What is it about history and conflicts? For some reason, academic debates, best left in the tobacco stained studies of tobacco stained academics, become-quite literally-matters of life and death. This is not just the case in Georgia-the Orange Order of Northern Ireland are named after the seventeenth century King William of Orange, and Kosovo Polje, where the Kingdom of Serbia was defeated by the Ottoman Empire in 1389, is one of the most crucial factors in the ongoing debates about the final status of the province.
However, in Georgia, the history angle is more pronounced than almost anywhere else in the world. The two ultranationalist leaders most associated with Georgia's ethnic conflict were both academics. Vladislav Ardzinba, the Abkhaz secessionist leader, was himself an historian, while Georgia's first president Zviad Gamsakhurdia was a philologist with a passion for history.
Last year, South Ossetian leader Eduard Kokoity made a great song and dance about "documentary proof" that South Ossetia had voluntarily joined the Russian empire in the late eighteenth century, and that the "legal documents" to this effect had never been repealed. Both Abkhaz and South Ossetian separatists are wont to claim that, historically, they have never been part of Georgia, and it was Stalin's arbitrary dividing of the republics of the USSR that led to their inclusion in the Georgian SSR, this in spite of the fact that the republican borders follow the huge natural border of the Caucasus Ridge.
Soviet nationalities policy stressed autochthonism, the idea that a people are entitled to a particular territory because they were there first. This led to extremely spurious histories delving back into the mists of time being created by each of the groups that found themselves with a union republic, or an autonomous republic or district.
Naturally, when you are attempting to trace the ethnogenesis of small, non-literate peoples on the edge of pre-history you are going to be speculating some. But problems arise when two such historical projects overlap each other, and when two groups claim the scant historical and archaeological evidence available as backing up their version.
This is exactly what happened with Georgian and Abkhazian historiography, and a war of words between academics set the stage for the all too real war that cost tens of thousands of lives in the early nineties. Unfortunately, history has reared its ugly head again with the latest Abkhazian history textbooks being distributed to schools throughout the self declared republic. These books present the unadulterated Abkhaz viewpoint, which, inevitably, either excludes Georgians altogether, or presents them as oppressors. Far be it from us to judge the historical accuracy of these books, but surely it cannot help establish the mutual trust and confidence that the Abkhaz themselves say is necessary for the settlement of the conflict.