ORDINARY SEPARATISM

Georgia continues to live in the rhythm of the election campaign: On 31 October, the country will elect a new president. Experts believe that the favourites of the race are the candidate from the Georgian Dream, Giorgi Margvelashvili, and the representative of the United National Movement (UNM), David Bakradze, behind whose figures one can easily see rivalry between the leader of the "dreamers", Georgian Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili, and the country's president whose party is the UNM. No one dares to predict the outcome of the elections: with more than a month left to the voting, the rivals are resorting to all conceivable methods, while opinion polls make it possible to roughly judge voters' likes and dislikes.

However, there is no doubt that relations with Russia, or to be more precise, their possible normalization, became one of the main topics during the election campaign. For the Georgian Dream the "Russian card" has been perhaps the main card since the very beginning, and Bidzina Ivanishvili, as many believe, won the parliamentary elections not least because he promised his fellow citizens to normalize relations with Moscow. Today, however, it is clear that the initial success of the "Russian slogans" may not repeat itself again. First, there was no quick and easy normalization. And second, the ex-speaker of the Georgian parliament, Nino Burjanadze, now promises reconciliation with Moscow. Fuel to the fire was added by Armenia's National Security Council Secretary Artur Bagdasaryan, who promised a speedy opening of the railway between Moscow and Yerevan through Georgia. Allegedly, Moscow, Tbilisi and Sukhumi agreed to that.

You've missed the boat 

But even a cursory analysis shows that Mr Bagdasaryan somewhat hastened with the success report and promises of an imminent "locomotive whistle". It must be remembered that the Abkhaz section of the Georgian railway was closed due to a separatist rebellion in Abkhazia in 1993 - those events are often referred to in the Russian press as "the Georgian-Abkhaz war". Chechen rebels led by Shamil Basayev and two battalions of Armenians - Krunk and Bagramyan, who are "notorious for" their monstrous cruelty against the civilian population, took part in it on the side of the Abkhaz separatists. Railway communication between Georgia and Russia was carried out by the "Sukhumi" branch that was blocked as a result of the conflict. Moreover, if Georgia itself wanted to use rail transit through the territory of Azerbaijan, for Armenia, for obvious reasons, this roundabout route is closed.

Despite that, shortly after the Georgian Dream came to power in Georgia, its members really started talking about the possible restoration of "Abkhaz" rail transit. The idea that initially caused some excitement in the community of experts then died out. In fact, the train is not a plane. Travelling from Tbilisi via Sukhumi to Moscow and back, experts said, it will definitely have to cross the Inguri and Psou rivers - the same border, on the status of which the positions of Moscow and Tbilisi are diametrically opposite. Even in theory, it will be impossible to avoid the question of who will be implementing border and customs control in this case and where. This means that transit will fail until there is a clear solution to the conflict and the status of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Although Bagdasaryan's statement caused some revival among political scientists again, in reality there is little evidence about the speedy resumption of transit. Moreover, Tbilisi once again notes a growth in tensions with Russia. The Georgian authorities are outraged by the fact that delegations from Abkhazia and South Ossetia are going to take part in the Sochi Olympics as representatives of independent states. The work to establish barbed wire near the village of Ditsi in Georgia's Gori District caused even greater indignation. The special representative of the Georgian prime minister for the normalization of relations with Russia, Zurab Abashidze, directly said that the deterioration of relations is intentional and is due to the upcoming meeting in Prague with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Grigoriy Karasin.

Diplomatic "implications" 

In recent weeks, Abkhazia has been mentioned in the Georgian and Russian media in connection with a tragic incident: the first secretary of the Russian consul, Dmitriy Vishernev, was killed near his house in Sukhumi. His wife was seriously wounded and died a few days later. The killer waylaid Vishernev and his wife Olga in the morning near a garage on Nazadze Street in Sukhumi, where they usually parked their jeep. When the couple got into the car, the killer walked up to them and shot them with a pistol through the glass.

