The Container Crosses, the Passenger Cannot: Türkiye's Abkhazia Policy and Its Own Citizens

A campaign launched by Turkish citizens asks Ankara for something short of recognition: accept Abkhaz passports, reopen the Trabzon to Sukhum sea line, and let families cross the water their goods already do.

On 29 June, representatives of the Abkhaz diaspora in Türkiye launched a public campaign calling on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to review its policy on Abkhazia. Supporters are submitting appeals through CİMER, the Presidency’s Communication Centre. The text they sign makes three requests: recognition of the Republic of Abkhazia; pending that, acceptance of Abkhaz passports as valid documents for crossing the Turkish border; and the opening of direct sea and air links through technical arrangements of the kind Türkiye already operates elsewhere. On 4 July the campaign received public backing from the Labour Party, Emek Partisi.

Note what this is. The appeal comes from Turkish citizens and is addressed to their own government. Its language is that of family life, health, education and movement, not geopolitics. It describes Abkhazia as ‘our maritime neighbour’ and lists what isolation suspends: families kept apart at weddings and funerals, seriously ill patients who cannot be moved in time, young people shut out of international education.

Recognition is the campaign’s ceiling. Its floor is more modest and more urgent: ordinary human and commercial contact, of the sort the two coasts had within living memory. The floor is available now. It costs Ankara nothing it has not already paid elsewhere, and it serves Turkish interests as plainly as Abkhazian ones. The case follows.

The ferry that stopped

Until 1996 a ferry ran twice a week between Trabzon and Sukhum. It was unremarkable, which is the point: traders, students and relatives crossed a sea that has connected the two coasts for centuries, and nobody thought the crossing political. In January 1996 the Commonwealth of Independent States imposed an embargo on Abkhazia at Georgia’s request. Türkiye is not a CIS member, but it observed the decision, and the ferry stopped. A year earlier, the door had already narrowed: from 1995 Türkiye ceased admitting Abkhazians on their old Soviet documents, steering them towards Georgian passports that most refuse to carry.

The blockade’s record can be stated without adjectives. It inflicted years of hardship on a population still recovering from the war of 1992 to 1993 and produced no political result. Even Russia enforced it until 2000, and within a decade diaspora leaders were arguing publicly that the embargo was costing their own country trade and prestige.

Ankara knew this. In 2008 foreign minister Ali Babacan told parliament that Türkiye had repeatedly proposed restarting Trabzon to Sukhum boat traffic as a confidence-building measure, and that no progress had been made. Weeks earlier a senior Abkhazian parliamentarian had returned from Ankara reporting talks on the same subject inside the prime minister’s office. The ferry, in other words, is not a diaspora fantasy. It is a policy Türkiye’s own foreign ministry once tabled, and the file has been open, on both sides, for nearly two decades.

The trade that never stopped

What the embargo did not stop was the relationship. It merely made it unofficial. Turkish cargo vessels sail to Abkhazia, Turkish goods fill Abkhazian shops, and Sukhum has kept a plenipotentiary representative working openly in Istanbul since the end of the war. In every year of Abkhazia’s published customs records, Türkiye has been the republic’s second trading partner after Russia. The customs committee’s figures for 2025 put the turnover at some 4.5 billion roubles (US $58.5 million), or 7.5 per cent of the republic’s foreign trade, all of it officially carried by sea and cleared through the ports of Sukhum, Ochamchira and Pitsunda.

Look closer, though, and the numbers show what informality costs. Turnover has lurched from around three billion roubles in 2015 to under one billion in 2017, up to a record share of Abkhazia’s trade in 2023, then down 15 per cent in 2025, a year in which Abkhazian exports to Türkiye fell by more than half. Fish, scrap metal and timber go out; machinery, fuel, textiles and animal products come in; and a portion of Turkish goods is believed to reach the Abkhazian market indirectly, through Sochi or the Gal district, rather than across the open sea. Commerce this useful to both coasts survives on the worst available terms: informal, uninsurable, unrecorded on the Turkish side and impossible to plan around.

Here is the absurdity the campaign exposes. The container is tolerated; the passenger is not. Goods cross the sea; a Turkish Abkhazian with a homeland and relatives on the other side cannot. They must fly to Sochi, obtain a Russian transit visa and queue at the Psou crossing, a detour of a day or more for a route the ferry once covered on a published timetable. Tens of thousands were already making that detour every year in the late 2000s.

A century of asking

Who is asking matters, though counting them is hard. Estimates of the population of Abkhaz descent in Türkiye range from tens of thousands to a million; the head of the Federation of Abkhaz Cultural Centres (ABHAZFED) once suggested 500,000 to 700,000, counting the closely related Abazins, while fewer than 10,000 people are thought still to speak the language. All such figures are estimates and should be read as estimates. What is beyond dispute is that these are Turkish citizens, with relatives, family graves and ancestral villages across the water. The appeal’s examples are not rhetorical flourishes. Funerals keep their own schedule, and a patient who needs a hospital needs it today, not after a transit visa.

