South Ossetia

After the Battle, Anger Follows Ethnic Lines
new_york_times:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/world/europe/17ossetia.html

By SABRINA TAVERNISE and MATT SIEGEL
Published: August 16, 2008
TSKHINVALI, South Ossetia — The Foreign Ministry is a charred hulk. A tank’s gun barrel has crashed through the entrance to the university. A security post at the boundary with Georgia stands empty; it is flying the Russian flag.
This is the capital of South Ossetia, the small ethnic enclave at the center of a conflict that has held the attention of the world and dragged relations between Russia and the United States to their lowest point in years.
The violence here has mostly subsided. But it is still far from clear who is in charge, and the answer will have important ramifications for an entire region’s future.
South Ossetia, with a population of less than 100,000, is territorially within Georgia, but it is essentially autonomous. It uses Russian currency — not Georgian — and has its own flag and language. Still, no one recognizes that status. Not even Russia, its closest ally.
Effective government was never this region’s strong suit. It was known as a haven for smuggling and counterfeiting. But now the government is simply gone, and the whereabouts of its president, Eduard Kokoity, a barrel-chested former member of the Soviet Union’s wrestling team, are unknown.
At some point, he surfaced briefly to grant an interview published on Friday with a Russian daily newspaper, Kommersant. In it, he was quoted using sharp language against ethnic Georgians, who fled their villages as Ossetian marauders pillaged and burned them in the backlash that followed last week’s Georgian Army assault.
“We don’t have any intention of letting anyone else in there,” he said in response to a question about Georgian returnees. He then said that more than 18,000 Ossetians had also fled, adding, “It’s them we need to return.”
That process was clearly in motion here on Saturday. Alexandra Anetoleyevna stood handing out bottles of water in front of her bullet-scarred apartment building. The authorities were not maintaining an official list of returnees, so she went door to door and compiled her own. On Saturday morning she counted 30 people. By the end of the night, it should be 50, she said.
“Neighbors will help their neighbors, and everything will turn out fine,” she said. “But the main thing is that people need to be in their own homes.”
Most of South Ossetia is still out of power, gas and water. Still, Ossetian refugees stood under the blazing sun in long lines on the Russian side of the border on Saturday, hoping to return.
But Georgians, Ms. Anetoleyevna said, are another story.
“Of course they shouldn’t be allowed to come home,” she said. “For 20 years they’ve spilled the blood of my people. We haven’t had a decent night’s sleep for 20 years. We’re just so tired.”
The ethnic Georgians, a small minority in South Ossetia, were not coming back. The region is a patchwork of Georgian and Ossetian villages, with the largest group of Georgians in a valley just north of here. That area was particularly badly hit in a violent backlash along ethnic lines, and now lies nearly in ruins.
Russian officials, who control foreign reporters’ access to this area, continue to refuse access to the villages. A reporter and a photographer for The New York Times, sitting on both sides of a bus during a press tour of the region, conducted a hand count of the number of destroyed homes.
In some villages, as many as 90 percent of the homes looked ruined. In the village of Kurta, almost nothing was left standing. The glass facade of the local Bank of Georgia had shattered into the street alongside a row of torched houses.
An official within the Russian presidential administration said that some buildings were destroyed by looters, but blamed Georgian forces for some of the destruction, claiming they were trying to make it look as if Russians had committed war crimes against Georgians.
Russia has accused Georgia of genocide, saying thousands of people were killed when the Georgian military moved in to go after separatist fighters on Aug. 7. But a preliminary body count, provided to Human Rights Watch by a doctor in the main hospital here, was only 44.
During the press tour on Saturday, Mikhail Minzayev, the interior minister of South Ossetia, claimed again that there had been more than 2,000 deaths, but said they had not been counted because many people had buried their relatives in their gardens.
As for ethnic killings in the predominantly Georgian villages, “there hasn’t been one such example of this in South Ossetia,” he said, standing above the carcass of a Russian Army barracks whose sides had been sheered off during the Georgian attack.
But reporters on Tuesday saw hundreds of irregular fighters and members of local militias looting ethnic Georgian villages as Russian soldiers looked on.
Even before fighting began and the local government disappeared, the line between police and military factions here was blurry. In the lawless atmosphere surrounding the invasion those lines, in many cases, disappeared completely.
Georgians who fled those villages described multiple waves of looters. Some were their neighbors, and others who came later were strangers with less sympathy.
Sorting out their identities is almost impossible. “Looters are looters,” said Pyotr Taslagan, an elderly man, standing near a shopping center with broken windows. “You can’t stop them and ask them what their names are.”