On October 7 the Parliament of the breakaway Georgian region of Abkhazia called for Presidential elections to be held on December 12. These will be the first elections since Russia recognised Abkhazia’s independence in August 2008, a few days after the EU-brokered ceasefire between Russia and Georgia.

The favourite seems to be the current President Sergey Bagapsh, the main negotiator of Abkhazia’s “independence”. A victory in the elections would give Bagapsh a five-year mandate to rule the ‘country.’ However four other candidates have been registered by the Central Election Commission, the Apsnypress local agency reported on November 2, the deadline for nomination: Raul Khajimba, an ex-Vice President of Abkhazia and well-known political figure who was also a contender in the controversial 2004 Presidential elections, Beslan Butba, a businessman and former lawmaker now leader of the Party of Economic Development, Zaur Ardzinba, head of the state-owned Abkhaz Shipping Company and Vitaly Bganba, a Doctor of Economics and scholar with no political party to back him up.

The Director of the Central Electoral Commission, Batal Tabagua, has estimated the total number of voters to be 129,000, on the basis of the 2007 Parliamantary consultations. Polling stations should be in the region of 186, with one additional polling station in Moscow, at the Abkhaz ‘Embassy’ in the Russian Federation, and one in the Karachay-Cherkess Republic in the north Caucasus. This information, revealed in press releases by local ‘governments,’ indicates that the Abkhaz authorities have the intention of organising, for foreign consumption, professional and transparent elections throughout the territory.

Nonetheless, many consider the information doubtful. For years, data on the demography of Abkhazia has been unreliable, and for that matter highly politicised. Abkhaz officials have deliberately overestimated the ethnic Abkhaz population. On the basis of the 2005 Presidential electoral poll, International Crisis Group estimated the total population of the rebel Georgian region to have reached 190,000.

The absurdity of the Abkhaz situation is that only some 35 per cent of the total population of the region is ethnic Abkhaz. For obvious political reasons some senior Abkhaz leaders who are taking a visibly pro-Russian stance are deceiving Abkhaz voters by claiming that the Abkhaz constitute a majority in the “country” while Armenians and Russians have the status of “significant minorities.” Where in the world have you ever seen an ethnic group calling for the recognition of its independence by the international community on the basis of nationality criteria set forth by the United Nations, while this same group constitutes a clear minority in the territory where they live? How can Russia evoke the case of Kosovo, where most reliable estimates put the ethnic Albanian population at 90 per cent of a total ranging from 1.9 to 2.4 million?

Should the UN or international law give the right to ‘self-determination’ to any other 60,000-strong ethnic group on this planet, the world would experience an enormous expansion of separatist movements pulling nations apart. The international community’s acquiescence to the right of self-determination would amount to interference in another’s state internal affairs. Unchecked interference by some states in other states’ affairs would run the risk of causing a disintegration of the whole international community. This is what the former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, a specialist in international law, constantly reminded the world when he was in charge of the New York headquarters in the 1990s.

Interference in another state’s internal affairs is what Russia has been conducting since the fall of Communism through the passportisation and militarisation of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and meddling in the internal affairs of its neighbours. According to Boutros Boutros-Ghali, states do not do a good service to the international community when they recognize on false pretensions the independence of “micro-states.” I don’t mean to besmirch the dignity of the some 60,000 Abkhaz living among the estimated 130,000 Russians, Armenians and… Georgians, but only opportunistic, authoritarian and badly advised leaders like Medvedev/Putin, Chavez and Ortega will ever give support to your cause.

This story gets even more absurd when we pay heed to the linguistic aspect of Abkhazia’s case. The quest for self-determination has to be based on either religious, ethnic or linguistic differences. These distinctive features function as centrifugal forces in the pursuit of this goal. On what basis is Abkhazia entitled to self-determination? In daily life, Russian is the lingua franca in Abkhazia and also the first language of the Abkhaz minority group. Even more strange for people who proclaim their difference, Abkhaz schools follow a Russian curriculum and Russian is the language of instruction.

A people which aspires to independence has to have the basis for the legitimate exercise of self-determination. In Abkhazia, the ‘Government’ is still trying to increase the role played by the Abkhaz language, in vain, because it has been restricted by insufficient institutional capacity and qualified teachers. Russophone Abkhaz has also put up resistance to such a change. This considerable ambivalence regarding the Abkhaz language among a substantial percentage of the Abkhaz population should disqualify Abkhazia to nationhood. Majority groups, Russians and Armenians, without whom the Abkhaz elite cannot maintain its state power, are even more ambivalent about their linguistic orientation and oppose fiercely any enforced policy of linguistic ‘Abkhazianisation.’ As a result, the dominance of Russian in the breakaway territory is supported by a great majority of its people.

As in past elections held in Abkhazia, Tbilisi will stay away from engaging in the electoral campaign. It is doubtful anyway that an Abkhaz candidate would accept being supported by Tbilisi. It could only harm the candidate, as the great majority of Abkhaz do not trust Georgia.

Richard Rousseau is Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Georgia