Neal Ascherson's: The Black Sea

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The Black Sea
By: Neal Ascherson on: 30.08.2008 [17:07 ] (1057 reads)
   

More than half the population of Sukhum had fled, during the thirteen months between the arrival of Georgian troops in August 1992 and the town's recapture by the Abkhazians. Sukhum had been shelled and bombed, attacked by aircraft with rockets and finally taken by storm. Many of the remaining Greeks were evacuated to Greece in 'Operation Golden Fleece', when a ship brought them off from Sukhum harbour in the middle of the war. An aircraft came from Israel to rescue the Jews. Almost all the Georgian and Mingrelian inhabitants abandoned their homes and followed the retreating Georgian forces, or were chased out by the Abkhazians and their ferocious allies as they reoccupied Sukhum.

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The Black Sea
by Neal Ascherson
Chapter 10

Reprinted with the Author's Permission
Published by Jonathan Cape, Random House,
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London, SWIV 25A

"The law-abiding town, though small and set
On a lofty rock, outranks mad Nineveh."

--Phocylides, quoted by Dio Chrysostom in 'Borysthenica'

The old Irish term for province is coicead, meaning a 'fifth', and yet, as everyone knows, there are only four geographical provinces on this island. So where is the fifth? The fifth province is not anywhere here or there, north or south, east or west. It is a place within each one of us - that place which is open to the other, that swinging door which allows us to venture out and others to venture in.

Mary Robinson, President of the Irish Republic, on signing the Declaration of Office in Dublin Castle, 3 December 1990

In August 1992, a small, savage war broke out on the shores of the Black Sea between Abkhazia and Georgia. It ended, just over a year later, with the defeat of the Georgian forces led in person by President Edward Shevardnadze and the emergence of a precariously independent Republic of Abkhazia.

Human settlement around the Black Sea has a delicate, complex geology accumulated over three thousand years. But a geologist would not call this process simple sedimentation, as if each new influx of settlers neatly overlaid the previous culture. Instead, the heat of history has melted and folded peoples into one another's crevices, in unpredictable outcrops and striations. Every town and village is seamed with fault-lines. Every district displays a different veining of Greek and Turkic, Slav and Iranian, Caucasian and Kartvelian, Jewish and Armenian and Baltic and Germanic.

An ancient 'multi-ethnic' community is a rich culture to grow up in. Bosnia was once like that. So was Odessa before the Bolshevik Revolution, or Vilnius, in Lithuania, before the Second World War. The symbiosis of many nationalities, religions and languages in one place has always appealed to foreign visitors, and never more than in today's epoch of nationalist upheaval. But nostalgia makes bad history. The symbiosis has often been more apparent than real.

Living together does not mean growing together. Different ethnic groups may co-exist for centuries, practising the borrowing and visiting of good neighbours, sitting on the same school bench and serving in the same imperial regiments, without losing their underlying mutual distrust. But what held such societies together was not so much consent as necessity - the fear of external force. For one group to assail or attempt to suppress another was to invite a catastrophic intervention from above - the despatch of Turkish soldiers or Cossacks - which would pitch the whole community into disaster.

It follows that when that fear is removed, through the collapse of empires or tyrannies, the constraint is removed too. Power struggles in distant places, to which one group or another feels an allegiance, reach the village street. Democratic politics, summoning unsophisticated people to pick up sides and to think in terms of adversarial competition, smite such commuities along their concealed splitting-plane: their ethnic divisions. And, often reluctantly at first, they divide. The familiar neighbours, with their odd-smelling food and the strange language they speak at home, become part of an alien and hostile 'them'. Antique suspicions, once confined to folk-songs and the kitchen tales of grandmothers, are synthesised into the politics of paranoia.

All multi-ethnic landscapes, in other words, are fragile. Any serious tremor may disrupt them, setting off landslides, earthquakes and eruptions of blood. The peoples themselves know this, and fear it. But nationalism, when it breaks out around the Black Sea, is usually a plague which has arrived from somewhere else, and against that plague there is no known serum. This was the fate of Abkhazia.

