Forgotten Abkhazia: Anatomy of Post-Socialist Ethnic War

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Subject: Forgotten Abkhazia: Anatomy of Post-Socialist Ethnic War

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Forgotten Abkhazia: Anatomy of Post-Socialist Ethnic War


http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~ponars/POLICY%20MEMOS/Derluguian163.html
Program on New Approaches to Russian Security
Policy Memo Series
Series Editor: Erin Powers
 
-------------------------------------------------------------

Memo No. 163
PONARS, 2000

The Forgotten Abkhazia: Anatomy of Post-Socialist Ethnic War
Georgi Derluguian

Northwestern University - November 2000

Local wars in the Caucasus have always tended to follow precedents -
whether in the 19th century, in 1917-21, or in the period of 1989-94.
It remains uncertain whether the NATO operation in Kosovo or the
second Chechen war within a decade will induce new wars in Karabakh,
Abkhazia and elsewhere, but it is clear that the region's many
conflicts have not ended in any durable solution.

The conventional explanation for such conflicts stresses the
combination of local ancient hatreds and Moscow's secret meddling. I
argue that this explanation is both incorrect and an impediment to
finding a durable, peaceful solution. After all (it is argued), there
is nothing to be done if the hatreds are so ancient, and Russia, as
any state faced with similar problems, can surely be expected to
continue "meddling" in its Caucasian underbelly. To reframe these
inherently pessimistic assumptions, let us revisit the background and
the typical arguments or presumed "facts" one hears from the opponents
in the Abkhazia conflict. This is by no means a pedantic exercise.
Abkhazia's troubles are structurally similar to other smoldering
separatist conflicts throughout the Caucasus and the Balkans. By
getting the record straight with Abkhazia, we may gain a better
understanding of Karabakh and Kosovo, as well.

Geography
Abkhazia consists of about 250 kilometers of gorgeous winding beaches
and densely green valleys climbing to the snowy peaks of the Caucasus
towering in the background. In the 20th century, Abkhazia was
transformed into one of the best vacation spots on earth. The resorts
and the agricultural hinterland of Abkhazia were exceptionally
precious, for within the immense confines of the USSR, after all,
there were very few moderately humid sub-tropical locales.

The real estate value of Abkhazia brought the blessing of exceptional
wealth during the 1950s-80s, the times of late Soviet prosperity, but
it also caused the curse of seemingly perpetual devastation after the
collapse of Soviet order in the early 1990s.

Linguistics, Archeology, and Ethno-Genetics 
Linguistically and anthropologically, the native Abkhazians belong to
the North Caucasian group of peoples also comprised of the Adyghs
(Adygeis, Circassians, Kabardins) and, more distantly, the Vainakhs
(Chechens and Ingushes) and most Daghestanis. The distant ancestors of
North Caucasian peoples have inhabited the valleys of the North
Caucasus apparently since the late Stone Age. The nationalists, of
course, would take (or vituperously contest) this scholarly theory as
political argument directly related to presumed historical rights. Yet
all it really says is that the mountain environment was so
inaccessible and poor that historical migrations and conquests
bypassed the Caucasus ridge, which resulted in durably isolated
languages and genetic pools.

History and Culture
A manifestation of durable isolation is the easy-going religious
syncretism of Abkhazians. The majority of Abkhazians remained
essentially pagan believers under the thin veneer of mixed
Christianity and Islam. Today, as I have observed myself, sacred
groves are still frequented for the annual sacrificial feasts, and the
dead are buried after long periods of funerary rites in the backyard
rather than in cemeteries. I have heard common Abkhazians ridiculing
the Muslim zeal displayed by the volunteers from Chechnya and the
Middle East who in 1992 rushed to defend Abkhazia's independence
against the Christian Georgians. After the quiet departure of the
foreign volunteers, the mosques they built remain abandoned.

According to textbooks, Abkhazia became part of the Russian empire in
1810 when a particular branch of Abkhazian princely lineage swore
vassalage to the Tsar. But the 19th century situation is sufficiently
documented to make it clear that the Russian in Abkhazia was a
squarely diplomatic fiction until the final military defeat of the
independent highlander communities of the Caucasus in 1864.

