SUKHUMI, Georgia, Aug. 10 - The men on the seashore announced their citizenship one by one. The first man, who did not appear Slavic, said he was Russian. Then the second, then the third. Another produced a new passport bearing the Russian seal. "I am Russian, too," he said.
It was the same among all the men sipping coffee under the oleander and palm, just as it is throughout this city, the partly abandoned capital of Abkhazia, a tiny self-declared state.
"You can ask any person here, and they will have the passport of the Russian Federation," said Apollon Shinkuba, a retired general in the military of a nation that officially does not exist.
Abkhazia, a breakaway Georgian republic roughly the size of Delaware, has been swept by a paper revolution.
As latent civil war with Georgia threatens to flare anew, the Abkhaz have become Russian citizens by the tens of thousands, declaring allegiance to Moscow, which they hope will defend them if fighting breaks out. It is a policy resembling voluntary annexation - not by force or referendum but by the mass assumption of the citizenship of a neighboring state.
The Abkhaz have been applying under a provision of Russian law that grants citizenship under certain circumstances to residents of the former Soviet Union. They hope their new allegiance will prove to be insurance in the event of war, although there is no clear guarantee.
"The president of the Russian Federation is the guarantor of protection of the citizens of the Russian Federation, no matter where they live," said Valery Arshba, Abkhazia's vice president, himself a Russian citizen. He added, "Political protection implies military protection."
The status of Abkhazia - a republic on the Black Sea that is adjacent to Russia and has a deep affinity for it but is within the internationally recognized borders of Georgia - is one of the last of the sovereignty disputes that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
The Georgians and the Abkhaz were held together under Soviet rule. In 1992, not long after Soviet rule ended, civil war broke out, ending in 1993 with the expulsion of the Georgian Army followed by a line of demarcation that is still patrolled by a United Nations observers.
What remains beyond that line is a place of astonishing beauty and often eerie stillness, a republic in a state of unsettled suspension. Abkhazia has been independent for 11 years, able to claim self-government, but at a cost of isolation and at a high economic and social price.
No nation recognizes it. Its factories are idle. Its infrastructure is run down. Its government claims to operate on a budget of $15 million a year.
There is little traffic, no postal service, no state currency (rubles, not Georgian lari, circulate here) and a marginal economy. Its hospitals depend on donations from aid organizations. Minefields litter its byways and will take years to remove.
Village after village in the former Georgian zone of Gali, near the Inguri River, across which Georgian civilians fled as their army collapsed and Abkhaz fighters advanced, remain depopulated and sacked. Weeds grow from rooftops, horses wander the grounds of gutted factories, people are few.
And tensions have risen again. Georgia has never given up its claim to Abkhazia, and the new Georgian president, Mikhail Saakashvili, has pledged to bring the renegade republic into the national fold, as he is also trying to do with another separatist region, South Ossetia.
At a briefing for journalists and political analysts this week near Tbilisi, Georgia's capital, Mr. Saakashvili said he would be patient but also spoke with an air of inevitability.
Abkhazia, in his view, will return to Georgia. "We can do just about anything short of full independence," he said, and referred to possible federalist models for reintegration.
The political rhetoric has been leveraged with force. Late last month, the Georgian Coast Guard fired on a cargo ship calling at Sukhumi, asserting that ships sailing for Abkhazia without Georgian permission violate Georgia's territorial integrity and international law.
Mr. Saakashvili later announced that he had ordered illegal ships to be sunk.
Here on the western side of the Inguri River, the Abkhaz people, a tiny ethnic minority whose roots reach to ancient times, see themselves as besieged. The government suspended talks with Tbilisi, vowed to remain firm on national status and said it would use force to counter actions it regarded as hostile.
"Right now we have our forces ready, and if necessary we will fight," said the acting foreign minister, Georgi Otyrba, who became a Russian citizen three months ago.
Abkhazia maintains an army seasoned by civil war. Officials here say it has more than 20,000 fighters and is organized in the manner of the Swiss, with reservists who keep automatic rifles at home, prepared to gather swiftly at predetermined locations for local defense.
An exercise held last month to test military readiness was a success, Abkhaz officials said. Several of them added that Mr. Saakashvili, whom they regard as young, inexperienced and rash, has chosen a course that could quickly slip from his control.
"The idea of the new president of Georgia will lead to a new war," said Nugzar Ashuba, speaker of Abkhazia's 35-member parliament. "It is absolutely so."
Mr. Ashuba added that although Abkhazia regarded its military as a defensive force, it had aircraft, artillery and tanks, and if the Georgians continued to test their borders it might strike first. He said, as an example, that Abkhaz fighter planes or helicopter gunships could be sent to sea. "We can destroy the Georgian ships, we have all the means," he said. "But we don't want a scandal. Of course, if they keep doing this, we will reconsider."
Little prospect for negotiation exists for now. The Abkhaz president, Vladislav Ardzinba, has been ill and is not visibly in command of the government. An election to replace him is set for October. The new president will serve a five-year term.
One Western diplomat, citing the delicacy of the subject and speaking anonymously, said it was difficult to assess prospects for peace talks. "It is really hard to discuss it seriously until after the Abkhaz presidential election," he said.
In the interim, residents here have been becoming Russian in waves, with encouragement of the de facto state. Mr. Arshba, the vice president, said that 170,000 of Abkhazia's 320,000 residents had become citizens of Russia, and 70,000 others had applications pending. The shift started in the late 1990's. More than 50,000 Abkhaz people had become Russian by 2002, he said, when a government campaign induced roughly 117,000 more people to adopt Russian citizenship. The latest push began this summer.
Numbers here are malleable and impossible to confirm. Mr. Otyrba said that he had seen new, unpublished census data and that 80 percent of what he said were 362,000 residents of Abkhazia were Russian.
Mr. Saakashvili insisted that the population is of Abkhazia was much smaller than Abkhaz officials contended - fewer than 200,000, about half of whom are Abkhaz and the rest principally Armenian and Georgian.
One point is clear: given that to obtain Russian citizenship an Abkhaz applicant must be at least 16 years old, on paper the Russification of Abkhazia is almost complete.
"We're at about 80 percent now," said Gennadi Nikitchenko, chief of the Abkhaz office of the Congress of Russian Communities, which has been assisting residents with applications and forwarding bundles of the documents to the office of the Russian Foreign Ministry in Sochi.
What wartime protections these new citizens might enjoy is anything but certain.
The Western diplomat suggested that their status was not ironclad. "People can have a Russian document," he said. "That doesn't make them Russian."
Russia has been ambiguous as well. The Russian defense minister, Sergei B. Ivanov, told the Interfax news service this week that "the protection of the interests of Russian citizens in Abkhazia and South Ossetia should be done by political and diplomatic methods."
President Vladimir V. Putin has remained silent on the matter.
As the impasse continues, a sense of lost opportunities pervades. Abkhazia, subtropical and inexpensive, gorgeous and little known, seems like a coastal boom waiting to happen.
The republic is breathtaking, a narrow land in which mountains more than 12,000 feet high tumble in forested hills to the Black Sea. Its farmland is rich in tangerines and tea.
The republic's famed beaches at Sukhumi, Gagra and Pitsunda were formerly vacation destinations for the Soviet elite. Stalin himself kept dachas here. Before the Bolsheviks took state holidays, Abkhazia's beaches were lounged upon by czars.
Yet for all of its beauty and access to the sea, Abkhazia suffers from its isolation and reputation as a land that is locked in struggle. Sukhumi, the seat of the separatist government, remains 60 percent destroyed and is full of gutted buildings and glassless windows.
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