Zviad Gamsakhurdia, Georgia’s first post-Soviet president, from 1991 to 1992, has been dead for fifteen years. But in view of his responsibility for initially provoking the South Ossetian campaign to secede from Georgia — the conflict that set off last month’s war with Russia — his brief but tumultuous reign merits some fresh scrutiny. Trying to understand the Ossetian, Abkhazian, and other minorities’ alienation from Georgia without reference to the extreme nationalism of Gamsakhurdia is like trying to explain Yugoslavia’s collapse and Kosovo’s secession from Serbia while ignoring the nationalist policies of Slobodan Milosevic. Yet in all the debate over the causes of the Russian —Georgian war, Gamsakhurdia is rarely even mentioned. [L]ying between the immediate and the distant past is the Gamsakhurdia era, beginning in the late ’80s, the years of Soviet liberalisation and the rise of assertive nationalism that did much to shape subsequent Georgian politics — right up to the present. Gamsakhurdia, then mainly known in the West as a scholar and dissident, was also a fiery Georgian nationalist who, like Serbia’s Milosevic, rode to power on a wave of chauvinist passions. Both were demagogues who manipulated justified popular grievances and crude popular prejudices to demonise “enemies” — a tactic that soon became a self-fulfilling prophecy.While Milosevic’s “Greater Serbia” was to be built with territory seized from neighbours Croatia and Bosnia, where Serb minorities were supposedly in mortal danger, Gamsakhurdia’s “Georgia for the Georgians” would be established by curtailing the rights and autonomies enjoyed by Georgia’s internal minorities, privileges he saw as divisive vestiges of the Soviet system. Gamsakhurdia’s rhetoric provoked fear among all Georgian minorities — Adjars, Armenians, Azeris, Greeks, Russians, Abkhazians, and Ossetians. The latter two were especially concerned to protect their cultural rights and self-rule by means of the new opportunities offered by Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika. These included free speech, multiparty elections, the devolution of power to local parliaments, and in 1991 an invitation to redraw the USSR’s constitutional basis in a new union treaty. Gamsakhurdia and his allies responded with fury. Excerpted from an article by Robert English in ‘The New York Review of Books’
