nos 209, 210, 243 to 246, 248 and 249, September to November 1877; collected in Works, vol. 1 (Tbilisi, 1952).

6. Sergei Meskhi, ‘On the Settlement of Abkhazia’, Droeba (Tiflis), no. 24, 1878, p. 1.

7. Sergei Meskhi, ‘Abkhazians and Abkhazia’, Droeba (Tiflis), no. 158, 1878.

8. Georgii Tsereteli, ‘Resettlement’, Droeba (Tiflis), no. 27, 1879, p. 1 (dated 4 February 1879 in AbkhazWorld’s ‘Demographic change in Abkhazia’).

9. Georgii Tsereteli, Droeba (Tiflis), no. 47, 1879, pp. 1 to 2.

10. I. Chichinadze, Shroma [შრომა] (Tiflis), no. 15, 1882.

11. Antimoz Jugheli (Gadagmeli), correspondence ‘Abkhazia, 10 October’, Droeba (Tiflis), no. 216, 29 October 1883.

12. Antimoz Jugheli (Gadagmeli), correspondence ‘Abkhazia, 13 November’, Droeba (Tiflis), no. 240, 29 November 1883.

13. Correspondence from Sukhum, ‘This year they have settled people in Abkhazia’, Droeba (Tiflis), no. 219, 1884.

14. Iveria [ივერია] (Tiflis), no. 114, 9 June 1887, p. 2.

15. Petre Charaia, ‘Abkhazians and Abkhazia (an ethnographic description)’, Iveria (Tiflis), nos 165 and 167, 1888.

16. Iveria (Tiflis), no. 120, 1894, pp. 1 to 2.

17. Konstantin Machavariani (Abu-kino), ‘From My Diary’, Moambe, no. 9, 1895, pp. 61 to 64.

18. Petre Charaia, ‘Landownership in Abkhazia’, Kvali, no. 12, 1897, p. 252, and no. 13, 1897, p. 268.

19. Iliko Vermitsanashvili, ‘The Township of Gudauta (Abkhazia)’, Iveria (Tiflis), no. 188, 1897.

20. Iveria (Tiflis), no. 11, 1881, p. 95, cited in Nazim V. Bagapsh, Ethno-demographic Development of Abkhazia: Territorial Aspect (Moscow, 2010), p. 55, quoted in Agrba below.

21. Noe Zhordania, statement of 1918, and Nikolai Vorobyov, On the Groundless Claim of the Georgians to the Sukhum District (Abkhazia) (Rostov-on-Don, 1919), both quoted in ‘Revelations of forgotten voices‘.

22. Gosplan (Abkhazia) report to the government, 1940, and Konstantin Chichinadze, ‘20 Years of the Abkhaz ASSR’, report to the Abkhaz ASSR Supreme Soviet, 3 March 1941, in Абхазия: документы свидетельствуют. 1937-1953 (Sukhum: Alashara, 1992).

23. Adgur E. Agrba, ‘On the Demographic Expansion of Abkhazia (1937 to Mid-1950s): Towards Framing the Issue’, Аҧсуаҭҵаара / Abkhaz Studies, no. 11, 2018, pp. 90 to 96.

24. George Hewitt, ‘Abkhazia, Georgia, and the Crisis of August 2008: Roots and Lessons’, Global Dialogue, vol. 11, 2009, for the remark of the 1952 editors, their gloss on ‘coloniser’, and the omission of the 1877 articles from the 1955 edition.

25. ‘The Samurzakanians: An Abkhaz Borderland Between the Ghalidzga and the Ingur’, AbkhazWorld, for Gogebashvili’s 1907 protest at the alteration of Abkhaz surnames.

First published on AbkhazWorld

On 7 July 2026 a delegation arrived in Abkhazia from the Republic of Ghana, representatives of a municipal district that carries the same name as the capital of Abkhazia: Suhum (Suhum Municipal District). It is one of the country’s 33 municipal districts, covering an area of 359 km² with a population of 126,400. By way of comparison, the district covers more than 13 times the area of the Abkhazian capital, and has almost twice the number of inhabitants. Its economy is predominantly agricultural: cocoa, cassava, yams, maize, bananas, citrus fruit and other crops are grown here, then processed and traded.

Frank Danko, a representative of the Ghanaian municipality, and the head of the administration of the Abkhazian capital, Timur Agrba, signed a partnership agreement between the two Sukhums, opening the way to cooperation in culture, investment, education and other areas. It is the first agreement of its kind with the official structures of an African state.

Ghana, a ‘terra incognita’

News of the Ghanaian delegation’s visit was widely covered in the Abkhazian media and on social networks. Some users took the head of the delegation for the ‘king’ of Ghana, presumably because of his traditional dress and the ‘retinue’ around him, although a moment on the internet is enough to establish that Ghana is not a monarchy. Under its constitution it is a presidential representative democratic republic. A shortage of knowledge about African culture and identity is in fact a good reason to become better acquainted with it, and at the same time to draw parallels with the colonial policies our own peoples have met at various points in their history. One expression of those policies is a dismissive, belittling attitude towards the cultural symbols, traditions and markers of identity of other peoples.

On official visits, Ghanaian representatives often appear in garments made of kente cloth, one of the country’s foremost national symbols. For many centuries this vivid handwoven fabric was associated with the royal authority of the Ashanti people, and today it has become a symbol of Ghana’s cultural heritage and national identity. When members of an official delegation appear in kente, they signal respect for their own traditions, and the cloth works as an instrument of cultural diplomacy, allowing the country to present itself to the world not only through official statements but through what makes it distinctive.

Reactions on social media

We looked not only at how local residents responded to the arrival of the guests, but also at the verdicts of social media users beyond Abkhazia. Within a few days, the post about the Ghanaian delegation’s visit in the Facebook group ‘Аԥсадгьыл/Апсадгьыл/Apsadgil’ had drawn almost 3,000 reactions and around 280 comments, counting replies within threads. This is the familiar pattern for a news item that Abkhazia regards as neutral and Georgia treats as a red flag. The Georgian, or more precisely the pro-Georgian, audience takes any contact between Abkhazia and the outside world badly and reacts with extreme aggression, in language that shows no restraint whatsoever. The ‘Ghana case’ is a textbook illustration of how such an audience typically responds.

The scale of the aggression is clear from the ratio of hostile to constructive comments, roughly 275 to 12 (23:1). Almost one comment in six in the thread (approximately 16%) contains obscenity, often in the form of sexualised threats.

Hate speech linked to the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict

It is worth noting that the abuse and the hate speech are aimed not only at the Ghanaian delegation but, above all, at the hosts, that is, at Abkhazians, and they occur more frequently than the racist attacks on the guests. As so often, Georgian users call Abkhazians ‘Apsuians’, deny Abkhazian statehood and question the origins of Abkhazian surnames. Some go further still and compare Abkhazians to monkeys.

One example is a comment by the Abkhazian user Laura Beniya, which drew 269 negative reactions from Georgian users:

translation from Russian: ‘I knew that Georgians are intolerant of Abkhazians and of other peoples. It showed even in the years when we lived side by side: the mockery, the arrogance, the sense of superiority. But today, in the twenty-first century, insulting people for the colour of their skin, for their origin, for their clothing, is undisguised fascism. There are countries where the word “negro” is banned as an insult and where you can be given a prison sentence for it. It turns out that Georgian society as a whole is hypocritical: to the outside world it promotes humanist values, while for domestic consumption it uses entirely different ones through its propaganda channels. For ignorant and ill-mannered people in particular this is the norm, and going by social media they are multiplying across every kind of content.’

Here are some of the replies to Laura Beniya’s comment:

translation from Russian: Konstantine Guges: ‘Laura Beniya, poor thing, are we playing the victim again? That is the Apsuian tradition, after all. So it turns out that while living alongside Georgians the poor Apsua (who enjoyed the greatest privileges of anyone, thanks to the Georgians) could see all this))))))) Who are you writing these fairy tales for!!! I know a great many peoples, and nowhere have I seen fascism and Nazism such as yours!!!’

Vladimir Ivanov: ‘Laura Beniya, which bush are you broadcasting your apsuara from? You are having a celebration, I see. Papuans, just like you and your tribe. Do you think hiding behind the Russians’ backs will save you???’

Zaza Todua: ‘Laura Beniya, and who are you yourself, not a Georgian? Since when did a Beniya become an Abkhazian?’

translation from Russian: Davit Berazenishvili: ‘Lyutik Lataria, you would do better to google the origins of your own surname one more time, rather than defending national distinctiveness and the rights and interests of native diplomats nobody has ever heard of (with all due respect to these gentlemen’s rights)! Lyutik, really now, does the photo session above, of this comically staged “diplomatic” mission, not look ridiculous? Where did you dig up these characters, and what brotherhood, if you will forgive me, unites you?’

‘BEDSHEET PEOPLE’, ‘CANNIBALS’ AND ‘SCAM KINGS’: HATE SPEECH DIRECTED AT THE GHANAIAN DELEGATION

Below we set out the main categories of hate speech used against the Ghanaian delegation and against the hosts who invited them.

Depersonalisation through racial category: the very first reply to the post, which set the tone for everything that followed, refuses the guests any individuality, reduces them to a racial category and suggests that they are impostors:

translation from Russian: Tamuna Siradze: ‘Laura, do not poke your nose into other people’s business! N*groes (that is what this race is called, not “African Americans”) have nothing to do with it, this is between Georgians and Apsua!’

‘Laura Beniya, we are not laughing at the colour of their skin, it is simply that your level of development and culture is the same. We are glad you have met your relatives.’

