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 communities 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 landslips, 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.
This little region of coast and mountains, stretching from the 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 migrants from the northern Caucasus had all settled in Abkhazia during the nineteenth century, while the biggest single group of inhabitants — 4 5 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 com-pulsorily 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 the 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 Minister 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 Abkhazian 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 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 recognised 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-coloured 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 neighbours, 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. Can 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 the 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 Sandra ofChegem. 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 Sandra 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 towards 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, th
e 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 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 empire - the Soviet eclipse -meant the beginning of war between neighbours.
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