Journeying to Sukhum, one could almost feel like being in a normal country. Soon after leaving Gali, the road becomes much better. In fact, the road north of Gali is in the process of being re-asphalted. Maybe it will soon extend through Gali to the boundary. But if that happens, I suspect it will be because the Russians, the source of the lion’s share of Abkhazia’s budget, want a proper road for their military base at the boundary, not out of any sense of responsibility towards the Georgian inhabitants of Gali. The police-manned barriers along the road to Sukhum (all up, with no stops during my journey) are a rather intimidating reminder that this is not a normal country.
To an extent, life in Sukhum does seem rather routine. Visiting in July, the place is thronged with Russian tourists there for a seaside holiday. They perhaps give it a more bustling appearance than would be the case out of season. But since the expulsion of its Georgians, Sukhum is a much emptier place than it once was. Away from the seafront, the centre of tourist activity, and a few renovated streets in the town centre, there are lots of abandoned, derelict buildings, the still unhealed scars of the war. The government building, burned when the Abkhazian forces took Sukhum in September 1993, remains as it was, a burned out shell. Like many buildings, the railway station, a vast, typically Soviet structure, is gradually being taken over by greenery. Perhaps this has been the fate of sacked cities over millennia; a remaining, truncated population retreats to a few areas of the town, leaving the rest to collapse and return to nature.
Neal Ascherson described a visit to Abkhazia not long after the conflict in his brilliant book, Black Sea: The Birthplace of Civilisation and Barbarism. At that stage Sukhum was barely functioning, its officials working without pay, its ministers without proper doors to their offices. That is no longer the case. Government offices stand amid well-groomed parks; vehicles, complete with Abkhazian license plates (a crucial symbol for a new state), stop at traffic lights and are directed by traffic police; banks open and close. The place works.
It does better than just work. The seafront is really pleasant, a shady walk, flanked on one side by a mass of pink oleanders, eucalyptus, and palm trees. The lush green of Abkahzia’s sub-tropical climate is a great attraction. It is easy to see why so many Georgians speak wistfully of how much they miss Sukhumi. At one end of the promenade, near the president’s office, men sit in the shade of the oleanders, playing chess and other board games, drinking coffee. There is a special kind of coffee here, Turkish coffee with its own little quirk. The individual cezve coffee pots, filled with coffee and hot water, are pulled to and fro in a tray of burning hot sand until the mushy scum that forms on top just begins to rise and boil over. Once or twice a day I watch this ritual, before taking my little cup to sit under the oleanders, looking out at the sea.
Seeing the hordes of Russian tourists on the beaches, in the restaurants and coffee shops, I cannot help wondering whether this might not be the basis of a viable economy. Its other asset, its climate, is suitable for growing citrus and tropical fruits for export. Mandarins are ubiquitous; I did not, however, find freshly squeezed mandarin juice to be a pleasing substitute for orange juice. But no. In reality, Abkhazia depends on the Russian subsidy, and it is the Russians who run the place.
A visit to the Abkhazian foreign ministry, to pick up my visa, was instructive. I had made a note of the address, and there, sure enough, was a large official looking building. The foreign ministry, I thought. But no. The foreign ministry was just one short corridor up the stairs on the first floor. The building housed other ministries and government agencies as well. The finance ministry was situated on a similarly short corridor opposite the foreign ministry. On the foreign ministry corridor, there was an office with a couple of desks for the consular section, another room for protocol, one for information and so on. And just one lavatory, a gents. I guessed that the ladies’ was across the way, in the finance ministry. It brought home what a toy-town place Abkhazia is, recognised as independent only by Russia, Nicaragua, Venezuela and the Pacific island states of Nauru and Vanuatu (as well as South Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh and Transnistria, themselves not widely recognised).
Following the brief renewal of conflict over South Ossetia and the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, the Russian army took control of Abkhazia’s boundary. Many Abkhazians did not like it, and there was even some resistance. The degree of dependence on Russia is troubling to many Abkhaz. But they have no choice. This is not an independent country; its sovereignty is a sham. What the Russians intend in the longer term, whether the eventual goal might be the full incorporation in the Russian Federation, is hard to guess. Probably they are keeping their options open. Even before the 2008 conflict, a leading Georgian international affairs expert told me in Tbilisi that he did not believe Georgia would ever recover Abkhazia (South Ossetia, given its proximity to Tbilisi, was another matter). Yet most of the world continues to affirm its support for Georgia’s sovereignty in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. What must be especially unsettling for the Abkhaz is the thought that a future, post-Putin Russian government might one day change its policy, decide to improve its relations with the West and to normalise relations with Georgia.
For the time-being it is hard to see circumstances in which Abkhazia’s status vis-à-vis Georgia could be resolved. Despite Tbilisi’s attempts to sweeten the prospect of a return to the Georgian fold, including the offer extensive autonomy for Abkhazia, there is, for the present, no incentive for the Abkhazians to take up such offers as long as they enjoy Russian support. But their position is precarious, dependent on Moscow’s goodwill and its ongoing bad relations with Georgia.
It is easy to sympathise with the Abkhaz; subjected to ethnic cleansing by imperial Russia, to a colonial policy which saw their territory swamped by other nations, and to oppression and forced assimilation policies under the Georgians Stalin and Beria (Abkhazia’s longstanding Greek community was, like other Black Sea Greeks, transported into exile by Stalin, their place taken by inward Georgian migration). That Abkhaz were resentful is little wonder. Georgians have rarely shown much sensitivity to smaller peoples in territory they regard as their own. For many, Abkhazia is Georgian land, and that is all. In so far as they would be permitted to exist as a distinct people, Abkhaz feared they faced a future similar to that of the native Americans, living in villages in the hills, much like reservations, while most of Abkhazia was thoroughly Georgianised. Some Georgians do acknowledge the distress of the Abkhaz. One young woman in Tbilisi told me that, if she were an Abkhaz, she would not want to live in Georgia. Another Georgian admitted that the Abkhaz had been treated like second-class citizens during Soviet times.
As the Soviet Union broke up, the Abkhaz saw their opportunity, like other submerged nations, the Baltic peoples and the Georgians themselves, to escape such a fate. But the road they took meant the forcible expulsion of the Georgian population, another injustice that did not in any way erase the earlier injustices suffered by the Abkhaz, but rather compounded them. Of course, there are other examples of states founded upon the violent expulsion of people whose presence was undesirable. Israel springs to mind. But the Abkhazians are less likely to get away with it.
It need not have been so. Unfortunately at the time of the conflict, the government in Tbilisi was dominated by nationalists with no sense of any need to reassure the Abkhaz (or the South Ossetians) about their position in an independent Georgia, or to reach compromises with them. But what kind of future can there be for a state ruled by a people less than 100,000 strong, a minority in their own land, based on the expulsion of nearly half its population, and utterly dependent on a big neighbour whose future support cannot be relied upon? For now, the Abkhaz may see little reason to compromise. The Georgian government, powerless as it is at present to restore its rule in Abkhazia, is offering compromises. Abkhaz suspicions about its good faith are understandable, given the record, including the attempt to retake South Ossetia by force in 2008. The Georgians have a lot to prove. But a future as a fief of Putin’s Russia, based upon the denial of the fundamental rights of the Georgian expellees, cannot be a sound foundation for statehood.
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