The little region of coast and mountains, stretching from he Russian border at Sochi in the north down to the Inguri River in the south, was precisely one of those mingled Black Sea societies. The Abkhazians themselves, speaking a pre-Indo-European language, were already there when the first Greek colonists arrived in the sixth century BC. But by 1992 they had become a minority in their own land, less than 20 per cent of the population. Russians, Pontic Greeks, Armenians and mirants from the northern Caucasus had all settled in Abkhazia during the nineteenth century, while the biggest single group of inhabitants - 45 per cent - was Georgian, or rather Georgian-Mingrelian.

They were relatively recent immigrants. After 1864, when Russia annexed this part of the Caucasus, many Moslem Abkhazians fled into the Ottoman Empire. Their lands were taken by Christian Mingrelians from across the Inguri River in Georgia, a process which continued fitfully until 1949 when Mingrelians were compulsorily moved into Abkhazia to take over the farms and houses left by the deported Pontic Greeks. Here began a resentment which was soon to seem ancestral. While the Abkhazians speak a north Caucasian language, the Mingrelians belong to the Kartvelian linguistic family which also includes Georgian, Svanetian and Lazuri. To the Abkhazian villagers, the Mingrelian presence seems to convey an unspoken threat. There were only about half a million people in all Abkhazia, while Georgia had five million. After the Revolution, Abkhazia had been declared a full republic of the Soviet Union, but in 1931 Stalin - the great Georgian - had demoted the land to a mere 'autonomous republic' within Georgia.

The first shocks which began to release the landslide came with Georgia's move towards independence between 1989 and 1991. Georgian nationalists, obsessed with the danger of Russian interference, took a harsh line towards their own non-Kartvelian minorities. In South Ossetia, where descendants of the Sarmatian Alans live, there was fighting. In the summer of 1989, the Georgian government decreed that a branch of the University of Tbilisi should be set up in Sukhum, the Abkhazian capital, alongside the recently established University of Abkhazia. This provoked student riots, which soon spread into ethnic street battles in Sukhum and the southern town of Ochamchira.

Under the pressure of distant events in Tbilisi and Moscow, the whole social structure of Abkhazia began to buckle. The Soviet Union itself fell apart in 1991. Civil war broke out in Georgia. The Abkhazian leaders opened discussions with other northern Caucasian peoples about forming a confederation and a military alliance, and declared that they wished to restore the semi-independence of 1920s. Then, in August 1992, Georgian forces attacked and occupied Sukhum. The Georgian National Guard was called to arms throughout the territory. The Abkhazian government escaped arrest in the capital and fled north along the coast to Gudauta, where they called for resistance. Volunteers from the armed hill peoples of the northern Caucasus - Kabardians, Chechens, Adygheans, Daghestanis - arrived to support the Abkhazians. So did contingents from the big Abkhazian diaspora in Turkey. The war began.

The Abkhazians were backed not only by the volunteers but by most of the non-Kartvelian population, but it was covert Russian intervention which decided the outcome. With the apparent aim of crippling the reality of Georgian independence and reasserting Moscow's hegemony in the northern Caucasus, the Russians supplied the Abkhazian side with heavy weapons and supported their ground troops with air strikes.

The Georgians were finally driven back over the Inguri River in September 1993. In the first phase of the war, Georgian and Mingrelian militias massacred or expelled Abkhazians in the districts they controlled; later, when the counter-offensive began, the advancing Abkhazians drove before them a mass of some 150,000 desperate Kartvelian refugees. There were atrocities on both sides. The towns were wrecked and often looted. In the south, the Georgians destroyed villages as they fell back, and sowed the fields with mines. The dead - killed in battle, murdered in their homes or victims of hunger and cold as they sought to escape across the mountains - have never been reliably counted but certainly numbered many thousands.

The Abkhazians had become 'masters in their own house'. But the house was roofless, and they wandered lonely through its desolate rooms.

Nine months after the Georgian troops had been driven from the land, the Abkhazian Minister of Information sat in her tiny, shabby room and still seemed astonished to be there. Dr Natella Akaba used to be a historian; she wrote her doctoral thesis on 'Colonial Policy and British Imperialism in Qatar'. She said thoughtfully, 'In the Brezhnev days, I was one of those who listened to Radio Liberty and thought that democracy would be such a natural, simple thing. Now I realise that in real life matters are much more difficult.'

