Culture : Abkhazians Fear They May Be Singing Swan Song Soon : An enclave in Georgia, famed for its choir, fights to save its ancient civilization. Hundreds have been killed.

GUDAUTA, Georgia —  A land of snowcapped peaks and seaside tangerine groves, Abkhazia is best known for its choir of elders. Every few months, these sturdy mountain men with long memories gather to sing ancestral Abkhazian legends of war and exodus, triumph and grief.

Today, the voices of the Nartaa Long-Living Men’s Choir carry an immediate, plaintive message. Their small Black Sea province is fighting an undeclared war against Georgia to save what remains of an ancient civilization.

“Our warrior heroes have died and physically departed, but the tales of their deeds will help us survive this genocidal assault,” intoned Khimbei Gezerdava, wiry and elfish at age 98, as he began the latest concert, a spirited performance for an audience of battle-weary Abkhazian guerrillas and refugees.

Abkhazians have been fighting since the Georgian army crushed their autonomous status within Georgia last August by seizing the provincial capital of Sukhumi. Thousands of people and their elected leaders fled and quickly formed a resistance army based here. Since then, almost 2,000 people on both sides have died as the means of defense escalated from firebombs and hang gliders to tanks and warplanes.

Support from northern Caucasian warriors and Russian fighter pilots has helped the outnumbered Abkhazians battle to a standoff, leaving the province partitioned into halves from which each army expels its ethnic rivals and loots their homes.

All this has turned a seaside paradise of eucalyptus trees, beach resorts and archaic hospitality into an ugly laboratory of “ethnic cleansing.” Entire villages and city blocks lie in ruins, while tangerines, the leading money earner after the tourists who have fled, rot on the trees.

Of half a dozen ethnic conflicts spawned by the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, the battle for Abkhazia is the most threatening to an entire language and culture. The 97,000 Abkhazians were already a minority in their own homeland, a territory the size of Puerto Rico.

The gravity of the Georgian offensive became chillingly clear when its commander, Col. Georgy Karkarashvili, warned on Abkhazian television: “We are ready to sacrifice 100,000 Georgians to annihilate 97,000 Abkhazians. We will leave the entire Abkhazian nation without descendants.”

His men have already gone to the trouble to erase much of Abkhazia’s written history--documentary and literary evidence of the separate Abkhazian identity that Georgia officially denies. In the first days of the invasion, witnesses said, Georgian troops set fire to the provincial archives and waved away firefighters at gunpoint, allowing thousands of unpublished manuscripts to go up in smoke.

Western scholars who had worked in the archives said that their loss, coupled with the likelihood of continuing ethnic warfare, could doom the Abkhazians to oblivion. “This might be the coup de grace for a people who have been clinging by their fingernails for more than a century,” said John Colarusso, a linguistics professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada.

Abkhazians trace their roots back at least two millennia. A highly ritualized mountain society, they hold warriors, women, scholars and especially their elders in high esteem. In their tongue, part of the Iberian-Caucasian language group, Abkhazia means “country of the soul.” Ruled in turn by the Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman empires, the Abkhazians fell under Russian domination in the 1860s; many fled to what is now Turkey and lost their language.

Georgian scholars argue that the Abkhazian culture, by then, had been absorbed into their own ancient civilization, even though the two languages are as different as English and Chinese.

In any case, Abkhazia and Georgia were separate republics in their first decade under Soviet rule, until dictator Josef Stalin in 1931 subjected the Abkhazians to direct administrative control from Tbilisi, the Georgian capital. For most of a generation until Stalin’s death in 1953, the Abkhazian language was banned and Georgians were moved en masse to Abkhazia to assimilate their neighbors. Ethnic Abkhazians today number only 18% of the province’s 525,000 people.

After regaining legal status for their language, the Abkhazians staged a series of uprisings that prompted the Soviets to allow them a university, a television station and a majority quota in the provincial Parliament. Today, children in Abkhazian schools study in that language through the fourth grade, then switch to Russian.

But as Moscow lost control, Tbilisi abolished the Georgian constitution that protected those minority rights and blocked a program to repatriate thousands of ethnic Abkhazians from Turkey. When Abkhazia’s Parliament reacted last summer by reviving its own autonomous 1925 constitution, the Georgian army sent tanks to shut it down.

With stunning swiftness, the Abkhazians fought back, and neighbors who had lived in harmony turned on each other in the ensuing battles for control of nearly every city, town and village.

“I was walking down the street with a friend, and some armed Georgians stopped us,” recalled Lyudmila Sergeigiya, 35, an Abkhazian journalist in the coastal resort of Gagra. “One of them was a shopkeeper who used to shake my hand. He said: ‘From now on, there is nothing between us. You will stay here and perish.’ ”

Sergeigiya said she hid in homes of Russian friends for 32 days until Abkhazian forces recaptured the city.

Then it was the Georgians’ turn to hide.

