In Search of a Missing Man in a Forgotten War

SUKHUMI, Georgia This fall, as I was preparing to travel to the Georgian breakaway region of Abkhazia, one of the cafeteria ladies in the journalism school where I teach stepped out from behind the pastry counter and asked a favor.

"Go talk to my neighbors," she said, writing down an address in Abkhazia's capital, Sukhumi. "Find out what happened to my husband."

During a year of teaching in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, and writing about Georgia for The Post, I'd heard many emotional stories about Abkhazia, a wedge of semi-tropical beaches and snowcapped mountains whose bid for independence from Georgia in the early 1990s launched an ethnic bloodbath in which both sides behaved atrociously. Many people I met in Tbilisi had left behind homes there. But Mzia, the cafeteria lady, had lost something more.

She knew, in the important sense, what had happened to her husband, Jinori. On Sept. 27, 1993, Georgia's army was routed from Sukhumi, a city of graceful villas that housed a mix of ethnic Georgians, Abkhaz and Russians. Fearing reprisals, tens of thousands of Georgians had crowded onto boats or begun an exodus through a high mountain pass. Mzia and her two teenage daughters left Jinori to guard the house and trudged for seven days through freezing rain and snow. They eventually made it to Tbilisi, along with many of Abkhazia's other 250,000 displaced Georgians. But Jinori never arrived. Months later, Mzia heard from another refugee that he had been killed by Abkhaz militiamen in or around the family house.

Georgia caught the world's attention last summer during its brief war with Russia. The cameras have largely moved on, but here, the debate over land rights and ethnicity remains as raw as ever. Despite the Georgian government's penchant for posting highway signs showing the distance to Sukhumi, most Georgians can't go there. For them, Abkhazia has become a symbol of more stable times, a measuring stick against which nothing Georgia now has can compare. "You have to smell the air in Abkhazia," I was told by friends who remembered it. "Nowhere else has that air."

The battle over that air, and the ground beneath it, helped lead to last summer's conflict -- and the most serious confrontation between Russia and the United States since the end of the Cold War. In August, Russia recognized Abkhazia as a state in its own right, along with Georgia's other breakaway territory, South Ossetia. For refugees who fled these places 15 years ago, Moscow's recognition changed little. Many of the displaced still live in Soviet-era dorm rooms provided by the Georgian government (which continues to insist that they will eventually be able to return home), stuck with memories of their seaside houses and balmy evenings on which, if you believe the rosiest accounts, multiethnic neighbors sang in the street, plucked fruit off trees and never thought about nationality.

"Why did Mzia send you here? Does she want her house back?"

In the damp, chilly air, the wizened Russian woman narrowed her blue eyes at me and my translator.

"No, no," I said, though I didn't know whether Mzia still wanted the two-story stucco house. "She just wants to know what happened to her husband."

The woman, who had lived in this ramshackle Sukhumi alley for 55 years, considered me, then spoke carefully. "She left with two children, and the husband stayed here. And on the third day came the Abkhaz." She pointed at another woman in a nearby garden. "She knows everything."

Masha was also an ethnic Russian, her face a web of wrinkles, her tall frame wrapped in woolen skirts and shawls. In her kitchen, we squeezed around a table beside the stove, and she brewed Turkish coffee and told us what had happened to Mzia's husband.

"He stayed with us three days," she said, gesturing toward the rooms she and her husband had shared with Jinori when armed men roamed the streets and shots rang out through the gardens. What did he talk about? What was he thinking? Masha shook her head. "He just hid here, that's all," she said. "After three days, it became quiet, and he went home."