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South Ossetia one year on: Georgians wait in fear for Russians

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  • South Ossetia one year on: Georgians wait in fear for Russians

    South Ossetia one year on: Georgians wait in fear for Russians to
    return
    A year ago, the Kremlin shocked the world when it sent troops into
    Georgia. Today, the war clouds over South Ossetia are gathering once
    more.


    By Adrian Blomfield in Gori

    Daily Telegraph/uk
    01 Aug 2009


    Clambering up a steep hill outside the Georgian city of Gori, they fix
    a borrowed pair of binoculars on the gutted cottages that, until a year
    ago, they called home.

    Russian shares rise as conflict is haltedCloser inspection is
    impossible. Though Eredvi is just a few miles away, it lies in the
    breakaway province of South Ossetia and their way is blocked by Russian
    troops and the local militiamen who burned their village down.

    Though his eyes are weak and his body wracked by illness, Tengiz
    Razmadze occasionally makes the trip to the top of the hill, listening
    as his younger son Zaza describes the ruins of the little house at the
    end of the village.

    Mr Razmadze has no need to see for himself. He lived through the
    destruction of his home, refusing to leave even as the roar of Russian
    bombers filled the skies during five days of war last August, killing
    his neighbours and striking his house.

    It was only as Ossetian militiamen, bent on revenge, embarked on
    drunken looting sprees in Georgian villages like Eredvi that lay on
    Ossetian soil, that he finally decided to flee.

    He reached Gori, a supposedly safe sanctuary deep in undisputed
    Georgian territory, only to find that his older son Zviadi had just
    been buried, after being killed in a Russian air strike.

    Zaza Razmadze saw the explosions that killed his brother. Running
    through the choking dust and smoke that darkened the sky above Gori, he
    stumbled on his body in the forecourt of the block of flats where Zvio,
    as his family knew him, lived.

    It was here that The Sunday Telegraph came across Zaza Razmadze,
    cradling his brother's head in his arms and imploring him to live as he
    ripped off his own shirt to try to staunch his wounds.

    Photographs of his grief were to become the defining images of the
    short but brutish war Georgia and Russia fought a year ago, images so
    compelling that the Kremlin sought to dismiss them as fabrication.

    In the garage where the two men worked together, Zaza Razmadze has
    built a shrine to the brother he loved, a small fountain above which he
    has carved the word's "Zvio's Stream".

    Jerkily he recalled that hot August day, explaining that ` unbeknown to
    him ` as he tended Zvio's body his brother's wife, eight months
    pregnant, was also dying in the flat above.

    "They had left the previous day," he said with quiet but forceful
    bitterness. "I still don't know why they came back."

    The only person who could answer that question is his nephew,
    eight-year-old Dito. Wounded in the blast that killed his parents, Dito
    is still to traumatised to speak of what happened.

    Two months ago, Zaza Razmadze got married. But any happiness that
    brought remains clouded by grief and anger, emotions that are caused to
    burn more deeply by a conflict that was frozen but never resolved ` and
    by talk of a new war.

    "If war resumes, every citizen of Gori will fight," he said. "Even the
    women will fight, even my new wife. We have nothing to lose."

    In the 12 months since a war that stunned the world, Georgia has
    slipped from its consciousness.

    Yet tensions remain high. At least 28 Georgian policemen patrolling the
    administrative boundary have been killed by sniper fire or remotely
    detonated mines since the end of the war. At border crossings, now
    sealed, Georgian and Russian guns remain trained on each other.

    Less than 100 yards separate the Russian and Georgian flags that
    flutter above identical dugouts, protected by sandbags and concrete
    barriers at the crossing of Ergneti.

    Capt Zura, the officer commanding the Georgian side of the line,
    pointed out Russian sniper positions on the roof of an abandoned hotel.
    "The Russians make a lot of trouble, especially at night when they are
    drunk," he said.

    Later that evening, Georgian officers at a nearby crossing said they
    had come under fire, claiming that a rocket-propelled grenade had
    exploded above their positions.

    Such is the instability that the International Crisis Group, a leading
    conflict prevention think tank, warned in June that "extensive fighting
    could again erupt."

    A European Union investigation is still trying to establish who was
    responsible for last year's war, which ended in a humiliating
    battlefield rout for the Georgian army. But western diplomats in Tblisi
    say it is fairly clear that Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia's pro-western
    president, walked into a carefully laid Russian trap by launching a
    massive assault against the Ossetian rebels, who had long enjoyed
    Moscow's support.

    Some military analysts in Moscow say that Russia is now contemplating a
    new war to oust Mr Saakashvili, whose determination to seek Nato
    membership for Georgia has consistently infuriated the Kremlin.

    Remarkably, the Georgian leader has defied widespread predictions that
    failure in the war would cost him his job ` despite four months of
    protests called by Georgia's fragmented opposition.

    But elsewhere, the omens do not look good. Since recognising the
    independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, another Kremlin-backed
    rebel enclave in Georgia, Russia has deployed thousands of troops in
    both provinces and has begun building new military bases.

    The Russian defence ministry angrily declined immediate comment on its
    troop levels in the two provinces and accused The Sunday Telegraph of
    failing to respect its dignity.