Her door was broken and splintered; the original lock had been wrenched off by marauding soldiers and replaced by a handle picked up in some nearby ruin. She was, on this point, luckier than the Minister of Education, a few streets away. His method of entering his office was to put his hand through a rent in the door-panel and pull. Once inside, he kept the door shut with a wedge of paper tied through the hole with string.

Only the Minster of Economics, who had commandeered a room in the old university building, possessed a real lock: an impressive modern thing with a number-coded button-panel. This did not mean that he kept money in his office. There was no money. Dr. Akaba and her ministerial staff of fifteen boys and girls received no salaries at all. They were entitled to one free canteen meal and a loaf of bread each day. As a special privilege of office, the minister was given an expense allowance of fifteen dollars a month for her official duties.

Sukhum was once a pretty, lazy southern town. Its climate is sub-tropical; its parks and esplanades are sweetly scented by white and pink oleanders, framed in alleys of palms, shaded by banana leaves and enormous eucalyptus trees. Until the war with Georgia, its population was as much of a mixture as it had been when the Greek colony of Dioscurias stood there and - so it was said - nine different languages could be heard in its market-place. The largest group (after Stalin had expelled the Greeks) was Mingrelian or Georgian; there were Abkhazians too, of course, but they were a minority in Sukhum as they were in Gudauta, Gagra, Ochamchira and all the other towns. The Abkhazians were thought of as a village people. Their strength was not on the coast but inland, in the villages up against the first foothills of the Caucasus.

Remembering all this, I walked through the streets of Sukhum nine months after the end of the war and felt a new silence, like a sort of deafness, pressing on my ears. Where had everyone gone? Here and there a few people walked across empty streets, or stood waiting outside the offices of some international aid agency. Behind the oleanders and palms, the houses were gutted and the dead walls were stained black by smoke. The tarry smell of burned timbers, the marzipan scent of burned plaster, still hung in the air. In the park, the bronze busts of Abkhazians poets and sages were pocked with bullets, and the central lawn had become a small military cemetery.

More than half the population of Sukhum had fled, during the thirteen months between the arrival of Georgian troops in August 1992 and the town's recapture by the Abkhazians. Sukhum had been shelled and bombed, attacked by aircraft with rockets and finally taken by storm. Many of the remaining Greeks were evacuated to Greece in 'Operation Golden Fleece', when a ship brought them off from Sukhum harbour in the middle of the war. An aircraft came from Israel to rescue the Jews. Almost all the Georgian and Mingrelian inhabitants abandoned their homes and followed the retreating Georgian forces, or were chased out by the Abkhazians and their ferocious allies as they reoccupied Sukhum.

The airport was unusable; the railway to Russia, running north along the Black Sea coast to the frontier on the Psou River, had been wrecked. No merchant ships dared to put in at Sukhum until the Turks resumed an occasional ferry service from Trabzon. In June 1994 the Russian Army re-entered Abkhazia as a peace-keeping force and deployed some 3,000 men in the south to keep the Georgians and the Abkhazians apart. But the Russians did little to reconstruct the country.

A year later, Abkhazia remains unrecognised. Under United Nations auspices, negotiations are dragging on between Georgia and Abkhazia to arrange the return of refugees and to settle Abkhazia's international status. The Abkhazian government would now consent to a 'confederation' with Georgia which recongised their country's right to sovereignty and independence. The Georgians, however, continue to claim that Abkhazia is an integral region of the Georgian state.

Achandara, under the foothills of the Abkhazian Caucasus range, was spared the fighting. It is a rich village, on good soil, and the sons and daughters of Achandara who have to work in Sukhum are nourished by parcels of maize-meal, fruit, honey and bread from their families. Along the road leading inland from the coast wander mares with young colts and herds of buff-colored cattle.

Not far away is Lykhny, with its sacred tree where thousands of Abkhazians gathered in June 1989 to proclaim the 'Lykhny Declaration', demanding the restoration of full republican status within the Soviet Union. Trees matter to Abkhazians. Their two conversions to world religions, to Christianity in the sixth century and then to Islam under the Turks, have been less enduring than older ways of reverence for natural objects and for the dead. The Minister for Ecology, a young marine biologist, told me that older Abkhazians preserved a healthy 'culture of using nature', by tradition never killing more than one animal on each hunting expedition. But it goes deeper than that.

As we approached Achandara, a young woman in the back of the car asked, 'Do you see that mountain?' Behind the village rose a steep conical hill, covered with dark-green forest and capped with thunder-cloud.

