Tthe border between Georgia and Abkhazia is curiously desolate. A long, wide bridge crosses a narrow river that has almost dried up.
There is almost more water on the bridge than below. And since the bridge is in no man’s land between the homeland and the separatist republic, no one is responsible for its maintenance. With each passing year, the potholes of the asphalt become deeper.
Behind me followed a wrapper of women dressed in black, all heavy with carrying bags loaded with Georgian products. From time to time, a car with the logo of some international aid organization would slip across the bridge. We passed three thin horses pulling a cart of people who had paid not to have to cross anyone’s land on foot.
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I reached the three or four huts that made up the passport control and waited in line. It is not particularly difficult for foreigners to get an entry visa to Akbhazia, just remember to register on the official government website a few weeks in advance. But something had gone wrong with my online registration as I did not receive confirmation until my entry visa had almost expired. As a result, I only had two days to visit the separatist republic.
“As soon as you get to Sukhumi, you have to go to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and get an exit visa,” the passport officer told me. “Otherwise, we can’t let you out again.”
I promised to do what he said, I put my passport back in my bag and went into Akbhazia. The first time I went there was with my mother, five years before. By then, the border had felt ominous and terrifying. The very polished cars had stopped side by side, the windows had fallen and the money had changed hands. Overall, people seemed unfriendly, almost hostile, but we finally found a driver who could take us to Sukhumi, the capital. The rugged, underground road took us past bombed-out ghost towns; the swollen corpses of cattle stretched into the ditches. The warning from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs kept ringing in my head: “The Ministry advises against any travel to the separatist republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.” I imagined the worst, but I didn’t dare say anything to my mother, as it was I, after all, who had suggested the rather unorthodox holiday destination.
To what extent can we trust our memory? Again, I asked myself this question when I left my passport control and headed to the parking lot. The area that had seemed so bleak the previous time felt very ordinary, almost insignificant, under the February sun. I went to the minibus row, found one going to Sukhumi and got myself a seat. The driver neglected to say that he intended to stop for half an hour in the nearest town, but bought me a coffee. After all, I was a stranger and a guest.
However, the view from the window was just as she remembered it. We passed burned buildings, abandoned villages and factories that had not operated since the Soviet era. Everything was covered and neglected, and the roads were in a terrible state: they had been badly patched and full of potholes.
In terms of area, Abkhazia is twice as large as South Ossetia, and is about the same size as Lebanon, which is not the only one the two countries have in common. As in Lebanon, people of many different ethnicities lived side by side in peace before murder began and war became the norm. The landscape is similar too; on the coast, it is green and fertile, with beaches and hotels, but the snow-capped mountains with their slopes and ski resorts are a short drive away. Before the war, nearly half a million people lived in Abkhazia, twice as many as they do now.
“Abkhazia was a paradise,” said Giorgi Jakhaia, when I met the blogger in Tbilisi before going to Abkhazia. He had escaped when he was eighteen, in the last weeks of the 1993 war. “Everyone was happy, everyone had a home and a job, and no one had to worry about tomorrow,” Georgi said. “All the rich in the Soviet Union lived in Abkhazia. They lived the high life and drove for their Suzukis, although no one in the Soviet Union was supposed to own such expensive cars. If it weren’t for the war, Abkhazia would be like Monaco or Monte Carlo today! ”
Ethnic Abkhazians are related to Kabardians and Cherkessians in the North Caucasus, but have lived alongside Georgians for more than a thousand years. During the war of independence in the early 1990s, the Russians supported them militarily and Russia is now the ally and closest partner of the separatist republic. But it was not always so. In the 19th century, the Abkhazians were much more opposed to the Russians than the Georgians. The Abkhazians sided with the Cherkessians north of the mountains, and many took part in the fight against the Russian army. In 1864, when after decades of war the Russians had crushed any resistance in the Caucasus, the collective punishment for the Cherkessians was exile to the Ottoman Empire. Several hundred thousand Cherkessians and Abkhazians were crammed into excessive ships and sent across the Black Sea, and another couple of hundreds of thousands had to flee. Many of them died and the Black Sea coast was left empty and abandoned.