Demographics
In 1864 the sweeping push of Russian armies towards the Black Sea
provoked among highlanders an apocalyptic panic that led to a mass
exodus across the sea into Ottoman lands (now Turkey, Syria, Jordan,
and even Kosovo.) As much as one half to perhaps three quarters of
Abkhazians abandoned their native land. The bitterness of exile
instilled among the North Caucasian mahajeers (Muslim refugees fleeing
from the infidels) a pro-Turkish, militantly Islamic identification
directed against the Russian conquerors. The current ethnic wars in
Abkhazia, Chechnya, and in the former Yugoslavia forcefully revived
these feelings. Today almost three million people in Turkey claim to
be the descendants of Abkhazians, Circassians, and Chechens.

In the meantime, the Abkhazians who remained in their homeland grew
very pro-Russian, which more than bemused the diaspora volunteers as
they rushed in 1992 to recover the land of their ancestors. Invariably
the diaspora nationalisms tend to presume their ethnic cradles a
repository of untainted national culture. But in the last century,
Abkhazia underwent profound changes that made the Abkhazians an ethnic
minority of 17% whose special status in the face of a Georgian
majority of around 45-50% could be secured only by the
counterbalancing factor of Russian state interests. Abkhazian popular
memory, therefore, downplays the effects of Russian conquest.

What Really Is in Popular Memory of Past Conflicts?
Before 1917 the Russian administration had two objectives in Abkhazia
- to create a revenue base by encouraging the introduction of
cash-crop plantations (citrus fruits, tobacco, and tea) and in a
related effort, placate the restless peasantry of western Georgia with
land grants in Abkhazia. Despite the land reclamation and resettlement
into frontier territories like Abkhazia, the rapid development of a
monetized economy, cash-crop plantations and accelerating population
growth by the beginning of the 20th century significantly worsened the
plight of peasantry throughout the Caucasus. When in 1905 and again in
1917 the Russian state experienced revolutionary breakdowns, the
social pressures erupted all over in the form of rural revolts, land
seizures, and banditry. In a multiethnic environment the agrarian
unrest evolved into numerous ethnic confrontations involving various
sub-groups of Georgians, Azeris, Armenians, Ossets, and Abkhazians.

The complexities of demography, land tenure and the revolutionary
politics of the time became totally incomprehensible to the Caucasian
men and women who grew up in the radically different atmosphere of
Soviet times. The historical memory of Caucasian peoples, imperfectly
preserved in family lore and eventually shaped by modern national
intellectuals, could only say about the dreadful events of 1905 and
1917-1921 "they were killing us," but, of course, this crude
simplification was repeated with enormously emotional belief. When the
Soviet state began breaking down in the late 1980s, the traumatic
memories became actualized and consciously reenacted under new and
quite different historical circumstances.

It is utterly wrong to follow the local nationalists, however numerous
and vociferous, in claiming that the recent conflicts were just the
reemergence of age-old hatreds. Under normal circumstances the
micro-conflicts (of which the macro-conflicts consist) would find
resolution in daily life - even if that, in particularly dire
instances, might involve the police. The impression of history
repeating itself is produced by two factors:
1) the culturally-driven rationalization of all kinds of conflict
along the lines of traumatic historical memory; and
2) the path-dependent institutionalization of ethnicity by modern
national states.

The Soviet Union and socialist Yugoslavia offered poignant examples of
the institutionalization (originally quite successful) of troublesome
ethnicities in the framework of federal republics. This framework
became unmanageable and destructive when the socialist states
attempted limited liberalization and market reforms in response to
their declining legitimacy and the looming bankruptcy of previous
industrialization efforts.

