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OSSETIA’S ABANDONED REFUGEES
[05:18 pm] 07 April, 2007

Ossetian refugees who fled their homes a decade and a half ago have
not even heard of a Georgian law that could give them compensation

By Alan Tskhurbayev in Prigorodny District and Dmitry Avaliani in
Tbilisi

Marina Pukhayeva has lived in the Prigorodny district of North Ossetia
for 16 years since she and her family fled the Akhmeta region of
Georgia following the conflict in South Ossetia. The house she left
behind in Georgia was later burned to the ground.

The Pukhayevs now live in a makeshift house on a former pig
farm. Around 50 other Ossetian refugee families from Georgia live on
the same settlement, consisting of rickety structures in the middle of
an enormous field.

A rough dirt track runs for about a kilometre to the nearest village,
Kambileevka. To get to school in the district centre, the children who
were born and grew up here have to walk much further than that.

The settlement has no sewage system here and no gas, so in winter
people heat their homes with firewood. The water they collect from an
outside standpipe often contains sand or even small fish.

This is a hidden place that few people know about. One local person
told IWPR that the local office of the Russian security service, the
FSB, had a designated officer whose job it was to stop foreign
journalists visiting the settlement.

In the 16 years the refugees have been here, they say they have never
received any assistance from government agencies. Local and
international charitable organisations give occasional help.

On January 1, 2007, a new restitution law came into force in Georgia,
promising compensation for refugees who suffered losses as a result of
the conflict in South Ossetia of 1990-92, which ended in South Ossetia
de facto seceding from Georgia.

However, implementation of the law, which would dramatically improve
the lives of the refugees, is still far off, as the two sides have
failed to set up a commission which would allocate the compensation
money.

The de facto authorities in South Ossetia have called the law a "PR
action" and complained that they were not consulted when it was drawn
it up.

Georgia’s government did not provide for the compensation payments in
its 2007 budget and appears to be waiting for as yet unspecified
assistance from the international community.

And the refugees themselves, the intended beneficiaries of the scheme,
say they have not even heard of it.

According to official Georgian data, 60,000 Ossetians fled South
Ossetia and other parts of Georgia as a result of the conflict. Most
are now resident in North Ossetia, on the Russian side of the border.

The law, passed in a third reading by the Georgian parliament on
December 28, states that anyone – whatever their nationality – who
lost property as a result of the conflict is entitled to compensation
in the form of property or the equivalent monetary value.

The law stipulates that a tripartite commission consisting of
Georgians, South Ossetians and representatives of international
organisations should be set up to look at applications submitted by
people claiming compensation.

Anyone with a relevant claim is entitled to apply to the commission
within a seven-year period after it is set up. The commission is
supposed to rule on applications within six months, and pay out
compensation within a year of its decision.

However, officials in the Georgian justice ministry which drew up the
law cannot say when compensation can actually be paid out.

In an interview with IWPR, Justice Minister Giorgi Kavtaradze blamed
the de facto South Ossetian authorities for showing no interest in
either the law or the commission.

"We presented the draft law to the authorities in South Ossetia
several times," said Kavtaradze. "We also handed it over through
international organisations. They merely sent us a written statement
saying they didn’t like the bill’s title, and it all ended there."

Boris Chochiev, acting deputy prime minister of South Ossetia, told
IWPR he was unimpressed with the bill. "There’s nothing we can do
with it," he said by telephone.

Chochiev said the law had been devised without his administration’s
involvement and had not taken Council of Europe advice into account.

"This is not a law about the return and welfare of refugees, but about
how not to return refugees and give them compensation," said Chochiev.

"How can we talk about the return and welfare of refugees when even
now we are registering [Ossetian] refugees from Georgia? It would be
better if Georgia had given a political verdict on its own policy
towards Ossetians, which has not yet changed."

Relations between the breakaway republic and Tbilisi are currently
very tense and negotiations are stalled on a way forward in the
dispute.

