South Ossetia: Ruins and Empty Villages Left in Wake of War

In Tskhinvali, some kind of life has begun to return. Children had begun playing on the burned out Georgian tanks on the streets of the South Ossetian capital.



When this IWPR reporter visited the town – the epicentre of the war over South Ossetia – on August 17, he found it badly destroyed, with official buildings multi-storey apartment blocks in ruins. Single-storey houses had survived the fighting better. All the

streets were full of craters from explosions.



Just one petrol station and one shop were working in the town. The streets were full of Russian military hardware but plenty of civilians have also now returned.



A curfew was operating in Tskhinvali and it was forbidden to be out on the streets with a weapon after 7 pm. After 9 pm, the road north through the mountains to North Ossetia is closed.



Before, the journey to and from the Russian frontier in the north had to skirt round four Georgian villages – Kurta, Tamarasheni, Kehvi, Achabeti – meaning that Ossetians had to use a difficult mountain road instead.



Now the main road is open through those four villages. They have all been heavily damaged and burned and no one is living there.



In Kurta, the tall recently constructed glass and concrete official buildings of South Ossetia’s pro-Georgian “alternative president” Dmitry Sanakoyev, mostly undamaged apart from broken windows, stand out awkwardly amid houses that were still burning.



The windows of a new gleaming shopping centre, cinema and discotheque, built to advertise Georgian promises of wealth and investment, were broken but the buildings were otherwise intact.



The road from Tskhinvali to the Ossetian village of Khetagurovo was littered with dozens of wrecked cars. The village itself was also badly damaged in the Georgian assault of August 7-8 and only a few people were still living there. Some of the houses had been reduced to piles of bricks.



The roads were pitted with craters from artillery shells and many of the iron gates to the houses had so many holes that they looked like sieves. The old church in the village had however survived intact.



This correspondent also managed to visit a few other Georgian villages in South Ossetia, without any military escort.



Avnevi and Nuli were almost empty, with just a few elderly Ossetians now living there. Unlike in Khetagurovo, there were no traces of damage from tank-fire or artillery. But many of the Georgian houses had been burned down – apparently since the fighting ended.



Avnevi used to have a mixed Georgian and Ossetian population. One old Ossetian woman Elizaveta Jioyeva said her son had left for Tskhinvali a few days before the war began and she had not seen him since.



“When there was shooting, we were not so afraid but now we have been left alone and we are afraid at night,” she said. “We are taking medicine the whole day. The only food left is milk from the cow.”



Elizaveta herself had fled the Georgian town of Gori in 1991 during the last Georgian-Ossetian conflict and said she did not want to be a refugee again.



“I’m never going to leave here, I don’t want to move,” she said. “I’d rather die here.”



The road south to Elizaveta’s former home in Gori was filled with hundreds of soldiers. The Georgian villages along the way were all abandoned, apart from a few old people. Russian checkpoints lined the road.



The only way into the town, in a journey made by IWPR on August 16, was with the Russian military.



Gori, which normally has a population of about 50,000 people, was mostly abandoned. The walls of buildings were pot-marked with bullet holes and windows were broken. The centre of the town was silent, without either people or vehicles. Only the huge statue of Stalin, the town’s most famous native, loomed over an empty square.



The entrance to Gori’s main street was blocked by two Russian armoured personnel carriers. The streets were full of soldiers wearing masks to conceal their faces.



The remaining elderly people in the town were gathering every morning to get bread from the bakery next to the church, but said that it was hard to get other kinds of food.



“There’s no oil or sugar, nothing,” said a woman who introduced herself as Tina. “There is no electricity or gas.”



Tina had harsh words for the Georgian president for instigating the conflict that has overwhelmed her country, “Misha [Saakashvili] is to blame for this. He started the war and he has to go.”



Naina, her neighbour, put the blame elsewhere. “No one used to say that this person is Russian or that person a Georgian,” she said. “Russians are good and kind people, we have the same religion. And the Russian soldiers here are behaving very well. There’s only one person who is guilty and he is in Moscow, you know who that is.” But she did not name whom she had in mind.



Some ethnic Russians remained in the city. An old woman, who lived there and who asked for her name not to be given because she was afraid for her own safety, said, “There is no leadership here in the town. Everything was fine here before and I just don’t know what’s happened here. Of course ordinary people aren’t to blame.”



We also found an Ossetian in Gori, Georgy. In 1991, he and his family had moved to North Ossetia but they moved back to Gori a few years later. “There’s no reason for us to fight. I don’t have a grudge against the Georgians, my wife is a Georgian,” he said.



“We are brotherly nations, but America is stopping us living together, it has its own interests.”



On August 16, the Russian emergencies ministry brought to Gori 40 people, mostly sick or elderly, who had been left behind in the Georgian villages of South Ossetia.



Maria is from the village of Achabeti and hid in her cellar for several days during the fighting.



“We were bombed and our houses were destroyed,” she said. “At first the Russian troops came in, then the Ossetians. People weren’t killed by the soldiers but a lot of people died in the bombing.



“Now they are lying [on the ground] and there’s not even a place to bury them.”



Alan Tskhurbayev is IWPR’s former North Caucasus editor and a regular contributor, based in Vladikavkaz