The night 300 volunteers came ashore: Tamysh and the July operation, 33 years on

SUKHUM / AQW'A —  Thirty-three years after some 300 volunteers landed under artillery fire at Tamysh, Abkhazia remembers the July 1993 offensive that broke the deadlock and opened the road to Sukhum.

Shortly after nightfall on 2 July 1993, around 300 men came ashore at Tamysh, a village on the coastal plain between Ochamchira and Sukhum. Georgian artillery in Ochamchira was already firing on them as the boats came in. The force, commanded by Zaur Zarandia, nom de guerre 'Lakut', pushed inland to the central highway and, joined by units of the Abkhazian army's Eastern Front, fought its way towards the village school. There, in heavy fighting, the Georgian 'Avaza' Dusheti Battalion was routed.

Thirty-three years on, the Tamysh landing is remembered in Abkhazia as the opening act of the July offensive: the operation that broke a punishing stalemate in the 1992–93 war and set the country on the road to the liberation of Sukhum that September.

The war lasted 413 days, and for most of its final year the Abkhazian army's central task was freeing the capital from Georgian forces. After the victory at Gagra in October 1992, frontal assaults across the lower Gumista in January and March 1993 both failed, the second at heavy cost. It was only after a pause of three and a half months, on the night of 2 July, that a meticulously prepared offensive struck the enemy simultaneously on several sections of the front. Within four weeks, Georgia had signed an agreement in Sochi that, for the first time since the war began, provided for the withdrawal of its troops from Abkhazia.

'This July operation is a bright episode of the war. One of the most vivid combat operations of the Abkhazian army. A unique operation,' Aslan Kobakhia, a Hero of Abkhazia, said on the operation's 30th anniversary. 'I believe that there was a mass feat. There were volunteers. The Tamysh landing was completely voluntary.'

Eight days on the highway

For eight days, from 2 to 9 July, the landing force and the Eastern Front units held a corridor roughly ten kilometres long on the strategic Ochamchira–Sukhum highway, denying the Georgian command the ability to send reinforcements to the capital. According to the Abkhazian account of the fighting, they held it against eight motor-rifle battalions, a mechanised tank brigade and an artillery battalion; by the same account, five tanks, three infantry fighting vehicles and two helicopters were destroyed, three tanks, an IFV and two armoured personnel carriers captured, and up to 1,000 enemy soldiers killed or wounded. When the corridor had served its purpose, the fighters demolished the bridges along that stretch of the highway and withdrew to fortified positions in the Abkhazian villages of the Ochamchira district.

Timur Nadaraia, a veteran of the landing and holder of the Order of Leon, has recalled that preparations were exceptionally thorough, shaped by the failures that had gone before. The force was made up of volunteers, among them members of the Abkhazian diaspora from Turkey and Cossacks, many of the latter, in Nadaraia's words, going into battle 'like Narts', the heroes of the Caucasian epic. Twelve Cossacks died in the fighting at the Tamysh school.

The landing had a curious precedent on the other side. Almost a year earlier, on the night of 14–15 August 1992, Georgian naval forces sailing from Poti had put several hundred men ashore near Gantiadi, now Tsandripsh, with two landing vessels, two 'Comet' hydrofoils, a barge and four armoured vehicles. The difference lay in the reception: the Georgian force was met by a small group of Abkhazian militiamen armed largely with hunting rifles. The men who landed at Tamysh came ashore under artillery fire.

The mined bridge at Lower Eshera

The landing was one blade of a larger design. On the night of 3–4 July, at Lower Eshera, Alik Lazba, commander of the eighth company of the third motor-rifle battalion, led a diversionary raid across the Gumista intended to draw Georgian fire away from the offensive's main axis. The plan had been to ford the river, but the water ran too high; the men crossed instead over a mined highway bridge, under intense fire. Accounts of the group's size vary between roughly 70 and 140 men. Each of them, before setting out, signed a document confirming that he went voluntarily. They were known afterwards as the 'suicide squad', and the name was not rhetorical.

On the right bank they held out for some 14 hours against a force the Abkhazian account puts at six battalions, up to a thousand men, a tenfold superiority. 'We were sheltering in a trench, and they were throwing grenades in at us,' Stas Zhiba, one of the participants, recalled years later. 'We had five seconds to find the grenade in the darkness and throw it back. This went on for hours. One grenade rolled away somewhere and we couldn't find it. We had already prepared ourselves for death. It turned out it had rolled behind one of our comrades, he covered it with his body.'

