"A guest is a gift from above," a storeowner told me over homemade vodka, honey and grapes during a recent trip to the breakaway region of Abkhazia. When God was distributing land to the world's nations, he continued, the Abkhaz missed out because they were busy attending to their guests. The Georgians, with whom Abkhazia waged a bitter war for independence in 1992-1993, have a similar story about their origins. "Well, sure they do," the storeowner conceded with a grin when I pointed this out. "They were our guests."
Separating who is guest and who is host in Abkhazia is just part of the maze of history through which any traveler to this sub-tropical conflict zone must pass.
I first encountered Abkhazia's obsession with the past on a bumpy bus ride over dirt roads into Sukhumi, the region's capital, when a 12-year-old boy named Yura began to tell me about the war with Georgia. On the dashboard of the ancient Mercedes bus were dozens of war medals, jingling whenever we hit a broken section of road. Like many Abkhaz I met, including self-styled Foreign Affairs Minister Sergei Shamba, Yura considered himself a historian. He recited dates from the conflict with ease, including the day his older brother, armed with a Kalashnikov he'd just received for his 14th birthday, went off to fight the Georgians and never returned.
For this unrecognized nation, history is the strongest means for validating the disputed independence, and indisputable difficulties, of the present. Returning to Georgia as an autonomous republic in exchange for peace and an end to the economic blockade would sever that connection, visitors quickly learn. "Every family lost someone in the war. Giving up our independence would be spitting on their graves," one Abkhaz told me.
Even in Sukhumi, where Russian tourists and investors are providing a slight swell of entrepreneurial activity, reference points are as firmly anchored in the past as hopes for an economic revival are focused on the future. Most of the conversations I had with locals eventually came back to the war: Unverifiable stories of Georgian drug smuggling, rockets fired on helicopters carrying pregnant women evacuees, and gunfire at boats of fleeing tourists.
With palm trees and broad boulevards stretching along its Black Sea shoreline, and the jagged peaks of lush mountains providing a backdrop, the Abkhaz capital often seems more resort town than regional hotspot, though.
Yet, despite the leisurely atmosphere, it is still rare to walk a block without seeing a burned-out, bullet-ridden building. Most of these homes and businesses belonged to the Georgians who made up almost half of Abkhazia's population before 1993 (the Abkhaz themselves made up around 20 percent). Now, some 250,000 Georgian refugees who fled during the war are rebuilding their lives throughout Georgia.
Sukhumi remains sparsely populated, and electricity is a daily question, but it did not seem to matter to the Russian tourists or the restaurant owners who happily catered to them. Roads were sporadically being repaired, there were many shops near the beach, and for every crumbling apartment building, there was another one a few meters away covered in clotheslines and balcony plants. When I took out my camera in front of one war-ravaged church, an elderly Abkhaz woman scolded my guide: "Take your friend to the new bank. Tell him to take pictures of that, instead."
With Abkhazia's economic isolation, though, crime is a constant threat. At night, the empty, unlit Sukhumi streets lay bare the dangers locals face daily; every roofless building shell grows ominous as its shadows fade into darkness. There is a police force, but it is concentrated in the tourist areas.
Ira, the woman who rented me an apartment, waited each day until I returned home, insisting I should not be out when the sun goes down. On my second night in Sukhumi, she told me I had missed two phone calls from women claiming they knew me. At the time, I did not even know my own phone number. Ira's suspicions focused on juvenile Yura, who had become my guide to the Abkhaz capital. "He could have told his friends or brothers. This is a small city and there are a lot of threats," she explained.
Finding a resolution to those security threats was one of the topics discussed in late June at a meeting of the Georgian-Abkhaz Coordinating Council, which unites representatives of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the United Nations, Commonwealth of Independent States peacekeeping troops, as well as the Georgian and Abkhaz governments. The meeting passed without breakthrough.
Still, outside optimism for resolving Georgia's and Abkhazia's differences continues to surface. After a June 19 meeting with de facto Abkhaz President Sergei Bagapsh and Foreign Minister Shamba, US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Matthew Bryza noted common ground between Georgia and Abkhazia on a potential conflict resolution, the Abkhaz news service Apsnipress reported.
Nonetheless, potential stumbling blocks remain. In the coming days, Georgia's parliament is expected to pass a resolution calling for the withdrawal of CIS peacekeepers, made up primarily of Russians, from Abkhazia. The region's leaders want them to stay.
Georgians tend to see Russia as the primary cause of their dispute with Abkhazia, but Russia's influence, aside from bargain-hunting tourists, is rarely acknowledged by the Abkhaz. In a 2005 interview with EurasiaNet, de facto Foreign Minister Shamba made no mention of the peacekeeper bases as a reason for why conflict with Georgia has not resumed.
Yet their presence -- or absence -- could prove critical for attempts to untwist the twisted ties that exist between Sukhumi and Tbilisi. Bagapsh has stated that if the peacekeepers withdraw, Abkhazia will drop the talks with Georgia and set up Abkhaz troops in the peacekeepers' place. "We are capable of protecting our state and our citizens," Apsnipress reported him as saying on June 21, the 12th anniversary of the deployment of peacekeeping forces in Abkhazia.
Still, the Abkhaz insist that they're ready to talk. Bagapsh stated at a June 26 news conference in Sukhumi that he is ready to meet with Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, sign an agreement on the non-resumption of hostilities, and discuss the lifting of Georgia's economic blockade, and the restoration of transportation routes. "I am ready to discuss any kind of issue with Saakashvili," the Russian news agency Regnum reported him as saying.
Nonetheless, for the Abkhaz, the role of host and guest at such a meeting has already been clearly defined. "We love to show our land to any guest," Bagapsh said in a 2005 interview with EurasiaNet, "provided they come as a guest."
Editor's note:
Vladic Ravich is a freelance journalist based in New York. See more photos of Abkkhazia taken by the author here.
