Abkhazia? Would you mind spelling that, Mr. President?

By Joe Bob Briggs
April 12, 2002

Am I hallucinating or did Bush just send 200 soldiers to Georgia?

I don't mean Fort Benning. I mean the real Georgia, as in the Caucasus Mountains. Guys who eat goat yoghurt and live to the age of 120.

I've met some of these guys. I wasn't brave enough to actually enter Georgia, but Georgians have been known to troll the bars around Adler and Sochi, on the Russian side of the border, where all the posh Black Sea resorts are.

And talk about your Alpha Male specimens. When Georgians suggest a "round" of drinks, they mean a bottle of vodka--for each person at the table. Insult one of them, and they not only vow to kill YOU, they include all your family as well. But if they're scary in a disco, I can just imagine how scary they are with malfunctioning Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders.

But wait! Were those really Georgians I met, or were they . . . Abkhazians? More important, are U.S. soldiers really going to Georgia, or are they going to Abkhazia?

Okay, let's back up. Everybody refer to your atlas. See that little speck of mountain chaos at the eastern edge of the Black Sea, wedged in there between Russia, Turkey, Armenia and Azerbaijan? Stalin's homeland? Yeah, that's the place.

Okay, it's a country now. And supposedly these Georgians are gonna help us rout out some Al Qaeda leftovers who have taken refuge in the Pankisi Gorge up in the snow-covered Caucasus. But I'm sure that whatever the Georgians are saying about that is at best a white lie and at worst an outright whopper. They wanna get the American military into the country under Georgian auspices because that tends to make them the legitimate government, as opposed to the breakway Abkhazian government in Sukhumi.

Whoops! I just lost two family members. I mean in the Abkhazian capital of Sukhum. If you put that last "i" on it, you're giving it the Georgian name. And Abkhazians hate Georgians. In fact, let's just refer to the capital of Abkhazia from here on out as AqW'a, which is the Abkhazian language name.

Trust me. If there are any Al Quaeda cells hiding in Georgia, they are not in the northeastern Pankisi Gorge. When Muslim separatists go to Georgia, they end up not in the east but in the west, in Abkhazia, where Abkhazians have ties to the northern Caucasus, the part of Russia where Russian soldiers fear to tread. Are you following this so far? I'm sure you're not. Diplomatic veterans with 30 years of experience can't follow this.

Okay, what exactly are Abkhazians? Nobody knows. All we know is that sometime in the last 3,000 years they got separated from the other ethnic tribes in the northern Caucasus--the Chechens, Ingushetians and various other wild mountain peoples--and during the Soviet years it got really bad for them as they lost their language, their government, and 80 per cent of their population, most of them ending up in Turkey. (And Brooklyn, of course. Every refugee nationality ends up in Brooklyn.) They've especially hated being part of Georgia since 1931, when Stalin tried to eliminate Abkhazia altogether.

But when the Soviet Union broke up, the Abkhazians saw their big chance. They actually started rioting as early as 1989, when the Georgians tried to take away their Abkhazian university and replace it with a satellite of the Georgian state university. But things got really bad during the Yeltsin years, when Boris was stirring them up as a way to force Georgia to remain part of the Soviet Union. "You need our Russian troops to contain these crazy Abkhazians," was pretty much his message.

But the Abkhazians revolted anyway. They got driven out of their capital, but they regrouped, made some alliances with the Russians and the Chechens, then made a sweep back down out of the mountains in 1993 and wiped out the Georgian army, and, while they were at it, all the Georgians that were living there.

That's why you now have up to 200,000 Georgian refugees hanging around the edges of Abkhazia, waiting for their big chance to go back in and reclaim their homes. A Boston Globe reporter named David Filipov recently showed up in Zugdidi, which is the town right there at the Inguri River, separating historical Abkhazia from historical Georgia. And the local militias told Filipov that they're very happy to see the United States sending troops, because they fully expect them to help cross the river and retake all Abkhazian lands. They even compared themselves to the Northern Alliance.

Filipov interviewed somebody named Gia Lomia, who fights for something called the White Legion, and he said, "Let the Americans come and help us. But tell the American government that 200 advisers are not enough. We need them to send at least 2,000 combat troops."

But I'm gonna go out on a limb here and suggest that maybe, just maybe, Filipov wasn't speaking to Georgians OR Abkhazians when he got his interview. I think he was more likely speaking to Mingrelians.

Did I say this was gonna be easy?

Okay. Just as the Abkhazians hate the Georgians, the Mingrelians hate the Abkhazians. The Mingrelians have been living in Abkhazia all these years, separated from their language, their national culture, and their ancestral lands, feeling twice removed from any chance at having a government of their own because, among other things, Georgians refer to them as speaking "the language of dogs" and Abkhazians don't refer to them at all. Their first language is Mingrelian, their second language is Russian, and their third language is Georgian, which happened mostly because it was foisted on them in schools after Stalin's plan to subjugate the Abkhazians and just get rid of the Mingrelians entirely, since there were entirely too many ethnic groups clogging things up around the Black Sea.

