Georgians uprooted in South Ossetia

updated 5:34 p.m. ET Aug. 29, 2008

KSUISI, Georgia - After Georgian soldiers stormed South Ossetia and killed Vitaly Guzitayev's friend, he hid in the woods. Once the Georgians left, he set fire to the elegant brick homes of ethnic Georgians who lived nearby.

"Georgians must not return here. Ossetia is for Ossetians," Guzitayev spat, sitting on a bench in Ksuisi two weeks later. "Let Georgians suffer. Now we are independent from them."

Arson gangs have targeted the homes of ethnic Georgians in breakaway South Ossetia as the conflict over control threatens to erase a centuries-old ethnic mix. Since the warfare between Georgia and Russia in early August, Associated Press reporters have witnessed burning homes and looting in villages in the region.

The conflict has pitted neighbor against neighbor in this region of mountain slopes and fruit orchards where two ethnic groups have lived side-by-side for centuries: Georgians whose culture is rooted on the Black Sea coast and Ossetians whose language and customs point to the east.

According to Georgia, at least 28,800 ethnic Georgians have fled South Ossetia in recent weeks, part of a larger exodus of some 160,000 people from the conflict zone. South Ossetian officials say the region's population of Georgians was only about 14,000 when the fighting started earlier this month.

Few Georgians left
Whatever the figure, no one disputes that there are few Georgians left in South Ossetia. And any who try to return will find many of their neighbors hostile, their language despised and their homes destroyed.

Olia Bugadze, 68, is one of a handful of ethnic Georgians left in Ksuisi. She said she hid in a corn field as Russian troops swept through, then watched as neighbors descended on her home, looted it and set it on fire. Now she camps in the ruins of her kitchen.

"I am afraid," said Bugadze, clad in a worn-out black shirt and skirt, as she showed a visitor the destruction. "Every day they threaten me and want to drive me out of Ossetia."

Georgian officials say some ethnic Georgian men were summarily shot by militia fighters in the aftermath of the fighting, a claim that the AP was not immediately able to independently confirm.

However, an AP reporter saw dozens of ethnic Georgians — all middle-aged or older men — who were rounded up after the fighting and held in the basements of South Ossetia's Interior Ministry.

They were forced to haul debris on streets bombed-out by Georgian rockets and artillery. The AP saw at least three such groups escorted by armed South Ossetian policemen.

Asmat Babutsidze lived in the hamlet Achabeti, a predominantly Georgian village in South Ossetia. After the fighting ended, she said, men with guns looted and torched her home and took her to a jail in Tskhinvali.

Locked in a basement
There, she said, she was locked in a basement cell with 43 other women, most of them — like her — ethnic Georgians.

Guards, she told the AP in an interview in Tbilisi, mocked and kicked the hostages. Women were forced to sweep the glass-littered streets, she said, while men were made to bury the dead.

South Ossetian President Eduard Kokoity said some Georgian civilians were detained for their own protection, not as part of an effort at collective punishment. "The Interior Ministry protected them to save their lives," he said.

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