'That one?'

In mild alarm, she said, "Don't point at it. We do not point at it."

What was its name?

'It has a name, but we must not say it." She explained that it was forbidden to cut wood on the mountain. Once, in spite of their warnings, a tsarist general had forced an Abkhazian work-party to fell timber there, but as the first tree bowed and crashed, the general too fell paralysed to the ground.

At her parents' house, her father and his neighbors, wrapped in veils, were taking honey from the hives. The family had not been warned of our visit, but soon we were sitting down to a meal on the grass: maize bread, hard white cheese, cucumbers, little dumplings fried to celebrate the honey harvest. Then came clear red wine from grapes in the arbour, chacha eau-de-vie, and finally the main course: stiff maize porridge eaten with slices of cheese and spoonfuls of spicy akhud (bean stew with pepper paste). In front of us, women carried cloth-covered trays across the lawn as they prepared the marriage feast for one of the sons of the house.

Afterwards, we walked among orange and pear trees to see the family graves in the orchard. Here within a square of iron railings lay Grandfather. He had been arrested in 1947, for nothing more than being a prosperous peasant, and sent to a Siberian labour camp. When he felt that he could bear exile no more, he had written a letter - one page for his children, the other for his wife - and slipped it into a bottle which he hid in the grave of another Abkhazian comrade, knowing that sooner or later his friend's people would come to find his bones and bring them home. Then he cut his own wrists and died. Many years later the letter in the bottle was delivered, and in turn his own family set out for Siberia to fetch his body back to Achandara to lie beside his wife. Standing in the sun, with the unnameable hill behind her, his daughter-in-law said to me, "You know, there was a Russian woman there who asked us why we wanted him. She said that he was just a dead body, nothing worth having. an you believe that?'

A few yards away, there was a fresh grave. Cousin Z., a young schoolteacher, had been killed in the war against Georgia. The tomb-stone bore his portrait in relief, and beside it was a full-length oil painting showing him in camouflage fatigues, grasping his Kalashnikov. Over the grave, in the Abkhazian custom, a sun-roof had been erected so that the family could sit and keep the dead man company.

On the way back to Sukhum, a few miles down the valley, we passed a row of empty houses. The orchards round them were green, but the walls were scorched black by fire. Mingrelians had lived here since 1945, when they were resettled from western Georgia. But there had been no battles in this valley. Peaceful families had been driven from their homes by he Abkhazians simply because they belonged to the culture of the invaders.

A voice from the back of the car said, 'They shared our land, and they were our neighbours. But then they made war on us...'

It was more than a decade before the war began that Fazil Iskander wrote his novel Sandro of Chegem. It is more a series of connected tales about Abkhazian lives and fantasies, done in the manner of a volume of Isaac Babel stories, than a conventional novel. And in most of the Sandro tales there recur mentions of another, different people who live among the Abkhazians. Iskander called them the 'Endurskies'. In a foreword, he suggested that Enduria, their land of origin, was a 'fictitious district', and that 'the Endurskies are the mystery of ethnic prejudice'. But nobody in Abkhazia has any doubt about who is meant. What Iskander wrote about the 'Endursky'-Mingrelians, or rather about Abkhazian attitudes toward them, belongs in any manual of ethnic tensions, in any aetiology of the symptoms of group prejudice.

In 'The Tale of Old Khabug's Mule', the mule - a suitably sardonic and detached observer - remarks that

the Abkhazians have a very complicated attitude towards the Endurskies. The main thing is that no one knows exactly how they got to Abkhazia, but everyone is sure they're here to gradually destroy the Abkhazians. At first the hypothesis was developed that the Turks were sending them down... The Chegemians from the village of Chegem put forward a different version of the story. Their version is that somewhere deep in the dense forest between Georgia and Abkhazia the Endurskies had been spontaneously generated from wood mould. Very likely that was possible in Tsarist times. And later they grew into a whole tribe, multiplying much faster than the Abkhazians would have liked...

Some older Chegemians, the mule recalls, say that there was a time when Endurskies did not live in Abkhazia and only came to the village in small parties to hire themselves out for seasonal labour. Now they were a permanent, yet never fully accepted, part of the landscape.

