August 12, 2010
Georgia
Georgia two years after the war with Russia...
When God was creating the Earth, Georgians sat down, drank and talked. Meanwhile, other nations were coming to God, each of them having a wish. When Armenians came, they wanted to see right to the sky, so God gave them high mountains. Others had been coming until there was no nation left, only Georgians were still sitting, drinking wine and chacha. When they finally showed up before the Creator, he told them: You came late – I have already divided and gave away everything. The Georgians replied: Well, what can we do, so come, sit with us and we shall drink to your health. They sat down, drank and talked, and God found out they were good and regretted that nothing was left for them. He reached into his breast pocket and said: There is still left a tiny piece of land next to my heart, which is especially precious to me. And He gave them Georgia (Georgian anecdote).
A newish Lad Niva jumps wildly over another of the potholes; Zurab, its driver, is turning the steering wheel in a futile effort to evade puddles. A dog that has been running along the car for a minute continues in relentless barking. It won’t stop until we leave “its” street. Behind the turn stands a sturdy soldier with an automatic and stops us with an unequivocal hand gesture. Zurab shows him a permit, explains who we are and where we are heading. The soldier watches us closely, and then lets us go further with a sweep of his hand. We continue over a muddy village square, where a bunch of bearded men kill their time. They resemble - every single one of them - a crew of weightlifters after a three-day drinking spree. A gloomy face of the most famous Georgian Yosif Dzhugashvili looks down upon their vacancy. In sight from the statue we stop again. This time definitively. Though the road continues further on, over the stream toward the mountains, it is blocked by two machine gun nests covering each other. We are in the village of Plavi, about one hour by car from the city of Gori. It is the border between Georgia and South Ossetia.
“When Ossetians celebrate, or when they simply get drunk” says Zurab and points to the hills on the horizon “they shoot from automatics at the Georgian side. Just for fun. They haven’t harmed anybody so far; I think that they shoot mainly in the air. The locals of course mind it, but they are scared to shoot back, so that they don’t heckle the Russians.”
At the edge of Plavi, in sight from the new border, lives Alexandrovna Kokšelidze (68). Her husband Georgi has recently had a stroke and is barely able to walk. What is more, an opening for urine with a bag hanged around his neck in a ‘musketeer’ style dangles by his waist. He has not left the garden of his house for years, and he stayed home even when Russian cavalry trundled around in August two years ago. They survived bombing from heavy weapons and air strikes, and then they counted army vehicles passing by. In the end, hundred and fifty eight armoured vehicles went past their house. “We had to stay – I would not have got anywhere with my husband”, recalls Iveta Alexandrovna. “Only the old and the sick remained here, the young ones had run away. It was the local Ossetians who helped us most. One of them gave us a piece of advice: let the door open, they would smashed them down anyway, and, most importantly, walk slowly when you see soldiers. Don’t run. They will start to shoot otherwise. How ridiculous! Look at us, where would we run?”
Mrs Koškelidze cannot deny her former Russian teacher self. She severely corrects every mistake we make in endings while nagging her husband; she even pours wine instead of him and proposes a toast: a rare thing to see in Georgia. “God give us peace and everything will be good!” she raises her glass with homemade wine and empties it. We cannot but follow her.
