Telegraph.co.uk

Saturday 09 August 2008

Georgia conflict: Screams of the injured rise from residential streets

Dispatch from South Ossetia: Fighting between Georgia and Russia
intensifies, forcing hundreds from their homes.

Adrian Blomfield in Gori
Last Updated: 4:48PM BST 09 Aug 2008
The ground shook and a series of explosions rippled through the air.
>From the middle of a housing estate in the Georgian town of Gori a huge
fireball rose into the sky, twisting and mushrooming as if in slow motion.
Choking dust swirled above the debris, darkening the sky. A brief silence
followed and then the screaming started.
For two days, Georgia has been convulsed by a Russian air and ground assault
in a conflict that has escalated rapidly from a localised war against
separatist rebels in South Ossetia into a full-scale military confrontation.
But this was the first time that Russian bombs had struck a residential
area.
The fighter jets responsible for the devastation had been targeting a
military barracks in the built-up outskirts of Gori, a Georgian town 15
miles from the Ossetian frontier. They missed.
Just one of their bombs struck the base. At least two others fell in a
compound of long, low-slung apartment blocks, five of which were quickly
reduced to blackened shells. A third hit a small secondary school, which
crumbled to the ground in a pile of rubble and twisted girders.
>From the gutted buildings, survivors began to emerge, some hobbling, others
bleeding from shrapnel and flying glass, all covered in a cloak of soot and
dust.
Then they brought out the dead.
In front of a row of garages, a corpse, covered in a chalk-like film, lay on
the ground. Kneeling beside the body of her son, a middle-aged builder
identified by neighbours as Iano, the white-haired woman cursed the
Russians, then cursed God. Then she beseeched his forgiveness and cursed the
Russians again.
"You have taken my boy, you pigs, you criminals," she said in a low voice,
before turning her face towards her dead son as she tenderly stroked his
matted hair. "I loved you like I loved no other. Now be with God."
Standing to one side, her frail husband propped himself up on a walking
sticks and stared into space, blank incomprehension in his eyes.
Up a small flight of steps in a nearby courtyard, a young man, bare-chested
and kneeling on the ground, cradled the head of his brother in his lap.
Shaking off hands offered in comfort from neighbours, he moaned in agony and
begged – in ever more frantic tones – for his brother to live.
Still wailing, he was hauled away from the body by Georgian troops who
bundled the corpse into the back of a Lada. His face streaked in his
brother’s blood, the man raced to keep up with the car, his hand repeatedly
pawing the rear window.
Slowly, his legs buckling beneath him, he began to fall behind. Giving up
the chase, he knelt unmoving in the middle of the road, his face staring in
the direction of the receding car.
More dead were brought out of the buildings, among them a mother and her
daughter who were laid side by side in the back of a military truck.
Those who survived stood in small groups on the road outside their shattered
homes, bewilderment etched on their faces.
Russia denies deliberately targeting civilians, and insists that the
offensive in Georgia is not war but a "peacekeeping mission".
Few of the people of Gori believe that. So powerful were the bombs aimed at
the barracks that they shattered windows in a half-mile radius. Even if all
had hit their intended target, the chances of collateral damage would have
been high.
As a lone fire engine battled the inferno, with flames spreading across the
roofs of two blocks of flats, this small part of Gori began to resemble
another scene of Russian military retribution: Grozny.
The Chechen capital was pounded into submission in 1999 on the orders of
Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, with little regard for civilian
life. By the time Chechen rebels lost the city, barely a single building
stood intact, forcing residents to eke out an existence in cellars and
basements for six years until Moscow finally began serious reconstruction in
2006.
While the bombing of Gori has not been remotely comparable, Grozny was in
the back of many peoples’ minds as they took shelter.
"We know what the Russians are capable of," said Nina Kogiddze, a teacher
who was flung to her kitchen floor by the force of the blast as she was
brewing coffee. "Do you think that when they fight wars, they abide by
civilised rules? They hate Georgians. They would be happy to kill us all."
No official death toll from the apartment bombings has been released as yet,
but there can be no doubt that the casualty rates would have been much
higher if most of Gori’s residents had not fled the previous day, after the
first Russian bombs fell.
It was fortunate, too, that the school holidays were under way.
"If classes were in progress, we would have a hundred children dead," said
Givi, the headmaster of the Lyceum College, as he surveyed his devastated
school.
Other Russian bombing raids in Gori killed at least two civilians in another
block of flats in a nearby suburb.
On the road to Tskhinvali, South Ossetia’s ramshackle capital, and the main
stronghold of the Moscow-backed rebels, Russian jets maintained their
bombardment, strafing Georgian artillery positions in the fields near the
frontier.
The rebels, who have been reinforced by Russian tanks and ground troops,
claimed to have retaken the town after intense hand-to-hand fighting.
