Introduction
Much has been written since the summer of 2008 about Russo-Georgian relations and the rights and wrongs of the August fighting that erupted in or around both South Ossetia and, to a lesser extent, Abkhazia. Most commentators (foreign correspondents, media opinion-formers, NATO-spokesmen, politicians) forgot (or chose to ignore) the issues underlying the conflicts in both these long-suffering Transcaucasian regions, preferring to take their cues from Georgia's well-oiled (or, at least, well-financed) spinning machine. The argument has, thus, been that President Dmitry Medvedev and Premier Vladimir Putin have embarked on a mission to revive the Kremlin's imperial ambitions, dormant since the 1991 collapse of the USSR, along the former Soviet periphery, beginning with punishment of Georgia for the avowedly pro-Western stance of its president, Mikheil Saak’ashvili, since his overthrow of Eduard Shevardnadze in November 2003. Thus, it is the larger matter of east-west relations that have tended to be debated, whilst the voices of those trying to argue their respective cases against Tbilisi for some two (if not nine) decades have been drowned out. This article seeks to redress the balance, with special reference to the Abkhazian cause. But first let it be noted that there is absolutely no genetic link between the languages spoken by the Abkhazians and the Georgians: Abkhaz is a North-West Caucasian language related to Circassian and Ubykh (extinct since 1992), whilst Georgian is a South Caucasian (or Kartvelian) language related to Mingrelian, Laz and Svan; Ossetic is an Iranian language. Read more...  [AbkhazWorld.com]

 

*George Hewitt has held the title Professor of Caucasian Languages at London University's School of Oriental and African Studies since 1996 and been a Fellow of the British Academy since 1997. He is the author of Georgian: a Structural Reference Grammar (1995) and Georgian: a Learner's Grammar (1996; 2nd edition 2005); he edited The Abkhazians: a Handbook (1998) and is currently preparing a self-tutor for Abkhaz. He has written extensively on the Georgian-Abkhazian conflict since 1989.