Traces of the short war from August 2008 are still visible around Gori. Ruins of burnt-out houses and stores pillaged by “kontrakčiki”: mercenaries hired by the Russian army, who the locals call only “bandits with automatics” or “Cossacks”. The local economy, suffering from an artificially created border, interruption of natural business connections with Ossetians and related high unemployment rate, is getting off the ground only slowly. The picture is completed by military and police checks in the border zone, strong military garrisons in the nearby Gori and, most of all, by large refugee settlements, where tens of thousands people are jammed in hundreds of identical houses, thinking of villages in Ossetia where they had to escape from and also of their dead relatives and neighbours. “Until this day I don’t understand what the war was for and why it was fought. I have nothing against Russians; we had been living with Ossetians together for our whole life and everything was fine. So why?” shakes her head uncomprehendingly Iveta Alexandrovna. A similar view is held by a majority of people we speak with. There is no trace of hatred or hostility; if there is a man they hate it is Putin, the “main bandit”, not Russians in general. It is the mercenaries they are most mad at: they took the war as a way to enrich themselves, and common Russian soldiers often have to moderate them. Iveta Alexandrova is grateful for that. “When the soldiers came – and I mean Russian ones, not the Cossacks “, remembers she, “they were so hungry that they were plucking unripe corn. We didn’t have anything either; supplying had not been working well for three weeks, but when we saw them, we told them: boys, take at least a slice of bread, don’t eat that corn, or you will be sick. Or a soldier with an automatic came...I was afraid, that is clear, but he said: ‘Mother...’ So I thought that a murderer would not call me ‘mother’. So I say to him ‘What do you need?’
‘We got drunk a bit yesterday and got lost. How can we get to Cchinvali? Should we take the byroad or the asphalt road?’
So was the war here: nothing actually happened to us, nobody came here with bread for three weeks, my husband ran out of his pills, but we survived. As far as I know, they killed one person, a twenty one year old young man, whom they ordered in Russian to help them repair their car, but he didn’t understand. He didn’t know what they wanted from him; he didn’t speak Russian at all. They shot him to pieces. They also asked whether he was a Christian, so I don’t think that they were Russians because they have the same religion as we have.”
Vacho and His Cemetery
As most of Georgian cemeteries, also the one in Karaleti village resembles some sort of a morbid highway rest stop. There are benches and tables between the tombstones, which are on anniversaries filled with the deceased’s relatives and friends celebrating his memory. In hot summer months, hardly a day goes by without picnics with food, wine or chacha. There is no mourning at local cemeteries. In April 2008 though, there was no party at the Karaleti cemetery. Those who remained in the village met there to hide from pillaging “bandits with automatics”. Vacho Gogaišvili, together with his horse Maxim, was hiding there in sight from his house. The sixty year old man was at home on April 7, 2008 when the war began. He was alone: his wife works in Istanbul and his grandsons live in Tbilisi. He ran away from soldiers in the last minute. “They came, parked their cars, entered the garden, smashed the door with their automatics, searched the house whether there was anything of use, and in a minute they were pulling the fridge with a lorry. They destroyed everything that didn’t come in useful, and when they were leaving, they started a fire upstairs” remembers Vacho, for whom it is hard to walk due to serious rheumatism. When they left I rushed to get my neighbours, who helped me to put the fire out. If I hadn’t been close-by, I wouldn’t have a place to live today.” The room where the soldiers started the fire is painted white again; only a crack left by the automatic gunstock is visible on the door. “They went from a house to house, it was the same. Then I heard that they had been looking for young people, mainly the ones who served in the army. Nobody like that was here – everyone who had been able had run away –, but when they came across such a house, they at least set it on fire. About six houses in our village burnt down. And our store, of course.”
Two days after the invasion of the Russian army, Vacho bought new goods for his “magazine” on the main road in Karaleti, so that he had in store goods for 20 000 lari, which is about ten thousand dollars, i.e. two hundred times more than a common Georgian pension. In less than forty eight hours, only charred walls full of debris and melted plastic were left from the magazine. Vacho’s business and life savings disappeared in a blink of an eye.
“I did not stay at home; I slept with the other neighbours at the cemetery, three or five days. We were afraid that the bandits would come back, and that if they saw us, they would shoot us. In the next three days the soldiers came three more times: they searched the house, found out that everything was jumbled up and there was nothing to steal, so they left. The last ones caught me up already at home – they were Chechens –, they came, they stared...I tell them: come and search the house, there is nothing left and nobody is here, take whatever you want. They searched the house, but they didn’t find anything, so they left again. They also told me not to be afraid, that nobody would hurt me. And where my sons were. In Tbilisi, I told them. They left the house and continued elsewhere. They did not stop until Gori. There was no Georgian army: only the ones who couldn’t run remained.
