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 for 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 Scot 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 recognise the diversity of Abkhazia, and have no intention of forcing a single culture on its peoples. There is a coherent effort to rescue and reorganise 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 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 o
f 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.'
Chapter Eleven
' . . . But tell me —why is he kicking his heels around here? What is he after?'
'He's studying marine life.'
'No, no, that's not it, old man,' sighed Layevsky. 'From what I gathered from a passenger on the steamer, a scientist, the Black Sea's poor in fauna, and organic life can't exist in its depths owing to the excess of hydrogen sulphide. All serious students of the subject work in the biological stations of Naples or Villefranche. But Von Koren's independent and stubborn. He works on the Black Sea because no one else does.'
Anton Chekhov, The Duel'
It is a happy world, after all. The air, the earth, the water, teem with delighted existence.
William Paley, Natural Theology
THEY SAY: 'the Black Sea is dying.' I open an American newspaper and read: 'The Black Sea, the dirtiest in the world, is dying an agonising death.' I am told, on the authority of a UN document, that the Black Sea constitutes 'the marine ecological catastrophe of the century' because '90 per cent of the basin is now anoxic'
Here are treasures in the museum of self-accusation, the international gallery of eco-doom. It is entirely true that the Black Sea is nine-tenths dead, and that its waters below the 200-metre oxycline are poisoned with hydrogen sulphide gas. But they always were.
When the Argo fled back from Colchis to the Danube delta, with the navy of King Aeetes in pursuit, she was flying over a lifeless gulf nearly half a mile deep. Had she sunk on the journey, her timbers and the Argonauts themselves would still be sitting intact on the blue-grey bottom mud, for there is no oxygen in the water which would allow them to rot. Down there, only metal is consumed. Their bronze swords and helmets, the studs on their belts and the rings on their fingers, would have been dissolved away to nothing. As for the Golden Fleece, it would have lost all the bullion glare that made it worth the voyage from the Pagasaean Gulf in Greece to Colchis. It would lie there to this day, across the laps of dead Jason and Medea, but now returned to its old innocence, whiteness and sheepishness.
This death or near-death of a sea was not caused by the human race. It apparently annoys some fanatics that an ecological catastrophe can be achieved by ecology itself, without any need to call on expert human assistance. All the same, it was the natural action of natural forces which brought about this huge act of pollution: the decay of billions of tons of up-country mud and leaves and living ooze and dead micro-organisms, poured onto the sea floor since the last Ice Age by the five great rivers of the Black Sea.
It was not our fault. That is a fact, but a fact which might excuse the human race many other sins if it were too widely known. In consequence, journalism and propaganda about the condition of the Black Sea seldom mention hydrogen sulphide. If they do (as in the case of that UN document), they slip in a hint that the anoxia is in some way connected with human crimes against the environment.
What is dying, or rather being murdered, is not the Sea but its creatures. What is being polluted by human agency is not the main body of water (apart from the tipping of drums of toxic waste by Italian ships), but the surface layer whose abundance has shaped the whole prehistory and history of the Black Sea littoral. These are not small distinctions. Something terrible and perhaps final really is taking place. But there is no way to appreciate the scale of this threat without drawing back and surveying the precariousness of the entire Black Sea system: a surface film of life stretched over an abyss of lifelessness.
Out of twenty-six species of Black Sea fish being landed in commercial quantities in the 1960s, only six now survive in numbers worth netting. The hamsi anchovy provided 3 20,000 tons of fish as recendy as 1984; within five years it has fallen to a mere 15,000 tons. The fish catch from all species is less than one seventh of what it was ten years ago, and some species are now almost certainly extinct. In the Sea of Azov, where all the Black Sea problems are multiplied, landings of sturgeon which averaged 7,300 tons a year in the 1930s had been reduced to 500 tons by 1961; almost all Azov sturgeon are now bred on fish farms. As for the mammals of the Sea, the monk seal is now extinct, reputedly because a Bulgarian hotel-builder dynamited its last cave-refuge, while the three species of dolphin or porpoise have been reduced from almost a million in the 1950s to anything between a third and a tenth of that number today.
Monstrous plankton blooms have begun to appear on the shallow north-western shelf of the Black Sea, where the bottom is above the anoxic level and where many of the important fish species spawn. 'Red tides' formed from dying phytoplankton began to occur with regularity in the early 1970s. The worst of these, in the Bay of Odessa in 1989, reached the horrifying concentration of one kilogram of plankton for every cubic metre of sea-water. Hydrogen sulphide, generated in the shallows rather than rising from the depths, began to reach the surface so that the stench spread through the city streets and the bay was covered with dead fish; much the same happened that season off Burgas, in Bulgaria. The penetration of light in these increasingly turbid coastal waters has dropped by anything between 40 and 90 per cent, killing off bottom-living creatures like flatfish, molluscs and crustaceans and destroying almost the entire pasture of sea-grass. At the other end of the Black Sea, in the Bosporus, bottom marine life has declined so steeply in the last few decades that one of the main food sources — molluscs, urchins, marine worms — needed by the migrating fish shoals on their way to breed in the Sea of Marmara is disappearing.