Politics
The presumably irrational ethnic violence is commonly blamed on
imperfections in character, class structures, and institutions of
Eastern Europeans. Overlooked is the centrality of the League of
Nations with its perfectly liberal and legalistic discourse in
sponsoring the nationalist warfare on the ruins of the Hapsburg,
Ottoman and Russian empires. In 1919 the Great Powers set three
standard conditions to be met within one year by the newly created
nation-states. The three conditions were: 1) historical rights; 2)
cultural belonging of the populations, if necessary, decided in
plebiscites; and 3) effective occupation. The first clause prompted
the new regimes to create the committees of national historians and
ethnographers whose patriotic findings supply the most nationalist
ammunition to this day. The second and especially the third condition,
the demand of effective occupation, sent the aspiring national states
scrambling to hoist their flags and install their garrisons in as many
contested areas as possible before the deadline and the looming
plebiscites. To compensate for the severe shortage of regular troops,
local militias and irregulars of all sorts were recruited and armed in
the process. The results were expectedly bloody.

Everywhere - in Karabakh, Adjaria, Southern Ossetia, and in Abkhazia -
the arrival of nationalist armed forces exacerbated the local
ethnically-colored agrarian conflicts and led to outright massacres.
The Abkhazian militias sought an alternative source of weapons via the
Russian Bolsheviks. Abkhazia became autonomous within the Georgian
Soviet Socialist Republic as its reward.

In 1936 Lavrenti Beria, then Party First Secretary of Georgia,
launched the "Georgianization" of Abkhazia with his trademark
organizing vigor and ruthlessness. Large numbers of Georgian
collective farmers and specialists were transferred to Abkhazia as
part of a campaign against backwardness. Meanwhile the Abkhazian
language, which only a decade earlier acquired its own alphabet, was
replaced with the Georgian language in official usage, and the nascent
Abkhazian intelligentsia was decimated in purges. This falls into the
late 1930s Stalinist trend to reduce the roster of national autonomies
to a more manageable number and eliminate along the way virtual
fiefdoms like Abkhazia. But the fact that both Stalin and Beria were
ethnic Georgians was missed in neither Abkhazia nor in Georgia.

After 1953 the surviving Abkhazian intelligentsia and party cadres
exploited the death of Stalin and the execution of Beria to reverse
the tide. The ethnic demographics were changed irreversibly but the
Abkhazian leaders successfully urged Khrushchev to resume state
sponsorship of Abkhazian culture and affirmative action in university
admissions and administrative promotions favoring the titular
nationality. Unsurprisingly enough, this provoked resentment among the
local Georgians.

Normally such tensions would be contained by the bureaucratic
procedures and the constraints imposed by official Soviet discourse on
nationalities. But Georgia boasted a vibrant civil society centered
around a highly regarded artistic and professorial intelligentsia
whose lineages reached back to the inordinately large and ambitious
petty nobility of pre-socialist times. From 1956 to 1989, the unruly
Georgia was no less Moscow's headache than Poland. Each cycle of
protest left in its wake newly actualized practices, and ever-wider
networks and conciliatory political arrangements which ensured the
recurrence of further protests. As long as the Soviet state remained
functioning in the low-repression mode, the cycle of protest evidently
offered a valuable bargaining opportunity for Georgian and Abkhazian
officials. They were conniving, almost openly, with dissidents and
crowds. The escalating cycles of protest regarding Abkhazia's status
took place every decade: in the late 1950s, the late 1960s, in
1978-79, and in December 1988.

Ironically, it was at the pinnacle of Gorbachev's democratization that
Moscow finally resolved to use coercion instead of the usual
gratuitous pacification of Georgian-Abkhazian ritualized clashes. In
April 1989 nineteen protestors died in Tbilisi, most of them women.
Tbilisi's shovel massacre initiated the first anti-Communist
revolution of 1989. Over one single tragic night the legitimacy of
Georgia's Communist party was destroyed and the mercurial nationalist
dissident Zviad Gamsakhurdia suddenly became the likely contender for
state power.

Revolution and War
The Abkhazian population of less than one hundred thousand felt
beleaguered by the five million Georgians and the republic's
prospective independence. In the disarray, the organizing of Abkhazian
countermobilization passed to the younger and less inhibited
generation of national nomenklatura. They pursued two goals: 1) to
preserve the Soviet-era ethnic quota system, which prevented the local
Georgians from scoring an automatic majority in the Abkhazian
parliamentary elections; and 2) to recruit external allies among
Russians and Chechens simultaneously.

