Guest Editorial: Rice visit could galvanize action on Abkhazia
David J. Smith
Thursday, July 10
American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is in Tbilisi, focusing welcome international attention on the explosive conflict in the Georgian territory of Abkhazia. She may be able to galvanize the West into well-measured action—and time is of the essence.
Bomb blasts are killing innocent people. Russian annexation of Abkhazia proceeds. Each day, Russia pours concrete on a foundation of human tragedy because—make no mistake—today’s Abkhazia is founded upon vicious ethnic cleansing.
It is time to uphold justice and human decency; to support the Georgian territorial integrity everyone professes.
Following his April 16 decree that extended the Russian economic, legal and administrative space to Abkhazia, then Russian president and now-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin rolled in an additional 600 soldiers pretending to be peacekeepers—they are heavily armed paratroopers.
Moscow then inserted 400 railroad troops to repair the moribund train line from the regional capital of Sukhumi to the port (and former Soviet naval base) of Ochamchire, chipping away at the principle that peacekeeping is the only legitimate reason for Russian forces to be in Abkhazia.
An agitprop campaign fingers Georgia for preparing an invasion, implausibly through a narrow defile called the Kodori Gorge where it has no military forces. (Neither are there any Georgian troop movements around Zugdidi, along the road leading from the Georgian-controlled Mingrelia region to Abkhazia.)
A Russian fighter downing an unarmed Georgian reconnaissance drone and the arrest of an alleged Georgian spy in the North Caucasus heighten the drama.
Western leaders met Moscow’s gambit with prompt, stiff and united condemnations.
Initially, the tougher than expected words captured Moscow’s attention, but words too often repeated to no effect devolve into diplomatic dithering, which Moscow interprets as weakness. And, as Winston Churchill said of “our Russian friends…there is nothing for which they have less respect than for weakness.”
Then came bombings in Gagra and Sukhumi. Separatist leader Sergey Bagapsh seized the moment to close the administrative border between Abkhazia and the rest of Georgia.
Russia’s Abkhazia gambit—whether creeping or sweeping annexation, proto-recognition or conjuration of some Kremlin-styled limbo-state—proceeds relentlessly. The result will be to reinforce a petty autocracy built upon ethnic cleansing that sprang from the final throes of the Soviet Union.
Moscow miscreants exploited ethnic tensions in the South Caucasus in an attempt to thwart Georgian independence and, failing that, to hobble Georgia’s restored statehood. Backed by a popular vote, Georgia declared independence in April 1991. Backed by Moscow, Abkhaz separatists declared independence three months later. Civil war broke out in the summer of 1992 and, after brutal fighting punctuated by violated ceasefires, the Abkhazian capital of Sukhumi fell in September 1993.
One need not agree upon every fact nor hold Georgia or Georgians altogether blameless to establish the fundamental truth.
The Abkhaz separatists and their Russian sponsors destroyed a thriving multi-ethnic society of 550 000, among whom 18 percent were ethnic Abkhaz. 80 percent—Georgians, Greeks, Estonians, Jews and more—were either killed or terrorized into flight by systematic murder, rape, beating and plunder.
Today, hundreds of thousands live as internally displaced people in the rest of Georgia or as refugees in other lands. Meanwhile, interlopers and speculators misappropriate the homes these people left behind.
This is the foundation of the Abkhazian regime that Russia reinforces.
It was mostly overlooked because, in the 1990s, the West was distracted by atrocities and wars in the former Yugoslavia. Civil war and ethnic cleansing in Abkhazia seemed a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom the West knew nothing.
Today, the Balkans are calmer. Bulgaria and Romania belong to NATO and the European Union. The West has important geopolitical interests in the Black Sea, Caucasus and Central Asia, beyond. Georgia, linchpin to those interests, is a fast-developing democracy, a candidate for NATO membership and part of the EU’s European Neighborhood. In 2008, Sukhumi is as close to Paris and Berlin as was Sarajevo fifteen years ago.
Mostly, the West understands its interest and what is happening in Abkhazia. But it averts its gaze from the real source of the problem—the Kremlin. The propensity of Western democracies—reinforced by 60 years of unprecedented peace and prosperity—is to misunderstand that it is not strength, but weakness that provokes bullies.
Analyzing another time in history, Henry Kissinger, writes, “In the long interval of peace the sense of the tragic was lost.” Now, tragic it will be if Western words do not soon turn to well-measured action.
Timely action can free hundreds of thousands of refugees from perpetual exile, liberate the Abkhaz people from the petty politics of ethnic hatred, and place one of the final bricks in the edifice of Europe whole and free. Timely action can uphold Western interests and values of justice and human decency.
Timely action can be the result of Rice’s visit.
