DUBLIN RESTAURATEUR FEARS FOR HIS FAMILY’S LIFE
By Sarah Neville

Herald.ie
Wednesday August 13 2008
Ireland

A DUBLIN based Georgian restaurant owner is frantically trying to get
his family back to the city after they travelled home for a summer
break to their home country.

His relatives made the trip to Georgia for a break and were there
when the conflict with Russia began.

George Motsonelidze, the owner of Nikala on Dublin’s Talbot Street,
has been looking for possible flights to get members of his family,
including his mother, back to Ireland.

What was supposed to have been a break from the cold and wet summer
we are experiencing in Ireland has now become a source of great
worry. George’s family travelled to their home country in search of
sunshine and to visit old friends and have now found themselves in
a country embroiled in international conflict.

He is still worried for his relatives, despite an outline peace
deal brokered by French President Nicolas Sarkozy in the early hours
of today.

The deal would end fighting sparked by Georgian President Mikheil
Saakashvili’s decision to launch a military offensive last week in
the pro-Russian region of South Ossetia.

Bombing

"Saakashvili was mad to go and bomb a town in the middle of the night,"
a senior official in Sarkozy’s office told reporters.

"He gambled, he lost," the official said, adding that Russia’s
reaction was too heavy-handed and Moscow was increasingly perceived
as the aggressor.

The Dublin-based restaurant owner is now trying to arrange flights
to get his family home.

George’s task is made even more complicated by the fact that there are
no direct flights between Dublin and Georgia. He said his relatives
will need to travel to Armenia, which is further south, to get a
flight home.

Getting out of the country shouldn’t be a problem because according
to another Georgian living in Dublin, Mukran Mikaeirdze, work and
other services are carrying on as normal in the areas that are not
being bombed.

"They all have Irish passports," George said of his relatives.

Mukran, who is a friend of George’s, is keeping in close contact with
his family. "The situation is calm but mobilised," he said.

The Georgian said that he is glued to the news channels trying to
get each update as the situation continues.

He added that the Irish Georgian community were bonding together and
praying at the Christian Orthodox Church on the Navan Road in Dublin
for an end to the violence.