In 'Tali, Miracle of Chegem', the narrator mocks:

The Chegemians were sure that all Abkhazians dreamed of becoming related to them. Not to mention the Endurskies, who dreamed not so much of becoming related to the Chegemians as of subjugating them, or not even subjugating but simply destroying the flourishing village, turning it into a wasteland... so that they could go around saying that there had never been any Chegem... None of this would prevent the Chegemians from maintaining quite friendly relations with their Endursky aliens in normal times.

On the Black Sea coasts, there have lived many Chegemians and many Endurskies. They inhabit Crimea under the names of Tatar and Russian Ukrainian, filling their pails at the same pump and then going home to wonder what 'they' are really plotting. They used to live in the Empire of the Grand Comnenians, when Greek, Turkish, Hebrew, Italian and Kartvelian were spoken on the streets of Trebizond, or in the nineteenth-century Odessa where nobody was a native but everybody agreed that the Jews were Endurskies. They live in Moldova now, upstream from the estuary of the Dniester, where the Chegemians are the Moldovans of Romanian speech while the Endurskies are the Slav settlers of 'Transdniestria' in the east of the country. In Moldova, just as in Abkhazia and Chechnia in the northern Caucasus, the end of the empire - the Soviet eclipse - meant the beginning of war between neighbours.

Independence always has an aspect of amputation. Old but still living connections are cut through. The majority celebrates, but a minority always mourns when a customs barrier shuts the familiar highway to yesterday's capital, when certain medals become impossible to wear at parades, when a much-loved newspaper in a metropolitan language is no longer delivered daily. Neighbours depart, with dignified regret or in panic. There is always loss.

The amputation of Abkhazia was brutal and untidy, and the loss was very great - not only the physical loss of human lives, burned houses, broken bridges, but also the huge cultural impoverishment inflicted by the flight of the Mingrelians and Georgians. Some of them, just possibly most of them, will find their way back. But the country will never be the same again. They were a part of Abkhazian society, and their intimacy with the other communities there - even if that intimacy was superficial and mistrustful - can never be reconstructed.

Abkhazia also lost its history. More accurately, it lost the material evidence of its own past, the relics and documents which any newly independent nation needs to re-invent and reappraise its own identity. This was not an accidental consequence of the fighting in Sukhum. It was, in part, a deliberate act of destruction.

The National Museum was not burned, but it was looted and devastated. In its dim halls, stuffed bears and spoonbills lean over torn cartons of Greek pottery shards. The huge marble relief of a woman and her children, found on the sea-bed off the site of Dioscurias, was spared because the staff (several of whom were Georgians) hid it behind boards. But the Georgian soldiers took the coin collections and even replicas of gold and silver vessels whose originals were already in the museum at Tbilisi. The cases containing Abkhazian finery, inlaid muskets and jewelled daggers and decorated wedding-dresses, were broken and emptied. Soldiers do this everywhere in occupied cities - it was no worse than the plundering of the Kerch museum in the Crimean War. But the fate of the State Archives was different.

The shell of the building stands down by the sea. Its roof has fallen in, and the interior is a heap of calcined rubble. One day in the winter of 1992, a white Lada without number-plates, containing four men from the Georgian National Guard, drew up outside. The guardsmen shot the doors open and then flung incendiary grenades into the hall and stairwell. A vagrant boy, one of many children who by then were living rough on the streets, was rounded up and made to help spread the flames, while a group of Sukhum citizens tried vainly to break through the cordon and enter the building to rescue burning books and papers. In those archives was most of the scanty, precious written evidence of Abkhazia's past, as well as the recent records of government and administration. The Ministry of Education, for example, lost all its files on school pupils. The archives also contained the entire documentation of the Greek community, including a library, a collection of historical research material from all the Greek villages of Abkhazia and complete files of the Greek-language newspapers going back to the first years after the Revolution. As a report compiled later in Athens remarked: 'the history of the region became ashes'.

The young official in Sukhum explained to me the national symbols of his country. Here was the state flag: the white hand on a red background stood for the ancient Abkhazian kingdom; the star for the Absilian ancestors; the seven green-and-white stripes for the traditional tolerance of the Caucasian peoples among whom Islam and Christianity existed together in peace. Here was the national coat of arms, devised from an Abkhazian epic legend. A horseman riding the winged steed Arash shoots his arrow at the stars: at a large one representing the sun, and at two smaller ones which are tokens of the 'union of the cultural worlds of East and West'...

