A simmering property conflict in Georgia
THESSALONIKI – Dogfights are a common spectacle in the Caucasus, but a recent bout in Georgia’s mountain region of Tsalka resulted in the murder of an ethnic Greek and a Georgian almost caused a full-scale outbreak of violence. The incident brought to the surface a situation that had been simmering for some time over the seizure of property owned by ethnic Greeks who emigrated from Georgia to Greece. It began in a village square in Tzavaheti, when a 19-year-old ethnic Greek, Ivan Boudagov, and a 50-year-old Svan (the Svans are a Caucasian mountain tribe), Sadur Ubeliani, got their dogs to fight. After a drawn-out contest, the Svan’s dog annihilated his opponent, a defeat that its ethnic Greek owners did not take lightly. One of them went home and brought back his own dog, which soon made short work of the exhausted winner. This breach of the rules resulted in a savage street fight, in which someone shot the offending ethnic Greek, whose friends then shot Ubeliani in retaliation. The news spread throughout the other villages in the Tsalka region, home to the some 25,000 ethnic Greeks still living there. The tension reached a pitch between them and the Svans, who had moved down from the mountains and settled in the area. When Greeks began emigrating from Georgia to their historic motherland, poverty-stricken Svans and other Georgians made homeless by natural disasters settled in homes vacated by the departing Greeks, expropriating their property. «In many cases the Georgian government encouraged these people to occupy the houses, promising them that the state would buy them from the Greeks,» said Kyriakos Iordanov, president of Georgia’s Union of Greek Communities. «The authorities had promised to pay the Greeks compensation for their lost property. But nothing has been done and both Greeks and Svans, feeling deceived, have turned against each other,» he said. According to information collected by the union, over 1,000 homes in the Tsalka, Kobuteti, Tetritskaro, Koubati, Harapa and other regions have been occupied by Georgians so far, provoking incidents chiefly between Greeks and Svans that threaten to deteriorate into a full-scale bloodbath. The Greeks claim that the Svans often attack their homes in an attempt to terrorize them and drive them out. Ethnic Greek leaders have made official protests to the Georgian government, which sent military forces to Tsalka after the incident with the dogs. The Greek Foreign Ministry has also been briefed, and hundreds of ethnic Greek Georgians have signed a petition asking the parliaments of the two countries to work together to find a solution to the property issue. «We lost out homes once before, when we were driven out of Turkey. We don’t want to lose our property now, in a time of peace,» said Achilleas Tsepidis, a Greek from Tsalka who has emigrated to Greece.