The murder of a diplomat is always an emergency, especially if a representative of a superpower is killed. Given the special relationship between Moscow and Sukhumi, the picture is even more shocking.

Soon, however, information was leaked to the press, which made us take a different look not so much at the tragic incident in Sukhumi as at the very nature of separatist regimes. Whatever they say, they are, in principle, criminal. Whether we are talking about Abkhazia, Nagornyy Karabakh, South Ossetia or Serbian Krajina - the essence of the problem is the same. In these self-proclaimed entities which the term "incomplete state" invented by Russian politicians suits best, power is in the hands of very distinctive people - former "field commanders" who make their initial capital on the banal looting of civilians and are well aware of what kind of power the Kalashnikov rifle provides in an extra-legal area. Then, however, they change their camouflage jackets to suits and invest the stolen money in business more or less successfully, although no legal business can exist in such "incomplete states" by definition... But they can longer get rid of the psychology that is most accurately called the psychology of a "bandit". In any case, when there was another violent division of power in Abkhazia, its participants directly promised to "call" their "North Caucasus" allies to "sort out" their opponents "by the law of the mountains". It is unlikely that they meant employees of legitimate law enforcement agencies.

As we now know, Vishernev worked on issues of "disputed property". This topic is very sharp here.

The background of the "housing problem" with resort-military or rather resort-bandit specificity is as follows. With the outbreak of the war in 1993, the majority of the population left the once flourishing "resort" autonomy. The Georgians, who constituted the majority here, were subjected to rigid "ethnic cleansing". However, not only Georgians but anyone who disagreed with the separatist plans, including even many ethnic Abkhazians, had to flee. Others acted "on the situation" : someone, above all, local Armenians joined numerous local militias and engaged in robberies, someone chose to run away from the war, abandoning all their property, including attractive property in the resort "strip", and someone just tried to ride out the storm, hoping that all wars come to an end sooner or later.

The war really ended. The gangsters' tyranny, as it turned out, had only just begun. Very soon they began to seize abandoned apartments in Abkhazia. Property in the resort area looked too attractive. First, they divided the homes of ethnic Georgians. Then, as it was recognized by Russian journalists, the houses of Georgians expelled from the country became spoils of war and on average there were three Georgian houses for each Abkhazian, but because of the bad habit of spoils of war to run out, it was time for others - those who had no protection from powerful local clans - to part with their property, in particular or rather primarily, ethnic Russians, Greeks, etc. And the capture of apartments was permanent. The first wave occurred in the early 1990's and the second wave - in the late 1990's. The new peak of seizures of houses belonging to Russians occurred immediately after Moscow recognized the independence of Abkhazia. And often people were simply presented the decisions of local courts with their fantastic corruption and were given 24 hours to flee to Russia. Usually, they were threatened with violence.

It is significant that Sukhumi has long denied the existence of the problem of so-called "Russian apartments". But this summer, Moskovskiy Komsomolets, a scandalous but well-informed publication, stated: "... The Abkhazian 'authorities' (hereinafter the quotes are ours - ed.) seem to have got themselves into a mess. For many years, they pretended that there was no problem with the illegal confiscation of property from the Russian-speaking population of the republic. Since MK first wrote about this in 2010, none of the Russian residents of Abkhazia mentioned in the article has been able to move into their rightful homes. Nor did the situation change after the arrival of the new "president" - Aleksandr Ankvab, whom the non-Abkhaz population of the republic supported in the hope that he would be able to solve their problems."

Vishernev, it is claimed, started to work quite vigorously. Many asked him for help. And obviously, it seems that the Sukhumi separatists did not like this activity, particularly at the official level. Apparently, they decided to "deal with him by the rules". And there is no doubt that the Russian diplomat fell victim not so much to "a separate killer" as to the essence of the separatist regimes, which, we should recall once again, remain bandit regimes.