The compactness of the Abkhazian population made its political
mobilization relatively easy. By contrast, the emerging political
scene of Georgia was plagued by extreme fragmentation reminiscent of
feudal patrimonial feuds. In January 1992, after Gamsakhurdia was
toppled by his erstwhile allies (apparently helped by Yeltsin), Eduard
Shevardnadze was called to sort out the Georgian mess. Shevardnadze
eventually achieved a degree of pacification, but not before Djaba
Ioseliani and Tengiz Kitovani, the two picturesque warlords who
brought him to power, disgraced themselves with military defeat in
Abkhazia.

The origins and the course of the 1992-93 war are shrouded in dark
mysteries. But there can be no doubt that the Abkhazians were aided by
the Russian military. The Chechen detachment of Shamil Basayev
received its training on the former dacha of Khrushchev in Pitsunda,
which still belongs to the Russian presidential administration. The
motives and the institutional movers of Russian covert aid are less
clear. Journalists suggested reasons ranging from sophisticated
geostrategic calculations to purported revenge against Shevardnadze,
whom the Russian generals accused of selling East Germany to NATO.

As with all conspiracy theories, the major point of doubt is the
assumption of a unified actor capable of long-term calculations under
conditions of radical uncertainty, along with the seamless execution
of plans. Either the acts of Moscow were guided by a secret genius
enforcing a devilishly complicated plan, or the events followed a
chaotic trajectory consisting of myriad contradictory acts and
motivations that in the end benefited Moscow.

In the end, the Abkhazians, just like the Karabakh Armenians, scored
victory by benefiting from the combination of stronger popular
mobilization (due to acute feelings of national danger), disarray in
the enemy camp, and covert Russian aid. Abkhazian war leaders
exploited the chaos in Moscow in late September to early October 1993
(the days when Yeltsin was fighting the Supreme Soviet). Realizing
that it would be impossible to control predominantly
Georgian-population areas, they apparently resolved there should be no
population at all. Ethnic cleansing has its own perverse logic - a
simple maximization of return on effort.

Policy Recommendations

History. The long history of inter-ethnic conflict in Abkhazia does
not mean it is fueled by the mysterious vitality of ancient hatreds.
As in other so-called "ethnic" conflicts it is rather a specific
cumulation of feudal and ecclesiastic politics - the ways in which
early modern empires consolidated their rule over multi-ethnic realms,
the agrarian revolts induced by the breakdown of empires, and the
ill-considered decisions of the League of Nations. At fault most
recently are the longer-term conflictual trends that resulted from the
initial success of communist nationality policies. In a nutshell, we
must revamp historical education and actively intervene in reframing
popular perception. History is too important a political factor to be
left to local nationalist intellectuals.

State-Building. The modern cycles of violence in the Caucasus and the
Balkans are clearly pegged to cycles of state creation and breakdown.
It is therefore vital to create new states in the area. But new states
must not be national and nationalizing - in stark contrast to what has
been the dominant trend and ideology of recent decades. Inventing the
particular patterns of non-national state-building is the main
challenge. Yet it is clear this will not happen without integrating
the troublesome zones of the Balkans and the Caucasus into much larger
entities, possibly the European Union or a renewed, market-based
Russian sphere. In turn, the shape and the outlook of the newest
Russian empire will depend on the character of Russia's integration
into the world system.

Economy. The noisy boom occurring in Sochi, across the Russian border
from desolate Abkhazia, suggests the likely takeover by new Russian
capital. Once the Russian blockade of Abkhazia is lifted and the scene
is sufficiently stabilized, we may see latter day Russian
carpetbaggers rushing to the region. In itself this is not evil, but
this process cannot be left to run its own course, for the
consequences would likely be disruptive of any tenuous peace and
renewed Abkhazian-Georgian coexistence. 

Demographics. The immediate conclusion is stark: the return of
Georgian refugees to Abkhazia cannot be an immediate goal, and from
the beginning was a wrong policy priority. The real priority is the
establishment of lawful authority capable of enforcing law and order.
Since very little trust exists between Abkhazians and Georgians and
the prospects for an effective state are remote, refugees will
continue to suffer in exile. Long-term adaptation to exile may be a
more humane approach.


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