In the following years, the remaining Abkhazians repeatedly rebelled against the Russians, which in turn led to further deportations and the introduction of a new law banning Abkhazians from living on the coast. or in larger cities and towns. This law remained in force until 1907. Georgians, Greeks and Armenians moved to the deserted Abkhazian villages. Then, in the early 1930s, the dreaded Lavrenty Beria was put in charge of the South Caucasus region. Beria, himself a Mingrelian, a minority Georgian people, had been born in Abkhazia and made it possible for even more Georgians to move there. In 1939, the number of Abkhazians was as low as eighteen percent of the total population, and this figure remained stable until the dissolution of the Soviet Union. About half the population, that is, forty-five percent, was Georgian.
Under Gorbachev, the division between the Abkhazians and the Georgians grew. While the Georgians fantasized about independence, the Abkhazians wanted to continue to be part of the Soviet Union, preferably as a separate Soviet republic and not as part of Georgia. In the spring of 1989, several thousand Abkhazians signed a declaration demanding the establishment of a separate Abkhazian Soviet Socialist Republic. This provoked the Georgians and thousands of people protested against the proposals. Tensions grew and on April 9 the Soviet army rolled in Tbilisi to calm things down. Twenty-one people died and several hundred were injured. Nine months later, Soviet soldiers marched on Baku and only worsened there.
In April 1991, Georgia declared independence from the Soviet Union. The Abkhazians, on the other hand, worked to maintain the union. By granting the Abkhaz a generous proportion of seats in the Abkhaz parliament, at the expense of Armenians and Georgians, Tbilisi politicians managed to calm things down, at least for a while. In February 1992, the Georgian parliament decided to reintroduce the constitution from 1921, which makes no mention of an autonomous Abkhazia, Ossetia or Adjara. In response, the Abkhazians reintroduced the 1925 constitution in July of that year, which did recognize Akbhazia as a union republic. In other words, the Abkhaz parliament declared its independence from Georgia. The answer was not long in coming: on August 14, Georgian tanks moved to Sukhumi. The Georgian army, which consisted in part of newly released prisoners, lacked discipline and soldiers assaulted, raped and looted. The Abkhazians received the support of the Confederation of Mountain Peoples of the Caucasus, which dreamed of a free Caucasus, and eventually also obtained arms from Russia.
Georgia would lose a lot. A quarter of a million ethnic Georgians lived in Abkhazia and the region covered about half of the country’s coast in the Black Sea. The war, which barely made headlines in the West, was a succession of horrific incidents on both sides and culminated in attacks and uprisings, marked by fleeting ceasefires that were broken again and again. When Abkhazian forces took control of Sukhumi in September 1993, the remaining Georgians fled the city in panic, to avoid chaos.
“On September 27 we left Sukhumi on a Ukrainian warship,” Giorgi Jakhaia told me. “It simply came to our notice then that Sukhumi had fallen. It happened that same day. Not everyone was as lucky as us and many had to flee over the mountains. The snow arrived early that same year and hundreds of refugees died frozen as they passed through the mountain pass. We were accommodated in a hotel in Tbilisi, the current Holiday Inn. Almost all Tbilisi hotels became temporary accommodation for refugees from Abkhazia. We lived in that hotel room for ten years. ”
At least eight thousand people lost their lives. With the exception of a few thousand who lived in the Gali district, near the border with Georgia, all Georgians left Abkhazia. Since then, some 50,000 Georgians from Gali have returned home, but more than 200,000 Georgian refugees still live elsewhere. Many of them are in temporary refugee centers and their lives remain at a standstill. “I dream of going back to Sukhumi one day,” says Giorgi, who often posts photos of ancient Abkhazia on his blog. “It’s the most beautiful place on earth.”
With permission from The Border: A trip around Russia through North Korea, China, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Norway and the Northeast Passage ‘Erika Fatland. Courtesy of Pegasus Books.