14 August: The Morning Abkhazia Has Been Forced to Remember

The sea was warm that Friday. Children were swimming. Naira Malijapha had taken her little ones down to the shore at Mayak, just outside Sukhum, the way any mother does on an ordinary August morning when summer is in full swing and the mountains hold the heat softly against the coast. Then the helicopter came in low over the beach and began to fire on the apartment blocks behind them, and the sky that had been impossibly blue a moment before was filled with the sound of automatic weaponry. Someone shouted that tanks had entered the city. The summer ended in that instant. So did a good deal else.

 

Thirty-four years on, this is the image that springs first to the mind of anyone in Abkhazia old enough to remember 14 August 1992, not the dates, not the politics, not the geopolitics of a collapsing empire, but the disbelief of an ordinary afternoon turning into something none of them had thought possible. Ludmila Sagaria put it most simply: ‘No-one expected that such a thing could happen at all, that a war could happen.’

But the war had been a long time coming. Since 1988 a kind of nationalist fever had been blowing through Georgia, the cry of "Georgia for the Georgians!" appearing on city walls, shouted at rallies, settling into the rhetoric of the streets. First in the manifestos of Giorgi Chanturia's National Democratic Party, then in the speeches of Zviad Gamsakhurdia, a man capable of declaring outright that no Abkhaz nation existed, that slogan became the name attached to a slow, deliberate reimagining of a multinational republic as the property of a single people. In Abkhazia, among Armenians, Russians, Greeks, there were those who knew what such an atmosphere tended to mean. Since the Abkhaz Supreme Council had adopted the Declaration on State Sovereignty in August 1990, relations with Tbilisi had ground on through what historians now call the "war of laws", two parliaments passing measures each declared null and void by the other, a slow procedural deadlock that ran for nearly two years. On the morning of 14 August, the Abkhaz Supreme Council was due to convene to debate a draft federative treaty with Georgia. The session never happened. Before the deputies could gather, a mechanised battalion of the Georgian Army, a thousand men, five tanks, a helicopter, ten artillery pieces, crossed the Ingur River and rolled north along the coast through Gal, Ochamchira and Gulripsh. The official pretext, broadcast within hours by Tbilisi, was that hostages from the Georgian State Council were being held somewhere in Abkhazia and had to be rescued. There were no such hostages in Abkhazian hands. There never had been.

Years later, in the 2009 documentary Absence of Will, Eduard Shevardnadze smiled faintly into the camera and answer, when asked whether the war could have been prevented, that of course it could. Then he added: ‘Defence Minister Tengiz Kitovani should never have sent troops to Sukhum. That,’ he said,’ was our biggest mistake’. Those words placed on the record, belatedly, a truth that had been denied for years; but they could not give back anything to a grave in Tamsh, or to anyone whose life ended on the road to Sukhum airport beneath the rotors of a helicopter.

 

+ Lord David Ennals: Georgian troops guilty of atrocities - November 1992

+ The Patriotic War in Abkhazia (1992–1993), by Aslan Avidzba

+ Georgian-Abkhaz War | FBIS Reports (Aug-Oct. 1992)

+ Tengiz Kitovani: "they [Russians] officially gave us the 108 tanks of the Akhaltsikhe Division"

The dispatches filed from the field by Russian correspondents that day, radio bulletins from Moscow, ITAR-TASS wires, Interfax cables, read with a kind of grim simultaneity. By the early afternoon, the Gal district was under Georgian control. Soon afterwards a Mi-24 gunship was circling the suburbs of Sukhum and firing rockets into the airport. The parliament's press service was reporting that helicopters were hovering directly above the building. By thirteen hundred hours an airborne assault had taken Sukhum airport itself. By fourteen hundred the Supreme Soviet building was being shelled from the sea. That same afternoon Vladislav Ardzinba went on Abkhaz television and told his people to defend their homeland; the Presidium ordered the general mobilisation of every adult between eighteen and forty.

 

 

A week later the commander of Georgian forces in Abkhazia, Giorgi Karkarashvili, appeared on Sukhum television and delivered the sentence that has defined the war in Abkhaz memory ever since. He would, he said, sacrifice 100,000 Georgians to annihilate 97,000 Abkhazians, which was in essence the Abkhazians in their entirety. He promised, in the same breath, to leave the entire Abkhaz nation without descendants. The figure 97,000 was not rhetorical exaggeration; it was, in essence, every Abkhazian resident on the territory of Abkhazia. Months later, in Le Monde diplomatique, the Georgian state minister for Abkhazian affairs Giorgi Khaindrava would put a similar number on it from a different angle: kill fifteen thousand of their young, he told the French paper, and the genetic stock of the nation would be destroyed, adding: ‘We are perfectly capable of doing this.’

 

This is the sentence that, more than any tank or artillery piece, told Abkhazia in what kind of war it was now engaged.