All this is the normal kitsch of nationalism, with an element of modern high-mindedness: the allusions to 'traditional tolerance' (not always so traditional in the northern Caucasus), or to 'the union of cultural worlds'. But the ethnic mythology of the Abkhazian minority dominates both flag and crest. Every nationalism has to answer the question 'Who belongs? Who is an Abkhazian - or a Scott or a German?' These national symbols seemed to suggest a narrow, ominous definition.

When I came to Abkhazia, it seemed to me natural territory for 'Pol-Pottery'. A small, village people, regarding itself as the original and native population of the land, had conquered the towns and put most of their non-Abkhazian inhabitants to flight. It seemed likely that a dramatic ideology of ruralism would be imposed, insisting that the 'true' Abkhazian identity was to be found in the countryside while the towns were dangerous, cosmopolitan places in which that identity would always be dissolved. In the same way, I expected that the new government would reassemble loyalty to the new state around the Abkhaz language, forcing it on all its subjects as a condition of citizenship. There were enough melancholy precedents in the history of modern nationalism.

But, surprisingly enough, no such mood is to be found in the new Abkhazian government or among its supporters. They recognize the diversity of Abkhazia, and have no intention of forcing a single culture on its peoples. There is a coherent effort to rescue and reorganize the teaching and practice of Abkhazian culture, above all in music and dance. But members of the government in Sukhum insist that Greek, Armenian 'and even Georgian' culture would be developed as well: 'we do not blame the whole Georgian people, and we appreciate their traditions.' No special primacy will be given to the Abkhaz language. It will be one of the two official languages, with Russian (spoken in practice by everyone in the country) as the other. But the pre-war balance of languages used in schools as the medium of instruction is to be restored as far as possible, assuming that the refugees and exiles return (there used to be a hundred schools teaching in Abkhazian, seventy in Russian and a hundred and fifty in Georgian). All non-Abkhazian schools will continue to study the language, as they did before the war, but there is to be no pressure to give it more prominence in the curriculum.

This moderation has several sources. One is common sense. Abkhazia's wealth has depended upon beach tourism from Russia and Georgia and upon the insatiable Russian and Ukrainian demand for Abkhazian fruit and vegetables. Even if a combination of state terror and isolationism was used to 'Abkhazianise' the land, it would end in ruin. But nationalism can be immune to common sense, and a more important reason for tolerance is the personal origins of the new leadership.

They are sophisticated, professional men and women, often educated in Moscow or Leningrad. Several were senior officials in the old Communist Party. A good many of them speak little or no Abkhaz, which they regret but do not regard as disabling. After all, they reassure themselves, even Fazil Iskander writes in Russian.

They are not villagers, though most of them have village relations. Neither are they plebeians who have risen to power as officers in an insurrectionary army - that element which has so often overturned the first, more worldly generation of liberators (men like Ben Bella in Algeria, for example) and diverted a country towards peasant-worship and religious fundamentalism. Such people exist, angry and disoriented, in Abkhazia during this aftermath of the war. But for the moment they have not found their way to challenge the urban intellectuals who are in charge. For the latter, with their mixed cultural inheritance, an Abkhazian is simply somebody who lives in Abkhazia and is committed to Abkhazia: nothing more ethnic or exclusive than that. It is a Black Sea solution, worthy of the Spartocids who ruled the Bosporan Kingdom and all its peoples two thousand years ago.

Natella Akaba said to me, 'We must not become a conservative rural community. There has to be a balance between past and future, country and town. Some Georgian scholars wanted the Abkhazians to become like aboriginals living in a native reserve, and that must not be allowed to happen.

'We can survive for some time like this. Perhaps the world will alter its view of us, if we can hang on. And a change must take place at the beginning of the twenty-first century, a change in political mentality, or everyone will perish in these little local wars. I don't think the aim of the Ossetians or the Abkhazians or the people of Karabagh is to isolate themselves from the world. We want to enter it, while keeping our own identity. Maybe, one day, that will be understood.'

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Here is the link:
by Crack_Smoke_Republican on 31.08.2008 [03:25 ]    
This is Google's cache of www. abkhazia.org/BlackSeaCh10.html.