The cost is disputed even within the Abkhazian record: one account gives 39 dead, while Lazba himself spoke in an interview of 19, adding that the true figure may be higher, with around 90 per cent of the attackers wounded. When some of his men were cut off under the bridge and no relief was forthcoming, Lazba organised covering fire himself and brought them out. The following day, unsanctioned by his own staff, he crossed alone to the Georgian lines to recover the bodies of the dead. The Georgian commander, he recounted, asked only one question: how many men they had been the previous day. On hearing the answer, he removed his hat. 'We lost three hundred dead alone,' he said. 'This is your land!'

The heights above Sukhum

The offensive's main blow fell north of the capital. Crossing the Gumista at Dvurechye, where the river's two branches meet, Abkhazian forces liberated Akhalsheni on 3 July and Upper Kaman on 5 July, the latter taken by the Afon-Eshera battalion. On 7 July they seized the Sukhum hydroelectric station, capturing a group of Georgian guardsmen led by General Zurab Mamulashvili, along with his then-underage son, Mamuka Mamulashvili. At 10pm on 9 July, Abkhazian units entered Shroma; by midnight resistance had been quelled and the flag of the Republic of Abkhazia raised over the village. The Akhbyuk hill, dominating the approaches to the capital, changed hands repeatedly before being retaken on the morning of 22 July and held despite heavy losses.

On the Georgian side there was disarray. Givi Kvantaliani, head of the police academy in Tbilisi, was demoted to private for refusing to go to war with his cadets. On 18 July, Tamaz Nadareishvili, chairman of the council of ministers of the Autonomous Republic of Abkhazia and head of its defence council, resigned, citing his health.

On 15 July the Eastern Front launched Operation 'X', involving the Chlou and Katran groups and the Edelweiss detachment. The military historian Valiko Pachulia writes that the operation, supported by armour, ran precisely to plan, with steady communications and all units acting under a single command; it freed strategically important heights and gave Abkhazian forces control over part of the Gal district.

From Sochi to the Ingur

The shuttle diplomacy of Boris Pastukhov, the Russian president's personal representative, moving constantly between Gudauta, Tbilisi and Sukhum, produced the ceasefire agreement signed in Sochi on 27 July 1993 by Sokrat Jinjolia for Abkhazia, Vakhtang Goguadze for Georgia and the Russian foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev. It provided for a joint commission, with UN and OSCE observers, to be formed by 5 August. Facing the loss of Sukhum and military defeat, the Georgian side had agreed, for the first time in the war, to a document providing for the withdrawal of its troops from Abkhazia.

Georgia did not honour it. On 16 September the Abkhazian armed forces went over to the offensive; on 27 September they took Sukhum and raised the state flag over the council of ministers building. On 29 September the Gumista and Eastern fronts met at the Kodor bridge, and on 30 September the army reached the Ingur, on the border with Georgia.

Ruslan Blabba

'Not in order to weep'

In blockaded Tkuarchal, Anna Gunia was 15 when the wounded and the dead began arriving from Tamysh on 2 July. Only later did she learn that her uncles, Tariel and Chach, and their nephew Ruslan Blabba had been among the landing force. Ruslan was brought in first, unconscious, with a head wound. She remembers her mother stroking his feet, there was nothing else anyone could do for him. On the ninth day of his coma, she saw a tear run from his eye; the family were asked to leave the ward, and he was gone. He was named a Hero of Abkhazia posthumously. When the wounded Tariel was carried in, he had taken four bullets, his first question was about Ruslan. The family did not tell him.

Mushin Gunia (Chach)

That same day, Gunia's sister-in-law Eleonora, 14 years old, was killed by a shell as she stood in her yard picking a freshly ripened walnut, in front of her mother. The Georgian guardsmen, Gunia writes, understood that a successful landing at Tamysh meant losing the war they had unleashed, and turned their guns on the villages.

A few years ago, Gunia found a photograph in the AGTRK archive: Tariel, Chach and Ruslan together, before setting out for Tamysh. Her family avoids the subject at home, she writes, but she wants their descendants to know the price at which the victory, and the country, were won, 'not in order to weep and suffer, but to build, to love, to create, to rejoice in what we have, to multiply it and to learn, to work for the good. To be happy, and to make our country happy.'