[Marxism] Georgian chauvinism

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

(Because of the misleading title of this article, I nearly passed it 
over unread. It turns out to be a rather devastating critique of 
Georgian chauvinism that fully puts the war into context. I should 
add that the bizarre sect-cult in the U.S. called the Socialist 
Workers Party has campaigned vigorously on behalf of the Georgian chauvinists.)

NY Times, September 7, 2008
Soviet Union's Fall Unraveled Enclave in Georgia
By ELLEN BARRY

TSKHINVALI, Georgia ? It is not easy for Ireya Alborova to root 
through the events that cracked this city in half, but one small 
bright memory stands out from 1989, when she glanced at the building 
across the street from her high school and spotted a flag.

It was a small Georgian flag, fixed in an attic window. Ms. Alborova 
was an unruly 15-year-old, preoccupied with her friends and her 
classes, and she took it in ? a small piece of information ? and kept 
walking. But now she thinks of it as the first signal of what was coming.

Most of the world now knows what happened: South Ossetians and 
Georgians began a drawn-out war to control this sleepy valley, where 
the main feature is a road that cuts through the Caucasian ridge into 
Russia. That flared into a global standoff last month, when Georgia 
pounded Tskhinvali, the capital of the South Ossetian enclave, with 
rocket fire and Russian troops poured across the border in response.

But for Ms. Alborova's family, which is partly Georgian but wound up 
on the Ossetian side of the conflict, the crucial event took place 
during the last months of the Soviet Union, when the fabric of a 
multiethnic society tore apart with breathtaking speed. For the past 
18 years, in a city encircled by Georgian positions, the family and 
its neighbors have been reliving the rifts and betrayals of that period.

Her Aunt Fuza's neighbor, a Georgian woman, crossed ethnic lines to 
pass on a warning that an attack on Ossetians was planned ? and then 
disappeared. A checkpoint appeared between Tskhinvali and her 
mother's ancestral village, cutting the Alborovas off from their 
Georgian relatives. Construction suddenly halted on a huge 
supermarket being built near their apartment 18 years ago, and not a 
day's work has been done since then.

Its foundation was eventually picked apart to build trenches. And the 
citizens of Tskhinvali became a resistance.

"It's not a question of whether you choose to or not," said Ms. 
Alborova, who is now 34 and lives in Toulouse, France. "Sometimes you 
are obliged. In some situations you don't choose anything."

Tskhinvali is a city of low-slung, sand-colored buildings suspended 
between urban and rural life. Roosters crow in the cool of the 
morning, and almost every house has its own grape arbor, used to make 
sweet pink wines that are stored in plastic soda bottles and brought 
out for the slightest occasion. There were also monumental 
Stalinist-era apartment buildings where the elite lived, and a grand 
neoclassical theater.

Ms. Alborova practically grew up in that theater. Her mother, Medeya, 
was Georgian. (Though her mother's mother had been Ossetian, children 
in the Caucasus take their father's ethnicity.) Medeya met Gelim 
Alborov in a state folk dancing troupe, and when they married in the 
1970s, unions of Georgians and Ossetians were still unremarkable.

To a teenager's eyes, the two ethnic groups were woven together 
inextricably. Children in Ms. Alborova's class were given their 
choice of language for classroom use, and though most of them were 
Ossetian, 28 out of 32 opted to study Georgian.

"Our teacher was embarrassed," Ms. Alborova said. "No one wanted to 
learn Ossetian."

In the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, some 50 miles to the southeast, 
Georgia's first post-Soviet leader was emerging. Zviad Gamsakhurdia, 
a longtime anti-Soviet dissident, based his campaign for the 
presidency on a vaulting Georgian nationalism ? an idea powerful 
enough to fill the vacuum left by Communism's collapse.

The platform, known as Georgia for the Georgians, cast ethnic 
Georgians, who made up 70 percent of the population, as the country's 
true masters. Mr. Gamsakhurdia derided South Ossetians as newcomers, 
saying they had arrived only 600 years ago and as tools of the Soviet Union.

On the street in Tskhinvali, small changes began to appear.

Ms. Alborova's aunt was exasperated to go to the store and see that 
pasta manufactured in Russia had been put in packages labeled with 
Georgian script. Her neighbor Emma Gasiyeva kept hearing slogans: 
"Brush them out with a broom!" and "Who are the guests, and who are 
the hosts?" a reference to the theory that Ossetians had been brought 
to the area as agricultural workers.

In 1989, Ms. Alborova was 15, and she saw only shadows. She heard 
that her Georgian classmates were gathering for some kind of meeting, 
but she was not invited. "They stopped talking to us," she said of 
her Georgian neighbors. "It was done very quickly."

Over the next three years, Tskhinvali became something like Belfast 
in Northern Ireland.

The government in Tbilisi established Georgian as the country's 
principal language, enraging the Ossetians, whose first two languages 
were Russian and Ossetian. A few months later, more than 10,000 
Georgian demonstrators were transported to Tskhinvali in buses and 
encircled the city, until they were repelled by Ossetian irregulars 
and Soviet troops. A true war began in 1991, when thousands of 
Georgian soldiers entered Tskhinvali. The city was shelled almost 
nightly from the Georgian-held highlands, and Medeya Alborova recalls 
holding pillows over her teenage daughters' heads, as if that could 
protect them.

When Mrs. Alborova got to Tbilisi to see her relatives, it was like 
stepping into a parallel universe. She sat with them watching news on 
Georgian television, as the announcer recited a litany of crimes 
committed by Ossetians against Georgians. At times, she said, she was 
not sure she was on the right side of the conflict.

But the years made all of them harder. Even after a cease-fire in 
1992, Tskhinvali was isolated from the Georgian territory around it, 
and accounts of atrocities against Ossetians ? rapes and grisly 
killings ? circulated endlessly.

Mothers, who wield enormous power in this society, urged their sons to fight.

But Ms. Alborova found a way to leave, through a scholarship to study 
in France. She arrived in Toulouse in 2001 and took in the town with 
amazement; people were so focused on pleasure. She replayed her 
memories from Tskhinvali, sealed off from the bright world that surrounded her.

"I understood that I had lost 10 years of my life," she said.

Ms. Alborova returned to Tskhinvali on Aug. 24 with butterflies in 
her stomach. She had expected physical damage, and it was there: 
bullet holes pockmarked virtually every building. But what surprised 
her were the people. Not many of them were left, and those who 
remained seemed damaged.

Soon after her return, Ms. Alborova was taken aback when a friend 
asked her if she could kill President Mikheil Saakashvili if he were 
standing in front of her. A family friend, who greeted Ms. Alborova 
affectionately on Karl Marx Street, turned icy when asked about Georgians.

"They have poison in their blood," said the woman, Katya Kharebova, 60.

Many in Tskhinvali say they would welcome the return of their 
Georgian neighbors. Still, it is difficult to imagine how long it 
will be before these people will live together again, much less 
intermarry. When history sets down the consequences of what happened 
on Aug. 7, the death of a neighborhood will not be recorded.

Indeed, in 20 years, it may be hard to find Georgians and Ossetians 
in this area who can talk to each other at all. Ms. Alborova's 
nieces, who live in Russia with her sister, are the first generation 
of her family that does not speak Georgian. Her mother shrugged, when 
asked about it.

"Who's going to teach them?" she asked.


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