#2,732

Armistice Day, blood-red poppies are ubiquitous and there is an atmosphere of solemnity as the fallen of the Great War are remembered. It has, however, come to my attention that a memorial in my native Scotland, commemorating around ten thousand combatants killed and wounded in the 1992-1993 war between Abkhazia and Georgia, has been recently dismantled.

We are currently, in the autumn of 2017,  inclined to view fervent independentist passions in the context of Catalunya. It was in 2014 that Caledonia was the example of a nation dealing with the issue of ‘home rule’. Then the efforts of Scotland to become a free and sovereign nation had resonated with the Abkhaz.

"We have a Scotland Street, Shotlandaa Rimüa, in Abkhazia and a Sukhumi Street in Scotland," the Abkhaz Georgy Gabuniya was quoted as saying, referring to a ‘twin city’ link between Abkhazia and the small East Ayrshire town of Kilmarnock, the site of a stone memorial to the victims of the Georgia-Abkhazia war erected in 1995.

But Tamar Beruchashvili, Georgia’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, became aware of the monument through the internet and persuaded Scottish authorities to ‘handle’ the issue during her visit to Scotland in September this year. “They fully accepted the information provided and agreed with the approach by the British state regarding Georgia’s territorial integrity and sovereignty. And the local council decided to dismantle this monument a few days ago,” Beruchashvili said.

My interest in all this? I find any ‘rewriting of history’ abhorrent; living in Munich for ten years I have become well aware of what this means. I am also dismayed by the readiness of officials in Scotland to accede to demands coming from the country most intransigently opposed to any international recognition of an independent Abkhazia.

Not that I have ever visited the shores of the Black Sea. But over the past year and a half I have developed an instinctive sympathy for Abkhazia, as it gradually took on a virtual reality for me when, as a writer of popular fiction, I set the action of a novel in a country I wish I had visited as a much younger man.

"On the very eve of the war a delegation from Abkhazia, including its then-mayor, was hosted by Kilmarnock’s Town Council. Now, with impeccably inappropriate timing on the very eve of Armistice Day, we learnt of this move to dishonour the fallen in Abkhazia’s war of survival." 

So writes Profesor George Hewitt, Honorary Consul for Abkhazia in the United Kingdom. I find it worth quoting...

Lest we forget