Abkhazian gunmen burst into Rima Seradze’s home in Gagra, held the 58-year-old Georgian widow at gunpoint and beat her grown son unconscious. “What have we done?” she protested. “You can’t blame simple people for this war.” The intruders left with her carpet, her record player and all her money.

Ethnic purging has become rampant, judging by unofficial census data from two cities 25 miles apart on opposite sides of the Gumista River that forms the front line.

At least 13,000 Abkhazians have fled or been expelled from Georgian-controlled Sukhumi, leaving 6,000 behind in a city now shrunken to half its peacetime population of 130,000. Gudauta, the new Abkhazian stronghold, counted 7,000 Georgians in a prewar population of 18,000; all but 1,000 Georgians are gone now.

The fate of the renowned Nartaa choir, made up of six centenarians and 37 other Abkhazians older than 75, is another poignant index of the strife. Twelve of the choir’s 43 members are missing, isolated in mountain villages cut off by war. One ailing vocalist had to leave Sukhumi’s hospital when it was bombed, fled to Gudauta by boat and died a few days later at age 100.

In an interview, three choir representatives counted 20 descendants killed in the fighting. They told of a fellow member, age 87, whose village was burned down; of another member, 89, who went to the riverfront to help his grandson fire rocket launchers at Sukhumi’s skyscrapers.

“If they let me, I’ll go fight too,” declared Khajarat Ladariya, 103, a stooped veteran of both world wars. “My hunting rifle is ready.”

If war breaks up the choir, the legends sung by its members may die with them. Among the documents burned in the archives was the only known Abkhazian-language collection of Nart Sagas, heroic myths about a matriarch and 99 warrior sons that are central to Abkhazia’s largely oral folklore.

But this conflict is creating new sagas. One of the more colorful is that of Musa M. Shanibov, a former professor of Marxism-Leninism who started the Caucasus People’s Confederation to promote independence for a chain of tiny mountain republics along Russia’s southern border. Abkhazia has become his leading cause.

Within days of the Georgian attack, Shanibov sent 3,000 warriors from the northern Caucasus republics to augment Abkhazia’s 7,000 volunteer troops. The newcomers brought rifles, a command structure, $100,000 in donations and a pair of AN-37 fighter planes that take off and land on a widened strip of the Black Sea coastal highway.

Arrested in Russia for fomenting unrest, Shanibov escaped and turned up in Abkhazia, the only guest in a 700-room Turkish-built luxury hotel, abandoned when the fighting started. There he is laid up with a leg wound inflicted accidentally by his bodyguard’s gun.

“If we don’t make a united stand in Abkhazia, our Caucasian civilization will come under a heavy blow,” Shanibov said in an interview from his bed.

The heroic image of a small band of mountaineers fending off a bullying Georgian army six times its size doesn’t quite fit, however. Russia is tilting the conflict against Georgia to keep its Black Sea bases; the Abkhazians have stooped to the same inhumanity as their enemies.

Both sides cut fingers off their dead victims as war trophies and round up innocent bystanders for periodic “prisoner exchanges.” Among those now held hostage are Abkhazia’s deputy prime minister and the Georgian Red Cross chief in Sukhumi--both seized while on humanitarian relief missions.

For months, Georgia has blocked roads to the multiethnic town of Tkvarcheli, trapping its 40,000 residents. Georgian troops often threaten to shoot down Russian helicopters with emergency relief; when the aid gets through, Abkhazians in control of the town refuse to distribute it unless their people get most of the seats on the flight out.

“We want peace,” said Raul Eshba, a prominent Abkhazian collaborator with the Georgians. “If this war is a tragedy for the Georgians, it is genocide for us. We are on the edge of destruction because we are a minority.”

But Eshba blames Russia, not Georgia. “If Russia wanted it to, this war could end very quickly,” he said.

Russia professes neutrality in the conflict but rejects demands by Georgia to abandon former Soviet air bases and other installations in Abkhazia. Moscow has sent paratroopers to defend the bases; Russian jets have bombed Sukhumi to destroy Georgian missile launchers.

The sheer volume of Russian-inherited Soviet weapons seized or purchased by both sides--scores of tanks and railway carloads of ammunition--is enough to fuel the war for years to come.

“Georgia is going to be a brutal state if it’s going to hold to its current borders,” said Paul Goble, a specialist on former Soviet nationalities at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. “And if Abkhazia breaks away, you’re talking about a country that would be roughly the same ethnic mix as whites and blacks in South Africa. How do the Abkhazians hold on? It would require a kind of repressive system that would rival that of the Georgians themselves.”

“The longer the war lasts, the more difficult it will be to make peace with Georgia,” said Vladislav G. Ardzinba, the Parliament Speaker who heads the rebel government in Gudauta. “If someone sets out to destroy your home, it will be very difficult to invite him in ever again.”

Sergei Loiko of The Times’ Moscow Bureau and special correspondent Lori Cidylo contributed to this report.