DANIEL MCLAUGHLINreports from Georgia's breakaway region of Abkhazia, which will be in focus at an OSCE conflict resolution conference to be held in Dublin today
SHE HAD made the trip countless times before, but now she just didn’t want to go.
The skinny brown mare twisted her neck and stamped her hooves as her old driver berated her with a stick and Georgian curses. Her load was heavy, the morning sun was already hot and the bridge across the river Ingur was long.
She was hitched to a rickety cart fitted with two rough wooden benches, on which 15 people faced each other across a pile of bags and boxes. Nearly all the passengers were women, and they peered out from the tarpaulin that covered the wagon and laughed at the old man’s travails.
The women were crossing the broad green river from the Georgian-controlled bank to their homes in Abkhazia, a separatist-run region that Russia recognises as an independent state. They too had made this journey many times, since Abkhazia broke from Georgia in a 1992-3 war that killed several thousand people and drove about 200,000 ethnic-Georgians from a province that was a subtropical summer playground for the Soviet elite.
The women’s talk and laughter faded when conversation turned to daily life in Abkhazia. They shook their heads and held up their hands as if words were insufficient or useless. And the cart was jerking closer to the other side of the bridge, where Abkhaz soldiers waited.
Before she clambered out of the creaking wagon, one of the women said quickly: “This is how we live. How does this look to you? Does this look like a decent life?” On the far side of the bridge, where the slow journey began, Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili looks down from a billboard emblazoned with the map of Georgia – which includes the rebel-held regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
Here, in Abkhazia, it is former local leader Sergei Bagapsh who looks down on the women from a huge poster as they move through a makeshift checkpoint. The green, white and red Abkhaz flag tightens in the breeze, and in the distance the Caucasus mountains gleam white with snow.
Abkhaz militia check documents and cars and dusty minibuses wait to take people further into what Georgia and its US and EU allies see as occupied territory.
The alleged occupiers are Russian troops, and close to the de-facto border they have built a big new base that stands in stark contrast to the ruination that surrounds it in the town of Gali.
Here, in the only part of Abkhazia that now has a significant ethnic-Georgian population, houses still stand gutted beside atrocious roads that appear not to have been repaired since the war.
Georgians living here accuse the Abkhaz and their Russian allies of intimidation and discrimination, while the separatist leadership in their capital Sukhumi say this region is a hotbed of activity for Tbilisi’s special forces, which they blame for several murders in recent months.
The road suddenly improves at the edge of Gali, and streams westward through lush fields and orange groves, past solid houses half-hidden by cherry and palm trees, towards Sukhumi.
There is none of Gali’s gloom here. On Sukhumi’s restored promenade, men talk above the click of draughts games and Russian tourists and businessmen mingle with the locals over coffee.
There are few police on the streets, and no soldiers or tension. A Black Sea breeze rustles the palms, and the sun glints off the turquoise water.
But there are shadows here, thrown by ruined buildings like the huge, burned-out parliament just a few blocks from the water, and by the memories of the people who survived the war.
“I was running here and there to get bread and other things for the family. And a rocket landed,” said Sveta Yetumiyan (54), taking a break from sweeping leaves in a Sukhumi park.
“It’s still sore, especially when it’s cold,” she said, raising her dress a little to show a dimpled scar below her knee. “I still have some shrapnel in there.”
She says she could live with the Georgians again, if they were ever to return to this sun-kissed region where they formed a majority in Soviet times.
“We had no problem with them until the war. Then I don’t know what happened. Politics, I suppose.”
When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Abkhaz reasserted long-held demands to be free of Georgian control, insisting that Tbilisi had no more right to rule them than Moscow.
The nationalists who surged to power in Georgia in the early 1990s could not countenance such a move, and fierce fighting erupted, with Russia taking the side of the separatists. Georgians and Abkhaz still tell gruesome tales of massacres and torture that followed.
Russia propped up Abkhazia following the conflict, and after its 2008 war with Georgia over South Ossetia, Moscow recognised it as an independent state. Venezuela, Nicaragua, Vanuatu, Tuvalu and Nauru have followed suit. All other countries see this territory as Georgian.
Tbilisi and most western capitals believe Abkhazia is effectively controlled by Russia, to destabilise Georgia and maintain a strong military presence in a strategic region.
“There are no occupiers here, and we will not be dictated to by anyone” insisted Abkhazia’s foreign minister, Viacheslav Chirikba.
“We didn’t fight a war to be part of another country. We want to be independent. We have a treaty with Russia because we are scared of Georgian attack. If Russia withdrew, Georgia under Saakashvili would attack us the next day.”
Saakashvili says the first step towards a peaceful solution is the withdrawal of Russian forces from Abkhazia.
In Zugdidi, a town on Tbilisi’s side of the de-factor border, many Georgians driven out of Abkhazia during the war have set up home.
“It was terrible – genocide against Georgians,” said Alfred Dzhikia (40), who fled to Zugdidi from the Black Sea resort of Gagra.
“But we could sort it out if it wasn’t for the Russians. They want their empire back – that’s the main problem.”