National dress as a pretext for ridicule: the traditional Ghanaian attire worn by one of the delegates, ‘kente’ (a ceremonial cloth wrapped around the body), became the chief visual trigger for mockery. It is what the word ‘bedsheet’ attaches to, along with the coinage ‘bedsheet people’, which surfaced in a number of variations:

translation: ‘That bedsheet man has surely eaten two Apsua.’

translation: ‘Did our lads really fight for these “bedsheet people”? These savages you have dragged onto Abkhazian soil... I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. When I picture the respected people who once walked through Sukhum, and today this corner of paradise has been turned into a jungle...

New occupants have clearly been delivered to Sukhum’s “nurseries”.’ 😥🫣🐵🙊🙉🐵🙊🙉

translation: ‘Did he get out of bed, wrap himself in a sheet and head off to the meeting like that? 😃 Abkhazia and Samachablo are Georgia, so stop ***** with our heads. ❤️🇬🇪’

translation: ‘Does this one in the white sheet eat people in the morning and work as a king in the afternoon? I am mad about you lot 🤣😁😂🤦🏻‍♂️’

‘Actors in costume’: the most extended racist remark in the thread comes from the same author who opened the discussion, and develops the idea of ‘actors’ into a full-blown conspiracy theory in which the black guests are props in a production staged by Russia.

translation: ‘The level of people they deal with is the level of the residents of Abkhazia themselves. Now they will be brought bananas for free, and they will be white-skinned macaque monkeys.’

translation from Russian: Albert Sharafutdinov: ‘Georgy Dumava, what foreign ministry? These are actors in costume. Tomorrow they will go off to some Kazakh casino at Kapchagai and act out whatever tomorrow’s circumstances require of them. Did you see how performer number one is holding a comical black umbrella indoors over performer number two, who is signing something there? Are the ceilings leaking in your “foreign ministry” building? And if not, then why is he doing it? Because he knows that the white spectator wants some strange and inappropriate behaviour on stage from the black troupe, on top of the hilarious sheets wrapped round their bodies. So there he is, holding a mad umbrella over him INDOORS. When and where did Ghana recognise Abkhazia? Never and nowhere. Not even Ghana. How did they get to you? Through Russia, obviously. They arrange EVERYTHING FOR YOU! Beginning with independence and ending with this laughing stock. That is why I have already written somewhere that Abkhazians would do better to use their own language and not switch to Russian, so that people who understand something about the international scene are not appalled by this performance.’

‘Nigerian’ kings and fraud: commentators try to draw sarcastic parallels with the so-called ‘Nigerian letter’ scam, the email fraud in which the recipient is promised an enormous inheritance from a non-existent African relative, long since an internet meme.

translation from Russian: ‘Lyutik Lataria, what are their names? Did you take them at their word that they are kings and chiefs? Have exactly the same kings and chiefs, from Nigeria for a change, say, never sent you an offer to collect the hundred million bequeathed to you by your uncle in Ghana?’

The ‘cannibalism’ motif: the most persistent and the most openly racist of all those recorded in the thread. It appears at least four times, ranging from a brief aside to a fully worked satirical sketch:

translation: ‘After the meeting:

Mamadou, how did you like the mayor of Sukhum?

Mamadou: he was magnificent, brother, Kumbalu...

Have another helping, Mamadou, don’t be shy...’

translation:

*Facebook user*:

‘This photo could do with a few Ossetians 🤣’

*Facebook user*:

‘They were eaten 😁’

translation: ‘Has anyone asked about that white man? Or have they already eaten him and washed him down with seawater? 🤣’

‘Gudrons’: the use of racist terminology and neologisms:

translation from Russian: ‘Laura Beniya, they call themselves n*groes, so what are we supposed to call them, gudrons?’

translation: ‘How dare you mention Georgians, your n*gger mother (crude abuse follows)... your “n*gger tolerance”.’

translation: ‘May not one of these n*ggers spare your Apsua’

What we have set out above is only a small part of the comments, and we are aware that reading them may provoke a strong emotional response. This material is not published in order to set off another wave of indignation on social media. Its purpose is to show what is happening in the public sphere today, how aggressive the rhetoric from outside has become around the question of Abkhazia’s de-isolation, and why outside observers need to see not only the official statements of the Georgian authorities but also the real sentiments that surface in online discussion.

This wave of racist and chauvinist remarks drew a response from the Georgian journalist Tengiz Ablotia, who published the following text on his Facebook page (we quote only the opening):

‘In recent days I have been watching closely as people in Georgia mock the Abkhazians over that African delegation. They take such pleasure in jeering at Abkhazia’s backwardness, at the fact that Russia runs everything there, at the fact that nobody goes there apart from a few village Africans... “Ha-ha-ha, what are these Abkhazians like...”. I would like to address the authors of such comments and posts: perhaps, before laughing at others, it would be worth taking a look at yourselves first? Is there no mirror in your house? Whom are you laughing at, what are you laughing at, and by what moral right? <...>’.

First published by OKNO and translated into English by AbkhazWorld.

Correspondence: ‘This year they have settled people in Abkhazia’
Droeba, 1884, no. 219

They write to us from Sukhum: ‘This year, on the state lands of Abkhazia, Germans, Greeks and Mingrelians have been settled. Many of the Germans died of the Sukhum fever, and many returned home to their own country; but those who stayed have worked tirelessly this summer, so that where there had been impassable forest they have turned it into ploughland. Here and there in the woods, ancient churches and burial places have come to light, thickly covered with inscriptions. It would not be out of place to give some attention to these remains, all the more so because the new settlers care nothing for them and are pulling them down and levelling them without mercy.’

The Settlement of the Black Sea Shores
Sergei Meskhi, Droeba, no. 74, 18 July 1876

Ever since the lands of the Circassians expelled to Turkey, and the Black Sea coast more generally, passed into Russia’s hands, our government has several times attempted to distribute those lands to Russians and to members of other peoples for settlement.

Yet these attempts proved unsuccessful every time. Some, it is true, did come and settle, but within a year or two they became convinced that they could not establish themselves there. They knew nothing of the particular qualities of the local soil, or of the natural conditions in general, and they had no labourers either, so they went back again.

Along the Black Sea coast, besides the land that went to peasants and labourers, a great deal was sold to ‘men of merit’, to various generals. These men never even set eyes on their plots: those who found buyers sold them, while those who could not simply left the land to lie deserted.

Mr Katkov himself, who is forever preaching in his newspaper that the Russians must settle firmly in the Caucasus and put down deep roots, and who complains so often that the Russian treasury spends far too much on the Caucasus yet draws no benefit from it, this very Mr Katkov, so it is said, is now selling the estate that the government granted him near Bichvinta [Pitsunda] some five or six years ago.

What is the cause of this? Why is it that people who come from foreign lands do not take to the place and cannot take root on the Black Sea coast? The chief cause lies in nature itself: a man of the plains cannot endure the mountains, and a dweller of the sandy desert cannot grow accustomed to the climate of the sea.

For this reason, in our view, these places on the Black Sea coast should be settled and cultivated, once again, by the peoples of the Caucasus. Nature itself resists the settling here of a people from another land and another tribe.

A Lecture on the Caucasus
Droeba, nos 36 and 37, 14 and 16 April 1876

Gentlemen! The full conquest of the Caucasus took place in this present century.

Ivan IV Vasilyevich made the beginning, and Peter I and Catherine II carried the rapprochement with the Caucasus further, yet even then it could not be said that they had set foot in this land. In our own century it was Alexander I who achieved the greater success in the matter. Through Russia’s union with Georgia he all but brought it to a resolution.

Once Alexander I had resolved to annex this rich country [Georgia] to his state, he was then bound to seize the whole of the Caucasus, for without that he could make no use of Georgia at all.

Although Georgia was joined to Russia in Alexander I’s day, Russia [that is, Russia] had no route to it whatever. To the north the mountaineers barred the way, to the east and south-east the Persians, and to the west Turkey, which held this entire region as far as Anapa. Of these, the mountaineers were the most dangerous.

The Russians set about ridding themselves of this troublesome people, and completed [its subjugation] only in our own century. The war that this brought on between Russia and Iran ended in 1813. By the treaty of that year Iran ceded to Russia its possessions in the Caucasus, in particular a great part of Dagestan, together with Baku, Shemakha and Shusha, that is, the region known as Shirvan.

In this way the Russians forced one road through to the south-west; but it was not convenient enough, since to reach Georgia by it they had to make a fairly wide circuit. The nearer and more favourable route lay from the west. On that side, however, Russia came up against Turkey. Under the terms of the Treaty of Bucharest (1812), the whole of the western Caucasus remained with Turkey, along with the following towns: Poti, Suncha, Laba and Anapa. Less fortunate still were the Russians against the mountaineers of the Caucasus. These mountaineers were the Lezgins, the Chechens, the Circassians and the Abkhazians.

In 1829 the Russians secured for themselves Anapa, Sukhum, Poti and Akhaltsikhe, that is, the whole of the western Caucasus.

Turkey likewise gave up the mountaineers who had stood under its influence. Yet the Russians needed a further thirty-five year war to subdue them. Consider it: this people, a mere handful that did not exceed a single million, held out for all that time against several tens of millions of Russians. The place became a veritable hell for the Russians, one in which their army perished and their money was devoured.

The war was waged on both sides of the Caucasus range: in the east against the Chechens and Lezgins, and in the west against the Circassians and Abkhazians. The Abkhazians and Circassians had a particular way of waging war, which lay in this: they never merged into a single army under one command. Not only did these two peoples never unite, but neither the Circassians on the one side nor the Abkhazians on the other ever fell upon the Russians together. They would ordinarily fight the Russian army village by village. The Russians, for their part, made a mistake of their own: following the mountaineers’ example, they would send their troops in small detachments. In the end the Russians grasped their error and dispatched numerous forces against these peoples all at once, and by this means, in 1864, they brought the long war to a close.

