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Human Rights Practices for 1998 Report
A look at the state of human rights in Georgia over the course of 1998. Published by the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor.

I had entered Adjara, a small region of Georgia where a Georgian dialect is spoken and the population is mainly Muslim. Using religion to divide and conquer, Lenin created Adjara in July of 1921, splitting it off from the main body of Georgia and its Christian population. But such differences from central Georgia in language and religion have little to do with Adjara's current autonomy. Adjara is a fairly benign criminal warlordship run by one Aslan Abashidze, whose power over Aslanistan, as it is locally known, is made possible by the customs duties he extracts on legal and illegal goods entering by sea or over this land border with Turkey. People pay bribes to get jobs at the border posts, particularly at the port of Batumi, where they shake down others to earn back their investment and much more. It's like buying a taxi medallion and making the money back through fares.

Beyond the gate I met a gang of taxi drivers. One grabbed my arm and threw my duffel bag into his battered Lada. The Lada had a cracked windshield and roof, its doors lacked handles, dark stains were everywhere, and onions rolled back and forth on the floor beneath my creaking seat as the vehicle lurched over deep potholes. The car smelled of leaking oil and diesel fumes.

"Georgia beautiful, yes!" the driver exclaimed.

"Yes," I replied. Looking up at the mountains all around, I had to admit it was.

UROPE and Asia fuse along the shores of the Black Sea, but the Caspian Sea is all Asiatic. Between these two bodies of water is a land bridge where Europe gradually vanishes amid a 750-mile chain of rugged mountains as high as 18,000 feet. This is the Caucasus -- Russia's Wild West. Here Russian colonialists since the seventeenth century have tried unsuccessfully to subdue multitudes of unruly peoples. To the west and southwest of the Caucasus lie the Black Sea and the most undeveloped part of Turkey; southeast lie the mountains and tablelands of Iran; east, across the Caspian Sea, are the desert wastes of Central Asia; and north lies Russia, shattered like much of the Caucasus by poverty and chaos following seven decades of communism. The northern slopes of these mountains, properly called the North Caucasus, contain various ethnic chieftaincies that are now part of the Russian Federation; the region to the south of the highest ridges is called the Transcaucasus -- the land of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. The Balkans border Central Europe. The Caucasus has no such luck.

Even before it did in Mesopotamia, civilization may have taken hold in the Caucasus, where there is an abundance of both water and vegetation, allowing for domesticable animals and agriculture. The mountainous terrain shelters miniature tribal worlds lost in time. The Greek geographer Strabo (64 B.C.-A.D. 23) noted that in the Greek Black Sea port of Dioscurias, now in the northwestern-Georgia region of Abkhazia, seventy tribes gathered to trade. "All speak different languages," he wrote, "because ... by reason of their obstinacy and ferocity, they live in scattered groups and without intercourse with one another." It was on Mount Caucasus, in Georgia, that Prometheus, punished by Zeus, was chained to a rock so that an eagle could continually peck at his liver. Prometheus, who created man out of clay, represents the pre-Olympian authority that Zeus toppled; the very antiquity of the Prometheus story, which is part of the creation myth of the Greek world, could be further evidence that the Caucasus was a cradle of civilization. One theory holds that the word "Georgia" comes from the Greek word geo ("earth"), because the ancient Greeks who first came to Georgia were struck by the many people working the land.

Today the Caucasus is shared by four countries and about a dozen autonomous regions with as many as fifty ethnic groups among them, each with its own language or dialect. Some are well known and numerous, such as the Georgians, the Armenians, the Azeri Turks of Azerbaijan, and the Chechens. Others are smaller and obscure, such as the Ingush, the Ossetes, the Avars, the Abkhaz, the Balkars, the Kalmyks, the Mingrelians, and the Meskhetian Turks.

In 1991 the collapse of the Soviet Union, to which all of the Caucasus had belonged, set off a gruesome pageant of warfare, anarchy, and ethnic cleansing that engulfed the region for years and simmers still, with 100,000 dead and one and a quarter million refugees. No other region of the Soviet Union equaled the Caucasus in demonstrating how bloody and messy the death of an empire can be.

In the 1990s the American media and intellectual community embraced the causes of the Bosnian Muslims and the Kosovar Albanians, but they virtually ignored similar instances of ethnic cleansing in the Caucasian regions of Abkhazia, Ossetia, and Nagorno-Karabakh. And even as the problems of sub-Saharan Africa have become known through sympathetic international media coverage, the infinitely complex and intractable Caucasus has truly tested the limits of Western knowledge of the world.

