The Experiment by Eric Lee

Author:Eric Lee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zed Books
Published: 2017-02-15T16:00:00+00:00

10

ACHILLES HEEL: GEORGIA’S NATIONAL MINORITIES

The Georgian Social Democrats believed in the rights of ethnic minorities. Article 129 of the constitution made this very clear: “It is forbidden to bring any obstacle to the free social development, economic and cultural, of the ethnical minorities of Georgia, especially to the teaching in their mother language and the interior management of their own culture. Everybody has the right to his mother tongue in writing, printing and speaking.”1

Over the course of eight more articles in the constitution, the Georgian leaders laid out their vision of ethnic and linguistic minorities with full rights. In this they were not only acting in accordance with socialist principles, and in particular what they had learned from the pre-war Austrian Marxists, but with the zeitgeist of the post-war era, particularly US President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Everyone, including Lenin and the Bolsheviks, now seemingly supported the rights of peoples to self-determination, and the rights of national minorities within multinational states.

But the multicultural paradise proposed by the Georgian Constitution was not to be, as it clashed with a very different reality on the ground. It was not only that the peoples of the Transcaucasian region had a long history of conflict, which would have been difficult enough. In addition, they were also not alone in determining their relationships with one another, as other powers (and Russia in particular) had an interest in exploiting inter-ethnic conflicts to gain influence in the region. What is extraordinary is the persistence of these conflicts, which played an important role in the three years of Georgian independence and continue even today. Historian Emil Souleimanov wrote of this period:

A greater security threat to the new republic [than that coming from Denikin] was the Bolshevik incitement of separatism among the South Ossetians and Abkhazians … The civil war that broke out in Georgia’s ethnic peripheries and cost thousands of lives, was partially instigated by the Bolsheviks who, after the defeat of Denikin’s troops at the end of 1919, concentrated their efforts on regaining control over the South Caucasian region.2

If in 1918‒21 we can detect the hand of Russian Bolsheviks in some of the ethnic unrest that plagued Georgia, there are striking parallels to the situation today. Souleimanov wrote:

During the most recent period of Georgia’s national history, the mosaic-like (sub) ethnic map of the Georgian region … has proven to be an effective tool for intervention by outsiders: and this factor has indeed become the central nightmare of Georgian intellectuals and statesmen striving for the territorial and ideological-political cohesion of the country. Thus, Georgian statesmen have become especially sensitive to the efforts ‒ if sometimes only perceived ‒ of foreign powers to take advantage of Georgia’s ethnic and territorial fragmentation.3

In this chapter, we’ll look at the relationship between the Georgian Social Democrats and four minorities who lived within the borders of their republic ‒ the Abkhazians, Ajarians, Ossetians and Jews.

ABKHAZIA

Abkhazia is the region along the Black Sea coast stretching up to the Russian frontier. In 1917, with the

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