The Abkhazians and Circassians, having fought village by village, surrendered village by village as well. But the Russians soon became convinced that their Russification was impossible. Thereafter the Circassians and Abkhazians withdrew from their own country.

Turkey took in these peoples and settled them along the frontiers of Bulgaria and Serbia. In their place the Russians resettled inhabitants from the interior provinces of Russia and founded the Kuban and Black Sea communities and the Sukhum department.

From Petre Charaia, ‘Abkhazians and Abkhazians (an ethnographic description)’
Iveria, 1888, nos 165 and 167.

We wish, so far as we are able, to describe the real and true life of Abkhazia; this is not easy. Because of Abkhazia’s geographical situation, the life of the Abkhazian people today is not what it was ten years ago. To say nothing of the fact that during the last war a part of the Abkhazians were forced to migrate to the Ottoman Empire, from where not even half of them have returned. Some scattered in different directions. The Abkhazian nation has, in consequence, diminished so far in numbers that today it does not amount to even a quarter of what it once was. And once fate had willed that the people should dwindle, that some should leave for one place and some for another, and that they should be scattered across various lands, the customs, habits, faith and, in general, the whole way of life and traditions of the Abkhazians have gradually altered and passed away.

Add to this the self-sacrificing labours of the clergy of the present day, their work in spreading and preaching the teaching of Christ among the Abkhazians, and add further the influence of so-called civilisation and of enlightenment in general, and it is easy to see that in Abkhazia, if not today then tomorrow, we shall see little of what we once saw.

The Abkhazian is of medium height, lean of build, dark-complexioned, with black hair, black brows and black eyes; the look of the eyes is a little wild and mournful. Nature has endowed him quite generously with both ability and beauty.

The Abkhazian is quick-tempered, swift, hot-blooded, of proud disposition and jealous of his honour; the smallest thing that seems to him dishonourable is enough to rouse the wrath of a spirit already fiery and quick to take fire, and he is as graceful and light of foot as a gazelle. In days of old the Abkhazian bowed his head before no man, and turned his back on no one.

The Abkhazian loves his truly beautiful country to the point of self-forgetfulness, and, as the poet said, is ready to declare: ‘I would not exchange my homeland for the paradise of a foreign land.’

In the Abkhazian’s understanding, there is no country in the world better than Apsny. ‘God preserve Apsny’ is forever on the lips of the Abkhazian, in joy and in sorrow alike.

The Abkhazians call their homeland Apsny. The name is composed, in my view, of the following words: apsua, meaning ‘Abkhazian’, and an, meaning ‘mother’; apsua an, contracted to Apsn, that is, the mother, or homeland, of the Abkhazian, Abkhazia.

From a dispatch by Iliko Vermitsanashvili, ‘The Township of Gudauta (Abkhazia)’
Iveria, 1897, no. 188

Our township is built on a beautiful high spot on the eastern shore of the Black Sea. To the east of our township there flows a small river, the Gudou (in Abkhaz, ‘big-hearted’), from which Gudauta took its name.

From the west, the township of Gudauta is watered by a river smaller still than the Gudou, the Adzlagaradzi (’mill water’).

Fifty Georgians live in our township (one Imeretian, two Gurians, the rest Mingrelians), together with thirteen Greeks, eleven Russians, five Abkhazians and two Armenians. Our township is the only place of trade in the whole Gudauta district, which extends ninety versts in length and fifteen to thirty in breadth, and is made up of twelve Abkhazian communities, three Russian and one Armenian.

‘Abkhazia , October 10’, A. Dzhugheli (Gadaghmeli)
Droeba, 1883, N 216.

'... Abkhazia , as the very name of the place suggests, belonged and belongs to the Abkhazians ... In this last war (1877-1878 -- Ed.), this country was almost completely emptied. The vacated lands of the Abkhazians were distributed among all who desired them. This country, as a country of the covenant, had a famous name. Everyone who had vaguely heard that in Abkhazia land was being divided and given away upped and moved here . Within 5-6 years Greeks, Russians, Bulgarians, Germans, Mingrelians, Imeretians, Armenians, etc. flooded into Abkhazia. And the authorities refused no-one.'

Excerpt from P. Charaia, “Landownership in Abkhazia” (continued),
Kvali journal, 1897, No. 13, p. 268

Not so long ago, Dal was densely populated by Abkhazians... This land, renowned since ancient times for the bravery of its inhabitants, has now been so thoroughly depopulated that no one lives there anymore...

See more:

A campaign launched by Turkish citizens asks Ankara for something short of recognition: accept Abkhaz passports, reopen the Trabzon to Sukhum sea line, and let families cross the water their goods already do.

On 29 June, representatives of the Abkhaz diaspora in Türkiye launched a public campaign calling on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to review its policy on Abkhazia. Supporters are submitting appeals through CİMER, the Presidency’s Communication Centre. The text they sign makes three requests: recognition of the Republic of Abkhazia; pending that, acceptance of Abkhaz passports as valid documents for crossing the Turkish border; and the opening of direct sea and air links through technical arrangements of the kind Türkiye already operates elsewhere. On 4 July the campaign received public backing from the Labour Party, Emek Partisi.

Note what this is. The appeal comes from Turkish citizens and is addressed to their own government. Its language is that of family life, health, education and movement, not geopolitics. It describes Abkhazia as ‘our maritime neighbour’ and lists what isolation suspends: families kept apart at weddings and funerals, seriously ill patients who cannot be moved in time, young people shut out of international education.

Recognition is the campaign’s ceiling. Its floor is more modest and more urgent: ordinary human and commercial contact, of the sort the two coasts had within living memory. The floor is available now. It costs Ankara nothing it has not already paid elsewhere, and it serves Turkish interests as plainly as Abkhazian ones. The case follows.

The ferry that stopped

Until 1996 a ferry ran twice a week between Trabzon and Sukhum. It was unremarkable, which is the point: traders, students and relatives crossed a sea that has connected the two coasts for centuries, and nobody thought the crossing political. In January 1996 the Commonwealth of Independent States imposed an embargo on Abkhazia at Georgia’s request. Türkiye is not a CIS member, but it observed the decision, and the ferry stopped. A year earlier, the door had already narrowed: from 1995 Türkiye ceased admitting Abkhazians on their old Soviet documents, steering them towards Georgian passports that most refuse to carry.

The blockade’s record can be stated without adjectives. It inflicted years of hardship on a population still recovering from the war of 1992 to 1993 and produced no political result. Even Russia enforced it until 2000, and within a decade diaspora leaders were arguing publicly that the embargo was costing their own country trade and prestige.

Ankara knew this. In 2008 foreign minister Ali Babacan told parliament that Türkiye had repeatedly proposed restarting Trabzon to Sukhum boat traffic as a confidence-building measure, and that no progress had been made. Weeks earlier a senior Abkhazian parliamentarian had returned from Ankara reporting talks on the same subject inside the prime minister’s office. The ferry, in other words, is not a diaspora fantasy. It is a policy Türkiye’s own foreign ministry once tabled, and the file has been open, on both sides, for nearly two decades.

The trade that never stopped

What the embargo did not stop was the relationship. It merely made it unofficial. Turkish cargo vessels sail to Abkhazia, Turkish goods fill Abkhazian shops, and Sukhum has kept a plenipotentiary representative working openly in Istanbul since the end of the war. In every year of Abkhazia’s published customs records, Türkiye has been the republic’s second trading partner after Russia. The customs committee’s figures for 2025 put the turnover at some 4.5 billion roubles (US $58.5 million), or 7.5 per cent of the republic’s foreign trade, all of it officially carried by sea and cleared through the ports of Sukhum, Ochamchira and Pitsunda.

Look closer, though, and the numbers show what informality costs. Turnover has lurched from around three billion roubles in 2015 to under one billion in 2017, up to a record share of Abkhazia’s trade in 2023, then down 15 per cent in 2025, a year in which Abkhazian exports to Türkiye fell by more than half. Fish, scrap metal and timber go out; machinery, fuel, textiles and animal products come in; and a portion of Turkish goods is believed to reach the Abkhazian market indirectly, through Sochi or the Gal district, rather than across the open sea. Commerce this useful to both coasts survives on the worst available terms: informal, uninsurable, unrecorded on the Turkish side and impossible to plan around.

Here is the absurdity the campaign exposes. The container is tolerated; the passenger is not. Goods cross the sea; a Turkish Abkhazian with a homeland and relatives on the other side cannot. They must fly to Sochi, obtain a Russian transit visa and queue at the Psou crossing, a detour of a day or more for a route the ferry once covered on a published timetable. Tens of thousands were already making that detour every year in the late 2000s.

A century of asking

Who is asking matters, though counting them is hard. Estimates of the population of Abkhaz descent in Türkiye range from tens of thousands to a million; the head of the Federation of Abkhaz Cultural Centres (ABHAZFED) once suggested 500,000 to 700,000, counting the closely related Abazins, while fewer than 10,000 people are thought still to speak the language. All such figures are estimates and should be read as estimates. What is beyond dispute is that these are Turkish citizens, with relatives, family graves and ancestral villages across the water. The appeal’s examples are not rhetorical flourishes. Funerals keep their own schedule, and a patient who needs a hospital needs it today, not after a transit visa.