Vacho has no business plans today. Being sixty and ill, he has no strength left to start over.
Nina from Leningrad
That little city looks as though it was shaped by some giant machine lacking taste and social sense. Small, simple houses huddled together in tens, or rather thousands of identical copies. The city has no name; the locals call it “Cottages”. It lies on the edge of Gori and it is a home of twenty thousand refugees from Ossetia.
In one of the houses, which would be hard to find for the second time, lives Jegorovna Metreveli with her husband George. He is bound to a wheelchair due to a gangrene and amputation of both legs. He is completely dependent on his wife and on the help of nurses from Catholic Caritas. His only joy is smoking of cigarettes.
Only a few months ago they both lived in the village of Tamarešeno. Today, it is razed to the ground, and according to the locals Russians are building there a military base.
“When Russians came to us to Tamarešeno,” depicts the energetic seventy-year old lady born in Lenigrad, “I was about to bake bread. It was eight in the morning, and they came from the garden next to ours. They wondered whether we were hiding some young people or soldiers – I told them that we of course were not, and that they could go and find out themselves, but they didn’t. They trusted me. And they left. After them, Ossetians came. And they were mean; they dragged my husband out of bed and hurled him to the ground. ‘What are you doing here’ they asked him and he replied ‘I am sick, no one took me away, so I remained here”. They left him lying and went to the first floor, where they smashed the door with automatics and searched and destroyed everything. I couldn’t do anything at all. Finally, they went to another house. Houses were burning all around us, and I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t go anywhere with my husband, so we waited until two at night, and then I borrowed a trolley from the neighbours, put my husband there and took him to my son in the next village. When we got there, there was nobody at home, so I hid the old man in the cellar. I brought a mattress, and we slept there that night. But I rather left the door open, so that the soldiers could see that there was nobody but us; they would smash the door and shoot it to pieces. We survived the night; I fed him in the morning and went to find out what was happening, if it was possible to buy some food, and who stayed and who run away. I returned in the evening, and my husband wasn’t there. Who took him? What happened to him? I didn’t have the slightest idea, and there was nobody who could tell me. He doesn’t remember anything. What to do? I thought that our village is burnt out; there was no place to come back; the Russian soldiers who I asked said they were going to make a military settlement out of our village. So I left and headed toward Chchnivali; it didn’t take long and I got lost. I kept walking all night and reached Ossetia; I was rather hiding in the forest for three days, eating what I found; nothing mattered on the fourth day. I kept saying to myself: ‘I will go to the village, whatever happens, happens.’ I went all day until I reached the edge of Sarabuki village. I didn’t dare to go in that evening, but I did the day after. I met an Ossetian who could speak Georgian excellently. He at least explained where I am to go in order to avoid military patrols.”
Nina Jegorovna’s unbelievable anabasis ended by an encounter with Russian soldiers. They took her to her brother to Cchinvali. She stayed there until the beginning of September not knowing what happened to her husband. As it turned out later, he was found by two Red Cross workers and taken first to Cchinvali and then to a hospital in Tbilisi. He met with his wife Nina after a month of separation.
They have been living for two years in “cottages“ in Gori; they both have about 90 lari of pension. Tamarešeno was burnt out and is now razed to the ground and being rebuilt by Russians. Georgians can no longer live there; it is no longer possible together with Ossetians.
“You know” says Nina to us, while we are bidding farewell “I cannot complain about Russians. And it has nothing to do with the fact that I am one of them myself. Common soldiers behaved decently to me. Then I don’t understand, really don’t understand the reason of the war. Why those boys came, why they drove us off our village. Why?”
We do not know the answer.
Jan Hanzlík, Petr Šilhánek, „Papa e Mama“ atelier.
