Letter: Georgia wants to erase Abkhazia

Sir: Your correspondent Hugh Pope ('Taming the unruly people of Georgia', 28 April) is certainly correct in drawing attention to the chaos, violence and general economic misery that characterise present-day Georgia, and to the fact that Georgians are set against Georgians.

However, what he says about the Abkhazian crisis is seriously misleading. We Abkhazians are not, as Mr Pope (employing the terminology of the Georgian leader Eduard Shevardnadze) maintains, 'separatists' or 'rebels'. We are autonomists who, in reaction to the unprovoked Georgian attack on Abkhazia last summer, are fighting for our very survival as an ethnic group.

Not only has the ethnically mixed population of Abkhazia been subject to pillage, torture, rape and murder, but a systematic effort has also been made to obliterate the historical memory of the Abkhazian people, who have their own language and have been settled in the region since antiquity, through the deliberate destruction of archives, libraries and museums.

We would like to emphasise that it is not only the Abkhazians who are threatened by what Andrei Sakharov once described as the 'mini-empire' of Georgia but so, too, are the Mingrelians, South Ossetians, the Adjarians (Muslim Georgians), Russians, Armenians, Greeks, Catholics and Baptists.

We call upon Western governments, including Britain, to exert the maximum pressure on the Shevardnadze regime to respect the human rights of the various ethnic groups in the area and, indeed, of the Georgian people themselves. If there is no rapid and fair solution to the current crisis in Abkhazia, we fear the imminent outbreak of a generalised conflict in the Caucasus region, the consequences of which will be incalculable.

Yours sincerely,

YURI VORONOV

STANISLAV LAKOBA

(Deputies, Parliament

of Abkhazia)

LIANA KVARCHELIA

Gudauta, Abkhazia

28 April