Vladislav Ardzinba

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources.
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. (help, get involved!)
Any material not supported by sources may be challenged and removed at any time. This article has been tagged since January 3007.

Vladislav Ardzinba (born May 14, 1945) is an Abkhaz politician who was the first president of the unrecognized, but de facto independent Republic of Abkhazia, a breakaway autonomous republic of Georgia, from 1994 to 2004.

After graduating from the Historical Department of the Sukhumi Pedagogical Institute, Ardzinba spent eighteen years in Moscow specializing in ancient Middle Eastern civilizations at the Institute of Oriental Studies. Back to Sukhumi in 1987, he became Director of the Abkhaz Institute of Language, Literature and History. In the late 1980s, he became involved in the Abkhaz secessionist movement. He was elected a People’s Deputy to the last Soviet Supreme Soviet in 1989. During these years, he was known for his close ties with the hardliner Communists in Moscow.

He was elected the chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Abkhaz ASSR in 1990. When the Abkhazian war erupted in 1992, Ardzinba was ousted by the Georgian government forces from Sukhumi, the capital of Abkhazia, and he took shelter in Gudauta, northwestern Abkhazia, which was a home to the Soviet-era Russian military base. After the central Georgian government lost control of Abkhazia in 1993, the breakaway region held, in 1994, its first elections, considered by Georgia and the United Nations as illegal; Ardzinba was victorious and became the entity's first president. He was re-elected in 1999, although he was the only candidate running for office. The international community did not recognise his presidency, and a referendum on independence that he organized in 1999 was also declared invalid. He has stated that independence from Georgia is not negotiable, and has tried to align the state with Russia. As a leader of the Abkhaz side, he met the two successive Russian presidents Vladimir Putin and Boris Yeltsin, and Eduard Shevardnadze of Georgia.

His rule was widely assessed as autocratic, at least partially based upon the political and economic support from Russia. Human right records were extremely poor. Most of the pre-war Georgian population of Abkhazia were deprived the right to return and those who remained were subjected to systematic ethnic cleansing. Ardzinba aroused some further criticism from the international community after issuing a decree banning Jehovah's Witnesses in 1995.

During the last years of his presidency, Ardzinba faced criticism for both failing to bring stability to Abkhazia and his increasingly low public profile. He has not appeared in public since 2002. As a result, the role of governing the state had been increasingly left to Prime Minister Raul Khajimba.

He has been in extremely poor health and has been undergoing treatment in Moscow for some time. Despite increasing calls from the opposition (particularly the Amtsakhara movement) for him to resign, he had stated that he would finish his term, which was supposed to end in October 2004, but in fact did not end until February 12, 2005, due to disputes over the election of his successor. There were also calls for him to be impeached, but although the Abkhaz Constitution allows for this, the process would likely have not been completed before the end of his term, and no serious steps were taken to bring it about. He was unable to run for a third term, due to constitutional restrictions, and it is unlikely that his health would have enabled him to do so even if this were allowed.

He was replaced by the winner of the presidential election of 12 January 2005, Sergei Bagapsh. A previous election had been held in late 2004 after the murder of opposition leader Garri Aiba, but it had resulted in considerable controversy over the results.