Abkhaz for the future

The key question in the Abkhazian elections: what is better to give to Russia - the soul or the wallet? The outcome of the vote is unpredictable

Listen to the Abkhaz deputies, so on the eve of the presidential elections, the fate of the country was decided by the referent Marina. Her last name and exact position are the subject of controversy. But, according to deputy Adgur Kharazia, it was she, and not the speaker and not the counting commission, who, at the height of the election campaign, voted on new amendments to the constitutional law on elections to be held on December 12. Voting was carried out by polling, which made it possible to simply bypass the majority agreeing with the amendments with a piece of paper. This method - the Abkhazian know-how - was approved at the meeting, which in the minutes is called the "session of parliament". Opposition deputies were indignant: according to the same protocol, there were only 13 people at this “session”.

Something is unclean here, Kharazia is sure. But his opponent, the author of the amendments, Batal Kobakhia, sees no crime in this - it's just that an unfortunate technical error crept into the protocol. The voting procedure was approved not at a general session, but at a meeting of the working commission, which is also legitimate. Who is guilty? Referent who made the protocol.

The deputies discussed all these twists and turns, sitting side by side at a press conference, which gradually turned into a skirmish between them and representatives of the opposition presidential candidates. The fact is that the adopted amendments are very important. They allow the citizens of Abkhazia to vote abroad. Vadim Smyr, the leader of the organization of veterans of the war with Georgia "Aruaa", believes that this is a direct path to falsification. “There are rumors that a vote of 15,000–20,000 people outside of Abkhazia is expected,” he frightened journalists.

“Regardless of the voting results, the authorities decided to award the victory to the incumbent president already in the first round,” the leader of the veterans assured. The opposition, he continued, will not tolerate such mockery: “Of course, we will resist. Where this will lead, you know.

In the last elections, this led to a semblance of an orange revolution. As a result, the opposition candidate Sergei Bagapsh became president, while Raul Khadjimba, the candidate of the authorities and Moscow, had to admit defeat and be content with the post of vice president.

Now they have switched places. Khadzhimba is one of three oppositionists who have a chance to compete for the presidency. Each of the trinity is the embodiment of key political archetypes: the “silovik” Khadzhimba, the “oligarch” Beslan Butba and the “business executive” Zaur Ardzinba.

There are no reliable public opinion polls, and analysts do not undertake to predict the outcome of the vote. The editor-in-chief of Chegemskaya Pravda, Inal Khashig, believes that the oppositionists are more or less on a par. In each of the election headquarters they assure that it is their candidate who wins - and in the first round. President Bagapsh is no exception.

Common sense suggests that the president, who ruled the country in the best years of its de facto independence, has a good chance of being re-elected. But Abkhazia is not Russia. Here, albeit at the micro level, there is a real multi-party system, an opposition TV channel and various NGOs that meticulously study all the steps taken by the authorities. According to Inal Khashig, this suits Moscow: “Abkhazia is a showcase that proves that the recognition of independence was logical. South Ossetia is not suitable for this role.” All that Moscow now needs from Abkhazia is for everything to go smoothly, and not like last time. But there are no guarantees for this, Khashig believes.

CLEANER ELECTIONS

If the authorities want to falsify the voting results, they hide it very carefully. The Central Election Commission reacts quickly to the claims of the opposition. On Wednesday, CEC head Batal Tabagua announced that no more than 3,000 ballots would be sent to Moscow and Cherkessk, where there will be foreign voting stations, five times less than Vadim Smyr had promised. The lists of those who voted abroad will be sent to Abkhazia every 1.5 hours to prevent repeated voting at the place of registration. Screens will be removed from the booths so that voters do not take photographs of ballots on their mobile phones, reporting to "sponsors". This is a way to prevent vote buying .

Liana Kvarchelia from the League of Voters "For Fair Elections" believes that this time everything will be fairer than before. Now you can vote only with an Abkhazian passport, which is stamped with the signature of a member of the election commission. Previously, it was possible to vote on the old Soviet passport, and on Form No. 9, which replaced these documents. According to Kvarcheliy, observers from the three opposition headquarters will be at all polling stations, which also sharply reduces the opportunities for falsification. She calls the numbers of potential voters abroad given by Vadim Smyr "absolutely unrealistic."

The same goes for concerns about 20,000 new passports seized by Georgian border guards off the coast of Abkhazia. Here the guarantor is candidate Khadjimba, who, as vice president, oversaw the issuance of passports and ordered that their numbers be deleted from all databases. “Although there is such a possibility,” President Bagapsh reasoned in a conversation with Newsweek. “We detained a man here with our passport and a Georgian in Moscow with the same one, but, apparently, issued in Georgia, from the same series.”

SOVIET AUTHORITY PLUS CORRUPTION

The collective farm house of culture in the village of Duripsh looks like a castle, which, after the death of the last inhabitant of the century, no one visited. The tall windows are draped in faded blood-red velvet. On the stage, behind the three rows of wings - a panel with green gardens and snow-capped mountains under a bright blue sky, that is, exactly the same picture that you see when you go outside. To the left of the stage is a portrait of Karl Marx with a quote from the classic: "Labor is the source of great wealth and great culture." Despite the peeling walls, it is obvious that the wealth of the millionaire Duripshinsky collective farm was truly great.

Khrushchev brought Fidel Castro here. According to legend, they were treated to a dish of steppe thorn, after tasting which, the drunken first secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU ordered to plant the plant he liked throughout the Union. But in the morning, thank God, I forgot. Presidential candidate Beslan Butba stands on the podium remembering the great leaders. In the front row, a gray-haired old man stands up and begins to speak menacingly in Abkhazian, accompanying each phrase with a blow of his staff on the floor.

