|
|
|
Armeno-Georgian
War of 1918 and Armeno-Georgian Territorial
Issue in the 20th Century By Andrew Andersen and Georg Egge
|
|
|
|
In
the Foremath of Delimitation: Conceptual
Conflict and the Lack of mutual Understanding The fall of 1918 was marked by the
territorial expansion of the recently created states of Armenia and Georgia
that came into physical contact after Turkish evacuation. That presumed the
need for official territorial delimitation. However, as has been mentioned
above, the approaches of the parties were far from consensus in terms of the
status of the two counties of the province of Tiflis, namely Akhalkalaki and Borchalo. Official Tiflis
firmly claimed the southern border of the province of Tiflis to be the
national border of Georgia while the Armenian government refused to accept
that approach, and argued that the administrative borders of the former
imperial provinces should
not be taken
into account, as not corresponding to either ethnic or historical boundaries[1]. Armenian officials
also
reminded
their Georgian counterparts that as early as in 1917,
during the Transcaucasian Conference
for the Reorganization of Local Government in Petrograd,
Georgian
Socialists, who a year
later formed majority government of independent
Georgia, assured the
representatives of Armenian nationalist
parties
to
support the idea of reviewing a number of
administrative
boundaries
in the region in accordance with the ethnic
principle[2]. Basing on the
above mentioned promises the government of the Democratic Republic of Armenia
urged Georgia to give up a number of border areas with the heavy Armenian presence[3]. The official
Tiflis argued though that the agreement reached at the Petrograd Conference
of 1917 was, in fact, not an agreement but rather a manifestation of
constructive initiative regarding administrative and economic delimitation
within the limits of a single federal stated (the reformed Russian Empire).
According to the representatives of the Georgian government, such an
initiative took place long before the
declaration of independence of Armenia and Georgia and could not be accepted
as the basis for the demarcation of state borders [4]. Thus by the fall of 1918, Georgia and
Armenia failed to agree on the future status of the disputed territory that
included the counties of Akhalkalaki and Borchalo. In addition to the two counties, Armenian
government also laid claims to a small part of Gori
county proposing the future state border to go through the Tskhra-Tskaro pass. |
|
|
