The death was
announced today
of Vladislav Ardzinba, who spearheaded Abkhazia's campaign in the 1990s
for independence from Georgia. He was 64, and had been suffering for
over a decade from a progressive degenerative disease that left him
confined to a wheelchair.
Ardzinba was born in the village of
Eshera in May 1945 and graduated in 1966 from the historical faculty of
Sukhumi Pedagogical Institute. He studied in Moscow as a graduate
student at the Oriental Institute under Yevgeny Primakov, who later
served as Russian foreign minister.
Ardzinba's political
engagement began in 1989, when he was elected to the USSR Congress of
People's Deputies -- the new-look legislature established by
then-Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev at the peak of
the glasnost/perestroika era. In that capacity, British professor
George Hewitt points out in a
personal tribute,
Ardzinba achieved national prominence across the entire Soviet Union
for his eloquent articulation of the problems facing that state's
ethnic minorities and their hopes for the future.
One year later, Ardzinba was elected a deputy, and then chairman, of the Abkhaz Supreme Soviet.
After
Georgia repeatedly rejected Abkhaz offers to negotiate a formal
agreement on federal relations, the National Guard under loose cannon
Tengiz Kitovani invaded Abkhazia on August 14, 1992. Ardzinba
coordinated the defense of Abkhazia from Gudauta, the coastal town to
which the republic's leaders retreated as the Georgians advanced on and
then occupied Sukhumi.
When the Abkhaz forces and their North
Caucasus allies retook Sukhumi and the war ended on September 30, 1993,
Hewitt writes, a leaflet was prepared on Ardzinba's orders for
distribution in the areas that had been under Georgian occupation
during the war, urging Abkhaz there to show magnanimity and not to
engage in acts of vengeance against either Georgian soldiers laying
down their arms or members of the civilian population.
Having
won its war of secession, Abkhazia then found itself subjected to years
of isolation and an embargo imposed in 1995 by the Commonwealth of
Independent States. In 1994, Ardzinba oversaw the
promulgation
of a new constitution for Abkhazia that defined the republic as a
sovereign, democratic, law-based state and a subject of international
law. Ardzinba was elected president on November 26, 1994.
Sporadic
initiatives first by the Russian Federation and then by the United
Nations to mediate a formal agreement between Abkhazia and Georgia that
would preserve Georgia's territorial integrity made little headway,
especially after the spectacular failure of an incursion by Georgian
guerrilla formations into Abkhazia's southernmost Gali district in May
1998.
Ardzinba himself was constantly vilified by Georgians,
not least because of unanswered questions about his role in the
execution shortly before the Georgian evacuation from Sukhumi in
September 1993 of Zhiuli Shartava, head of the pro-Tbilisi occupation
government.
Abkhazia finally formally declared its
independence from Tbilisi in 1999. In October of the same year,
Ardzinba was reelected unopposed for a second presidential term. The
first rumors of his illness surfaced in the Georgian media in early
2001, and he was constrained to travel repeatedly to Moscow for
extended periods of medical treatment. In the final years of his
presidency, according to Hewitt, his duties devolved on then-Vice
President Raul Khajimba, who worked closely with Ardzinba after the
latter withdrew from public politics.
Ardzinba reportedly hoped
that when his second term expired in October 2004, Khajimba would be
elected to succeed him. But Moscow's overt lobbying on Khajimba's
behalf proved counterproductive, and the standoff that followed the
election was ended only when senior Russian politicians persuaded
Khajimba and his close rival Sergei Bagapsh to run as a team in the
repeat vote.
Hewitt,
who has known Ardzinba for several decades, characterized him as "a
distinguished academic, an eloquent advocate of both Abkhazian rights
in particular and minority rights in general, an inspiring war leader,
a patriotic politician and president, with whom Tbilisi could actually
have worked," had Georgian leaders sincerely wanted a peaceful solution
to the conflict.
Russian political scientist Aleksandr Krylov
described
him as "not a typical politician -- he was too gentle and too
intelligent -- but in a critical situation he was capable of the most
decisive actions to defend national interests."
Speaking on Abkhaz television on March 4, Bagapsh, who was himself reelected for a second term last December,
praised his predecessor as "a national hero" and "an outstanding historical figure."
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