Transnational minorities challenging the interstate system: Mingrelians, Armenians, and Muslims in and around Abkhazia

Abstract

1The collapse of socialist regimes resulted in tremendous regional realignments in the regions surrounding the heartland of Eurasia. Remarkably, not only states, but also transnational actors have played significant roles in this process. This study highlights transnational ethnicities (Mingrelians, Armenians, and Muslims) in Abkhazia, and tries to describe how the involvement of transnational religious organizations (such as the Armenian Apostolic Church and Turkey's Diyanet) affected the politics around these minorities. In the Black Sea rim, interstate and transnational politics are rather autonomous from each other. For example, when scores of powerful countries, such as the United States and European Union member states, desperately tried to ignore Russia's recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, regarding it as a lawless act, Turkey's Diyanet admitted that Russia's recognition of Abkhazia created a new legal situation and began to fulfill its long-dreamed-of desire to help the Abkhazian Muslims. According to political conjuncture in Abkhazia, the same Gali population changes from Georgians to Mingrelians and back. This demonstrates how ethnic categories are used in a constructivist way in the Black Sea rim.

Keywords:

• transnational minorities
• Abkhazia
• Mingrelians
• Armenians
• Muslims

Notes

This paper is a result of the ongoing research project, “Transnational Politics in the Black Sea Rim: Religions, States, and Minorities” (April 2009–March 2012) financed by the Japan Ministry of Education. The draft of this paper was presented at the international conference, “The Modernization of Russia and Eurasia: Challenges and Opportunities,” held at National Chengchi University (Taipei) 13–14 November 2010.

Gali County is at the southeastern extreme of Abkhazia bordering Georgia proper, and most of the Mingrelians in Abkhazia are concentrated here. To identify place names in Abkhazia, this essay relies upon pronunciations in Abkhazian with the exception of Gali, because the overwhelming majority in this district are Mingrelians, who call it “Gali,” not “Gal.”

The OCG is translating prayer books into Assyrian and Abkhazian, but liturgies held in Mingrelian are inconceivable and artificial in the eyes of the OCG leaders (Archpriest David Sharashenidze 5 Feb. 2008).

Michael Mann echoes Brubaker, arguing that ethnic tensions tend to turn into genocidal conflicts when two ethnic groups lay claim to their own state over all or part of the same territory and when the weaker side is driven to fight rather than submit by believing that aid is forthcoming from outside (Mann 369–81). On the other hand, Mann criticizes Brubaker and other ethnological sociologists for underestimating the class factor. According to him, ethnic conflicts do not intensify merely because of mutual segregations and cultural discords; they take place when one of the parties or both parties perceive themselves as being exploited by the other and when ethnic cleavage trumps class cleavage as a mobilizing cause.

As is argued later, there are multiple reasons for the Mingrelians' obedience to the Abkhazian authorities after they returned to Gali County (the southeastern extreme of Abkhazia bordering Georgia proper). First, they are the Samourzakan Mingrelians whose self-identification is different from the Mingrelians living in Georgia proper. Secondly, they had made a conscious choice to live in an unrecognized state governed by Abkhazians when they decided to return to Gali. Thirdly, the Mingrelians do not need to request political equality with the Abkhazians as long as they are granted de facto opportunities to live in Abkhazia without abandoning their Georgian citizenship, to have their children educated in Georgian and with Georgian textbooks, and to visit Georgia proper relatively freely. Fourthly, the Bagapsh administration has been tactful in appeasing the Mingrelian population of Abkhazia. In other words, the Mingrelians' obedience is secured by Bagapsh's pro-minority rhetoric. Despite these factors, I attribute their obedience mainly to deep indoctrination with the Soviet concept of titular nation. One may find a number of similar examples of a minority's self-restriction in the former Soviet Union. For example, in Ukraine, ethnic Russians try to avoid being involved in the confrontations between the Ukrainian-speaking and Russian-speaking Ukrainians.

Armed conflicts continue in Lesser Central Eurasia, too, but in this region, the US, Russia, and China behave as allies in what they call the war against terrorism.

In contrast to the strict ethnographic meaning of Cherkess/Circassian as nationalities belonging to the Adighe language group, the Ottomans could not distinguish various immigrants from the Russian Caucasus from each other and called all of them Circassians (Çerkezleri).

