The Post-Soviet Wars: Rebellion, Ethnic Conflict, and Nationhood in the Caucasus

5. Wars in Georgia

Wars in Georgia Background In the bygone Soviet space, Georgia was without doubt the land of plenty and wonder. Located just south on the impressive mountain chains of the high Caucasus, every year hundreds of thousands of Soviet tourists visited its resorts on the Black Sea, relaxed on its beaches, and enjoyed excellent cuisine, fine wine, fresh fruits, hospitality, and the omnipresent public display of grandezza and style, which is so cultivated by Georgians. In the collective imagination of the Soviet public, Chechnya stands for the exotic, yet dangerous and wild Caucasus, and Georgia is its no less exotic but tamed and hospitable counterpart. Georgians were quite comfortable with the way their country and their culture were perceived in the Soviet Union, and they contributed to their national clichés, which, after all, served the tourism industry and brought cash into the country. Despite the fact that Georgia later produced an oppositional national elite whose radicalism and uncompromising stand toward the Soviet Union proved to be exceptional even by the standards of the late Soviet Empire, many Georgians are well aware of the fact that Georgia’s special position within the Soviet Union was not entirely to its disadvantage. It is not uncommon for Georgians jokingly to toast to “the colony we have lost—to the Soviet Union,” a reference to the opportunities that the exploitation of the Soviet shadow economy offered (a field which the Georgians, according to abundant anecdotic evidence, had perfected). When, in the early 1990s, a series of internal wars devastated the country, undoing all remnants of functional statehood , this came as no less unexpected and shocking for the Georgian population than it would for the populations of Germany or Norway today. Between 1989 and 1993, there were three related wars in Georgia. The first, over the breakaway region of South Ossetia, began in Novem5 115 ber 1989, escalated in January 1991, and then flared up again in June 1992. The second war was fought between rival Georgian groups bidding for political power; it began in December 1991 and ended in November 1993 and was triggered by the violent overthrow of President Zviad Gamsakhurdia by a coalition of opposition politicians and warlords . The third war was over the breakaway Autonomous Republic of Abkhazia; it began in August 1992 and ended in September 1993 with the defeat of Georgian troops. The conflicts over South Ossetia and Abkhazia remain formally unresolved to the present day. In both cases, the secessionist entities have asserted themselves militarily but have failed to gain international recognition. The wars have cost up to 13,000 lives and have produced the second largest ethnic cleansing in the former Soviet Union, when Abkhazian forces “cleansed” 200,000 mostly ethnic Georgians from the breakaway republic. But even in catastrophe and war, Georgia at least partly held up to its theatrical, dramatic style where tragedy and comedy are closely intertwined. It seems unusual for a sculptor and a playwright to become the leaders of the two largest paramilitary forces, while the president is the translator of Baudelaire into Georgian and the son of Georgia’s best-known modern novelist. All three leaders were drawn from Tbilisi’s close-knit intellectual elite. Perhaps, therefore, it is also not surprising that it is quite hard to find a Georgian who had participated in any of the militias and who had a rank lower than colonel. It seems that these armies, commanded by artists and intellectuals of a 116 | Wars in Georgia sort, consisted only of officers. And finally, it may also be characteristic of Georgia that the leaders of the eventually defeated paramilitaries were pardoned by President Shevardnadze and allowed to return to a life as privateers; Shevardnadze, in turn, after having lost power in the so-called Rose Revolution, retired unharmed. In Georgia, it seems, the gestures of pardon are respected more than the thrust for vengeance. This, at least, sets the wars in Georgia apart from other wars in the Caucasus region. Georgia (69,700 km2 ) lies in the South Caucasus and has an extraordinarily varied ecology, with alpine, subtropical, and semiarid climatic zones. To the west, the country is bordered by the Black Sea; the northern border is formed by the Caucasus mountain chain. Here, Georgia borders on the Russian North Caucasian republics of KarachaiCherkessia , Kabardino-Balkaria, Ossetia, Ingushetia, Chechnya, and Dagestan. In the southeast, Georgia has borders with Azerbaijan; in the...