The CS Monitor carries an interesting dispatch from Abkhazia, which is apparently turning into a hub for Russian tourism:
Butba has already restored one luxury hotel on Sukhumi’s fabled sea front and he has another hotel under reconstruction. “The way forward is to show the world that we can rebuild this country,” he says, “and then they’ll have to accept us.”
Though laudable, Butba’s hard-driving good cheer could be misplaced.
Once a lush, subtropical garden spot, Abkhazia has been ravaged and depopulated by war. The self-declared republic has a president, a flag, a national anthem, and an army. But most of its people carry Russian passports, the only valid currency is the ruble, and Abkhazia’s borders are guarded by a hard-faced contingent of Russian “peacekeeping” troops.
Georgia exercises sovereignty over Abkhazia in the eyes of the world community and forbids any planes to land at its Soviet-era airport. The huge Black Sea cruise ships that used to make ports of call at Sukhumi’s palm-lined waterfront have stayed away since the USSR’s collapse.
“Before the war, it was heaven here, this was a happy place,” says Lamara Tsvirzhba, a former scientist who ekes out a living as a small businessman. “Now we live amid ruins. Most people, even many Abkhazians, have left and all we have is the daily struggle to survive.”
My friend Lyndon at Scraps of Moscow has been posting a ton of old(ish) maps of Georgia and the Caucasus. In one, he finds some 1989-era ethnic minority maps of Abkhazia. They paint a chilling portrait of what, exactly, happened after the civil war: a mostly pleasant tourist attraction was depopulated and turned into a scarred wasteland.
I am in no position to pick sides, as I do not know the history well enough. But the effects of this war and the way it has been used as a proxy for both Russia and Georgia are depressing: paradise fallen in the very realest sense of the term.
So will independence improve Abkhazia? Most signs actually point to “no”—even if, despite everyone’s contradictory positions on breakaway provinces bears an independent Abkhazia, it is unrealistic in the extreme to pretend it will remain independent of Russia for long. Russia has too much of a compelling interest to use the province as a thorn in Georgia’s side; similarly, Georgia will exert tremendous pressure on the future Abkaz government, which will most likely drive it into Russia’s arms seeking support and aid. I want to avoid asking, “so what’s the point, then?” But that seems too shallow a question for a dilemma of this magnitude: the area is literally caught between a rock and a hard place.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1771 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
{ 2 comments }
Josh, thanks for the shout-out, believe it or not I have still more maps of the Caucasus to post, all of which (of course) can be used to glean insights into the current situation if one is so inclined.
But what I’m really wondering is, where’s the Registan coverage of Mongolia? Isn’t that in y’all’s neighborhood? I did a couple of posts (shameless self-promotion, I know) but don’t really have a clue about the lay of the land.
Lyndon,
You’re welcome! We have covered Mongolia in the past — Nathan even wrote some really interesting essays on the place when he was in grad school. We don’t have any objection to covering it, but we also each have our own beats: Michael does mostly Kazakhstan, Nathan does mostly Uzbekistan, I do mostly Afghanistan/Pakistan. We all try to cover the Caucasus as best we can, but since Mongolia isn’t an especially dramatic place—at least not in comparison to some other areas—it’s been low on the radar. It’s not a deliberate thing (hell, if I got paid to do this, I’d cover all of these countries a lot), merely a consequence of living in a world of scarcity—in this case, TIME.