As I noted in my previous publications (for example, see Matsuzato, “Patronnoe” 150–51), this argument is questionable from a historical point of view. But the point here is how the Abkhazian authorities try to construct the category of Mingrelians. The method of Rachel Clogg, who consciously rejects the category of “Mingrelians” while admitting that “many [Abkhazians] distinguish between the Gal/i [sic] population and official Tbilisi” (Clogg, 320), leaves room for reconsideration.

In Abkhazia in 1995 there were 91,162 Abkhazians (29%), 89,928 Georgians (most of them were Mingrelians) (28%), 61,962 Armenians (20%), 51,573 Russians (16%), 8177 Ukrainians (3%), 3535 Greeks (1%), and 6947 citizens of other nationalities (2%) (Krylov 1).

On 20 September 2009, namely the first Sunday after the 15 September declaration, I visited St. Georgi the Victor Church in Chuburkhindzhi Village, the only Orthodox church in Gali County, and witnessed the protests of parishioners asking how an ordinary priest (Vissarion), not a bishop, could dare to make this grandiose declaration of changing the diocese's affiliation and reestablishing the medieval Catholicosate. Priest Matfei, an ethnic Abkhazian, tried to console his flock by saying that they are, after all, Christians, for whom politics have only secondary significance. But obviously, this was not the explanation he wanted to give. Sharing the hardships of the August 2008 war, the closing of the border with Georgia, economic decline, military threat, and nationalist pressure with his Mingrelian parishioners during his one-and-a-half-year service, Matfei became too attached to his flock to represent the Sukhum-Abkhazian Diocese's official position. Concerned about his own delicate position, “wife and three children,” Fr. Matfei declined to articulate his opinion in his conversation with me, but nevertheless hinted at the hopelessness of the Sukhum-Abkhazian Diocese's policy to revitalize Christianity in Gali County using its own resources. According to Fr. Matfei, the only hope is Georgia, which will be happy to invest enormous sums of money to build churches and monasteries in this Mingrelian county (Fr. Matfei 20 Aug. 2009).

O'Loughlin et al.'s study reveals that after the August 2008 War and the recognition by Russia, the Mingrelians in Abkhazia are in a pessimistic mood in contrast to the Abkhazians, Russians, and Armenians. They fear that war with Georgia may be renewed, feel that they have only enough money for food, think that the economic situation is better in Georgia than in Abkhazia, tend to claim to have been discriminated against for ethnic reasons, and are less convinced that the direction in which the country is heading is right (O'Loughlin et al. 15–19).

The AAC (as well as the ROC) has been registered as a civil organization, but not a church (“U.S. Annual Report”). Besides, the AAC and OCG compete with each other around the historical and judicial belonging of a number of church buildings (see, for example, Ghazinyan).

A reason for the atrocities the Georgian paramilitaries conducted in the early stages of the Abkhazian War was that Georgia did not have a regular army then and those who intruded into Abkhazia were independent “national guards,” in which criminals often participated. Gia Nodia, renowned Georgian political scientist, describes the situation as follows: “What was named the Georgian Army was in fact an aggregate of self-governing (meaning ungovernable) battalions with poetic titles and weak coordination, in which Romantic patriots were fighting together with bandits. … Their constant brutality vis-à-vis the civilian population (not only to the Abkhazians) disgusted the local people (including the Georgians) and substantially damaged Georgia's international image.” (Nodia 50). The lack of discipline among Georgia's paramilitary predetermined their eventual defeat. First, their indulgence in plundering and committing atrocities gave the Abkhazian government precious time to evacuate from Sukhum to Gudauta. Second, they could not isolate the Abkhazians, but on the contrary, pushed all the non-Georgians to an anti-Georgian united front. Third, as Boris Nikolaevich Pastukhov, then vice foreign minister of Russia and authorized by another Boris Nikolaevich as Russia's plenipotentiary to handle the Abkhazian conflict, after a vivid description of what he witnessed in the early days of the war, told me: “Abkhazians are not little boys (pai-mal'chik). They responded to the Georgians as they deserved” (Pastukhov).

Since the northern part of Transnistria and Moldova belonged to Rzeczpospolita, there are a number of Catholic believers in northern Transnistria and Moldova.

