GEORGIA: Conor O'Cleryrecalls the violent friction and mutual distrust he witnessed on his visits to Georgia and South Ossetia two decades ago.
EVERY TIME I visited Georgia while it was still part of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, I was struck by the way disputes with ethnic minorities, particularly in South Ossetia, agitated Georgian nationalists as much as the drive for independence itself.
South Ossetia was then an autonomous region of Soviet Georgia, with its own local government and its own official language. When Georgia began to seek independence from the rapidly disintegrating Soviet Union, the leadership of the 65,000 ethnic inhabitants of South Ossetia, fearing cultural assimilation, began a campaign to become part of the Russian Federation. So too did the Abkhazians, an ancient people numbering fewer than 100,000, who lived in a Georgian province bordering the Black Sea.
Both regions received encouragement from sections of the Kremlin leadership that opposed the break-up of the Soviet Union. In 1989, the leader of the Georgian independence movement, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, a university professor with a history of dissidence, organised a demonstration and hunger strike in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, to protest against Moscow's interference in Georgian territory.
On April 9th, 1989, Soviet soldiers broke up the demonstration, gassing and hacking to death 20 people. Shortly afterwards, an outraged Georgian population elected Gamsakhurdia as president of Georgia with a mandate to seek full independence.
When I went to see Gamsakhurdia one snowy morning in his presidential office in Tbilisi, he and his officials were wearing overcoats because electricity had been cut off by the Kremlin. Moscow had not recognised Georgia's independence and still controlled essential services. He told me that his models for the freedom struggle were the Irish heroes Roger Casement and Terence MacSwiney.
In an open letter to Lenin written in 1921, Gamsakhurdia's father, the novelist Konstantine Gamsakhurdia, had famously predicted that Georgia would have its own Casements and MacSwineys until it gained independence. These Irish patriots had been in his mind, said Gamsakhurdia, when he organised the hunger strike. If Casement and MacSwiney were Gamsakhurdia's heroes, the South Ossetians were his Ulster Unionists and he fulminated against Moscow's encouragement for the "deceitful" and "treacherous" Ossetians who had declared their intention to unite with North Ossetia inside Russian territory.
Gamsakhurdia had sent a ragtag army of Georgian irregulars into South Ossetia to try to take control, but they were rebuffed after bloody street fighting.
Gamsakhurdia became very agitated when talking about the South Ossetians. "Autonomy means apartheid," he said. "Georgian people can't even enter the shops or use transport. On instructions from Moscow, Ossetians are not punished for their crimes. They fight against us with Soviet flags and pictures of Lenin."
When I inquired if he had any personal contacts with the South Ossetians, he replied, "No, you can't trust any Ossetians."
The feeling was mutual. The main South Ossetian town of Tskhinvali, less than 100km (62 miles) northwest of Tbilisi, was at that time cut off from Georgia proper by roadblocks manned by Georgian militiamen.
I had to walk through deep snow to enter the town, across a bridge barricaded with shoulder-high sewage pipes and guarded by Soviet conscripts. All that was left of a street of a dozen houses where Georgians had lived were blackened gables.
Some women sheltering in an abandoned building from Georgian sniper fire laughed when I said I was from Ireland. The Ossetians, they explained, called themselves "Ire" people and joked that "Ire-land" was their original homeland. They are in fact descended from migrants of Iranian stock from the North Caucasus, who first arrived in Georgia when fleeing from the Mongol invasion several centuries earlier.
They have been giving allegiance to Russia since 1801, when South Ossetia was annexed along with Georgia and became part of the tsarist empire.
This lasted until the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, when Georgia gained independence and South Ossetians rejected rule from Tbilisi, resulting in 5,000 Ossetians reportedly killed in the fighting.
In February 1921, the Red Army conquered Georgia and installed a puppet communist government and South Ossetia became an autonomous region within Soviet Georgia. The bitterness Georgians have harboured against the South Ossetians since then has been compounded by accounts of co-operation given by Ossetians to the Bolsheviks in 1921.
During the seven decades of authoritarian Soviet rule, there was an uneasy peace among all Soviet ethnic groups, and Georgians and Ossetians lived and worked together in the autonomous district and in Georgia proper. All that ended as the Soviet Union broke up.
The struggle of the South Ossetians to resist Gamsakhurdia's militia resulted in fighting that was "terrible, friend against friend", the deputy town mayor, Gerasim Khogaev, told me.
The Ossetians protested that they were not dupes of the Kremlin. I recall Julietta Ostayeva, a bespectacled school teacher with white hair and wearing a tweed suit, telling me: "We are a cultured people, not wild like Gamsakhurdia says."
They were trying to cling to the security of the Soviet past: Lenin's picture still adorned office walls and the red flag flew from public buildings.
Georgia gained full independence in 1991 but Gamsakhurdia was deposed the next year in a bloody coup that plunged the country into civil war.
Interethnic violence flared up anew in South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Of some 100,000 Ossetians living in Georgia proper, 60,000 were displaced in fighting during the 1990s and fled mostly to Russia, while 25,000 Georgians were expelled from South Ossetia and 250,000 from Abkhazia.
This has left an even greater legacy of bitterness, which has thwarted attempts at a resolution.
The current warfare comes as Georgia is trying to move into the EU and Nato ambit, Russia is becoming more assertive about its "near-abroad", and the will and ability of the West to exert its influence has been eroded by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In such circumstances, an end to hostilities is about as much as the region can hope for, after which hatreds are likely to continue undiminished and Russia may be more firmly ensconced south of the Caucasus than before.
Conor O'Clery was Moscow correspondent ofThe Irish Times from 1987 to 1991.