Despite the reaction from South Ossetia, Kavtaradze said that the
commission could still be formed without South Ossetian
involvement. But he said the agreement of international organisations
was needed before restitution money could be allocated from the state
budget.

"The appropriate sums will be allocated from the budget after the
commission starts working," he told IWPR.

Asked what sums would be paid out, Kavtaradze replied, "This is a case
when it’s impossible to make a preliminary financial calculation. We
don’t know how many people will apply to us, we don’t know the market
value of the property at the time of the appeal, and we don’t know how
much the price of property in South Ossetia will rise as a result of
this process.

"We are talking about billions," he added. "Millions won’t be enough
for this."

Kavtaradze said Georgia was planning to hold an international donor
conference to raise the money.

The international community has been encouraging Georgia to take this
step. Last spring legal experts from the Venice Commission of the
Council of Europe held consultations with non-governmental
organisations in South Ossetia and made recommendations to the
Georgian drafters of the bill.

Kavtaradze said a delegation from his ministry had met refugees in the
North Ossetian capital, Vladikavkaz, at a seminar arranged with
British mediation.

"Our delegation came away with very strong impressions – they came
back convinced that it [compensation plan] had evoked great interest
among refugees living there," he said.

However in North Ossetia’s Prigorodny region, where Ossetian refugees
from south of the border live in large numbers, no one whom IWPR spoke
to had been told about the Georgian law, and people sounded
distrustful of it.

"I haven’t heard anything about it and I’ll never believe that Georgia
can help us in any way," said Merab Lazarayev, one refugee.

Lazarayev, who walks with a limp as the result of a wound sustained in
the conflict, shouted out in indignation, "Look how we live here. Tell
me, can people live here? In this mud? I don’t even have a passport;
it got lost, and now they will ask for an identity document from
Georgia. I’m an invalid and I haven’t received a kopek from anyone in
all this time."

North Ossetia’s migration service has almost 18,000 refugees on its
register. Alexander Shanayev, head of the service’s department for
displaced people and refugees, said housing is the biggest problem.

"Today we have 4,275 families in a queue to receive housing," Shanayev
told IWPR. "Last year, just one housing voucher was handed out and
this year there will be another one. So at this rate, to satisfy
everyone we’d need 4,275 years. And our migration service can’t do
anything about it because that is the level of funding from the
[Russian] federal budget."

IWPR requested a comment from the North Ossetian government both on
the situation facing the refugees and on the Georgian restitution
law. However, despite repeated approaches to deputy nationalities
minister Soslan Khadikov, he did not respond to questions.

The refugees are not just fed up with their basic living conditions,
they are also fearful of being evicted from their current
housing. Several of the refugees said they had recently received a
visit from strangers telling them that they would have to leave their
houses by April as the land had been leased by local businessmen.

Sonya Tedeyeva is 75, and comes originally from the Georgian village
of Tetritskaro. Her husband died not long after the South Ossetian
conflict and was buried in Georgia. She said that his gravestone was
stolen and his body dug up. His relatives then brought his body with
them to North Ossetia for reburial.

Tedeyeva, wearing black clothing and headscarf, invited IWPR’s
contributor into her one-room house, which contains just a bed, a
table and a stove, and has bare electrical wires poking out of the
walls. In Georgia, she used to own a large house.

"Aren’t you sorry for us? In 17 years no one has helped us at all,"
she said.

Alan Tskhurbayev is a correspondent for Gazeta.ru in North
Ossetia. Dmitry Avaliani works for 24 Hours newspaper in Tbilisi.

This article is the first to be commissioned as part of an ambitious
new IWPR project, the Cross-Caucasus Journalism Network, which is
bringing together 50 journalists from all parts of the Caucasus for
meetings and collaborative work over a three-year period. The project
is funded by the European Union.

Institute for War and Peace Reporting’s Caucasus Reporting Service