Icewine Guy in Abkhazia
I wasn’t there to take in war stories. The 16 year old bullet holes in the apartment buildings were grotesque to me, but people lived in them, and children grew up under the pocked walls that remind everyone that 16 years ago this was a war zone and almost was again in August 2008, and could be again.
On the way into Sukhumi Max pointed out the bridge over the Gumista river up ahead. “That is where we stopped them in ‘92”. “Then we went around the mountains and circled Sukhumi and they had to evacuate.”
In the 1992 war, a battalion of Chechnyan mercenaries were the sharp edge of Abkhazia’s defense and counter attack, and they were arranged by the Russians, and supplemented by the tiny Abkhazian army and militia. Abkhazia had declared independence, and Georgia disagreed and sent troops in to re-take the territory.
In the encirclement, they almost caught Eduard Shevardnadze who was then Georgia’s president in Sukhumi. He escaped by the skin of his teeth.
The geography of low tech war was simple. The mountains were impassable. The sea was controlled by the Georgian navy and air force. This left a slim flat area that land armies could fight over. Flat streams that poured out of the Caucasus Mountains provided tactical obstructions every few miles.
The rocky flats of the Gumista River had been heavily mined to stop the Georgian advance. In just 2 years, Abkhazia became one of the most heavily mined areas in the world. It took 16 years of HALO to finally clear up most of the mines.
As we crossed the bridge, he pointed down to some woods on the north shore of the Gumista river. “That’s where I was”, he said.
“But Max, you were 15 years old!” I blurted out. I was looking at this man sitting beside me, trying to make a link between him and the scared 15 year old clutching an AK-47 and looking through the darkness at another army. I could no more do this than I could reach my own young self at Trafalgar Square a few weeks before.
He nodded and we drove into Sukhumi, his home town.
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