openDemocracy/Russia was created last year. Two new articles on Abkazia demonstrate why it is a brilliant initiative.
The idea was that English readers around the world should be able to learn at first hand the vitality and intelligence of Russia’s free voices and that Russians should be able to participate directly in the growing (we hope) democratic discussion that is global in its interests and concerns.
Alas, it has taken the crisis in the Caucasus to confirm how much this initiative is needed. openDemocracy has always resisted the clichés of received ideas and the imposition of worn out worldviews while seeing itself as a platform where minority voices and opinions (even if they too have their clichés and evasions) can be well published and debated when the current is against them.
oD’s exceptional coverage of the Caucasus predates the present interest and will continue after it. Others have drawn attention to the analysis and the seeking for human based conceptual frameworks in new essays by Ivan Krastev and Mary Kaldor, I’m just going to draw your attention to Zygmunt Dzieciolowski's encounter with Sergei Bagapsh the President of Abkhazia and then an article by Inal Khashig,
editor of the Abkhaz newspaper Chegemskaya Pravda, who states that the West's endorsement of Georgia's claims has merely ensured that Abkhazian independence is a fact.
Zygmunt writes in the tradition of his late Polish compatriot the celebrated Ryszard Kapuscinski. It’s a journalism of the main facts and the telling details, threaded with an awareness of history and place so that the reporting is rooted in time without being fatalistic or sensational. He brings to life the “soft voice” of President Bagapash, his willingness to delay catching his flight to Moscow to talk with co-editor of openDemocracy Russia, his wariness of and desire for independence from the Russia that has just saved his statelet but was only recently also imposing sanctions on it.
One detail I didn’t know that comes across strongly in both Zygmunt’s report and Kashig’s insistent article. The West’s participated in preventing medicines including antibiotics from being imported by Abkhazia after it broke away from Georgia in the early 1990s. This abuse of humanitarian principles turned everyone who remained into a potential martyr. When Russia let in antibiotics it made a moral gain (whatever the cynical calculations behind it) that western media coverage seems completely oblivious of. This is the kind of significant detail that openDemocracy Russia brings to our understanding of the Caucuses.