The meaning of these facts and figures is that, for the first time, mankind is about to extinguish life in an entire sea. Some forms will survive: sterile algae or jelly-like drifting creatures. But the living creatures with whom the human race grew up here - the billions of silvery fish migrating round the same track since the last glaciation, the grinning dolphins whom the Greeks appointed the patrons of Trebizond - these are about to leave us.
The causes are known. AH of them, with a few consciously criminal exceptions like the dumping of toxic waste, derive from human immaturity. At least 160 million people now live in the Black Sea basin - that is to say, in the area drained by rivers which run into the Sea — and among them are farmers, industrial workers, fishermen and seamen. But in the last fifteen or twenty years, their trades have all been overwhelmed with technical innovations, with modern fertilisers, supertankers, industrial processes based on hydrocarbons, dioxin or CFCs, electronic fish-location gear and modern drift-nets. Learning to operate these technologies takes all the mental concentration of Black Sea people, and for the wider questions of what these novelties do to the Sea and its life-systems and even to its human inhabitants they can spare almost no attention. When boats were made of wood, when peasants strewed their own dung on the fields and the worst industrial effluent was chlorine or sulphuric acid, there was at least more time to reflect; more opportunity for estate owners, iron-masters or ships' captains to take a broader and more inclusive view of the consequence of what they were doing. But now the toy has grown so big that it plays with the child.
The biochemical disaster is about 'eutrophication', an excess of organic and chemical nutrients. These are mostly nitrates and phosphates from agriculture and the residues of detergents. The phosphate concentration on the north-western shelf, for example, multiplied by nearly thirty times in the ten years between 1966 and 1976. The Danube's own phosphate discharge is 21 times greater than it was fifteen years ago, and the river also carries down 50,000 tons of spilled oil a year (worth $7.2 million at current prices, which would be enough to finance an ecological rescue programme for the entire Black Sea). It is this impossible surfeit of nutrients which causes 'red tides', plankton blooms and the loss of light and dissolved oxygen which is devastating the only area of the Sea's floor where life can exist.
There is also heavy-metal pollution, radio-active contamination since the Chernobyl accident in 1986 and the damage done by reckless use of sophistic
ated pesticides. The insecticide Lindane, dangerous to human health, is present in the Dniester River at ten times the permitted maximum concentration. In the headwaters of the same river, far up in the Carpathian foothills, an industrial reservoir at Stebniki burst its dam in 1983 and released 400 tons of potassium compounds downstream, traces of which were still fouling water supplies ten years later. And then there is simple, traditional human filth: domestic rubbish and sewage.
The Turkish novelist Yashar Kemal described the Golden Horn at Istanbul: 'that deep well surrounded by huge ugly buildings and sooty factories, spewing rust from their chimneys and roofs and walls, staining the water with sulphur-yellow liquid, a filthy sewer filled with empty cans and rubbish and horse carcases, dead dogs and gulls and wild boars and thousands of cats, stinking ... A viscous, turbid mass, teeming with maggots.' The sewage of a city of ten million people (increasing at the rate of one a minute) gushes almost untreated into the Golden Horn and the Bosporus. Few towns on the Black Sea are any cleaner. Swimming off the north Turkish coast, far from the nearest village, 1 have often had to dive under floating islands of ordure.
The river waters are far worse than the Sea, even though they are still the direct source of water for most Black Sea households. Everyone I met in Odessa boiled their water, or even ran homemade distilling plants in their apartments, to protect themselves against water piped directly from the Dniester. Sometimes it is chlorinated, but so crudely that strange compounds form and make it undrinkable, and these days every summer brings an outbreak of cholera along the arc of coast between the Dnieper and Danube estuaries.
The rivers themselves have been tamed and castrated. The building of colossal dams to control water flow, to irrigate and to generate electricity, has diminished the natural rise and fall of the estuaries, doing fatal damage to the life-patterns of anadromous fish which run upstream to breed. The reservoir at Tsimlyansk on the middle Don has practically abolished the annual flooding of the river's delta, while the barrage on the Kuban River ended the run-up of sturgeon, shad and salmon. The construction of Stalin's monumental dam on the Dnieper submerged under an inland sea the seven cataracts first listed by the Byzantine emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus, over which the Norsemen used to pull their boats on their way from Kiev to Constantinople.
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