A Turkish MP Puts Abkhazia's Isolation on the Parliamentary Record

ANKARA — Selçuk Özdağ, a member of parliament for the Gelecek Party, used a press conference at the Grand National Assembly to put Abkhazia's isolation before the Turkish public and to ask the government for four specific measures. None of the four requires Ankara to change its position on recognition, and Özdağ said so at the outset.

'Türkiye does not recognise Abkhazia as an independent state. It upholds Georgia's territorial integrity, and the great majority of the international community takes the same position. That is the official policy, and it is well known.' What followed was the distinction on which the rest of the statement turned. 'But refusing to recognise a state's status is not the same thing as treating the people who live there as though they did not exist.'

Özdağ paired Abkhazia with Gagauzia, framing both as small communities caught between larger powers, though the substance of his remarks concerned Abkhazia. He described a foreign policy that had come to consist of photographs with heads of state, and set against it a list of people who fall outside the frame: the student who cannot return to university because a passport is not recognised, the patient who cannot reach the country where treatment is available, the family with no school in which to teach its children their own language.

The passport as an instrument

The section of the statement most likely to be read closely in Sukhum concerned documents. Özdağ noted that the Abkhazian passport is accepted by a handful of countries, and that a considerable share of the population has therefore come to depend on a Russian passport in order to travel at all. That dependence, he argued, is not neutral.

'When that Russian document is slow in coming, or is withheld, or is refused elsewhere on account of the place where it was issued, people's lives are damaged by it. In this way Russia controls Abkhazia's door to the outside world not only through its economic and military weight, but through the passport as well.'

He put the consequence plainly. 'If the Abkhazian people pledge themselves to Russia and bow, all well and good; if not, they are stripped of every kind of basic human right.'

To that he added the restrictions arising from Georgia's law on the occupied territories, while stating that Georgia's sovereignty and security concerns were not being dismissed, and that neither the war of the 1990s nor the tens of thousands of displaced Georgians could be set aside. 'But between security concerns and the right of people to reach education, healthcare and their own families, a humane path must be found.'

'Today a freight container may cross to the far shore, but a human being may not. That the door thrown open to merchandise should be shut against a relative, a student, a patient is not acceptable.'

Freight and passengers

Özdağ returned to a point AbkhazWorld examined earlier this month in its analysis 'The Container Crosses, the Passenger Cannot'. The airport at Sukhum, closed for three decades, resumed receiving flights from Russia in 2025. Aircraft can therefore land and passengers can be carried. There is still no direct flight from Türkiye.

'Passenger ships once sailed from Samsun and from Trabzon. Today a freight container may cross to the far shore, but a human being may not. That the door thrown open to merchandise should be shut against a relative, a student, a patient is not acceptable.'

The observation is not rhetorical. Turkish goods reach Abkhazian ports; Turkish vessels work the coast; customs revenue is collected at the other end. The commercial route functions. What has not been restored since the 1990s is the passenger sailing.

Land, and the fear behind it

Özdağ also addressed the property question, and he addressed it accurately, which is uncommon in Turkish political commentary on Abkhazia. He recalled that the 2024 measure known as the apartments law, which would have opened residential property to foreign buyers, was withdrawn after mass opposition, and that the investment agreement understood to grant broad privileges to Russian investors was rejected in parliament after the same protests. He noted that the crisis ended in the resignation of the leadership of the day, and stated for the record that neither measure is in force.

He then explained why the matter has not closed. 'A community of limited numbers fears becoming a minority on its own land before foreign capital whose purchasing power is many times its own. It asks whether it might one day lose its houses, its coastline and its soil piece by piece. To belittle that anxiety is to understand nothing of Abkhazian history and nothing of the memory of exile.'

On Moscow, he was direct. 'Russia says that it recognises Abkhazia. But does recognition not also require respect for the will of a people?' To convert economic support into political pressure, and dependence on energy and budget subsidy into a lever for concessions, was not friendship, he said. 'It goes by another name: a relationship of dependency.'

Four requests

The statement closed with four proposals addressed to the Turkish government.

One. Without altering its position on Abkhazia's political status, Türkiye should examine the legal means by which Abkhazian passports might be accepted, for limited purposes, as documents of identity and travel. Özdağ pointed to British administrative procedures for documents issued by authorities the United Kingdom does not recognise, to the Taiwan case, and to existing status-neutral travel documents. Where necessary, he said, Türkiye could devise a security-screened travel document of its own, or a form issued alongside a visa.

Two. Türkiye should establish, with the Georgian authorities and the relevant international organisations, a clear humanitarian exemption mechanism covering travel for health, education, scientific, cultural and family reunification purposes. He observed that Georgian law already provides for humanitarian assistance and special permissions. 'Where there is political will, there is also legal ground for a solution.'

Three. Passenger sailings should be opened between Trabzon and Sukhum, and if possible between Samsun and Sukhum, on terms open to inspection and designed to meet the security and customs concerns of both sides. The conditions for a weekly or twice-weekly civil air link should be examined. 'To say "it is legally difficult" is not a solution. It may well be an excuse for indifference.'

Four. A standing humanitarian dialogue table should be convened between Abkhaz civil society organisations in Türkiye, the relevant circles in Abkhazia, the Georgian authorities and international organisations. He was careful to define what it would not be. 'That table is not a bargaining forum over political recognition. It should be a table for solutions.'

Where this sits

The four requests track closely with the campaign launched on 29 June by representatives of the Abkhaz diaspora in Türkiye, which asked Turkish citizens to file appeals through CİMER, the Presidency's Communication Centre. That appeal sought recognition of the Republic of Abkhazia and, pending it, the acceptance of Abkhaz passports as valid identity documents for crossing the Turkish border and the opening of direct sea and air links through technical agreements with the General Directorate of Civil Aviation, on the model already applied to Taiwan and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. On 4 July the Labour Party, Emek Partisi, published a statement in support.

Özdağ's intervention takes the same argument into the Assembly. He is not a member of the governing coalition, and no vote follows a press statement. What has changed is smaller and not trivial: the question of why a Turkish citizen of Abkhazian descent cannot board a boat at Trabzon has now been asked from inside the parliament, in terms that separate the humanitarian case from the recognition case and require no concession on the second in order to act on the first.

Türkiye has taken that route before. The precedents Özdağ cited are its own.

See also:

+ The Container Crosses, the Passenger Cannot: Türkiye's Abkhazia Policy and Its Own Citizens