Some conflicts are misremembered by accident. Others are misremembered because the simpler version is more useful. The war of 1992–1993 in Abkhazia belongs to the second category. What follows is an attempt to set aside the convenient shortcuts and look at the conflict as the Abkhazians themselves understood it: a struggle, finally, over the right to exist.

There is a particular violence in being remembered incorrectly. For the Abkhaz people, the war of 1992 and 1993 has suffered precisely this fate, refracted through interpretative frames so reductive that they obscure almost everything that matters. The conflict is routinely catalogued as an eruption of primal ethnic hatred, a separatist rebellion against a fledgling democracy, or, most conveniently of all, a proxy war engineered by Moscow against a vulnerable Tbilisi. Each of these frames has the merit of simplicity. None of them survives sustained scrutiny.

They share a structural defect that we might call post-hoc moral compression. Later geopolitical developments, above all the deterioration of relations between Russia and the West and the searing experience of 2008, have been projected backwards onto a wholly different historical moment, flattening its distinctions and quietly disposing of inconvenient particulars. Within this compressed space, Abkhazia ceases to be a political subject at all. It becomes an object, a territory acted upon rather than a community acting in defence of perceived existential interests, a derivative function of someone else’s strategy. The effect is to erase Abkhaz agency entirely while simultaneously absolving Georgian decision-makers of responsibility for choices made in a specific legal and political context.

This is not a neutral simplification. It is a second dispossession, conducted in the archive rather than on the battlefield.

To understand the conflict honestly, one has to begin from a different premise altogether: that this was a struggle, deeply rooted, over political agency, over sovereignty, and over the right of a people to define itself on its own terms. The questions at its heart were never reducible to who hated whom. They concerned who was permitted to exist as a historical and political actor, and who was to be written out of the record.

Nowhere is this contest over existence more naked than in a historiographical claim that has, with remarkable persistence, poisoned the well of every attempted reconciliation. The claim is this: that the Abkhazians of antiquity and the mediaeval period were in fact Georgians, and that the people who today call themselves Abkhazians (in Abkhaz Apswaa are latecomers, a tribe that descended from north of the great Caucasian ridge no earlier than the seventeenth century, displacing the genuine, Georgian, Abkhazians and brazenly assuming their name.

The provenance of this theory is not lost to history. It is documented with uncomfortable precision. It was formulated by the Georgian literary scholar Pavle Ingorokva, an auto-didact who wrote on literary themes and history, and it emerged in Ingorokva's elaboration between 1949 and 1951, finding even fuller expression in his monumental 1954 volume  Giorgi Merchule. This was no idle academic exercise undertaken in a political vacuum. It was conceived during the years of Lavrenti Beria’s repression, a period in which the Abkhazians were not permitted even to recognise themselves as a distinct people. Their schools had been closed, their script forcibly recast on a Georgian base, their place-names overwritten, and their lands settled by a steady inflow of Kartvelian (mostly Mingrelian and Georgian) migrants.

The timing is damning. Ingorokva’s theory crystallised in the very window, after the deportation of Greeks and Turks from the region, when plans were laid for the expulsion of the Abkhazians themselves. The theory furnished the necessary ideological pretext: if the Abkhazians were merely transient visitors, 'recent' intruders upon ancient Georgian soil, then their removal could be presented not as ethnic cleansing but as a kind of historical correction. That the deportations were ultimately thwarted owes nothing to any change of heart and everything to Stalin's death and  Beria’s fall from power and swift execution.

What ought to give every honest observer pause is not merely that such a theory existed, but that it was no aberration even at the time. Ingorokva had pursued this line as early as 1918, when, amid the territorial disputes of the newly independent Transcaucasian states, he had pronounced the Abkhazians a “Georgian tribe” in a report tellingly entitled “On the Georgian Borders.” His conclusions  were always conveniently favourable to Georgia. When his book appeared, approving reviews were lavished on it in the Georgian press, which welcomed above all the comforting proposition that there was henceforth no place for aliens in the Georgian political process. That a single, isolated philologist, the Georgian abkhazologist Ketevan Lomtatidze, dared to dissent from the collective verdict of her colleagues in the 1950s tells us a good deal about the climate in which this scholarship was produced.