The community’s habit of organisation is older than the Republic of Türkiye itself. Ergün Özgür’s study of the diaspora’s lobbying traces it to the Çerkes Teavün Cemiyeti, the Circassian Solidarity Association founded in Istanbul in 1908 by Ottoman generals and intellectuals. Solidarity committees formed during the wars of the 1990s. When Eduard Shevardnadze visited Türkiye in 2002, seventy associations and 6,675 individuals signed a published declaration in Abkhazia’s defence; another followed during Mikheil Saakashvili’s visit in May 2004. In 2008 the Friends of Abkhazia opened a signature campaign for direct ships and flights to Sukhum, and a 2009 American diplomatic cable, later published by WikiLeaks, recorded the same demand reaching foreign embassies.

The wall, meanwhile, has been growing higher rather than lower. In earlier Abkhazian elections, diaspora voters cast their ballots at a polling station in Istanbul. In the presidential election of 2025 the station, relocated to Sakarya, was cancelled on polling day itself after local officials objected, citing Georgia’s territorial integrity. A community of Turkish citizens discovered that its members could not vote for their other homeland on Turkish soil.

The CİMER campaign is therefore the latest instalment of a request this community has made lawfully, patiently and in writing for a generation. Each time the method has been the same: no threat, no ultimatum, an appeal to the state through the state’s own channels. A government that prizes the loyalty of its citizens might notice how loyally the request keeps being made.

Precedents of Ankara’s own making

The appeal’s precedents deserve careful handling, because they carry the argument. Türkiye is the only state to recognise the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, and it has built its own formula for operating air links there despite the restrictions of the International Civil Aviation Organization. The appeal adds that the United Kingdom has in the past accepted TRNC travel documents: evidence, on its reading, that a passport can be honoured without recognising the state that issued it.

Taiwan supplies the mirror image. Türkiye recognises the People’s Republic of China and maintains no diplomatic relations with Taipei, yet bilateral trade reached around two billion US dollars in 2022, by the account of Türkiye’s own representative there, and Taiwanese investment in Türkiye has passed three billion. Flights operate through technical arrangements between civil aviation authorities rather than interstate treaties, which is precisely the mechanism the appeal proposes for Sukhum. And in 2008 Türkiye recognised Kosovo despite the objections of partners it values.

The point is not an accusation of double standards. It is an observation about competence. Ankara already knows, from its own practice and in procedural detail, how to separate practical links from the recognition question when its interests require it. The campaign asks for the application of a method Türkiye invented.

The interest test

Would it serve Türkiye? Start in Trabzon. The eastern Black Sea economy gains a route and a market its merchants supplied for centuries before 1996. Turkish exporters formalise trade that already happens, with contracts that can be enforced and cargoes that can be insured. And Ankara earns standing with a very large community of its own citizens at no diplomatic price it has not already paid in Nicosia and Taipei.

Then there is the strategic point, which should be made soberly. Nearly every legal route into Abkhazia today runs through the Russian Federation, and the traffic figures say so plainly. More than three quarters of the republic’s foreign trade by value now crosses the Russian land border by road, while the sea, the one commercial channel that does not touch Russian territory, carries less than a tenth. Russia’s share of Abkhazia’s trade reached 75 per cent in 2025, having grown by two thirds in four years. Sukhum’s airport, reopened in 2025 after decades of closure, receives scheduled flights from Russian cities alone, flown by Russian carriers alone. Thirty years of isolation have not loosened Moscow’s position in Abkhazia. They have entrenched it, by leaving Russia as the only door. A direct Turkish link is the one policy on offer that widens Abkhazia’s connections instead of narrowing them.

The counterargument is real and deserves respect. Türkiye values its relationship with Georgia, and with reason: the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway, cooperation within NATO programmes and formal support for Georgian ‘territorial integrity’. Georgia has enforced its objection at sea. In August 2009 its coastguard seized the tanker Buket, carrying fuel to Abkhazia; a Georgian court sentenced the vessel’s Turkish captain, Mehmet Öztürk, to 24 years in prison, and he was freed within days only after foreign minister Ahmet Davutoğlu travelled to Tbilisi. Georgia detained 23 ships that year, and by one count more than sixty Turkish vessels had been seized over the preceding decade.

Three answers hold. First, nothing proposed here requires recognition; the appeal is drafted, deliberately, to sit beneath that threshold. Second, states maintain links with entities they do not recognise as a matter of routine, and Türkiye’s Taiwan practice is the working proof. Third, the policy has had since 1996 to show results, and it has not moved Abkhazia one step towards Tbilisi. If the aim was reintegration, the method has delivered the opposite: a territory bound ever more tightly to Moscow because every other door was closed.

Which returns the argument to where the campaign began. In 2023, after an opposition MP asked the foreign minister whether Türkiye would recognise Abkhazia, this publication suggested the realistic question was a different one: not whether recognition will come, but when the ferry between Trabzon and Sukhum will run again. Thirty years after the last sailing, Turkish citizens are putting that question, formally and in writing, to their own government. Answering it requires no treaty, no summit and no change of map. It requires a timetable.

In his 1954 book Giorgi Merchule, Georgian scholar Pavle Ingorokva argued that the Abkhazians who lived in ancient and medieval western Transcaucasia were not the same people as the contemporary Abkhazians. He maintained that they were Georgian tribes who spoke a Kartvelian language.

This interpretation drew strong criticism from a number of prominent Georgian and Abkhaz scholars. Among them were the distinguished Abkhazologist Ketevan Lomtatidze, as well as Nikoloz Berdzenishvili, Varlam Dondua, Georgy Soselia, Khukhut Bgazhba and Zurab Achba, also known as Anchabadze.

In this article, Lomtatidze examines Ingorokva’s claims in detail, drawing on linguistic, historical and ethnographic evidence. She challenges his interpretation of the identity and historical settlement of the Abkhazians, while stressing their deep roots in their homeland, their distinct language and cultural traditions, and their long contribution to the wider cultural history of the Caucasus.

The article was written in Georgian and first published in Mnatobi, No. 12, Tbilisi, 1956, pp. 132–139. It has now been translated into English by AbkhazWorld.

See also:

+ Questions of Abkhazian history in the book by P. Ingorokva ‘Georgi Merchule - Georgian writer of the 10th century’, by Zurab Anchabadze

+ Rewriting History? A Critique of Modern Georgian Historiography on Abkhazia

+ Giorgi Soselia’s Critique of Pavle Ingorokva’s ‘Giorgi Merchule’ and the Misrepresentation of Abkhazian History

+ The Coast That Kept Its Name

+ Ten Lies, Ten Answers: The Case Against Georgian Mythology on Abkhazia

+ The Ibero-Caucasian hypothesis and the historiography of Abkhazia, by Kevin Tuite

+ The value of the past: myths, identity and politics in Transcaucasia, by Victor A. Shnirelman

Ketevan Lomtatidze was a distinguished Georgian linguist and Caucasus scholar. She was born on 11 February 1911 and died on 22 September 2007. Her research focused particularly on the Kartvelian languages and on Abkhaz and Abaza linguistics.

Lomtatidze graduated from the Faculty of Philology at Tbilisi State University in 1931, specialising in the Abkhaz and Abaza languages. Through decades of research, she became recognised as one of the leading authorities in these fields.

In 1945, she became the first woman in Georgia to receive the degree of Doctor of Sciences. She later served as Director of the Institute of Linguistics of the Academy of Sciences of the Georgian SSR from 1953 to 1963 and again from 1975 to 1987.

Her contribution to linguistics was recognised in 1984, when she received the Dmitry Gulia State Prize of Abkhazia. A prolific scholar, Lomtatidze published around 400 works, including eight books, in Georgian, Abkhaz, Russian, English and German.

Her research interests extended beyond Georgian dialectology to the Abkhaz-Abaza, Adyghe-Kabardian and Ubykh languages. She also examined the genetic and typological relationships between Georgian and the languages traditionally grouped under the term “Ibero-Caucasian”, while making important contributions to both general Caucasian studies and theoretical linguistics.

Between 1937 and 1957, Lomtatidze devoted much of her work to Abkhaz studies, carrying out field research initiated by Academician Simon Janashia. She studied the Abzhui and Bzyb dialects of Abkhaz, as well as the Tapanta and Ashkhar dialects of Abaza, and developed an exceptional command of both languages. Her knowledge was reportedly so precise that she could often identify a speaker’s village of origin from subtle features of their speech.

In July 1989, a dispute over the proposed establishment of a Sukhum branch of Tbilisi State University became the focal point of a much deeper confrontation over authority, identity and Abkhazia’s political future. What appeared on the surface to be an educational disagreement reflected unresolved questions about who had the right to govern Abkhazia, protect its institutions and determine its place within a Georgia moving rapidly towards independence.

On 15–16 July, months of political tension erupted into street fighting in Sukhum and mass mobilisation across eastern Abkhazia and western Georgia. Rival crowds gathered, weapons were seized, roadblocks appeared and armed groups moved towards the capital. Soviet forces eventually intervened, preventing an even wider confrontation, but the violence left between fourteen and seventeen people dead, according to differing accounts, and hundreds injured.

The events became a decisive turning point in Georgian–Abkhazian relations. For many Abkhaz, they confirmed that their political and institutional security could not be guaranteed within an independent Georgian state governed solely from Tbilisi. Yet the violence was not inevitable, nor was it the product of timeless ethnic hatred. It developed through a specific sequence of political decisions, nationalist mobilisation, institutional coercion, fear, rumour and the collapse of trust between communities and authorities.

This article reconstructs that sequence, examines the disputed evidence and explains why the clashes of July 1989 became one of the most consequential episodes in modern Abkhaz history.

