The December edition of Eurasia Critic contains a quite extraordinary contribution, entitled: ‘Academy of Sciences of Georgia, Technical University of Georgia, Tbilisi State University and Tbilisi State Medical University 52 Professors: Petition'. Essentially it is a request to the international community (UN, OSCE, etc..) to act to restore Georgia's territorial integrity and return the refugees to their pre-displacement homes. To this extent there is nothing very remarkable about the document, but it requires comment for a number of reasons.
In the first place, one might have expected that the authors of a piece submitted for publication in an English-language journal would have taken the trouble to ensure that their text was distributed and/or published in decent English. Many might wonder why they should bother to struggle through something so unprofessionally presented. But, should they do so, what of the actual content?
Whilst readers might be expected to know something of the events and consequences of the wars in Abkhazia (14th August 1992 to 30th September 1993, under Eduard Shevardnadze's regime) and in South Ossetia (1990-1992, under Zviad Gamsakhurdia's regime; and, again, August 2008, under Mikheil Saak'ashvili's regime), they might be puzzled by some of the references. Who are the ‘Abashs' and ‘Svans'? What is behind the references to ‘Aphsuans/Abzuans'? Though the terms ‘Abkhazia' and ‘South Ossetia' appear (the latter twice placed in quotation-marks, though its first occurrence lacks them), why do we also find ‘Sukhumi and Tskhinvali Regions'? What lies behind the assertion that it was Russians who were guilty of ‘ethnic cleansing' of Georgians, which the petitioners allege to have taken place in the early 1990s?
In order to answer these questions we have to go back to the last years of the Soviet Union. From the end of 1988 an ugly chauvinism exploded in Georgia. One of its manifestations was a campaign against a number of the Soviet Republic's minorities, especially those with eponymous administrative regions, namely the Abkhazians in the Abkhazian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic and the Ossetians in the South Ossetian Autonomous District. Part of the campaign consisted of charges that these two peoples were not long-standing residents south of the Caucasian mountain-range (and ‘thus' - sc. according to Georgian logic - had no convincing territorial rights there). Though Ossetians, who descend from the Iranian-speaking Alans of earlier history, had certainly been present south of the mountains since the middle ages (and the late iranologist, Ilja Gershevitch FBA, told me before his death that, given the extent of the differences between the Ossetic spoken in North Ossetia and that spoken in South Ossetia, he was convinced that the split had taken place in pre-Christian times), charges were made (by Gamsakhurdia inter alios) that they only appeared on ‘Georgian' soil on the coat-tails of the Red Army in 1921. An extension of this argument was that the term ‘South Ossetia' was historically invalid, and so it became Georgian practice from those years to use the term ‘Samachablo' (Fiefdom of the Machabeli family) or ‘Shida Kartli' (Inner Kartli) to refer to the region in question, whose capital is Tskhinval(i) - hence the quotation-marks around the term. As for Abkhazia and the Abkhazians, it was impossible to ignore the historical fact of there having been such a region and people in north-west Transcaucasia for at least two millennia. But the late 1980s saw the resurrection of a fiction relating to the history of Abkhazia produced by one P'avle Ingoroq'va in the late 1940s to serve the Stalinist anti-Abkhazian policies of the day and to justify what seems to have been a plan to deport them to Siberia (as Stalin had done with many other inconvenient peoples from the late 1930s), a fate they escaped by a whisker. This pseudo-scholarly hypothesis argued, totally without historical justification, that the North-West-Caucasian-speaking Abkhazians, whose self-designation is ‘Apswa', arrived in Abkhazia from the North Caucasus as recently as the 17th century, replacing history's ‘true Abkhazians', who were speakers of the Georgian language, usurping not only the latters' territory but also the ethnonym applied to denizens of the region by Georgians and other external observers. Though I cannot be certain whom the authors of this petition have in mind when they speak of the ‘Abashs', I suspect it is the ‘Abasgoi', known to the ancient Greeks as a tribe resident in part of today's Abkhazia. Again I am not sure about the precise reference behind the term ‘North Caucasian Apzuas', but perhaps the authors mean the Abazinians, who live in the North Caucasian