The theory’s deepest flaw is not circumstantial but linguistic, and the proof is straightforward. Ingorokva’s edifice rests on a sleight of hand involving the very names of peoples, a confusion between what scholars call an auto-ethnonym and an exonym.

+ Rewriting History? A Critique of Modern Georgian Historiography on Abkhazia, by Stanislav Lakoba

+ Questions of Abkhazian history in the book by P. Ingorokva ‘Georgi Merchule - Georgian writer of the 10th century’, by Zurab V. Anchabadze

+ The Ibero-Caucasian hypothesis and the historiography of Abkhazia, by Kevin Tuite

+ The value of the past: myths, identity and politics in Transcaucasia, by Victor A. Shnirelman

+ On some issues of ethnic identity and placement of the Abkhazians (Regarding the work of P. Ingorokva 'Giorgi Merchule'), by Ketevan Lomtatidze

An auto-ethnonym is the name a people give themselves. An exonym is the name by which others know them. The Abkhazians call themselves Apsua (plural Apswaa). The wider world, drawing on an external tradition, calls them Abkhaz. These are not two peoples but one, viewed from inside and from outside. The dynamic is entirely unremarkable, and it is perfectly mirrored by the Georgians themselves, who name themselves Kartveli while the world variously calls them gurji, gruzin, and, in English, Georgian. No one supposes that the existence of these external names implies that “Kartvelians” and “Georgians” are distinct nations who happened to swap identities at some convenient historical juncture. Yet this is exactly the manoeuvre Ingorokva performed upon the Abkhazians. By treating Apsua as the marker of a separate, intrusive, recently arrived tribe, and reserving Abkhaz for a supposedly vanished Georgian population, he manufactured two peoples out of one and assigned the modern Abkhazians the role of impostors squatting on a borrowed name. As the Abkhazian politicians Arkhip Labakhua and Ivan Tarba protested to the Soviet leadership as early as April 1957, Ingorokva had sought to lay a foundation for his thesis through the falsification of historical documents and pseudo-scholarly exercises on toponyms.

The charge was precise. It has never been adequately answered.

What makes this matter pressing rather than consigned to history is its resurgence. Since the late 1980s, the migration theory, whether in its classical seventeenth-century form or in subtler contemporary variants, has spread well beyond the seminar room into the writings of prominent historians, into the universities, into the mainstream Georgian press, and into the rhetoric of public officials. Its very unambiguity, its accessibility to the non-specialist, has been its passport. Professor Giorgi Anchabadze (Achba) of Ilia State University, a historian respected in both Georgia and Abkhazia, has documented how widely it now circulates, particularly among an intelligentsia of non-specialists conditioned to find it congenial. It is no coincidence that the historiographical confrontation of 1989 preceded the war, that scholarly disputes spilled from academic journals into newspapers and from there into the streets. When a people’s adversary insists, as a matter of settled scholarship, that they are mere visitors upon their own indigenous soil, that they possess no ancient claim, no autochthonous standing, no rightful name even, then the ground for any genuine settlement has been removed in advance. One cannot compromise with a party one refuses to recognise as a historical subject at all. This is why the myth functions as an absolute barrier to peace. It denies the Abkhazians not this or that political concession, but their very identity.

The structural contradictions that exploded in 1992 were laid down decades earlier, in the peculiar architecture of Soviet federalism. The Soviet system married an ethno-territorial logic to a rigid hierarchy of rights. Union republics enjoyed nominal sovereignty and a constitutional right to secession; autonomous republics enjoyed neither. So long as central authority held, this asymmetry could be managed. When that authority collapsed, the distinction became explosive. Abkhazia had begun the Soviet period, until 1931, as a full union republic bound to Georgia by treaty. Under Stalin’s diktat, and over vehement Abkhazian protest, it was demoted to an autonomous republic and incorporated into the Georgian SSR. Six decades later, this single administrative act would be invoked to demonstrate that Abkhazia was an inseparable part of Georgia.

