The New York Times
August 15, 2004 Sunday

Threat of Civil War Is Turning the Abkhaz Into Russians

By C. J. CHIVERS

SUKHUMI, Georgia, Aug. 10

The men on the seashore announced their citizenship one by one. The
first man, who did not appear Slavic, said he was Russian. Then the
second, then the third. Another produced a new passport bearing the
Russian seal. ”I am Russian, too,” he said.

It was the same among all the men sipping coffee under the oleander
and palm, just as it is throughout this city, the partly abandoned
capital of Abkhazia, a tiny self-declared state.

”You can ask any person here, and they will have the passport of the
Russian Federation,” said Apollon Shinkuba, a retired general in the
military of a nation that officially does not exist.

Abkhazia, a breakaway Georgian republic the size of Delaware, has
been swept by a paper revolution.

As latent civil war with Georgia threatens to flare anew, the Abkhaz
have become Russian citizens by the tens of thousands, declaring
allegiance to Moscow, which they hope will defend them if fighting
breaks out. It is a policy resembling voluntary annexation — not by
force or referendum but by the mass assumption of the citizenship of
a neighboring state.

The Abkhaz have been applying under a provision of Russian law that
grants citizenship under certain circumstances to residents of the
former Soviet Union. They hope their new allegiance will prove to be
insurance in the event of war, although there is no clear guarantee.

”The president of the Russian Federation is the guarantor of
protection of the citizens of the Russian Federation, no matter where
they live,” said Valery Arshba, Abkhazia’s vice president, himself a
Russian citizen. He added, ”Political protection implies military
protection.”

The status of Abkhazia — a republic on the Black Sea that is
adjacent to Russia and has a deep affinity for it but is within the
internationally recognized borders of Georgia — is one of the last
of the sovereignty disputes that followed the dissolution of the
Soviet Union.

The Georgians and the Abkhaz were held together under Soviet rule. In
1992, not long after Soviet rule ended, civil war broke out, ending
in 1993 with the expulsion of the Georgian Army followed by a line of
demarcation that is still patrolled by a United Nations observers.

What remains beyond that line is a place of astonishing beauty and
often eerie stillness, a republic in a state of unsettled suspension.
Abkhazia has been independent for 11 years, able to claim
self-government, but at a cost of isolation and at a high economic
and social price.

No nation recognizes it. Its factories are idle. Its infrastructure
is run down. Its government claims to have a budget of $15 million a
year.

There is little traffic, no postal service, no state currency
(rubles, not Georgian lari, circulate here) and a marginal economy.
Its hospitals depend on aid organizations. Minefields litter its
byways.

Village after village in the former Georgian zone of Gali, near the
Inguri River, across which Georgian civilians fled as their army
collapsed and Abkhaz fighters advanced, remain depopulated and
sacked. Weeds grow from rooftops; horses wander the grounds of gutted
factories; people are few.

And tensions have risen again. Georgia has never given up its claim
to Abkhazia, and the new Georgian president, Mikhail Saakashvili, has
pledged to bring the renegade republic into the national fold, as he
is also trying to do with another separatist region, South Ossetia.

At a briefing for journalists and political analysts this week near
Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital, Mr. Saakashvili said he would be patient,
but spoke with an air of inevitability.

Abkhazia, in his view, will return to Georgia. ”We can do just about
anything short of full independence,” he said, and referred to
possible federalist models for reintegration.

The political rhetoric has been leveraged with force. Late last
month, the Georgian Coast Guard fired on a cargo ship calling at
Sukhumi, asserting that ships sailing for Abkhazia without Georgian
permission violate Georgia’s territorial integrity and international
law.

Here on the western side of the Inguri River, the Abkhaz people, a
tiny ethnic minority whose roots reach to ancient times, see
themselves as besieged. The government suspended talks with Tbilisi,
vowed to remain firm on national status and said it would use force
to counter actions it regarded as hostile.

”Right now we have our forces ready, and if necessary we will
fight,” said the acting foreign minister, Georgi Otyrba, who became
a Russian citizen three months ago.

Abkhazia maintains an army seasoned by civil war. Officials here say
it has more than 20,000 fighters and is organized in the manner of
the Swiss, with reservists who keep automatic rifles at home,
prepared to gather swiftly at predetermined locations for local
defense.

