Abkhazia caught amid broader conflicts

Tiny breakaway republic struggles for life, identity

Tamara Ezugbaya is the mother of five sons, four of whom died in Abkhazia's victorious separatist war with Georgia in the early 1990s. Her sons died in quick succession, within six months, the first two in the same battle. (sergei l. loiko/los angeles times)

LOWER ESHERA, Georgia - Fifteen years since its bloody war with Georgia, the breakaway republic of Abkhazia is a surreal spot where Soviet isolation lingers, the Cold War never ended, and people cling to facades of statehood. It is a half-abandoned place of rusting ports and skeleton homes in a land recognized by nobody.

Now, with Russia and the United States engaged in a high-stakes power grab in the former Soviet Union, this forlorn sliver of lush beaches and snowy Caucasus mountains touching the Black Sea, wedged between Russia and Georgia, has emerged as a hub of new tensions between the Cold War enemies.

The ethnic-religious conflict between Georgia and Abkhazia was brutal on both sides. In the end, as ethnic Abkhazians emerged as victors, ethnic Georgians were driven out in an orgy of torture, rape, and looting.

For Georgia, Abkhazia is an open wound. Thousands of refugees from the region linger in limbo in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital. The Georgian government has vowed to bring Abkhazia back within its borders.

Abkhazians swear it will never happen. "God forbid!" said Tamara Ezugbaya, the mother of five sons, four of whom died fighting Georgia in the early 1990s war.

A slight woman with a house in a mandarin orange grove, she has worn black all these years. Her sons died in quick succession, within six months, the first two in the same battle. Her mother was paralyzed with shock; her husband grieved to death.

"I don't think a single Abkhazian living here will allow this, as long as they're alive," she said.

But Georgia is furious over Russian interference. Leaders have called for a boycott of the 2014 Winter Olympics in nearby Sochi if Abkhaz goods are used to build the sports facilities, and have also warned that any more Russian peacekeepers posted to Abkhazia would be seen as "an act of aggression against the Georgian state with all ensuing consequences," a Foreign Ministry statement said.

Abkhazia has a flag, license plates, visas, border guards, and the government. There is also a quixotic campaign to distribute Abkhaz passports. "They are not recognized elsewhere in the world, but inside the country they are very much in effect," a government official says without irony.

Abkhazia is a vast junkyard of collapsed structures and resurgent nature. Roads are dotted with the shells of homes, picked clean of all but the frame.

Staircases to nowhere rise from tangles of vine. Cows claim the right of way on shattered roads, stepping among the bomb craters and puddles.

In Sukhumi, the once-thriving port is a ship graveyard, with rusted craft wedged into the sand. At the airport, out past the destroyed hotels and crushed Pepsi-Cola plant, abandoned helicopters and airplanes litter the runways. No international flights run in or out of Abkhazia these days; the only things taking off now are a United Nations helicopter, crop planes and the occasional flight to the mountains to drop off scientists or skiers.

The factories are blighted, offices shut down. Families have turned to their gardens to survive; to their milk cows and chickens; their fruit and nut trees. The economy is broken, but the people don't starve.

The government says that more than 200,000 people live in Abkhazia; most independent analysts believe the real number is lower. In any case, the official figure is less than half of the more than 500,000 people who lived in this then-thriving resort and citrus farming belt before the war erupted.

To the dismay of US-backed Georgia, which still considers Abkhazia to be part of it, Moscow has already distributed passports to nearly all the people here and encouraged them to vote in Russian elections.

Tensions have increased in recent weeks, after Kosovo declared independence from Serbia, a traditional Russian ally. Moscow bitterly objected, warning that Kosovo's example would embolden other breakaway regions and destabilize Europe.