region of Karachay-Cherkessia and speak the most divergent of the Abkhazian dialects. If so, then we have to point out that the Abazinians moved TO the North Caucasus FROM Abkhazia in waves of migration starting in the 14th century, as acknowledged in volume 1 of the 11-volume Georgian Encyclopaedia. As for the Svans, these are speakers of a language related to Georgian (the four languages in this South Caucasian family being Georgian, Mingrelian, Laz and Svan) who live in the mountainous region of north-west Georgia known as Svaneti(a), which borders Abkhazia. Thus, whereas one might think that to use a people's self-designation is to honour and respect them, the use of ‘Apswa' by Georgians to refer to the people known to the rest of the world as ‘Abkhazians' is actually an insult, for it implies that they have no territorial claims to the republic of which they are the autochthonous inhabitants - the use of the term ‘Sukhumi Region' perhaps underlines this diminution of the right to any other title for the area, though the lack of quotation-marks might allow for the historical justification for such a toponym. This sort of talk was coupled in the late 1980s with oppositionist rallying cries of ‘Georgia for the Georgians!' and assertions that Georgia could accommodate only 5% of ‘guests'. The message was clear: ethnic groups perceived to be strangers on ‘Georgian' soil were not welcome in Georgia, and, if Georgia were to gain its independence, their physical survival would be in jeopardy. Such nonsense, thus, became one of the underlying causes of the wars imposed by Gamsakhurdia on S. Ossetia and by Shevardnadze on Abkhazia. Therefore, it is not only oxymoronic but also highly dangerous to be repeating such language 20 years on in a petition that talks of a peaceful resolution of the relevant inter-ethnic/territorial disputes.
The S. Ossetian and Abkhazian wars created a large number of refugees (though nowhere near the numbers that have been claimed for propaganda-purposes). The authors repeat the charges that have been repeatedly laid for the last 16 years that Abkhazia was ethnically cleansed of its ‘Georgian' (recte largely Mingrelian) residents. Whilst there were regrettable incidents of some ethnic killings, as the Abkhazians retook control of their capital (Sukhum), there was no official policy to drive out the Mingrelians. As made clear in a report by the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples' Organisation (UNPO) in the autumn of 1993, the vast majority of those who fled (and thus ethnically cleansed themselves) did so before any members of the victorious forces reached their settlements. By no means all of the Mingrelians left, and no objections have been raised to their staying in, or returning to, their homesteads in the south-easternmost Gal District. And a question that has received hardly any attention is the treatment meted out by the Svans to those of their Mingrelian cousins who chose to exit Abkhazia via Svanetia. No mass-return to other districts has been countenanced, given the greater allegiance of the group concerned to Tbilisi (Georgia) than to the government in Sukhum. The accusation that Russians were responsible for the alleged ethnic cleansing hides a further, but unspoken, suggestion that Georgia lost the war because it was the Russians who fought and won it on behalf of the Abkhazians, which insults the memory of those who laid down their lives for the Abkhazians' right to self-determination.
After the further hatreds sown as a result of Saak'ashvili's insane decision to attack S. Ossetia in August 2008, and after the final expulsion on 12th August from the Upper K'odor Valley of the military forces illegally introduced into this part of Abkhazia by Saak'ashvili in the spring of 2006, and after the recognition by Russia of the independence of both S. Ossetia and Abkhazia on 26th August 2008, the final nail has been driven into the coffin of Georgia's claims to these territories, and there is no point wasting further time discussing a return of Georgia's territorial integrity within the frontiers set for it by the republic's most (in)famous son, Joseph Stalin. If more refugees are ever to be allowed to return to Abkhazia (since emotions are more raw in S. Ossetia, no predictions can be made about Georgians returning there), this is likely to occur ONLY in conditions of widescale recognition of Abkhazia's independence (ideally by Georgia itself in the first instance) coupled with guarantees by the international community that no further threat to that independence will be tolerated.
Readers of Eurasia Critic might care to take these observations into account when deciding what value to place on the Petition that occasioned them.