The community’s habit of organisation is older than the Republic of Türkiye itself. Ergün Özgür’s study of the diaspora’s lobbying traces it to the Çerkes Teavün Cemiyeti, the Circassian Solidarity Association founded in Istanbul in 1908 by Ottoman generals and intellectuals. Solidarity committees formed during the wars of the 1990s. When Eduard Shevardnadze visited Türkiye in 2002, seventy associations and 6,675 individuals signed a published declaration in Abkhazia’s defence; another followed during Mikheil Saakashvili’s visit in May 2004. In 2008 the Friends of Abkhazia opened a signature campaign for direct ships and flights to Sukhum, and a 2009 American diplomatic cable, later published by WikiLeaks, recorded the same demand reaching foreign embassies.

The wall, meanwhile, has been growing higher rather than lower. In earlier Abkhazian elections, diaspora voters cast their ballots at a polling station in Istanbul. In the presidential election of 2025 the station, relocated to Sakarya, was cancelled on polling day itself after local officials objected, citing Georgia’s territorial integrity. A community of Turkish citizens discovered that its members could not vote for their other homeland on Turkish soil.

The CİMER campaign is therefore the latest instalment of a request this community has made lawfully, patiently and in writing for a generation. Each time the method has been the same: no threat, no ultimatum, an appeal to the state through the state’s own channels. A government that prizes the loyalty of its citizens might notice how loyally the request keeps being made.

Precedents of Ankara’s own making

The appeal’s precedents deserve careful handling, because they carry the argument. Türkiye is the only state to recognise the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, and it has built its own formula for operating air links there despite the restrictions of the International Civil Aviation Organization. The appeal adds that the United Kingdom has in the past accepted TRNC travel documents: evidence, on its reading, that a passport can be honoured without recognising the state that issued it.

Taiwan supplies the mirror image. Türkiye recognises the People’s Republic of China and maintains no diplomatic relations with Taipei, yet bilateral trade reached around two billion US dollars in 2022, by the account of Türkiye’s own representative there, and Taiwanese investment in Türkiye has passed three billion. Flights operate through technical arrangements between civil aviation authorities rather than interstate treaties, which is precisely the mechanism the appeal proposes for Sukhum. And in 2008 Türkiye recognised Kosovo despite the objections of partners it values.

The point is not an accusation of double standards. It is an observation about competence. Ankara already knows, from its own practice and in procedural detail, how to separate practical links from the recognition question when its interests require it. The campaign asks for the application of a method Türkiye invented.

The interest test

Would it serve Türkiye? Start in Trabzon. The eastern Black Sea economy gains a route and a market its merchants supplied for centuries before 1996. Turkish exporters formalise trade that already happens, with contracts that can be enforced and cargoes that can be insured. And Ankara earns standing with a very large community of its own citizens at no diplomatic price it has not already paid in Nicosia and Taipei.

Then there is the strategic point, which should be made soberly. Nearly every legal route into Abkhazia today runs through the Russian Federation, and the traffic figures say so plainly. More than three quarters of the republic’s foreign trade by value now crosses the Russian land border by road, while the sea, the one commercial channel that does not touch Russian territory, carries less than a tenth. Russia’s share of Abkhazia’s trade reached 75 per cent in 2025, having grown by two thirds in four years. Sukhum’s airport, reopened in 2025 after decades of closure, receives scheduled flights from Russian cities alone, flown by Russian carriers alone. Thirty years of isolation have not loosened Moscow’s position in Abkhazia. They have entrenched it, by leaving Russia as the only door. A direct Turkish link is the one policy on offer that widens Abkhazia’s connections instead of narrowing them.

The counterargument is real and deserves respect. Türkiye values its relationship with Georgia, and with reason: the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway, cooperation within NATO programmes and formal support for Georgian ‘territorial integrity’. Georgia has enforced its objection at sea. In August 2009 its coastguard seized the tanker Buket, carrying fuel to Abkhazia; a Georgian court sentenced the vessel’s Turkish captain, Mehmet Öztürk, to 24 years in prison, and he was freed within days only after foreign minister Ahmet Davutoğlu travelled to Tbilisi. Georgia detained 23 ships that year, and by one count more than sixty Turkish vessels had been seized over the preceding decade.

Three answers hold. First, nothing proposed here requires recognition; the appeal is drafted, deliberately, to sit beneath that threshold. Second, states maintain links with entities they do not recognise as a matter of routine, and Türkiye’s Taiwan practice is the working proof. Third, the policy has had since 1996 to show results, and it has not moved Abkhazia one step towards Tbilisi. If the aim was reintegration, the method has delivered the opposite: a territory bound ever more tightly to Moscow because every other door was closed.

Which returns the argument to where the campaign began. In 2023, after an opposition MP asked the foreign minister whether Türkiye would recognise Abkhazia, this publication suggested the realistic question was a different one: not whether recognition will come, but when the ferry between Trabzon and Sukhum will run again. Thirty years after the last sailing, Turkish citizens are putting that question, formally and in writing, to their own government. Answering it requires no treaty, no summit and no change of map. It requires a timetable.

First published on AW Substack