A city dividing

By late afternoon on Saturday, 15 July 1989, two concentrations of people had formed within a few streets of one another in central Sukhum. Several hundred Abkhaz had gathered around School No. 1, where an admissions commission for a proposed Sukhum branch of Tbilisi State University had established itself. Near the seafront, roughly a thousand Georgian residents and supporters had assembled in Rustaveli Park. The physical distance was short. The political distance had become immense.

The violence that followed is often described as the first fatal Georgian–Abkhaz confrontation of the late Soviet period and, with hindsight, as a prelude to the war of 1992–93. Neither label is sufficient. “Prelude” can make later war sound unavoidable; “ethnic clash” can make the causes seem primordial and obscure. What brought people into the streets was a specific chain of political decisions, protests, rumours and failures of authority.(1)

At its centre stood a university. Yet the dispute was never only about classrooms, examinations or administrative convenience. It concerned who could make binding decisions in Abkhazia, whether an institution created as part of an earlier settlement could be divided from outside, and what safeguards would remain for the Abkhaz if Georgia left the Soviet Union. By July, each procedural move was being read as a declaration about sovereignty.

Why a university branch mattered

Abkhaz State University had itself emerged from the unrest of 1978, when Abkhaz protests forced the Georgian and Soviet authorities to concede several cultural and institutional measures. The former pedagogical institute in Sukhum became the second university in the Georgian SSR. It contained Georgian-, Russian- and Abkhaz-language sectors; the Georgian sector was the largest. For Georgian students and staff, a branch administered by Tbilisi promised a direct institutional connection to the republic’s principal university and an answer to grievances they described as discrimination.(3)

For many Abkhaz, the same proposal meant something very different. The university was one of the few substantial gains secured after decades in which Abkhaz schools had been closed, the language had been forced into a Georgian-based script, publishing and broadcasting had been curtailed, and state-directed settlement had sharply changed the demographic balance. In the 1989 census, people classified as Georgian numbered 239,872, or 45.7 per cent of Abkhazia’s population; Abkhaz numbered 93,267, or 17.8 per cent. Those figures did not prove a conspiracy in 1989. They did explain why control over an educational institution could not be separated from memories of linguistic suppression and demographic vulnerability.(2,3)

The proposed branch would remove the Georgian sector from Abkhaz State University and place it under direct administration from Tbilisi rather than the autonomous republic’s educational authorities. George Hewitt argues that this would weaken the viability of an institution that Abkhaz society had fought to obtain. He also notes that the existing university drew students from western Georgia, some of whom remained in Abkhazia. Whether every fear attached to the new branch was justified is less important than recognising that the fear had a concrete historical basis.(2)

There was also a legal question. On 14 May, the Georgian SSR’s Council of Ministers authorised the branch after weeks of strikes by Georgian students, staff and allied organisations. Yet the documentary collection compiled by B. E. Sagaria records that Union-level approval was required under a 1982 USSR Council of Ministers regulation. The USSR State Education Committee declined to endorse the proposal. A commission of Soviet people’s deputies, accompanied by a senior Union education official, visited Abkhazia from 3 to 10 July and concluded that the May measure should be treated as temporary, had outlived its purpose and was disrupting both education and inter-communal relations. Final authority, it said, belonged at Union level.(4,7)

Read the full article on AbkhazWorld

See also:

+ Soviet Abkhazia 1989 Facts and Thoughts, by Viktor Popkov

+ The murder of Alexei Kogoniya by Georgian Nationalists on 16 July 1989

+ Unity in the name of freedom: for the anniversary of the 1989 Lykhny appeal

+ An Open Letter to the Georgian People (1989), by George Hewitt

From a correspondence in the newspaper Iveria, 1887, No. 114

In previous issues we spoke about the resettled people, and also about how they had arranged themselves in their new places of residence. At present, among those settlers who have managed to establish themselves well, the best settled in Abkhazia are those who came from Racha, Imereti and Mingrelia. We have often received good news about them, and we continue to receive such news now. The other settlers have not been able to endure the climate of Abkhazia, nor to adapt to the local land, as well as the people from Racha, Imereti and Mingrelia have done. This is not surprising, since the land and conditions of Abkhazia resemble those of Imereti and Mingrelia, and these people know the manner and methods of working such soil.

From the correspondence “Internal News”, newspaper Droeba, 1869, No. 29

On 30 May of this year, the Kutaisi military governor, Count Levashov, sent the following letter to the chiefs of the Zugdidi, Senaki and Lechkhumi uezds:

“The administrator of the Sukhumi Military Department has informed me that, within a short period of time, Mingrelians have been moving into the Ochamchire district, holding certificates from the local authorities for resettlement in Abkhazia. He writes that there are few unoccupied places left in Abkhazia, and that those which remain will be needed by the local landless inhabitants. In connection with this, I have written to the district chiefs instructing them to return such settlers and hand them back to the chiefs of their own uezds.”

At the same time, the Sukhumi military administrator requests that the uezd chiefs be required not to grant Mingrelians permission to resettle in Abkhazia.

From Sergei Meskhi’s article “On the Settlement of Abkhazia”, Droeba, 1878, No. 24

As is known, after the expulsion of the Circassians, their country was left deserted and devastated. Now, following the migration of the local inhabitants to Turkey, Abkhazia too has been left in the same deserted condition, and even more ruined.

We have before us the example of previous years: Russians and Slavs are unable to live in these lands because inhabitants of flat, treeless plains cannot become accustomed to a mountainous, forested and humid country.

But, besides this, there is another reason which, more than anything else, prevents Russians and Slavs from settling on the Black Sea coast: namely, that wheat does not grow at all in these places; only maize grows here...

Taking all these circumstances into account, we cannot but agree with the articles which were recently published on this subject in the newspaper Tiflisis Moambe. The author of those articles argued quite rightly and with proper reasoning that a people of foreign stock cannot endure life in these lands. The people who can settle here must be those who already live in almost the same conditions, in the same climate and natural environment as those of Abkhazia and Circassia; and the author directly names the Mingrelians.

To this we may add only that, in this case, if they so wish, the Imeretians, like the Mingrelians, would in every respect be suitable for settling the lands along the Black Sea coast. Both can live without wheat; both are accustomed to a mountainous, rocky and humid climate; both are entirely reliable politically; and both are in need of fertile lands...

From G. Tsereteli’s correspondence “Resettlement”, Droeba, 1879, No. 27

After every war, whether it be a great war or a minor skirmish with foreign peoples, questions of the following kind usually arise in our state, both in the highest circles and among writers: “We have conquered such-and-such countries, acquired new lands, and established ourselves in such-and-such regions; therefore, it is necessary to found colonies in these new countries; to settle deserted places, rich but uninhabited lands; to stimulate exchange, trade and agriculture, and to bring life to a boil.”

[…]

In our view, this is a mistaken idea, because the people of the cold Russian plains are unsuited to our warm and mountainous countries. They will perish, and the empty places will remain uninhabited.

It is true that today the whole Black Sea coast on the Caucasian side is devastated; the land is abundant and capable of yielding rich produce, and the places here are excellent for raising livestock and for arable cultivation. However, only people from Georgia’s Imereti and Samegrelo are suitable for settling there. On the plains and along the seacoast, from the port of Sochi along the whole Black Sea coast of Abkhazia, and in the Batumi-Kobuleti area, it is the people of Imereti and Samegrelo who are best suited. The sea is close to them; they are accustomed to trade and exchange; they are also accustomed to marshy, malarial air. Consequently, these empty coastal places are suited only to these peoples, all the more so because they are today in great need of land.

[…]

The people of Lechkhumi and Svaneti, being mountain people, would be very well adapted to the mountainous slopes of Abkhazia. It is time, it is time for us to spread out within our own country; it is time to occupy new lands in the Caucasus, wherever a climate and soil suitable for us can be found. Let it be understood that the land of one brother will no longer suffice for five or ten brothers. Let us expand while we still have time, before foreign peoples arrive and settle in the empty places of our Caucasus.

From a correspondence in the newspaper Iveria, 1894, No. 120

After the expulsion of the Circassians and the Abkhaz, the lands along the Black Sea coast were left entirely abandoned.

[…]

Moreover, if the government considers it necessary to settle the Black Sea coast without fail, then for what reason should these lands not once again be granted to the inhabitants of Georgia — people in whose abilities and loyalty, of course, the government should never have any doubt? There are many such landless people in Imereti, Samegrelo, Lechkhumi and Racha, where the price of a plot of land rises to as much as three hundred tumans...

From Petre Charaia’s article “Landownership in Abkhazia”, Kvali, 1897, No. 12, p. 252

As is known, during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, Abkhazia became a theatre of military operations. The Abkhaz were forced to abandon their homes and seek refuge in various places. Willingly or unwillingly, many left for Turkey. When, after the war, they returned once again to their homeland, they were forbidden to settle in the area between the Kodor and Aabsta rivers, in the vicinity of Sukhumi. The government issued this order with the aim of settling people considered more reliable for the state near Sukhumi.

As a result, in the Sukhumi district the Abkhaz do not live as one compact body. One part lives in the Kodor section, between Okhurei and the Kodor, the Abzhuians; the other part, the Bzyb people, lives in the Gudauta section. These two groups, the Abzhuians and the Bzyb people, are separated from one another by almost two days’ journey on foot. Consequently, only nobles and princes are able to maintain contact with each other. And in that central and most favourable part of ancient Abkhazia, where the Abkhaz were forbidden to settle, and which now constitutes the Gumista section, not a single Abkhaz “community” is to be found. There are only state lands and allotments belonging to private landowners.

On the state lands live colonies of Russians, Germans, Mingrelians, Greeks, Estonians and Armenians. Among these colonists, the Mingrelians occupy, if not first place, then certainly second place in terms of numbers. After the Russo-Turkish War, the Mingrelians, and Georgians in general, were initially regarded with the same goodwill as settlers of other nationalities. They, too, were invited to cultivate and develop these empty state lands, just as representatives of other nationalities were. The supreme government of the Caucasus treated them with particular favour.

