'Being recognised and being a country worth dying for are two big differences'

SUKHUM / AQW'A — Nauru's withdrawal has revived an old argument in Sukhum about what a recognition is worth once given. Akhra Bzhania's answer is that it matters rather less than the state itself, and he sets out what should follow from that.

Nauru's decision to withdraw its recognition of Abkhazia, taken on 21 July and made public by the Georgian Foreign Ministry on 29 July, has reopened a familiar argument in Sukhum about what a recognition is worth once it has been given. Writing on his Facebook page shortly after the announcement, the Abkhaz public figure Akhra Bzhania sets the loss aside and turns to the larger question behind it: what a foreign policy doctrine for Abkhazia should actually consist of. His answer places the emphasis on the quality of the state rather than on the number of states willing to name it, and it ends with two concrete proposals, on passports and on shipping routes, that will be familiar to readers of our coverage of the Türkiye campaign. He has a personal stake in the story he is commenting on, having received a Nauruan parliamentary delegation in Sukhum in 2017. His text is translated in full below.

Bzhania writes:

'Some 230,000 irregular migrants alone crossed the borders of the EU in 2025 and 2026. All of them fled countries that are broadly recognised by the international community. Why did these people rush to storm Ceuta, why did they not stay and live in Morocco, Mali or Afghanistan? Presumably because having a flag in front of the headquarters in Manhattan does not automatically mean that you live in a state of your own. In a country where you can influence public life, where your voice carries weight and where your dignity will never be trampled.

Being a recognised country and being a country you want to live in and one worth dying for are, as they say in Odessa, "two big differences". You may get the first and never reach the second. And if you have the second, if there are young people who see a future in their country, who want to live in it, to reform it and, if necessary, to defend it, then you have done the most important thing. You have built a country that belongs to its citizens. That is what a modern state is. And that is precisely the fact we must make our main instrument for Abkhazia's integration into the international community.

We must convey clearly to world opinion the message that, despite sanctions, isolation and the military threat, the citizens of Abkhazia have built a law-governed and free society. Without being members of international institutions, we have put into state practice the main provisions of the international conventions on personal and political rights and freedoms. We have managed to create a country attractive not only to its own citizens but to thousands of foreigners, who feel comfortable and safe in multicultural Abkhazia.

We consider ourselves part of the world community and we should rightfully hold a worthy place in it. For that, our diplomacy must become more flexible, even aggressive. It should be oriented not towards expecting and holding on to acts of recognition, but towards a comprehensive demonstration of our legal personality and the widening of our foreign policy contacts. No one is obliged to do this for us. Russia, by recognising our sovereignty, effectively made Abkhazia a subject of international law, but it cannot solve our problems for us.

Everything must be brought into play to reach the goals we need. The resources of the diaspora, cultural, trade, sporting and personal ties, migration policy, the levers of regional logistics. In this game you have to keep raising the stakes, not sit on fifteen and wait to go bust.

Today there is a window of opportunity for such an active policy. It is no secret that relations between Georgia and the West are at their lowest point since the 1990s. There are two main reasons for this: Georgia's systematic drift towards an authoritarian state, and the position of Ivanishvili's government on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. In Brussels the latter caused bewilderment at first and then irritation, and in Kyiv open hostility. Not because of the supposed refusal to open a second front, which was in fact a Georgian Dream election fake, but because of the extraction of profit from the troubles of recent allies. Pirouettes of that kind in foreign policy are markers of reliability, and they are not forgotten quickly.

So those on whom Tbilisi relied in promoting its anti-Abkhaz agenda are disappointed in Georgia, and this moment can be used. That includes reviving the active dialogue with European countries that took place in the late 1990s. All the more so since the hopes the West entertained about Georgia as a bastion of the free world in the Caucasus have been realised to a greater degree precisely in Abkhazia. Yes, life is full of surprises.

Another crucial lever, one that remains almost entirely outside our foreign policy activity, is the Circassian diaspora. Four million people in fifty countries, drawn from every stratum, from hereditary military families to politicians. This is a powerful reserve we can genuinely lean on, but the main thing is to offer them the prospect of political cooperation. Abkhazia can and should become the centre of the Circassian world as the only independent state of this ethnic community. Our country can become the same kind of sheltering home for the Circassians of the world that Israel became for all Jews. If every Circassian, wherever he lives, in Egypt, Türkiye, Jordan or Germany, knows that in Abkhazia he will find protection and the advancement of all his interests, from cultural to legal, and that in our common home he will receive every possible privilege as part of the Abkhazo-Adyghean world, that alone will create a powerful foundation for representing our shared interests. First the recognition of our passport as a means of travel in countries with an Adyghean diaspora, then the legalisation of transport routes to the countries of the Black Sea and Mediterranean basins.

This will probably not happen tomorrow, whatever efforts we make here, but it will happen within a foreseeable perspective if those efforts are constant and systematic.

In 2017, on behalf of the People's Assembly, I had the honour of receiving a delegation of the Parliament of Nauru in Abkhazia. Wonderful, lovely people. Unfortunately, at sea ships do not only come together, they also part. Today Nauru has set a course away from Abkhazia, and evidently they considered it the safer one. May good luck go with them. As for us, we will carry on along our own course.'

Akhra Bzhania, Facebook. Translated from the Russian for AbkhazWorld.