Upon this constitutional foundation was built a sustained programme of demographic transformation. The numbers tell the story plainly. On the eve of the First World War, the Abkhazians still accounted for roughly sixty percent of the population of their own land. A deliberate policy of resettlement, accelerated under Beria through a dedicated office established for the purpose, reversed this utterly. The Georgian share of the population, which stood at six percent in 1886, climbed to thirty-nine percent by 1959 and to nearly forty-six percent by 1989. Across the same span the Abkhazians were reduced to a minority of some seventeen to eighteen percent in the territory that bore their name. This was accompanied by a sustained assault upon Abkhazian cultural existence: the closure of Abkhaz-language schools, the imposition of Georgian as the language of instruction, the recasting of the alphabet on a Georgian base, the Georgianisation of place-names, and the systematic exclusion of Abkhazians from the structures of power by the mid-1940s. One First Secretary of the period went so far as to deny outright that an Abkhaz language existed at all, insisting that the Abkhazians spoke merely a distorted Georgian. Although Stalin’s death brought a partial reprieve, with schools reopened and the language restored to print and broadcast, the policy of Georgianisation continued by quieter means, provoking Abkhazian mass-protest in almost every decade that followed.

+ In Defence of the Homeland: Intellectuals and the Georgian-Abkhazian Conflict, by Bruno Coppieters

+ After 30 years Georgians still refuse to acknowledge their own responsibility for the conflict, by George Hewitt

+ "Georgia for the Georgians": The Evolution of a Nationalistic Slogan

+ Zviad Gamsakhurdia: “Abkhaz Nation Doesn’t Exist!”

+ Nationalism, politics, and the practice of archaeology in the Caucasus, by Philip Kohl and Gocha Tsetskhladze

It is against this background, and only against it, that the events of 1992 acquire their proper meaning. As the Soviet order disintegrated, the legal confrontation between Abkhazia and Tbilisi unfolded in a “war of laws,” in competing declarations and jurisdictional claims, before a single shot had been fired. The Abkhazians, fearing for their statehood amid an increasingly unitary and nationalist mood in Tbilisi, proposed a federative treaty to fill the legal vacuum that the abrogation of all Soviet agreements had opened. Tbilisi rejected it, chiefly on the grounds that Georgian society was unready to contemplate federation.

Then, on the fourteenth of August 1992, on the very day the Abkhazian parliament had assembled to discuss a draft confederation treaty (a proposal for a negotiated political union with Georgia), Georgian armed forces crossed into Abkhazia. The parliament building was among the targets.

It should be noted that Abkhazia’s willingness to explore a confederal arrangement with Georgia did not end with the war. Even in its aftermath, Abkhaz leadership continued to signal openness to negotiated solutions: as late as January 1996, Foreign Minister Leonid Lakerba confirmed Abkhazia’s acceptance of a joint state framework, provided its constitution and national emblem remained distinct. Georgian negotiators, however, consistently rejected Abkhaz proposals as attempts to legitimise territorial gains, as Jaba Ioseliani made plain during the Geneva talks of April 1994. With no settlement forthcoming and every avenue exhausted, Abkhazia formally declared independence in 1999. The question of any political association with Georgia is today considered closed by Abkhazians.

The official justifications, the restoration of constitutional order, the protection of the railway, do not alter the essential illegal character of what occurred. Armed forces entered a territory whose authorities had not consented to their presence and with whom negotiations were, at that very moment, ongoing. The intervention terminated the political process unilaterally and by force. To call the Abkhazian response “separatism” is to invert cause and effect. It was the rational, defensive reaction of a community that had watched, across two generations, the steady erosion of its demographic majority, its language, its institutions, and its very name, and that now faced the prospect of resolution by arms.

The asymmetry was stark almost beyond comprehension. A people numbering around one hundred thousand confronted a state of millions, heir to substantial Soviet military assets. For the Abkhazians, defeat would have meant not political subordination merely, but the erasure of a collective that had been self-achieved at immense historical cost. It is worth recording, too, that the Abkhazian formations halted near their own capital and did not march into Georgian territory. The war they fought was, in its geography as in its logic, a war of defence. The Georgian demographer Anzor Totadze once argued, in all seriousness, that in fighting in Abkhazia the Georgians were rescuing the Abkhazians from disappearance. In that light, Abkhazian fear looks less like paranoia than like sober anticipation.