• Scolds?
• No, - they answer the correspondent of Newsweek, - he says that last time Khadzhimba and Bagapsh almost brought the country to war. So two remain: Butba and our boy - Zaur Ardzinba.

As if to confirm his words, one row of columns in the hall is decorated with portraits of Butba, and the second - Ardzinba. The owner of the opposition TV channel, the main football club and the main hotel in Abkhazia, Beslan Butba, performs in the small homeland of his rival Ardzinba. He speaks Abkhazian. Duripsh is one of the strongholds of the Abkhazian ethnic group, and spiteful critics accuse Butba of poor knowledge of their native language. The ethnos, according to Butba, is melting away every year - and in this he sees the main problem of the country.

Abkhazians, he says, are mowed down by drug addiction, traffic accidents and hopelessness. “I was just at the funeral yesterday. A young guy, 32 years old, hanged himself because there are no prospects. He lived on 2,000 rubles a month,” said the presidential candidate. As if on purpose, during the half day that we spent with Butba, the candidate had to stop at three houses where the wake was going on. The last was the house of a girl from his headquarters, who crashed in a car - the driver was driving at a speed of 150 km / h. “Abkhazia ranks first in the world in terms of deaths from traffic accidents,” one of Butba’s assistants said in a conversation with us.

The election campaigns of opposition candidates are akin to carpet bombing . On the eve of the elections, they daily wound hundreds of kilometers on the odometers of Mercedes and Lexus, trying to visit every settlement. They reported to their Sukhum headquarters around nine o'clock in the evening, and in the morning they set off again. Both opposition candidates with whom we managed to talk - Raul Khadzhimba and Beslan Butba - looked terribly exhausted. The head of the Abkhaz Shipping Company, Zaur Ardzinba, could no longer find the strength to meet in the evenings.

Candidate Butba is very proud of his program, and his aides say that rivals use it as a cheat sheet. Butba wants to change almost everything in Abkhazia. For example, the political system. "Our system," he says, "is Soviet power plus corruption." It is necessary that the villages be led by local residents, and not Sukhumi emissaries, Butba is convinced.

Corruption must be fought by reducing the number of certificates and inspection bodies. On more ambitious tasks (for example, wean the police from extortion and expel thieves in law from the country, as Mikheil Saakashvili did in Georgia), Butba does not threaten. “We have little information about what is happening in Georgia,” he hushed up the topic.

Candidate Khadjimba, as befits a security official, put the fight against corruption at the forefront, but his plans in this area are also vague and boil down to the need to “obey the laws” and “take tough measures.” But he considers Georgia's experience worthy of attention. “The positive things that are happening in their country can be an example. Why reject it simply because they are Georgians,” he told Newsweek.

WIND FROM THE NORTH

Unexpectedly for an economic liberal, Butba turns out to be an opponent of the "multi-vector" foreign policy proclaimed by President Bagapsh. “We have one vector and one friend - this is Russia,” he snaps. - Multi-vector policy should be excluded. Everything we do must be done with Russia and through Russia.”

• So you are in favor of a complete outsourcing of foreign policy?
• Yes, we will achieve little by communicating with other states.

Butba calls the northern neighbor "a country of countries" and says that Abkhazia would be glad to cling to "its warm core", that is, for example, to join the union of Russia and Belarus. This idea also appeals to Sergei Bagapsh.

However, with the pro-Russian image of Butba, not everything is so simple. The meaning of the deal he proposes with Moscow is as follows: you - foreign policy, we - the economy. “Local businessmen should have all the economic leverage,” he says. “If you open the doors to all the winds, then we can be bought up in five minutes.”

Those in Abkhazia who are dissatisfied with Bagapsh accuse him precisely of opening the doors to the wind blowing from the north. The president is accused of uncontrolled distribution of land plots to structures associated with Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, a deal unfavorable for the country on the railway and the transfer of an oil field on the Black Sea shelf under 100% control of Rosneft.

Candidate Khadzhimba is categorical when talking about Russian contracts: “When our president says that it is necessary to create conditions for oil production, this means that others will produce, and we will lose sovereignty.” The transfer of the railway under the control of Russian Railways, in his opinion, also means "the loss of levers for governing the country."

Khadzhimba says that the Abkhazians are grateful to Russia, but are not ready to "lay under" it. “We are not going to become a subject of the Russian Federation,” the candidate declares.

On another key issue for Abkhazian statehood - about ethnic Georgians in the Gali region - the candidates also react differently. “They have suffered a lot, including from Abkhazia,” Butba admits. “There are terrible roads, they are racketed, they are completely powerless.” Galtsy, he believes, should be issued with Abkhazian passports, and self-government bodies in the region should be formed from local residents.

President Bagapsh, a few months before the elections, actually began the mass distribution of passports in the Gali district, but was forced to stop it under pressure from the opposition, primarily Raul Khajimba. He told Newsweek that ethnic Georgians must go through the naturalization process, as in the US and the Baltics. According to Khajimba, it should take three years.

This is where the contradictions between the government and the opposition on the Georgian issue end. The return of the rest of the Georgians, who were the largest ethnic group in Abkhazia before the war, is out of the question. According to Bagapsh - for now. Khajibma is more categorical: “Most of them have been living in Russia for a long time. So what H should they come back to?” A fruitful dialogue with Georgia is also something of a fantasy. According to Bagapsh, Abkhazians come to Geneva to talk with Georgians "only out of respect for the Medvedev-Sarkozy document."