Abkhazia’s presidential rivals struck a deal on Sunday to hold new elections, avoiding a ruinous blockade by neighboring Russia on the rebel Georgian province.
Sergei Bagapsh, declared the winner after a recount, defied orders by current leader Vladislav Ardzinba to rerun the poll and scheduled his inauguration for Monday. Russia had threatened to impose an economic blockade if he went ahead. But after last-minute talks, mediated by Russian Deputy Prosecutor General Vladimir Kolesnikov, the rivals agreed to run in a new poll as a single team, with Bagapsh as the presidential candidate and Kremlin protege Raul Khadzhimba as his vice-president.
The tiny rebel state on the Black Sea has been in turmoil since October when Bagapsh accused Khadzhimba of rigging the poll. “It is a very solid compromise,” Bagapsh told Reuters by telephone from the regional capital Sukhumi. Russia’s Itar-Tass news agency quoted Khadzhimba as saying that he and Bagapsh had agreed to disband their armed supporters, whose standoff in the local capital Sukhumi has verged on violence.
“We will try to make things happen calmly, in an orderly way now,” Bagapsh said. The two ex-rivals, who together won 85 percent of the first vote, are virtually assured of victory in the new poll. Up to the last minute, the Kremlin, traditional kingmaker in Abkhazia where more than 70 percent of the population have Russian passports, had demonised businessman Bagapsh, who is as loyal to Moscow as Khadzhimba.
Last week, a top Russian government official denounced him as an “irresponsible politician, backed by criminal elements, who want to seize power by force”, and demanded that new elections be held to give Khadzhimba a second chance. But Kolesnikov’s role in hammering out Sunday’s deal suggested that the mood had changed in the Kremlin, which now appears more keen on compromise as long as it ends in providing a Moscow-friendly leader for Abkhazia.
It has faced similar problems in ex-Soviet Ukraine where the candidate it supported was eventually forced to accept a restaging of last month’s presidential election after masses took to the streets complaining of vote rigging. Moscow was humiliated when Ukraine’s Supreme Court cancelled the results of the Nov. 12 run-off and called a new election, almost certain to be won by the candidate it had opposed.
Control over Abkhazia is Moscow’s trump card in relations with another ex-Soviet state, Georgia, whose President Mikhail Saakashvili wants closer ties with the West. Saakashvili, who rose to power in a popular revolution a year ago, has made the reintegration of Abzhazia into Georgia a priority.
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