Arda’s flags

Oliver Bullough’s article: “Arda’s flags—A postcard from Abkhazia” features inaccuracies and omissions of historic, statistical and factual nature such as an allegation that Stalin settled Georgians in Abkhazia; the misstatement that there were 32,000 fewer Georgians in Abkhazia than recorded by the last soviet census of 1989; the alleged absence of the Russian military in Abkhazia while there is an ongoing construction of military bases, complete with family dwellings and other accompanying infrastructure; the portrayal of a known terrorist  - Shamil Basayev as “the Chechen land manager” and a savior of the Abkhaz insurgency of the early 1990s. Continue reading →