Georgia marked the 26th anniversary of tragic events on April 9th, when on Rustaveli Avenue, in the center of the Georgian capital, there was a clash between units of the USSR interior Armed Forces supported by a separate regiment of Air Landing Forces and participants of a peaceful demonstration, demanding independence for Georgia. As a result, 21 people were killed, dozens were injured, and hundreds suffered from tear gas which was used in a small space, when people were kettled into a small square and couldn’t run from there.
It was the kettling and impossibility of reacting normally to the common ‘police gas’ which was used in all countries that people died; of course nobody wanted to kill anyone. Their plan was to disperse the crowd and clean the square in front of the House of the Government, but it was developed unprofessionally, without consideration for the scheme of narrow streets and the fact that the avenue was blocked by trucks.
18 of those killed were women. It was a shock for traditionalist Georgian society. The remorsefulness and powerlessness strengthened in the following days, when a state of emergency was announced in Tbilisi. The establishment of a commission of the Supreme Council of the USSR (Anatoly Sobchak’s Commission) and the ensuing investigation couldn’t compensate for the pain of the losses and the humiliation of society. Moreover, none of those who had organized it were punished. Colonel General Igor Rodionov, who was blamed for everything by Georgian party officials, was sent to Moscow and appointed to a better position. The Minister of Internal Affairs of the Georgian SSR, Shota Gorgodze, peacefully retired, as well as the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the GSSR, Jumber Patiashvili. And nobody mentioned the fault of the leaders of ‘informal organizations’, whose irresponsibility and provocative actions predetermined the tragedy.
As a result, all the foundations of social self-confidence were ruined in Georgia. It caused aggression inside and beyond Georgian society. When the state of emergency was cancelled, and it seemed that independence supporters and leaders of ‘informal organizations’ had to develop a positive agenda for achievement of common goals, they tore at each other’s throats. During some incidents (for example, in the summer of 1990), there were shootings between them on Rustaveli Avenue, where a large-scale civil war would take place two years later.
The ‘syndrome of April 9th’ was even more destructive for interethnic relations. Society, which had been deeply shocked by the deaths of innocent people, greedily absorbed various rumors, which provoked aggression. The first signal was the events in Borchaly – a southern region of the republic with an Azerbaijani population. In summer 1989 a ‘classic’ incident in the Soviet history of the period happened. A conflict between a taxi driver, an Azerbaijani, and a passenger, a Georgian, who didn’t want to pay, turned into a serious interethnic confrontation. The post-shock social consciousness reacted to any irritants inappropriately. Georgia was full of rumors about Borchaly’s autonomy, separation from Georgia, and so on.
In fact, these rumors had no grounds; they were spread in the context of social upheaval.
In Abkhazia there were much more destructive consequences of the syndrome of social reaction to the shock. Unlike the situation in Borchaly, foundations and confrontations had been accumulating there for decades. One reason was an attempt by Georgian students and tutors of the Sukhumi State University to establish a branch of Tbilisi State University in the capital of Abkhazia. This was absolutely unacceptable to Abkhazian society. One Georgian student told me at that moment: “People died for us in Tbilisi; we have to do something as well.”
The April meeting in the capital was initiated in response to ‘the call of Lyhnen,’ demanding that the rights of the Abkhaz people be respected and the restoration of the status of Abkhazia as a Soviet Republic. Initiators of the Tbilisi meeting on April 9th tried to turn the process into ‘an anti-Moscow course’, not to provoke an inter-ethnic conflict; but in July 1989 the opposite result was obvious: 16 people from both sides were killed in Georgian-Abkhazian clashes. In November 1989 about 100 thousand demonstrators headed from Tbilisi to Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, to conduct ‘a protest against Ossetian separatism’ there. Armed units of Mkhedrioni entered the city; clashes began; they turned into a large-scale war.
All the incidents mentioned were provoked by the syndrome of humiliated national self-consciousness, as a result of the tragedy of April 9th, and the inappropriate reaction to even small irritants, including rumors which often had nothing in common with reality.
Of course, the Georgian-Abkhazian and Georgian-Ossetian conflicts had historical grounds. However, the attitude of Georgian society toward the problems would have been much more rational, reasonable, thoughtful and less emotional, if the leaders of the ‘informal organizations’ had acted more responsibly.