The personal ledger of those thirteen months and twenty-three days is impossible to render in numbers, although of themselves they are stark enough: about two thousand Abkhazians killed out of a tiny nation, seven thousand wounded, every family bereaved. But the testimonies gathered later carry the truth more honestly than cold statistics. Tamara Avidzba-Ezugbaya lost four of her five sons; her mother was paralysed by the shock, her husband grieved himself into his grave. Asta Ardzinba, two years old when the war began, still cannot speak easily about the aunt taken from a psychiatric hospital and buried in a common grave near Kutaisi, whose remains the family was only able to recover in 2005. Adgur Gulia was fourteen when his elder brother came home that afternoon from Sukhum, picked up a hunting rifle and went to war; his cousin did not come back. Maxim Gvindzhia speaks for almost everyone when he says, plainly, that: ‘Many loved ones were lost.’ ‘There is.’ says Londa Adlejpha, ‘no family the war did not touch in some way or other.’ And in the most ordinary households you find the most uncommon things: a young water polo player who had once represented the Soviet Georgian national team, lying wounded on the Gumista front, his playing hand ruined for the rest of his life.

Tamara Avidzba-Ezugbaya, the mother of five sons, four of whom died in the 1992-93 Georgian-Abkhazian War. Her mother was paralyzed with shock; her husband grieved to death.

While they buried their dead, the world looked elsewhere. The North Caucasus rose to help, as the appeal from the Confederation of Mountain Peoples brought volunteers down through alpine passes from Adyghea, Kabarda, Chechenia, Yusup Soslambekov, Musa Shanibov, Yuri Kalmykov being among the names that recur in every honest account, but the United Nations and the CSCE accepted only invitations from Tbilisi. Mission after mission visited Abkhazia at Georgia's request, whilst Abkhazia's own appeals went unanswered. Of the major international bodies, only the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation declared what was self-evident from Karkarashvili's broadcast and from the smoking ruins of the State Archive, which Georgian forces burned to the ground on the night of 22 October along with the Institute of Language, Literature and History, ninety-five per cent of the documentary memory of an entire people, reduced to ash in a single night, while desperate Sukhum residents were held back at gunpoint as they tried to rescue what they could from the flames. The UNPO said what almost no government would: that the Abkhazians were fighting not only for their land, but for their very survival as a people.

+ Estonian Orientalist Linnart Mäll and his role in activities of the UNPO during the Georgian-Abkhazian Conflict, by Aivar Jürgenson

+ 14 August 1997, Vladislav Ardzinba in Tbilisi. How did this come about?

+ Volunteer-movement and the Circassian factor during the Patriotic War of the people of Abkhazia in 1992-1993 – historical and political significance, by Aslanbek Mirzoev

+ Georgian Brutality and Local Support | 'Mobilizing in Uncertainty', by Anastasia Shesterinina

They fought for thirteen months on three fronts. On 2 October 1992 the Abkhaz militia retook Gagra in an operation that at last gave them a coastline and a corridor to the Russian border. Then came a long and brutal winter on the River Gumista. On the morning of 5 January 1993 Abkhaz units crossed the icy river and tried to fight their way into Sukhum; thirty-seven of them died there, more than a hundred were wounded, and the corpses lay on the battlefield for days. Only on the fifth day did the Georgian side hand over twenty-three of the bodies in exchange for prisoners. Some of those bodies, as the commanders who carried them home would remember, were still warm. The March offensive went worse, over two hundred young men remained over the Gumista. But these lost battles became the lessons that would lay the ground for the ultimate victory; they provided, as General Sultan Sosnaliyev later put it, the dress rehearsal for September. On the night of 1–2 July 1993 came the amphibious landing at Tamsh; then the September offensive itself. On 27 September at three minutes past three in the afternoon, Abkhaz fighters took the Government House in Sukhum. Three days later, at eight in the evening, the Abkhaz state flag was raised on the River Ingur. The war had lasted 413 days.

Abkhazian fighters (29 September 1993). | Photo by Marina Bartsyts.

It is a strange thing to commemorate a beginning. Victories are easier; they have an ending, and an ending invites celebration. But the date the 14th of August has no ending. It is the morning the helicopter came in over the beach. It is the moment Naira's children stopped swimming, and Adgur's brother picked up his rifle, and a thousand families began the long process of totting uo the number of those who would not be coming home. It is, as Kan Tania says, the historical milestone that cleaved the fate of a nation into a before and an after, and there is no third state to which any of them can return.

What the 14th of August asks of those who remember it now, thirty-four years on, is not anger. The dead are not served by anger; nor is the country they forged. What it asks is something quieter and harder: that the truth of what happened on that warm Friday morning be kept as a unified whole, not only the tanks and the helicopter and the shelled parliament, but also the children on the beach, the fathers reaching for hunting rifles, the mothers who learned in that hour to pray. To remember it like that, without sloganeering and without forgetting, is the small dignified act that a small country can still perform for itself. Abkhazia has always been good at small dignified things. It is one of the reasons it still survives.