An exercise held last month to test military readiness was a success,
Abkhaz officials said. Several of them added that Mr. Saakashvili,
whom they regard as young and rash, has chosen a course that could
quickly slip from his control.

”The idea of the new president of Georgia will lead to a new war,”
said Nugzar Ashuba, speaker of Abkhazia’s 35-member parliament. ”It
is absolutely so.”

He added that although Abkhazia regarded its military as a defensive
force, it had aircraft, artillery and tanks, and if the Georgians
continued to test the borders, it might strike first. He said, as an
example, that fighter planes or helicopter gunships could be sent to
sea. ”We can destroy the Georgian ships; we have all the means,” he
said. ”But we don’t want a scandal. Of course, if they keep doing
this, we will reconsider.”

Little prospect for negotiation exists for now. The Abkhaz president,
Vladislav Ardzinba, has been ill and is not visibly in command of the
government. An election to replace him is set for October. The new
president will serve a five-year term.

One Western diplomat, citing the delicacy of the subject and speaking
anonymously, said it was difficult to assess prospects for peace
talks. ”It is really hard to discuss it seriously until after the
Abkhaz presidential election,” he said.

In the interim, residents here have been becoming Russian in waves,
with encouragement of the de facto state. Mr. Arshba, the vice
president, said 170,000 of Abkhazia’s 320,000 residents had become
citizens of Russia, and 70,000 others had applications pending. The
shift started in the late 1990’s. More than 50,000 Abkhaz people had
become Russian by 2002, he said, when a government campaign induced
roughly 117,000 more people to adopt Russian citizenship. The latest
push began this summer.

Numbers here are malleable and impossible to confirm. Mr. Otyrba said
that he had seen new, unpublished census data and that 80 percent of
what he said were 362,000 residents of Abkhazia were Russian.

Mr. Saakashvili insisted that the population is of Abkhazia was much
smaller than Abkhaz officials contended — fewer than 200,000, about
half of whom are Abkhaz and the rest principally Armenian and
Georgian.

One point is clear: given that to obtain Russian citizenship an
Abkhaz applicant must be at least 16 years old, on paper the
Russification of Abkhazia is almost complete.

”We’re at about 80 percent now,” said Gennadi Nikitchenko, chief of
the Abkhaz office of the Congress of Russian Communities, which has
been assisting residents with applications and forwarding bundles of
the documents to the office of the Russian Foreign Ministry in Sochi.

What wartime protections these new citizens might enjoy is anything
but certain. The Western diplomat suggested that their status was not
ironclad. A document, he said, ”doesn’t make them Russian.”

Russia has been ambiguous as well. The Russian defense minister,
Sergei B. Ivanov, told the Interfax news service this week that ”the
protection of the interests of Russian citizens in Abkhazia and South
Ossetia should be done by political and diplomatic methods.”

President Vladimir V. Putin has remained silent on the matter.

As the impasse continues, a sense of lost opportunities pervades.
Abkhazia, subtropical and inexpensive, gorgeous and little known,
seems like a coastal boom waiting to happen.

The republic is breathtaking, a narrow land in which mountains 12,000
feet high tumble in forested hills to the Black Sea. Its farmland is
rich in tangerines and tea.

The republic’s famed beaches at Sukhumi, Gagra and Pitsunda were
formerly vacation destinations for the Soviet elite. Stalin kept
dachas here. Before the Bolsheviks took state holidays, czars lounged
on Abkhazia’s beaches.

Yet for all of its beauty and access to the sea, Abkhazia suffers
from its isolation and reputation as a land that is locked in
struggle. Sukhumi, the seat of the separatist government, remains 60
percent destroyed and is full of gutted buildings and glassless
windows.

Abkhazia still attracts upward of 350,000 tourists a year, almost all
Russian, according to Mr. Otyrba, the acting foreign minister, but
that is down from several million tourists before the war.Those who
visit create weirdly incongruous scenes, like that at the Elbrus
Club, a bustling discotheque between the beach and the skeletons of
buildings destroyed in the last war. On summer evenings, when music
thumps at the Elbrus and beer flows from its taps, Sukhumi seems one
part Grozny, one part Miami Beach.