Okay, let's review. The Georgians hate the big bad Russians. The Abkhazians hate the big bad Georgians. The Mingrelians hate the big bad Abkhazians who added insult to injury by treating them like mere Georgians instead of brothers in the ancient Colchis civilization. (Don't ask.)

Now. The Georgians who were run out of Abkhazia can conceivably take refuge in Tbilisi and other cities where their own people dwell, but the Mingrelian refugees have nowhere to go. Actually, they're refugees from Abkhazia, but their actual refugee camps are in the historical Mingreligian capital, the aforementioned Zugdidi. The problem is, Zugdidi is a Georgian city now. The Mingrelians don't like that, but theydon't have time to fight Georgia right now. First they have to go back into Abkhazia and get their homes back there. Then presumably they could launch an offensive against the illegal Georgian occupation of Mingrelia, which is next door to Abkhazia, and reestablish the country that hasn't been a country since before the Ottoman Empire, when it was turned into a vassal principality by the marauding Turks. (Russia annexed it in 1803, so for 200 years they've longed for the good old days when they had more autonomy as a Turkish puppet state than they have now.)

The goal of both the Abkhazians and the Mingrelians is ultimately to reestablish the kingdoms of Colchis and Kartli, which exist on maps at the British Museum pored over by antiquities scholars who would presumably have to be trundled down to Asia Minor to do the surveying on the reconstituted empires of three millennia ago. Hey, it's a long shot, but you can't keep a good Mingrelian down.

But it gets more complicated. (Sorry.) This week the Russians sent 78 armed blue-jacketed soldiers into the Kodori Gorge in Abkhazia. Why? Because that's where they say the Chechen terrorists are hiding, and they got upset that Georgia was letting American troops in but not allowing them to go in there and clean house. There are 1,600 troops patrolling the peacekeeping zone around Zugdidi, and some of them are Russian, but those blue jackets indicated there was some kind of SWAT-team action going on. Maybe the Russians thought they could sneak in undetected, but Georgia's president ordered the troops to either get out or he would drive them out, and apparently Putin has called them home now.

But at least the Russians had the right idea. If you're looking for terrorists, the Kodori Gorge is the place to look, and it has the added advantage of being in a non-country-- Abkhazia--with such a loose shifting government that nobody wants to go up there and check on what you're doing. But in the now increasingly likely event that we do stage operations in Abkhazia, I think there are a few things our president should know:

1. Abkhazians feel like they're "brothers" with the Chechens, Ossetians and Ingushetians, but they are not Muslim. Only 10 per cent are Muslim.
2. Ninety per cent of the Abkhazians are Christian, but they don't really go to church or call themselves Christian. It's sort of a holdover from a deal made by their king in the ninth century. (These people don't forget anything.)
3. They still have national shrines to ancient gods throughout Abkhazia, indicating that most of them profess some combination of political Islam, nominal Christianity, and practical paganism.
4. The reason they say the Georgians shouldn't come back to AqW'a, the capital, is that they don't want their Georgian friends to get hurt, and if they came back they would be obliged to kill them. This is one of those eye-for-an-eye blood-revenge countries where, if a guy in a neighboring family kills your brother, you're obligated to go kill any member of his family (doesn't have to be the killer). There were so many Georgian atrocities over the years that, if the Georgians come back, they have to kill them until the number of dead Georgians is equal to the number of dead Abkhazians going back to 1931 and including all the people sent to Stalinist labor camps. This makes perfect sense to an Abkhazian.
5. The only way to stop the cycle of revenge killings is to adopt a child from your enemy's family. They do this all the time. Once the child comes to live with you, you're considered a blood relation and you can no longer spill the blood of the other family. Marriage between warring families is even better. But, in this case, most Abkhazians don't want to get married to Georgians, and neither group wants to marry a Mingrelian, God forbid.
6. There are two cities in Abkhazia--Sukhum and Tkvarcheli-- and five resort cities (!) and 575 villages.
7. The ancient traditional vestment of the Abkhazian, called the cherkesska, is a belted black coat with long sleeves and a row of cartridge pouches on the chest.

Did I mention the Svans? I forgot to tell you about the Svans. The Svans have their own language, too, and they're the butts of jokes told by the Mingrelians. They also have a lost kingdom, but it's currently occupied by the Abkhazians and Mingrelians, which are in turn occupied by the Georgians, with the Russians on the way.

Please, Mr. President, no.

Joe Bob Briggs writes a number of columns for UPI and may be contacted at joebob@upi.com or through his website at www.joebobbriggs.com. Snail mail: P.O. Box 2002, Dallas, TX 75221.

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