The other part of the Gumista section, together with the lands located in Tsebelda, belongs to private owners, “landlords”. In this part of Abkhazia, the land was distributed mainly to those persons who had distinguished themselves in military or civil service and had thereby earned the attention of the supreme government.

See also:

• The Nineteenth-Century Georgian Press on Abkhazia

• Three Extracts from the Georgian Newspapers Droeba and Iveria

• Revelations of forgotten voices

• Georgii Tsereteli (1879): It’s time that we grab new territories in the Caucasus

• Who Should Be Settled in Abkhazia

Two years after Abkhaz reached Google Translate, cheap and imperfect AI tools sit within reach of Abkhazia’s ministries, newsrooms, classrooms and diaspora associations; used carelessly they will speed the drift towards Russian, and used deliberately they could give the language its best infrastructure in a century.

In the last week of June 2024, Abkhaz appeared on Google Translate. It arrived without ceremony, one of 110 languages added in the largest single expansion in the service’s history, alongside Avar, Chechen and Ossetian. For the first time, anyone with a phone in Sukhum, Sakarya or Edinburgh could type a sentence and receive something resembling Abkhaz in return.

Resembling is the word to hold on to. The output is uneven: sometimes serviceable, often stilted, occasionally invented. Yet the moment settled an old argument. The technology industry does not wait for small languages to be ready. The tools arrive anyway, half-finished, and the communities concerned either shape them or live with whatever they produce.

For Abkhazia the stakes are unusually concentrated. A republic of fewer than a quarter of a million people, thinly recognised and thinly funded, now has access to capabilities that once belonged to states with research budgets. The same technology, left on its defaults, will conduct its business in Russian and treat Abkhaz as decoration. Both futures are on offer, and the difference lies in decisions that can be taken now, most of them cheap.

Working with what exists

Any honest plan starts from the constraints. Partial recognition keeps Abkhazia off many international platforms, outside most funding programmes and beyond the reach of the usual development money. Internet access is decent in the towns and patchy beyond them. The universities produce able graduates but few machine learning specialists, and the ablest tend to complete their training abroad and stay there. Nearly every serious technical partnership runs through Russia.

Set against this, the current generation of AI has one saving property: much of it needs only a browser. Transcription of Russian or Turkish speech, drafting assistance, translation between major languages, identification of a diseased hazelnut leaf from a photograph: all of it runs on an ordinary connection at little or no cost. No data centre is required on Abkhazian soil. What is required is a plan that assumes small budgets, borrowed infrastructure and a handful of determined people.

One person has already shown the scale of the opportunity. Yandex Translate now offers Abkhaz in beta because Miron Baratelia, an Abkhaz computer science student at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, built his own Abkhaz translation system as coursework, took it into an internship with the Yandex Translate team, and carried the language into the product. One student, one project. The gaps that remain are of a similar size.

Why Abkhaz is hard for machines

Modern language models learn from text, and they are gluttons. English feeds them trillions of words. Abkhaz offers a thin digital layer: news sites, a modest Wikipedia, some digitised literature, social media posts, and shelves of books the machines cannot yet read. In the terminology of the field, Abkhaz is a low resource language, which is a polite way of saying the models are guessing more often than they are remembering.

The language itself compounds the problem. The literary standard sets nearly sixty consonants against a bare handful of vowels, carried by a Cyrillic orthography thick with modified letters. The verb is a sentence in miniature, stacking markers for subject, object, place and direction into a single word, so each inflected form appears far more rarely in any corpus than its English equivalent would. Rarity is precisely what statistical learning punishes. And annotated material, the tagged texts, aligned translations and transcribed speech on which serious tools are built, scarcely exists.

What exists, and what could

The foundations are not bare. Beyond Google’s system and the Yandex beta, Abkhaz has a presence on Mozilla’s Common Voice platform, where volunteers read sentences into their phones and validate one another’s recordings, assembling an open speech corpus clip by clip. Mozilla has publicly praised the growth of its Abkhaz contributor community. The lesson should make institutions uncomfortable: to date, volunteers have supplied more of the language’s training data than any ministry.

What could be built next, on modest means, follows from that. More speech comes first, above all recordings of elders, whose Abkhaz carries dialect and idiom that younger speech has lost, gathered with consent and stored openly. Then machine translation along the triangle that actually matters: Abkhaz, Russian and Turkish. Russian is the language of administration and Turkish the daily language of the diaspora, yet general purpose systems tend to pivot through English and mangle both directions.

Text to speech and speech recognition belong on the same list. An Abkhaz synthetic voice would serve screen readers, audiobooks and announcements; recognition would open decades of radio and interview tape to transcription. Less glamorous still is the plumbing: spell checkers, predictive keyboards and decent fonts decide what people type when they are tired. If writing Abkhaz on a phone is awkward, people write Russian, whatever their convictions.

The largest prize is optical character recognition tuned to Abkhaz orthography. The deliberate burning of the State Archive in Sukhum in 1992 destroyed a great part of the republic’s documentary memory, and much of what survives sits scattered across private shelves, diaspora collections and foreign libraries. Cheap scanners plus capable OCR would turn that scattered paper into a searchable national library. Every recognised page would also feed the corpus on which all the other tools depend, so the effort pays twice.

The diaspora classroom

By most estimates more people of Abkhaz descent live in Türkiye than in Abkhazia itself, and the language there is largely a grandparent’s possession. Evening courses run by village associations do heroic work with photocopies and goodwill. For those teachers, AI’s value is logistical: exercises and flashcards generated from banks of verified sentences, dictionaries in every pocket, real recorded audio attached to every example. A learner in Istanbul can check a verb form at midnight. A grandmother in Sakarya can send voice notes that become next week’s listening exercise.

Here one caution must be stated plainly. Current AI systems generate unreliable Abkhaz. A large model will produce fluent-looking sentences with invented endings and misapplied prefixes, and a learner has no way to tell. Machine generated Abkhaz placed in front of students without checking by fluent speakers does not preserve the language; it corrupts the copy being transmitted, at scale, in a confident voice, and a speech community this small lacks the redundancy to shake such errors out later.

The safe design principle is retrieval over generation. Let the machine find, sort and serve what fluent humans have written and recorded, and let humans do the composing. A tutor app that surfaces verified sentences with native audio is an asset. A chatbot that improvises Abkhaz is a hazard wearing a helpful expression. The principle costs nothing to adopt and a great deal to ignore.

Government: cheap first, ambitious later

Bilingual administration is the obvious opening. Officials draft in Russian, translation into Abkhaz is a chronic bottleneck, and machine translation used as a first draft, always corrected by a human translator, could raise a translation office’s output this year without pretending to replace it. Records offices can start scanning immediately, since scanning is cheap and no page is ever wasted; recognition and search can be layered on as the software matures. A retrieval based assistant on ministry websites, answering routine procedural questions strictly from published texts, would spare clerks the same ten enquiries a day.

The productive economy offers equally quick wins. Hazelnut and citrus growers can already photograph a sick leaf and receive a plausible identification from free tools, which means an extension officer with a phone now reaches further than one with a car. Tourism bodies can draft multilingual visitor material with AI and have humans check it. Clinics can use dictation and summarisation to spare scarce doctors their paperwork, provided patient records are not shipped casually to foreign servers. Free satellite imagery, read by open models, can track coastal erosion and forest change without a field trip.

The longer list needs money and patience. A national Abkhaz corpus programme, text, speech and aligned translation together, should be treated as infrastructure in the way roads are. Abkhazian State University could host a language-technology specialisation with scholarships attached; the Baratelia precedent shows the return available on a single student. And before any citizen-facing AI service launches, basic data protection rules need writing, because trust squandered early does not come back.

Archives, oral history and the NGO sector

For NGOs and cultural institutions the urgent task is capture, and the deadline is human. Elders will not wait for Abkhaz speech recognition to mature. Record now, at decent quality, with consent forms and safe storage, and let transcription follow when the tools arrive. Interviews conducted in Russian or Turkish can be transcribed today with existing systems, removing the largest single time cost small teams face.

The same drafting tools that threaten lazy journalism are a genuine equaliser for organisations writing grant applications and correspondence in English without a native speaker on staff. Research from the Academy of Sciences and the university could travel much further through AI-assisted translation into English and Turkish, reviewed by scholars before release. Museums and archives can photograph collections systematically and let recognition software propose catalogue tags for a curator to confirm. Subtitles, alt-text and audio versions then open all of it to blind readers and to the diaspora born.

Media: speed with a spine

Newsrooms gain the most mundane hours. Transcribing press conferences, translating copy between Russian, English and Turkish for an editor to polish, indexing decades of past reporting into a searchable archive: these are solved problems in the major languages that Apsnypress and its peers work in daily. Abkhaz subtitles on video output, checked by fluent staff, would return the language to screens where it is now largely absent.

The risks are just as concrete. Fabricated audio and video will reach the Abkhaz information space, if they have not already, and an outlet fooled once in a contested conflict pays for it for years. Quieter and slower is the erosion risk: the press historically set the written standard, and publishing raw machine Abkhaz normalises broken Abkhaz precisely where readers absorb what correct looks like. Unedited AI text in any language should be resisted for a simpler reason too. Readers can tell, and credibility is a small outlet’s only durable asset. Every newsroom needs a written rule covering disclosure of AI use, a ban on unedited machine text, and a requirement that no machine Abkhaz is published without review by a fluent editor.