    The Kremlin has also forced the withdrawal of two international
    observer missions from the conflict zone and, in breach of its
    ceasefire commitments, has prevented the third, the European Union
    Monitoring Mission (EUMM), from operating in either South Ossetia or
    Abkhazia.

    Even more worryingly, the EUMM came under attack for the first time
    when an ambulance driver was killed in an assault on a monitors' convoy
    near Abkhazia in June.

    "It was a definite attack on the EUMM," said Steve Bird, a Foreign
    Office official attached to the mission. "The mine used in the attack
    was remotely detonated."

    The EUMM says that Georgia has abided by the ceasefire agreements,
    brokered by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, that ended last year's
    war, but the Russians have not.

    In one of its most contentious moves, Russia used the days after the
    ceasefire to seize control of Akhalgori, a largely Georgian district of
    South Ossetia that had been under government control for over a decade.

    Russia now allows buses to carry displaced Georgians to their homes in
    Akhalgori, which ` unlike those elsewhere in Ossetia ` have largely
    escaped the arsonists. But most are still too afraid to stay for long.

    The Sunday Telegraph received a brusquer welcome at the Russian
    checkpoint when it sought permission to take photographs of buses
    crossing into Akhalgori. "Go and take your pictures in Georgia," the
    Russian commanding officer said, before stalking off in a rage.

    Observers suspect that Russia's tactics are partly aimed at laying the
    groundwork for a new war. A pretext could be created, they say, either
    by engineering a cross-border incident that results in Russian
    casualties ` or by accusing Georgia of helping anti-Kremlin rebels in
    Russia's nearby North Caucasus region.

    In a potentially disturbing omen, Russia on Saturday threatened to "use
    all available force and means" to defend its civilians after claiming
    that Georgia had launched several attacks on the separatist capital
    Tskhinvali in recent days. Georgia denied the allegations and the EUMM
    said it had been unable to verify Russia's claims.

    Last week it also claimed that North Caucasus rebels were operating in
    Georgia's Pankisi Gorge.

    "There is definitely a pattern to what the Kremlin is doing," said a
    senior Western diplomat in Tbilisi. He said that Moscow wanted control
    over Georgia, both to prevent the construction of a gas pipeline that
    would reduce Europe's energy dependence on Russia and to find an easier
    way of supplying its own troops in Armenia.

    But with Russia unlikely to find a pliant successor to Mr Saakashvili,
    the diplomat said a major war was unlikely. Instead, he predicted that
    Russia would make creeping advances deeper into Georgian territory or
    launch occasional bombing raids, as part of a campaign to destabilise
    its neighbour.

    "Georgia would protest to the international community but without
    guaranteed success," he said. "The law of the strongest will apply."

    In the meantime, for tens of thousands of Georgians uprooted from their
    homes or scarred from those few days of war, daily life grows ever more
    desperate.

    Over three days last week, The Sunday Telegraph revisited villages in
    Georgia that bore the brunt of the Russian advance and the brutal
    reprisals by the accompanying Ossetian militias.

    The border village of Ergneti has been all but abandoned, save for the
    occasional family that ekes out an existence in the charred ruins of
    their homes.

    Ivane Dvalishvili showed us the rusted remains of his grandson's first
    bicycle, almost all he had salvaged from the rubble. His 80-year-old
    neighbour, Gaioz, had neatly swept his destroyed possessions into large
    piles by the blackened walls of his house.

    A year ago, during an intense Russian arterial assault, the Sunday
    Telegraph took shelter with Makhvala Orshuashvili by the wall of her
    garden in the village of Tkviavi, where she fed us peaches from her
    orchard, shouting over the noise of the shells.

    We found her where we left her, sitting on a bench outside the garden `
    only this time she was wearing a black headscarf to denote mourning.

    When the Ossetians came through, raping and pillaging, they came across
    her husband returning home with bread. Telling him to run, they shot
    him in the back and he died later of starvation after rejecting food.

    Makhvala cowered in terror inside her house, listening as the drunken
    soldiers played a stolen guitar on the street outside.

    Back in Gori, stung by the financial crisis and the aftershocks of war,
    Zaza Razmadze is lucky if he takes home more than £5 a day, half what
    he earned before the conflict.

    With that he must support the families of eight relatives who were also
    forced out of Ossetia when the militias embarked on what the Council of
    Europe has described as a campaign of ethnic cleansing against
    Georgians.

    The Georgians of South Ossetia, about 25,000, are now housed in
    identikit camps that have mushroomed near the administrative boundary
    with the rebellious province.

    A small, whitewashed cottage in one of the camps now houses Zaza
    Razmadze's father, Tengiz. Blind in one eye, his eyesight failing in
    the other, Mr Razmadze ekes out an existence in his half-painted rooms,
    furnished with only a narrow bed, a flimsy table and a small
    television, on the £17 a month provided by the state.

    Like other Georgians in South Ossetia, he was never rich. But the
    fecund soil allowed them to create fruit orchards and vegetable
    gardens. In their new accommodation, Ossetia's displaced can no longer
    fend for themselves.

    Tengiz Razmadze seems a broken man, much older than his 60 years. He is
    trying to summon up the mental and physical strength to commemorate the
    first anniversary of his son's death on Aug 9. But it will be a
    struggle. "I don't know if I can survive the pain and sorrow again," he
    said.
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