Macro procesos de la Gestión Humana

The Ajar language (written and spoken) is Georgian; more precisely Ajars speak the western Georgian Gurian dialect, which also includes many Turkish loanwords.276 Indeed, Ajars, being ethnic Georgians, share many similarities with the Laz minority, which inhabits northeastern Turkey. The Laz people, who create the second largest minority in Turkey after the Kurds, are also linguistically related to another ethnic Georgian minority – Mingrelians.277

Since the census in 1926, when Ajars numbered 71.000 and thus formed 54 % of the population of the then Ajaria, Ajars have not been counted in the Soviet censuses as a distinct group but simply as Georgians.278 This implies that Ajars were not considered as a titular nationality in Ajaria and consequently Ajaria did not have a titular language. In relation to Tbilisi, there was no reason for this, since the Ajar (Gurian) dialect is absolutely understandable for other Georgians. This fact was also reflected in the relatively low rate of knowledge of Russian. Tishkov found out that only 42 % of Georgians (including Ajars) in Ajaria spoke Russian in the late 1980s.279

The pre-Russian Turkish influence was significant in establishing the Muslim religion as the main determinant of social identity. Also, the administration system resembled the Turkish system of millets, i.e. state-sponsored religious communities. The cultural distinctions were particularly visible during the first Georgian republic after World War I. Later, 'Ajaria became the only autonomous entity in the Soviet Union that had enjoyed its status because of religious differences from the titular

276_{Benningsen, Alexandre, Wimbush, Enders S. (1985):Muslims of the Soviet Empire: A Guide, Hurst, London,} p. 207.

277

Cornell (2001):Autonomy and Conflict, p. 215; for an encompassing overview of the ethnic divisions in the NW Caucasus, see Hewitt, George (1999):Abkhazia, Georgia and the Circassians (NW Caucasus), pp. 463-499. 278_{The figures come from Fuller, Elizabeth (1991): 'Georgia’s Adzhar Crisis',Report on the USSR, 9 August} 1991, p. 8.

279

nationality of the republic it belonged to.'280 In general Ajars were ethnolinguistically Georgians before the Soviet Union and hence most of the fundamental distinctions were determined by the Muslim religion, which was heavily targeted by the Bolshevik atheistic campaigns.

Although the Bolsheviks considered language as a key ethnic indicator, they introduced in the late 1930s a new ethnonym – Azerbaijani – to simplify the ethnically complicated situation in the Caucasus. 'Anyone in Transcaucasia who persisted in considering himself Muslim became, by fiat, Azerbaijani, regardless of language.'281 Moreover, Beria’s practices of the 1930s, which were aimed at suppressing the religious identity of Muslims in this area, bordered on ethnocide. To choose to be identified as an 'Azerbaijani' soon became either to be Georgian or to be classified as one of the totally alien Meskheti Turks, who were later deported to Central Asia.282 The processes of a culturally and physically violent homogenization (Georgianization) were proceeding already before World War II. As a consequence the new Ajars were still literate in Georgian just as their ancestors were, but they became secular and hence lost the only essential distinctive feature of their identity. Indeed, after the Soviet period, there has been an Ajaria but no Ajars.283

Ajars are ethnolinguistically Georgians, but moreover they themselves claim a strong Georgian identity.284 Similarly, the Ajars are the only minority population to be viewed as Georgians in the predominant conceptions of the Georgian nation.285 However, this only happened in the period of the hardest Georgian nationalism, when leading nationalist radicals tried to challenge the mutual inclusiveness of both identities. This interesting situation, where 'one group does not think of itself as an "other" but another group does' has been referred to by Toft as two-way mirror nationalism.286 Indeed, the challenges came mainly from Tbilisi. Academics of the Batumi University, as a response to Gamsakhurdia’s pan-Islamic threat rhetoric,

280_{Cornell (2001):Autonomy and Conflict, p. 214.}

281_{Derlugian (1998):The Tale of Two Resorts: Abkhazia and Ajaria before and since the Soviet Collapse, p.} 277.

282

Mesketi Turks are basically Sunny Muslims living in exile in Uzbekistan. They speak the Georgian dialect and in the meantime formed the only Muslim group of the area.

283_{Derlugian (1998),The Tale of Two Resorts: Abkhazia and Ajaria before and since the Soviet Collapse, p.279.} 284_{Ramaz Kurdadze, a Georgian linguist and a professor at the Tbilisi State University, told me that he himself} was surprised by the Ajar relation to the Georgian language. While he was carrying out a linguistic research on Ajar dialects, Ajars very often expressed their perceptions that they speak a major Georgian dialect. Personal conversation with Ramaz Kurdadze, Tbilisi, Spring 2004.

285_{Cornell (2001):Autonomy and Conflict, p. 216.} 286

wrote that his charges, which caused significant distress, are neither historically nor politically justified. Moreover, for Ajars, 'nothing was more galling than aspersions on their Georgianness.'287 Similarly Toft noticed the former chairman of the Ajar ASSR Council of Ministers Guram Chigogidze’s speech in the Georgian Supreme Soviet, where he stated that the separatist organization of Ajaria consisted of six persons.288

In fact, it is extremely difficult to reconstruct anything from the political economic functioning of the Soviet Ajaria as there are hardly any analytical sources on this topic. This notion is logical given the virtually unproblematic relations of the autonomous republic with the center. For similar reasons, and contrary to Abkhazia, Moscow never intervened in Ajaria. It seems to be safe to argue that Ajaria functioned along the typical Soviet peripheral rules that are described above in detail. The benefits coming from the tourist and petroleum industries were distributed by the nomenklatura, who were strongly influenced by various social networks or even criminal groups. The predominantly rural and mostly subproletarian inhabitants were not challenged by central policies, as was the case with their Abkhaz counterparts. Nevertheless, the more irrelevant the political economy appears to be for the explanations related to the Soviet period, the more important was the role that it played in the process of the post-Soviet de-escalation.