Umberto Bacchi -
Standing near an ancient monastery perched on a rocky ridge in southeast Georgia, armed border guards keep a watchful eye over tourists visiting the site, stopping those who venture too far uphill.
On the ridge’s opposite slope — where the tourists are headed — sit mountain caves with 1,000-year-old religious frescoes etched into their walls, a dozen kilometres from the village of Udabno. But access has been restricted since late April due to a flare-up in a border dispute between Georgia and Azerbaijan.
“This is one of the most important religious centres in Georgia,” said Davit Katsarava, a 42-year-old Georgian sportsman and actor protesting the site closure. “It’s our territory, our history but unfortunately Azerbaijani (people) think otherwise,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation during a visit to the monastery.
Almost 30 years after their independence, the two former Soviet republics are yet to agree on exactly where about a third of their shared border runs, and the David Gareja monastery complex is one of the main causes of contention.
From the Baltic region to Central Asia, unresolved border issues are a familiar headache to many post-Soviet countries, often fuelling diplomatic squabbles and conflicts over communities’ access to land and resources.
Demarcation problems came to the fore after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and its fluid internal boundaries became the rigid external frontiers of a host of new nations, leaving many unhappy with the borders they inherited, said experts on the region.
“One kilometre here, one kilometre there wasn’t so important in Soviet days because it was all one country,” said Thomas de Waal, a senior fellow at Carnegie Europe, a Brussels-based think- tank. The Georgian and Azeri foreign ministries did not reply to requests for comment. Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan have struggled for three decades to agree on their borders in the Ferghana valley, a largely agricultural region that is home to almost a quarter of Central Asia’s population.
Enclaves dotting the region have been the cause of longstanding, sometimes violent quarrels over access to land, infrastructure and water — which is predicted to grow scarcer due to climate change. At least three people were killed in separate confrontations between Tajik and Kyrgyz villagers earlier this year.
Disputes have also emerged in regions where boundaries are less intricate and sometimes between usually friendly neighbours, said de Waal.
In 2014, Russia and Estonia set out the position of their joint border after more than 20 years of wrangling, but the treaty, which included a small land swap, is yet to be implemented.
Russia has also been disputing ownership of a small border village with Georgia’s breakaway region of Abkhazia, a close ally that heavily relies on financial and political support from Moscow, de Waal added. Georgia and Azerbaijan set up a joint commission to demarcate the 480-km border between the two countries in 1996, said Kornely Kakachia, head of the Georgian Institute of Politics (GIP), a think-tank based in the capital Tbilisi. But after they agreed on almost 70 per cent of it, progress halted in the mid-2000s, he added. The David Gareja monastery complex, a sixth-century rock-hewn site sprawling across the barren slopes of a mountain about 60 km southeast of Tbilisi, has represented one of the “major stumbling blocks” to the negotiations, Kakachia noted.
The complex is an important religious landmark for deeply Christian Orthodox Georgia, but the Soviets had allocated a portion of it to Azerbaijan, a mainly Muslim country that also claims historic ties to the site.
— Thomson Reuters Foundation
Oman Observer is now on the WhatsApp channel. Click here