Schools and the public square

In schools, teacher training comes before pupil-facing tools. A teacher who understands that these systems continue patterns rather than know things can use them well and, more valuably, teach children to distrust them intelligently. Sensible uses exist today: lesson preparation, differentiated exercises, marking support in Russian-medium subjects. One exercise almost designs itself. Set pupils to correct Google Translate’s Abkhaz, and the tool’s weakness becomes grammar practice and scepticism training at once.

The familiar cautions apply. Misinformation moves faster than corrections. Children’s data should not sit on foreign servers with no local recourse. Essays outsourced to a chatbot hollow out the very writing skills schools exist to build.

The sharpest danger is quieter than any of these. The phone is now the ground on which language competition is decided, and every convenient assistant, every voice interface, every autocomplete on that phone speaks Russian. A pupil in Gudauta who asks a chatbot for homework help gets a fluent Russian answer in seconds, and each exchange makes Russian a little more the language of thought. Unless Abkhaz keyboards, spell checkers and interfaces are built, taught and made the default, AI will deepen a drift that is already generations old. That, and no imagined robot future, is the real threat these tools carry into Abkhazian homes.

What to do, and who should do it

To the government

• This year: appoint a small language technology working group linking Abkhazian State University, the Academy of Sciences and the education ministry, with a published workplan, and place state-produced Abkhaz texts and recordings under open licences so corpus builders can use them legally.

• This year: begin systematic scanning of newspapers, records and library holdings. Scanning is cheap, and no page scanned is ever wasted.

• Long term: fund a national Abkhaz corpus of text, speech and aligned translation as public infrastructure; create a language-technology track with scholarships at the university; adopt data protection rules before any citizen-facing AI service goes live.

To NGOs and cultural institutions

• This year: record elderly speakers at good audio quality, with consent and safe storage, and transcribe existing Russian and Turkish interviews with current tools.

• This year: use AI drafting, always with human editing, for English language grant applications and correspondence.

• Long term: organise a coordinated Abkhaz recording drive on Common Voice with the diaspora federations in Türkiye, complete with targets and validation rotas.

To media organisations

• This year: adopt and publish an AI policy: disclose use, publish no unedited machine text, and publish no machine Abkhaz without fluent review.

• This year: transcribe and index the back catalogue so that decades of reporting become searchable in seconds.

• Long term: pool bilingual archives into a verified Abkhaz-Russian parallel corpus and release it openly. It would be the single most valuable dataset for improving machine translation of Abkhaz, and the media houses already own the raw material.

To individual readers

• Record and validate clips on Common Voice. An hour of your voice will outlast you.

• Install an Abkhaz keyboard and write publicly in Abkhaz. Every sentence posted is visibility today and training data tomorrow.

• Digitise family letters, photographs and papers, and offer copies to an archive.

• If you are a student with technical leanings, remember that one undergraduate put Abkhaz into Yandex Translate. The spell checker, the OCR system and the Abkhaz synthetic voice are gaps of the same size, and they are waiting.

None of this needs permission from anyone outside Abkhazia. The tools are cheap, the raw material sits in attics, archives and elderly voices, and the deadline is set by human lifespans, not by any technology cycle. The machine will not save Abkhaz. People might, and for the first time the machine can carry what they save

First published on AbkhazWorld.com

Originally published in the Georgian journal Moambe in 1895, this remarkable account by Konstantin Machavariani (Abu-kino), centred on his conversation with Murzakan Kodor-ipa, offers a contemporary perspective on Abkhazia, the Muhajirism, and the fate of the Abkhaz people. Originally written in Georgian, it has been translated into English by AbkhazWorld.

From My Diary
By Konstantin Machavariani (Abu-kino)

Published in Moambe, No. 9, 1895, pp.61-64

The cause of any people who forget their language and make no effort to preserve and develop it is a lost cause. Its future is death and extinction.

In Ochamchira, on the banks of the Galidzga River, Abu-kino met Murzakan Kodor-ipa, a friend from his youth.

Having heard that Murzakan had emigrated to Turkey, Abu-kino asked him to recount what he had experienced. After a long hesitation, Kodor-ipa began his story:

“Abkhazia lies on the eastern shore of the Black Sea, between the rivers Bzyb and Enguri. It covers an area of 7,269.55 square versts and is divided into four districts: Gudauta, Gumista, Kodori and Samurzakano.

Allow me one brief remark. Some believe that Samurzakano, which stretches from the Okhurei River to the Enguri, belongs to Mingrelia rather than Abkhazia. They are mistaken. Although the inhabitants of Samurzakano speak Mingrelian, they are, in fact, Abkhazians.

There is no need to cite countless documents to prove this. One need only examine the names and surnames of the indigenous inhabitants of the region to be convinced that they are genuine Abkhazians. Among them are the Emukhvaris, Shervashidzes, Marganias, Chkhotuas, Anchabadzes, Kvadzhs, Murzakans, Abzagus, Bazalas, Kvablukhos, Gedlachs, and many others.

This region is called Samurzakano because it was once the hereditary domain of Murzakan Shervashidze.

Today (1895), the total number of Abkhazians does not exceed fifty-two thousand. They now live only in three districts: Gudauta, Kodori and Samurzakano. Gumista has been left almost entirely deserted, its inhabitants having emigrated—some in 1867, others later. After the last war, virtually the whole of Abkhazia was emptied as its people departed for Turkey.

Even before a single shot had been fired, confusion and unrest had already spread throughout the country.

On 18 April, the twenty-two Cossacks stationed at the port of Gudauta, the only harbour between the Bzyb and Sukhum, were recalled to Sukhum. By this single order, the entire region was left without a single soldier, defenceless and exposed to marauders.

I must tell you that at the time Sukhum was garrisoned by the Third and Fourth Battalions, a regiment of Labin Cossacks, militia units and mountain artillery. Altogether, the force numbered no fewer than four thousand men. As I understood it, this was more than sufficient for General M. Kravchenko to meet the enemy honourably both at Gudauta and at Sukhum.

Instead, he withdrew his troops from Sukhum, moving them eight or nine versts away to the banks of the Machara River. Nor did he remain there. He retreated another thirty-five versts to Tsebelda.

Such unwarranted caution on the part of the commander was soon exploited by certain individuals, who spread rumours among the population that the Russians must already be in serious difficulty if they were abandoning their positions before the enemy had even appeared and retreating towards Georgia. If the enemy were to arrive, they said, the Russians would surely flee even farther.”

“On 28 April, two armoured vessels approached the settlement of Gudauta. The whole of Upper Abkhazia gathered there. As I have already said, there was not a single soldier present. The people had neither weapons nor leaders. You may have heard that several years earlier the Abkhazians had been disarmed. What were they expected to do? How were they supposed to fight an enemy? With their bare hands? With their teeth?

It is easy enough to say: ‘You should have fought. You should have died rather than surrender a single piece of your native land to the enemy.’

Yet the war had not even begun when Reshid Gech, a well-known prince of the Jikhs living beyond the Bzyb River, came to Sukhum and warned General Kravchenko:

‘We have learned that the Hünkâr (the Sultan of Turkey —Ed.) is preparing to wage war against us. The first attacks will undoubtedly fall upon our Black Sea coast, above all upon Sukhum. Therefore, either return our weapons to us or provide us with troops to defend us from the enemy.’

Kravchenko did not believe him and dismissed the outraged prince empty-handed.

The war began, and once again, my dear Abu-kino, the old truth proved itself anew: the weak are always blamed by the strong.

Responsibility for the so-called uprising in Abkhazia was placed not upon the inept and helpless chief shepherd who abandoned his flock to the wolves, but upon the flock itself, the Abkhazians.

It was not General Kravchenko who was blamed, but the indigenous Abkhazians living between the Bzyb and Galidzga rivers, who were accused of having shamefully surrendered the Black Sea coast without shedding blood.

As a result, Abkhazia was divided into two parts: the ‘guilty’ and the ‘innocent’. Those living between the Bzyb and Galidzga rivers were declared guilty, while those living between the Galidzga and Enguri were deemed innocent.

The latter retained hereditary rights to the lands they occupied and those allocated to them by government mediators. The former, however, were stripped of their hereditary rights. They were permitted only lifelong use of their plots as tenants and were denied the right either to lease them on a sharecropping basis or to sell them.

Our country is so rich and so desirable that people come here from every direction, seeking to establish themselves. There is no need to look far for proof. Just look at the lands once belonging to our Abkhazians and Circassians. Today Armenians, Czechs, Little Russians and others have settled here and prosper. Everyone is drawn to this land.

Many of these newcomers attempt, by both word and deed, to mislead the indigenous inhabitants into abandoning their homeland forever, so that they, or government officials, may settle in their place.”

From the correspondence of Antimoz Jugheli (Gadagmeli), “Abkhazia, 13 November”, Droeba, 1883, No. 240

The most notable development in Abkhazia at present is the settlement of the uninhabited areas here. After the last war, the principal directive was that Abkhazians were not to be allowed to settle on the lands between the rivers Kodori and Psyrtskha (Psyrpha — Ed.). Everyone else, however, was granted the right to settle there.

As Droeba’s readers were previously informed, people of various nationalities poured into the country, yet no one apart from our Imeretians, Mingrelians and Greeks was able to establish themselves on these lands. At present, seven or eight Mingrelian villages and three or four Greek villages have been founded around Sukhum.

Being Christians, these settlers, once they had arrived and established themselves, also began to attend to their spiritual needs and set about building churches. For example, today, in the village of Merkheuli, fourteen versts from Sukhum, beside the main highway, representatives of the local population and Archpriest Father D. Machavariani were invited to attend the consecration of a church.

In addition, in the village of Abzhakva, close to Sukhum, the Mingrelians are building a church of stone and lime at their own expense.

