by David Zenian
WASHINGTON, August 27 — Thousands of Armenians, mainly women and children, are fleeing the escalating civil war in the western Georgian Black Sea province of Abkhazia, leaving their homes, shops and other personal property at the mercy of looters.
Worst affected were predominantly-Armenian inhabited villages like Shahoumianovskaya and Gulripchi, where dozens of homes were looted and torched.
Details compiled August 27 through telephone interviews from Washington with Armenian community leaders in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi and officials in Yerevan, also included reports of casualties.
The fighting between government troops and independence-minded Moslem Abkhaz militiamen, and hit-and-run attacks by the followers of ousted President Zviad Gamsakhurdia, have cut off all inland escape routes, leaving the new refugees with the only option of escaping north to the Russian port city of Sochi.
"The situation is very serious. We have no reliable statistics on the number of Armenian refugees, but they are in the thousands. A few hundred have managed to reach Yerevan, but the vast majority are in the Sochi area. A number of Armenian villages were looted a few days ago, and some Armenians were killed in the fighting and others were wounded," said Van Baybourtian, the editor of Tbilisi's Vrasdan newspaper.
An estimated 100,000 Armenians live in Abkhazia, where the ethnic Abkhazians make up roughly only twenty percent of the region's 500,000 population.
The battle for control of Abkhazia, which declared its independence from Georgia last month, has not only triggered a new refugee problem, but also severed one of the few rail tracks that link Armenia and the Black Sea.
Baybourtian said "armed bandits" — a common reference to Gamsakhurdia's followers — this week blew up sections of the Sukhumi-Tbilisi railway. "Sukhumi is one of the Georgian ports used by Armenian merchants. Between the fighting and the terrorist attacks, rail traffic has stopped. The other Georgian ports of Poti and Batumi are of no use too because the roads to and from those two places to Tbilisi are not safe due to the presence of Gamsakhurdia's men along the way, " he said.
In the months preceding the fighting, some Armenian "community leaders" in Sukhumi were accused of siding with the Abkhaz independence movement.
"A day or two after the initial government attack on Sukhumi, some Armenians there were reported to have joined the fighting on the Abkhaz side, but this has since been officially denied by the government and the denial was broadcast on the radio and state television in Tbilisi several times," Baybourtian said.