None of this requires the denial of suffering, and honesty demands that suffering on every side be acknowledged. The war and its aftermath produced the displacement of much of the Kartvelian population of Abkhazia, a fact upon which international diplomacy has fixated to the exclusion of almost everything else. Yet this displacement merits a closer accounting than the simplified narrative built upon it allows: that the majority departed before Abkhazian forces arrived, that a considerable portion of those who left were the descendants, within living memory, of resettlement policies that had reduced the Abkhazians to a minority on their own soil, that those who took up arms and subsequently fled fall outside the refugee-definition of the 1951 Convention, and that Abkhazia itself, in 1999, unilaterally opened the way for the return of more than forty thousand largely Mingrelian persons, even as Tbilisi denounced those who accepted this offer as traitors. The deeper point, however, lies elsewhere. No serious party will say it aloud, but everyone knows it: a mass-return, layered upon the wounds the war has left, would sow the seeds of a fresh catastrophe rather than heal an open wound.

The Georgians have a homeland called Georgia, their motherland. The Abkhazians have nowhere else.

This is an asymmetry no international resolution can dissolve by an act of will, and honesty requires its acknowledgement as well. To recognise all of this is not to weaken the Abkhazian case but to state it in its only durable form. A claim to historical legitimacy that can be advanced only by averting one’s eyes from the costs of victory is fragile. A claim that can look squarely at those costs and still insist upon the underlying right, the right of a small indigenous people not to be erased, is the claim that can survive scrutiny. The point is not that the Abkhazians fought without consequence to others. It is that they fought because the alternative, as they had every reason to understand it, was their own extinction as a people.

The diplomacy of the past three decades has failed, and it has failed for a reason that is rarely named. The post-war architecture has proceeded, with depressing regularity, as if Georgia were the sole legitimate party to the dispute and Abkhazia a subordinate annoyance to be managed rather than a subject to be engaged. The result has been a process long on ritual and short on resolution. International law has been invoked to sanctify this posture, the principle of territorial integrity elevated above that of self-determination, yet applied with a selectivity that betrays its own incoherence, refusing to engage seriously with the conditions, armed intervention and existential threat among them, under which a claim to self-determination acquires genuine moral and legal weight.

+ Abkhazia [14 August] 1992-2022, by Metin Sönmez

+ The Georgian–Abkhaz War of 1992–1993: Recognition, Agency, and the Politics of Narrative Power

+ The Hand of Moscow and the Sterility of Geneva, by Izida Chania

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

+ The Georgian Press on the Position of the Georgian Population of Abkhazia During the Georgian-Abkhazian War (1992–1993), by Daur Achugba

Why there will be no peace without an honest history

The refusal to recognise Abkhazia as a political actor has not produced stability. It has entrenched division, deepened isolation, and driven Abkhazia into a dependence on Russia that serves no one’s long-term interest, least of all the Abkhazians themselves. Beneath the diplomatic failure lies an epistemic one, almost entirely absent from international analyses preoccupied with borders, refugees, and security arrangements. The deeper conflict is over identity and historical legitimacy. So long as a substantial current within Georgian society continues to regard the Abkhazians as latecomers, as marginal actors, as a derivative sub-group within a larger Georgian narrative, reconciliation will remain not merely difficult but conceptually impossible. One cannot make peace with a people whose existence one regards as a historical error.

A durable solution, then, cannot be engineered through security guarantees and refugee protocols alone, however necessary these may be. It requires something more demanding: an honest and thorough correction of the narrative itself. The international community must abandon the convenient geopolitical binaries that reduce Abkhazia to a Russian instrument. Georgia must confront and disown the state-sanctioned denial of Abkhazian history that has poisoned three generations of relations. And both must come to recognise Abkhazia as what it is, a legitimate historical and political subject with an ancient and autochthonous claim to its own soil.

Real reconciliation cannot be grown in the soil of enforced historical amnesia. It can begin only with an act of acknowledgement, unconditional and unflinching, of the right of the Abkhazian people to exist, securely and as themselves, upon the land that has always been their own.