Y taxi headed for Batumi, the "capital" of Adjara. The pinnacles of the Caucasus, capped with bluish snow, towered above corrugated-tin huts and citrus orchards. Cattle reaching for eucalyptus leaves stood beside the road. Hideous apartment buildings of unfinished cinder block, splattered mortar, and makeshift iron balconies -- built in the Khrushchev era, in a style prevalent throughout the former Soviet Union -- announced the city. They were followed by a succession of examples of Russian provincial architecture: peeling white buildings, like rotting wedding cakes, in Baroque, Empire, and neoclassical styles, with lead roofs and wrought-iron gates and balconies filled with flowers, on wide, leafy streets distinguished by palms, cedars, cypresses, and fruit trees. Women on the streets wore short skirts and poorly made copies of European designs. Some carried umbrellas in the rain and walked like dancers. Russians and Georgians all had wondrously sculpted faces. Here in the site of the Greek Colchis -- a near-mythical domain of wealth and sorcery -- I had found a dilapidated and captivating Belle Epoque.

Batumi, a city of 137,000 named for the nearby Bat River, is strategically situated on the Black Sea where Anatolia meets the Caucasus. An ancient Roman, Byzantine, and Persian port, Batumi changed hands several times in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Russia captured Batumi from the Ottoman Empire during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878. The Turks, taking advantage of chaos that was even greater in Russia than in Turkey toward the end of World War I, recaptured it in 1918. After the armistice 15,000 British soldiers replaced the Turks. They were gone within two years, as the Bolsheviks consolidated their control over the Czar's empire. Then the border froze shut for decades, with Turkey on one side and the Soviet Union on the other. The histories of Turkey and Georgia may have been interwoven for millennia, but the difference for someone walking across the border is vast. A time change symbolizes the extent of the transition: I set my watch ahead not one but two hours on the Georgian side (a legacy of the Soviets, who, like the Chinese Communists, established their own time zones).

Yet a mingling of cultures was set to resume. Within a few months of my visit the Russian border guards were to be withdrawn, under a new treaty between Russia and Georgia, and a new road on the Turkish side of the border would increase links. If the Georgian government, in the capital of Tbilisi, got its way, all the border posts would eventually be run by private Western companies, so as to help eliminate corruption and thuggery. States throughout the former Soviet Union are so corrupt that for now the only way to bring honesty to -- and earn public revenues from -- their frontiers is to all but sell them off.

The taxi ride cost twenty Georgian lari or $10, the dollar being well established in Georgia as an unofficial currency. The driver deposited me at the rear of the tenementlike Intourist Hotel. The cavernous, unlit lobby was paneled in cheap plywood. An old woman in a smock was sweeping the floor. Another old woman sat at the reception desk. Her transistor radio was playing beautiful, weepy hymns that seemed like an intoxicating blend of Greek and Russian music. Across the hall in the half darkness was a video-game machine, and next to it a souvenir shop where another woman was writing in a ledger. One of the shop's cabinets held pocket knives, hard candies, and a book with diagrams of handguns. Another cabinet offered brassieres and ornamental daggers. A few days later in a store in Tbilisi I would see beach balls for sale alongside assault rifles.

I used the hotel phone to call Eka Khvedelidze, my translator, who appeared a short while later. "Don't stay here," she advised me. "There are rats in the rooms. Let's walk to the new private hotel." The private hotel had ugly furniture and dark-brown carpeting, but it was well lit and clean. The Russian blonde at the desk wore a fashionable black dress and smiled, unlike the ancient automatons at the Intourist.

After depositing my duffel bag, I walked around Batumi with Eka. There were barefoot children, garbage-strewn streets, cracked sidewalks, and potholes everywhere. And there were Audis, BMWs, and Mercedes-Benzes. The juxtaposition of luxury and scarcity was ever present. Shops where gilded mirrors and magnificent chandeliers hung sold nothing but bubble gum and ice cream; bars run by Russian women were decorated with shower curtains and old Christmas ornaments. The market area was well stocked with cans of paint and other goods from Turkey, and with imported whiskeys and perfumes. Unlike the convention-bound, drab towns of Turkey, with their grilled-meat stalls and men in dark woolen caps sipping tea, here I found a complete vacuum of tradition, as if everything -- the interior decorating, the whole economy, in fact -- had been improvised and might collapse tomorrow.