A nurse working at a clinic run by a local Catholic church and supported by charities from Poland in Sloboda-Rashkovskaya Village (Kamenskii raion, Transnistria) told me that they did not feel Moldova to be a different country. According to her, this perception is only shared by “top leaders” (verkhi) (Logina).

This visit provoked the furious protest of the Georgian Foreign Ministry, which summoned Gugerotti for an apology (“Vatican Ambassador”).

For example, the Diyanet sends 25 imams to Ukraine: 22 to serve the Crimean Tatars and one each for the Muslims in Donetsk, Kharkiv, and Mariupol' (Görmez 29 Mar. 2007; Savuran 16 Mar. 2010; see also Korkut).

For example, after the Easter liturgy conducted at the ancient Lykhny Church (built in the tenth century), parishioners and priests move to the pagan holy ground of Lykh-nykha to participate in the prayer of the Shakryl clan. This prayer was revived in the early 1990s (Krylov 4).

The Diyanet can offer help to foreign Muslims only when they ask for it (in other words, the Diyanet refutes the criticism of pursuing its own world strategy) and when the secular government of the country coordinates with the Turkish government in regard to the help (Görmez 29 Mar. 2007). The latter condition is understandable because Diyanet officers visit the country and conduct public activities, such as giving lectures, financing mosque construction, and instructing methods of missionary activities. These activities can be interpreted as a threat to the country's spiritual security.

Görmez told me of his own personal experience in Ajara. When he went to internal Georgia through Ajara, near the Turkish-Georgian border, he saw two old women, whom Görmez asked what they were doing. They answered that since they had no possibility of practicing Islam in Ajara, they came once a week near the border to listen to Azan performed in the Turkish territory lest they should forget they are Muslims. According to Görmez, the OCG in Ajara even uses public kindergartens for conversion of Muslim children. In March 2010 (when I interviewed Görmez), the Diyanet was preparing to appeal to international human right institutions to protect the Ajarian Muslims. Mathijis Pelkmans's anthropological study of the Ajarian Muslims emphasizes that Christianization of the Ajarians since 1989 is a natural process, but what he describes largely confirms Görmez's protest. For example, the authorities (both Tbilisi and Batumi) did not allow the Ajarian Muftiate, established in 1992, to work normally, constantly harassing it on the pretext of corruption, lack of religious education among its leaders, and alleged spying for Turkey. The only vocational school in the region was transformed into an Orthodox school, and Muslim youth who need vocational education have no alternative but to enter the school (Pelkmans 116, 117–18). It is unsurprising that Z. Gamsakhurdia and M. Saakashvili pursued and pursue the Christianization of Ajara. But even Aslan Abashidze, who governed Ajara autonomously until 2004 and who is a descendent of a prestigious Muslim family of Ajara, publicly declared that “Islam is slowly dying in Ajara” (Pelkmans 112) and he himself converted to Orthodoxy. Georgian historian George Sanikidze describes his own experience of fieldwork in Ajara in 2003, when “local authorities went to great lengths to prevent” Sanikidze from contacting Muslims (Sanikidze 12). Pelkmans remarks on “the difficulties of observing Islam while living in a state that privileged Christianity both through state policies and through the dissemination of Georgian ‘high’ culture” (Pelkmans 143).

“Twenty-five million Muslims in Russia” is at least a twofold exaggeration of reality, but similar numbers often appear in Russian Muslim leaders' speeches. Even Putin said that there were “twenty million Muslims in Russia.”

I mean, for example, the strange inaction of the UN Security Council during the early days of the Abkhazian (1992) and second South Ossetian (2008) Wars, when hundreds of civilians were being killed. We should not forget that both the Abkhazian and South Ossetian governments largely cooperated with the UN and OSCE missions until the war in August 2008. Stanislav Gobozov, a leader of the Fatherland Party of South Ossetia (an ardent opposition party to the incumbent Kokoity administration), says that the OSCE mission did its utmost to eliminate the last defense capability of South Ossetia, while turning a blind eye to the Georgian military's building “near forty artillery batteries” surrounding Tskhinval. After August 2008, the South Ossetians understandably requested that all international organizations, except for the Red Cross, leave South Ossetia (Gobozov 29 Dec. 2010).