Black sea blues.

• Author: King, Charles
• Position: Reporter-at-Large - Interview

MAXIM GUNJIA sits down in an armchair opposite a plush couch. His spacious office is filled with abstract art. He recalls his time in Washington, which he visited while studying in the United States. "I like Georgetown", he says in unaccented English. "And Adams Morgan--that Cuban place, what is it? The Habana Village!" Like many young clubbers, he prefers New York's scene to Washington's. "The city doesn't really have much of a soul."

Gunjia is hip, 28 and into restaurants, art and jazz. He is also the deputy foreign minister of a country that no legitimate government recognizes and that some people have called a haven for drug traffickers and arms dealers.

It is easy to think of his homeland--the Republic of Abkhazia, a small triangle of land wedged between the Caucasus mountains and the Black Sea--as a Ruritanian fantasy. From the perspective of Georgia, which claims Abkhazia as its own territory, it is simply a puppet of Russia, a pretend state that Moscow manipulates in order to keep Georgia's central government weak, scare away foreign investors and block the further expansion of Western influence in the Caucasus. More ominously, Georgian politicians contend that Abkhazia has become a hotbed of black-marketeers, trading in everything from guns to people. Abkhazia's leaders "have profited from illegal smuggling and contraband [and] now threaten to draw us all into conflict", said Georgia's president, Mikheil Saakashvili, in a speech in Washington last August. "In the post-September 11 world, illegality and pockets of separatists can no longer be ignored or tolerated."

But there is more to the story than this. Abkhazia is not simply a renegade statelet. It is in fact a remarkable example of how individuals can get on with the task of living their lives even without the imprimatur of international legitimacy. If left to their own devices, most people will figure out pretty quickly how to make a living, support their families and provide for their own security, even after a devastating war. But that resourcefulness can also be a vice. Once people have come up with workable ways of governing themselves--putting food on the table, keeping the peace, even selecting their own leaders--they are usually loath to accept someone else's version of how these things ought to be done. The Abkhaz should know. They have spent the last 14 years constructing something that looks like a real country, and they do not appear to be interested in giving it up.

ABKHAZIA LIES along the northeastern coast of the Black Sea. It is lush, almost jungle-like in places. Fertile river valleys have hosted farmsteads for thousands of years. Hazelnut groves and cornfields blanket the countryside. Forested hills press right down to the seashore, and beyond them rise the granite face of the main chain of the Caucasus mountains and the snow-covered peaks that mark off the boundary between Abkhazia and the Russian...