David J. Smith is Director, Georgian Security Analysis Center, Tbilisi, and Senior Fellow, Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, Washington
Views expressed in guest editorials are the writers’ own, and should not be taken to represent, or bear the endorsement of, the Messenger. Letters may be edited for length and clarity.
Bomb blasts are killing innocent people. Russian annexation of Abkhazia proceeds. Each day, Russia pours concrete on a foundation of human tragedy because—make no mistake—today’s Abkhazia is founded upon vicious ethnic cleansing.
It is time to uphold justice and human decency; to support the Georgian territorial integrity everyone professes.
Following his April 16 decree that extended the Russian economic, legal and administrative space to Abkhazia, then Russian president and now-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin rolled in an additional 600 soldiers pretending to be peacekeepers—they are heavily armed paratroopers.
Moscow then inserted 400 railroad troops to repair the moribund train line from the regional capital of Sukhumi to the port (and former Soviet naval base) of Ochamchire, chipping away at the principle that peacekeeping is the only legitimate reason for Russian forces to be in Abkhazia.
An agitprop campaign fingers Georgia for preparing an invasion, implausibly through a narrow defile called the Kodori Gorge where it has no military forces. (Neither are there any Georgian troop movements around Zugdidi, along the road leading from the Georgian-controlled Mingrelia region to Abkhazia.)
A Russian fighter downing an unarmed Georgian reconnaissance drone and the arrest of an alleged Georgian spy in the North Caucasus heighten the drama.
Western leaders met Moscow’s gambit with prompt, stiff and united condemnations.
Initially, the tougher than expected words captured Moscow’s attention, but words too often repeated to no effect devolve into diplomatic dithering, which Moscow interprets as weakness. And, as Winston Churchill said of “our Russian friends…there is nothing for which they have less respect than for weakness.”
Then came bombings in Gagra and Sukhumi. Separatist leader Sergey Bagapsh seized the moment to close the administrative border between Abkhazia and the rest of Georgia.
Russia’s Abkhazia gambit—whether creeping or sweeping annexation, proto-recognition or conjuration of some Kremlin-styled limbo-state—proceeds relentlessly. The result will be to reinforce a petty autocracy built upon ethnic cleansing that sprang from the final throes of the Soviet Union.
Moscow miscreants exploited ethnic tensions in the South Caucasus in an attempt to thwart Georgian independence and, failing that, to hobble Georgia’s restored statehood. Backed by a popular vote, Georgia declared independence in April 1991. Backed by Moscow, Abkhaz separatists declared independence three months later. Civil war broke out in the summer of 1992 and, after brutal fighting punctuated by violated ceasefires, the Abkhazian capital of Sukhumi fell in September 1993.
One need not agree upon every fact nor hold Georgia or Georgians altogether blameless to establish the fundamental truth.
The Abkhaz separatists and their Russian sponsors destroyed a thriving multi-ethnic society of 550 000, among whom 18 percent were ethnic Abkhaz. 80 percent—Georgians, Greeks, Estonians, Jews and more—were either killed or terrorized into flight by systematic murder, rape, beating and plunder.
Today, hundreds of thousands live as internally displaced people in the rest of Georgia or as refugees in other lands. Meanwhile, interlopers and speculators misappropriate the homes these people left behind.
This is the foundation of the Abkhazian regime that Russia reinforces.
It was mostly overlooked because, in the 1990s, the West was distracted by atrocities and wars in the former Yugoslavia. Civil war and ethnic cleansing in Abkhazia seemed a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom the West knew nothing.
Today, the Balkans are calmer. Bulgaria and Romania belong to NATO and the European Union. The West has important geopolitical interests in the Black Sea, Caucasus and Central Asia, beyond. Georgia, linchpin to those interests, is a fast-developing democracy, a candidate for NATO membership and part of the EU’s European Neighborhood. In 2008, Sukhumi is as close to Paris and Berlin as was Sarajevo fifteen years ago.
Mostly, the West understands its interest and what is happening in Abkhazia. But it averts its gaze from the real source of the problem—the Kremlin. The propensity of Western democracies—reinforced by 60 years of unprecedented peace and prosperity—is to misunderstand that it is not strength, but weakness that provokes bullies.
Analyzing another time in history, Henry Kissinger, writes, “In the long interval of peace the sense of the tragic was lost.” Now, tragic it will be if Western words do not soon turn to well-measured action.
Timely action can free hundreds of thousands of refugees from perpetual exile, liberate the Abkhaz people from the petty politics of ethnic hatred, and place one of the final bricks in the edifice of Europe whole and free. Timely action can uphold Western interests and values of justice and human decency.
Timely action can be the result of Rice’s visit.
David J. Smith is Director, Georgian Security Analysis Center, Tbilisi, and Senior Fellow, Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, Washington
Views expressed in guest editorials are the writers’ own, and should not be taken to represent, or bear the endorsement of, the Messenger. Letters may be edited for length and clarity.