Refugees and reconciliation

Just a short note to share this UNHCR report. It's quite old but gives a pretty good overview of the Georgia-Abkhazia war and the resulting internal displacement of mainly ethnic Georgians (but also the Abkhaz and the other Soviet-constructed nationalities that reside, or resided, in Abkhazia).

Today I attended a training in a village near Anaklia (on the Black Sea coast), very close to the border. The participants were a group of women, all but one (who's Abkhaz) ethnic Georgian, and most of them still living and working in Abkhazia but having crossed the border this day for the training. It was held jointly with a Tbilisi organisation, which I think was sponsored by the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung and working with mixed (Georgian-Abkhaz in this case) families and these women were all part of mixed families. The topic of the training was conflict resolution and leadership, and our boss, K., was conducting the session while I had the benefit of S. translating to me. What I gathered from that was that the basic structure of the session was to begin with the common goal of both Abkhaz and Georgians, which is to finally live in peace, and then try to get the participants to discuss how to achieve that. Part of it was identifying what good leadership is, to identify good and bad leaders, in part, I think, to encourage a form of democratic awareness and to try to e.g. dissaude them from voting for populists in elections; but also to get the women to become leaders themselves in their communities, for peace-promoting activities.

It seemed, however, that most of the Georgians couldn't name a single example of a bad Georgian leader (even though they could name plenty of good ones and the reason for their being good was that they tried to unite the peoples living within Georgia's borders and treat all ethnic groups the same), and the Abkhaz woman couldn't name a single bad Abkhaz leader. To me, this suggests that ethnic and national loyalties remain quite strong and likely to stand in the way of a critical evaluation of the conflict and thus a proper reconciliation, even though the participants all agreed that in order to move on, both sides need to forgive each other for atrocities committed during the conflicts. Either way, the group wasn't very active, so it will be interesting to see how discussions go once we do get an active group. It's worth noting as well that since I don't speak a word of Georgian (ehh, well apart from "hello", "goodbye" and "thank you") and am dependent on translations, I may have misinterpreted things and may continue to do so. So perhaps I'm dead wrong, but then that's ok because in this case it would be a good thing.

We took a break to go and have a look at the Black Sea however, and since it was the first time I ever saw it I figure that's worth mentioning...