In my review of Svante Cornell’s Small Nations and Great Powers. A Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict in the Caucasus (Curzon Press, 2001) I included the following: ‘[T]his volume's value is greatly reduced by an absolute travesty of reality in the treatment afforded to Abkhazia. I have had to say this so often over more than a decade that I am seriously tempted to suggest that any Westerner who feels the urge to comment on this particular issue should first learn Georgian so that what Georgians say about their relationship with the Abkhazians in their own language can be properly assessed... Only then perhaps will there be better appreciation that, just as the meddling hand of Moscow is unnecessary in Daghestan because “the Dag[h]estani leadership and its policies are by themselves [sic — GH] sufficient to fuel widespread opposition” (p.281), so in the case of the Georgian-Abkhazian dispute one needs to look no further than Georgian attitudes and behaviour towards this particular minority to understand the reasons for Abkhazian suspicions. And the conflict did not start brewing (p.347) after the troubles in South Ossetia had quietened down (July 1992) but had its proximate cause in the events of 1989 (see Viktor Popkov's article in another Curzon volume The Abkhazians, which I edited in 1998); these fatal clashes, moreover, arose as a direct result of the rampant Georgian chauvinism that exploded during perestrojka under the leadership of the late Mingrelians Merab K’ost’ava and Zviad Gamsakhurdia, no friends to the Abkhazians.’ Sadly, to judge by the same author’s article (Russia Shuts Out the International Community) in The Daily Telegraph (16 June 2009), he is no better informed today about Abkhazian affairs than he was in 2001. Read more...

[http://www.abkhazworld.com/articles/analysis/249-hewitt-reply-to-cornell.html]