Georgia says it still controls a significant portion of Tskhinvali and
claims to have shot down four Russian jets yesterday. Georgian officials
showed to Western reporters the papers of one Russian pilot they claimed to
have captured.
Russia also launched air strikes across Georgia’s wider territory for a
second day, striking an airport at Kutaisi in the west and the country’s
main Black Sea port of Poti.
"The Russians are now bombing civilian targets at will, including a port, an
airport and a railway station where 17 people were killed," said Shota
Utiashvili, an interior ministry spokesman.
Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s pro-western president, was preparing to
declare martial law, a process that would involve the full mobilisation of
every man of fighting age, Mr Utiashvili said.
Against the might of the million-strong Russian army, it is unclear how
effective such a strategy would be. Reservists have already been drafted
onto the front line, but few have any battle experience and most have had
just a week’s training.
When a bomb fell close to their positions, one company of new recruits
scattered frantically for cover, ignoring pleas and orders from their
commanders to remain in place.
"On Tuesday I was a bank clerk," one fresh-faced reservist said. "Then they
woke me up in the middle of the night and gave me half-an-hour to report.
I’ve been up on the front line and I’ve never been so scared in my life."
Given the challenges, it may prove difficult for Mr Saakashvili to sustain
morale.
Already his tactics seem to have back-fired, analysts and diplomats say that
he may have launched military actions with the intention of forcibly
reclaiming South Ossetia, which broke away from Georgia in a short but
brutal war 17 years ago. His gamble may have been that Russia would not
intervene militarily.
Moscow, increasingly belligerent on the international stage and long at
loggerheads with Georgia over its pro-Western policies, has given financial
and military support to the rebel republic, but there have been rumours of a
fall-out between the secessionist leader Eduard Kokoity and the Kremlin.
It was suggested that Russia was fed up with the tiny state, just
one-and-a-half times the size of Luxembourg, that has largely sustained
itself on smuggling, the counterfeiting of money and alleged pension fraud
against the Russian authorities. US diplomats say that half the fake dollar
bills on the American east coast are manufactured in South Ossetia.
Instead Russia was said to be concentrating its support on helping Abkhazia,
another, much larger, breakaway region that has long been a popular holiday
destination and has a much more advanced economy than South Ossetia’s.
Russian planes yesterday bombed the Kodori Gorge, a region of Abkhazia still
under Georgian control, raising the prospect of the conflict spreading to a
second front.
Yet from the Russian perspective, the reincorporation of South Ossetia would
bring Georgian accession into NATO, a move strongly opposed by Moscow,
closer. European members opposed a US push earlier this year to bring
Georgia into the alliance on the grounds that the frozen conflict of South
Ossetia and Abkhazia had yet to be settled.
Russia, which has repeatedly punished Georgia with economic and diplomatic
sanctions for its pro-western Rose Revolution in 2003, is determined not to
lose one of the last few holds it has over its querulous neighbour, analysts
said.
Mr Saakashvilli may also have banked on support from his closest ally, US
president George W Bush, whose administration is said to have given tacit
support for a Georgian assault on South Ossetia in the believe that the
territory could be recaptured within 48 hours.
But as events have unfolded differently, Washington has offered Georgia –
one of the largest contributors of troops in Iraq – little more than
lukewarm vocal support.
In a demonstration of the fact that Georgia could be abandoned by its chief
ally, President Bush warmly embraced Mr Putin at the opening ceremony of the
Olympic Games in Beijing on Friday.
With the West apparently unwilling to participate in a proxy war with Russia
at a time when relations with Moscow are already highly strained, Georgia
now faces potential isolation in its conflict with its giant neighbour.
Already the economic consequences of the war are being felt as Western
specialists involved in helping Georgia develop its infrastructure began to
flee.
Americans and Britons gathered in hotels in the capital Tbilisi to organise
road convoys into neighbouring Armenia after Russia closed its air space and
most airlines cancelled flights after a military base close to the airport
was bombed on Friday.
"Its the last straw," said a British architect who was preparing to leave
Georgia for good. Three days ago we were making promising progress but now
two thirds of our staff have been called up and its simply too dangerous to
stay in Tbilisi."
The Georgian government yesterday ordered the evacuation of the country’s
parliament and all official buildings amid fears that they could become new
Russian targets.
By a swimming pool in one hotel, a nervous American clutching a Blackberry
read out the latest advice from the US Embassy to her friends. All
dependants had been ordered to evacuate and anyone in the country for
"non-essential" reasons was also urged to leave.
At the news, one of her friends sank his head into his hands.
"The Georgian dream is over," he said.