It is said that other newcomers are shown greater favour and receive more assistance. It is difficult to say with certainty how true this is. What we do know for certain is that other settlers are given up to fifteen chervonets to help with the initial establishment of their farms.

From Sergei Meskhi’s article “Abkhazians and Abkhazia”, Droeba, 1878, No.158

In this 1878 article, Sergei Meskhi reflects on Abkhazia, the suffering of the Abkhazians and Circassians, and the forced exile of Abkhazians to Turkey. Originally written in Georgian and published in Droeba, it has been translated into English by AbkhazWorld.

Sergei Meskhi (1845–1883) was a famous 19th-century Georgian writer, journalist, and public figure. He edited the progressive Droeba (”Time”) newspaper from 1869 to 1881.

Abkhazians and Abkhazia

Abkhazia, and indeed this entire stretch of the Caucasian coast of the Black Sea, is one of the most beautiful and richest corners of the earth. Nature has generously endowed this land... Yet, just as rich as this nature is, so unhappy and impoverished was the people who had lived here since ancient times... The Circassians and Abkhazians who lived here enjoyed the blessings of their country only to the extent necessary not to die of hunger...

It would take us too far to describe the historical conditions which caused these peoples, of excellent character, fine abilities, and generously gifted by nature, to remain almost in a state of barbarism; why they retreated into their mountain cliffs, hid in the forests, and for what reason they became estranged from urban and civic life...

The Abkhazians left behind their ancestral lands, their fields, mountains, forests and huts, and resettled in Turkey, where great misfortune and a life of suffering awaited them.

In the years 1864–1866, as is known and as was written at the time, more than 200,000 Circassians alone migrated to Turkey.

This year, according to official figures, 50,000 Abkhazians have left their country and resettled in Turkey...

Most of the Abkhazians who were placed on ships to be deported to Turkey wept and sobbed, stretching out their hands towards their native land. And when they were bidding farewell, they said: “Tell the Russian government that we are not leaving of our own free will; we are being taken away by force, and therefore let them regard us as prisoners of the enemy, but not as traitors...”

Mr Machavariani says that this people was forced to side with Turkey because it had no means of resisting the enemy.

There is no doubt that among this people there were those who were haunted by the thought of liberating Abkhazia, and for that reason turned away from Russia. But there is also no doubt that the overwhelming majority of Abkhazians were compelled, against their will, to take the side of the Turks, because they had no other path, no other means of defending themselves and their families...

A few days ago, our newspaper published an article by Mr Machavariani, in which the reader had the opportunity to learn how, under what conditions, and with what degree of coercion the deportation of the Abkhazians was carried out...

If this is so, then we must hope that our government will grant all Abkhazians who wish to return the right to come back and settle once again in their own country. Apart from considerations of humanity, this is demanded by justice, and even by practical interest, because there can be no doubt that peoples such as the Circassians and Abkhazians are better to have as friends than as enemies.

See also:

+ Three Extracts from the Georgian Newspapers Droeba and Iveria

+ Revelations of forgotten voices

+ Georgii Tsereteli (1879): It’s time that we grab new territories in the Caucasus

Walk through Sukhum today and you will come across a street sign that surprises most visitors: Scotland Street. It is not a whim of the town planners. It is the Abkhaz half of a friendship that has lasted forty years, and its Scottish counterpart sits far to the north-west, in a quiet public park in the Ayrshire town of Kilmarnock. There, for more than two decades, a small stone carried the Abkhaz flag and a short inscription remembering the people of Sukhum who died in the war of 1992 to 1993.

This is the story of that stone, and of the town that raised it.

A Soviet-era friendship

Kilmarnock and Sukhum became twin towns in the mid-1980s. The exact founding date is recorded a little differently depending on who is telling the story. The local council’s own accounts from the period date the link to December 1985, and note with some pride that Kilmarnock and Loudoun was the first Scottish local authority to twin with a Soviet area. Abkhaz officials remember the formal agreement being signed on 2 October 1986. Either way, the friendship began while the Soviet Union was still standing and Abkhazia was still an autonomous republic inside Soviet Georgia. The first mayors to bring the two towns together were Konstantin Bigvava in Sukhum and Thomas Ferguson in Kilmarnock.

Getting there took a little manoeuvring. According to Victoria Argun, a former assistant to the Sukhum mayor, the pairing was arranged through the Moscow society for friendship with foreign countries. Sukhum’s planners had hoped to twin with a town in the Basque Country. Tbilisi intervened in the talks, and Kilmarnock was offered as the alternative.

Whatever its origins, the link became a warm one. For years the two towns took turns visiting, one travelling out one year and hosting the next. Abkhaz delegations were shown around Kilmarnock and met not just the provost but ordinary councillors and residents, who turned up simply because they were curious about a small country most of them had never heard of. Sukhum’s schoolchildren wrote to Scottish pen pals about their lives and their homeland. When a large group of Scottish visitors came to Abkhazia, around forty of them, the pipers among them put on national dress and struck up an impromptu concert in the centre of Sukhum, drawing a crowd. Their hosts drove them out to the villages of Duripsh and Lykhny, where families laid long tables and everyone wanted a look at how the Scots lived.

War, and a flag handed over

The last easy visit came in August 1992, when a Sukhum delegation was in Kilmarnock for the town’s celebration of its 400th year. The visiting mayor presented Provost Danny Coffey with Abkhazia’s newly created flag. It was, the local paper noted, the first time the flag had been seen outside the country. Within days of the delegation returning home, war broke out between Abkhazia and Georgia.

Kilmarnock did not look away. The council launched a Sukhum Appeal on the last day of 1992 and set up a committee to gather money, tying its effort to a national UNICEF campaign. The sums were modest at first, a few hundred pounds, then they grew. Kilmarnock’s football supporters ran a raffle that raised more than £2,400. By the spring of 1994 the town had collected close to £10,000, with a further donation from Kilmarnock’s German twin, Kulmbach. When a Sukhum delegation returned in June 1994, led by Mayor Nodar Khashba, it brought photographs that spoke plainly of what had happened: burned bodies, rows of coffins, shelled buildings. The mayor told his hosts the city’s population had fallen from around 140,000 to 90,000, and that at least 600 orphans were now registered in the town.

There is a painful footnote to all this generosity. Argun recalls that the money Kilmarnock raised was sent through an international organisation and routed via Tbilisi, and that it never reached Abkhazia. The town gave what it could, in good faith. The blockade and the war did the rest.

The stone in Howard Park

In 1995, Kilmarnock did something almost no other place in the world was willing to do at the time. It put up a permanent memorial to Abkhazia’s war dead. The stone stood in Howard Park, near the town centre, bearing the Abkhaz flag, the years 1992 to 1993, and the words: “In memory of those from our twin town of Sukhum who died in the Abkhazian/Georgian conflict.”

Sukhum’s mayor at the time, Garri Aiba, himself a veteran of the war, travelled to Scotland for the unveiling. In return, Sukhum renamed one of its streets after Scotland. It is worth pausing on the timing. This happened when Abkhazia was recognised by no one and cut off almost completely from the outside world. A Scottish market town chose to name Abkhazia’s grief and to keep it in a public park, among its own memorials.

The years that followed were hard, and the visits grew fewer. But the letters kept coming. Officials on both sides say the two towns went on writing, marking each other’s holidays, keeping the thread intact through the leanest years.

Georgia’s objection, twenty-two years on

In November 2017 the stone became news again. The Georgian embassy in London, led by Ambassador Tamar Beruchashvili, pressed the British and Scottish authorities to remove it, objecting in particular to the Abkhaz flag and arguing that the memorial ran against UK policy on Georgia’s territorial integrity. The move fitted a wider Georgian strategy of challenging any sign abroad that treated Abkhazia as a country in its own right. Early that month the ambassador announced that the memorial had been taken down.

The reaction in Abkhazia was immediate. The Foreign Ministry called the removal an act of vandalism and set it alongside the burning of Abkhazia’s Institute of Language, Literature and History and the state archives during the war. Kan Taniya, then deputy foreign minister, launched a petition to save the stone that gathered close to 1,900 signatures. George Hewitt, Abkhazia’s honorary consul in the United Kingdom and a longtime advocate, threw his weight behind the campaign, calling it part of a pattern of Tbilisi shutting down any advertisement of Abkhazia’s existence.

What is often forgotten is that Georgian voices joined them. Jaba Devdariani, a former Georgian diplomat, called the ambassador’s push a rigid application of non-recognition policy that worked against reconciliation, and suggested she could have spoken at the memorial or placed a message of peace beside it rather than have it removed. A group of international specialists made a similar case, arguing that a war memorial should remind us of the cost of war, not be treated as a political banner.

East Ayrshire Council, which had inherited the memorial after a local government reorganisation in 1996, was caught in the middle. It described the Sukhum link as a friendship rather than a formal twinning, and it agreed to reinstate the stone, though with revised wording. That compromise satisfied few. Abkhaz officials replied that changing the inscription would empty the memorial of its meaning, which for them amounted to demolition by another name.

What the stone still says

Strip away the diplomacy and a simple fact remains. A small Scottish town looked at a small country in the Caucasus, at a moment when the wider world had turned its back, and decided its dead were worth remembering. It raised money it could barely be sure would arrive. It carved Abkhazia’s loss into stone and set it among its own monuments. When Sukhum answered with a street sign, the gesture was returned in kind.

The official label on the link has softened over the years, from twinning to friendship, and the fate of the stone itself has never been fully settled. But Scotland Street is still there in Sukhum, and the memory it points to has proved harder to remove than a piece of granite.

First published on AbkhazWorld