I don’t consider the problematic history as such to be off-topic. But snide remarks about it belong in the Pit, and a general discussion about the morality of visiting regions with unresolved historical (or even ongoing) ethnic violence or civil rights violations is better served in Great Debates, since it raises issues that go far beyond my own individual trip.
My own political views have been well documented on this board (and there’s even a monstrous thread about them with 423 posts and 26,300 views, back from when I was a candidate for the EU Parliament). To summarize their application to this particular situation, I oppose both sides in the conflict, as well as the status quo and the various proposals to modify it. I deplore both the violence perpetrated by the Abkhazian separatists and the decades of Soviet-sponsored Georgianization that triggered it. (And I am emphatically not trying to imply that the two are morally equivalent, nor that one excuses the other.) I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking, both before and after my visit, about why things got so bad in Abkhazia in comparison to other regions with similar problems. For example, just as the Soviet Union pursued a long-term policy of Georgianization in Abkhazia, so too did it pursue a long-term policy of Russification in Latvia, to the point where in both regions the titular ethnicity almost became a minority. Many regard this as a form of attempted genocide. Upon the dissolution of the USSR, the Latvians and Abkhazians seized power in their respective regions and enacted measures to undo the decades of cultural assimilation. (And many would say that these measures are also genocide, or at least “ethnic cleansing”.) In Latvia this took the form of stripping citizenship and other civil rights from the Russian and other non-Latvian population, causing hundreds of thousands to flee or emigrate, and leaving hundreds of thousands of those who remained stateless to this day. In Abkhazia, the situation erupted into open and bloody physical conflict. What led to such different outcomes? I don’t have any good answers.
As I mentioned upthread, I didn’t directly engage any of the locals in discussion of the political situation, though I probably would have liked to if the right opportunity had presented itself. Most of the people I talked with were ethnic Russians, but many of them were relatively recent immigrants to Abkhazia and in all cases my interactions were not of an extended nature. An exception was my visit to the university, where I had the chance to talk at length with ethnic Abkhazians. However, these were meant to be academic discussions about scientific and technological research, and so it didn’t seem right to start injecting politics into the conversation. One of the older academics nonetheless made hostile remarks about Georgia over lunch without getting into any specifics about human rights. I’m generally not shy about voicing my political opinions in informal settings but I didn’t feel that doing so at a business lunch, after only having just met him, was the right time.