Diana Khidasheli and her four children spent the night before the August 8 outbreak of war with Russia in their house basement, hoping for an end to the intensive shelling of their village, Kemerti, in the Georgian-controlled South Ossetia conflict zone. Now Khidasheli thinks the decision to hide was a mistake. The next day, she had no time to pack.
Diana Khidasheli and her four children spent the night before the August 8 outbreak of war with Russia in their house basement, hoping for an end to the intensive shelling of their village, Kemerti, in the Georgian-controlled South Ossetia conflict zone. Now Khidasheli thinks the decision to hide was a mistake. The next day, she had no time to pack.
"I left all my gold, everything, but I am alive," said Khidasheli, who says she was among the last of the villagers able to get out of Kemerti ahead of advancing South Ossetian separatist and Russian forces. The family’s car was shelled en route to Gori, a Georgian city on the border of South Ossetia; Khidasheli’s sister was wounded in the onslaught.
"We don’t know nothing about those who were left behind, but we heard from our neighbors that they were all shot," she told EurasiaNet. "[For years] we had been living in a situation where the sound of shooting had become a part of our daily life, and we did not leave our home. We hoped to return, but now it is over. My house is in ruins," she said.
Khidasheli’s story is neither unique nor new for Georgia. Seventeen years after armed conflict first broke out over South Ossetia, Georgia’s public schools, kindergartens, sanatoriums and government buildings are again turning into homes for thousands of displaced persons.
Many chose to stay with relatives or friends, but scores of others – a steadily increasing number, according to official sources -- look to the government for help.
As of August 13, the Georgian Ministry for Refugees and Accommodation had registered some 22, 400 displaced persons. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees puts the total number of individuals uprooted by the conflict at over 100,000 – a figure that would appear to include individuals living in separatist-controlled South Ossetia and the Upper Kodori Gorge, a strip of Georgian-controlled territory in breakaway Abkhazia. The UNHCR could not be reached to clarify.
Along with several other families, Kemerti villager Khidasheli was lucky to be placed in several rooms in a fire station in downtown Tbilisi. A parliamentarian reportedly helped the families find the space.
"Fourteen people live in one room with seven beds, but we have water and electricity. We were really lucky," said her roommate, Sopiko Gherkinashvili, a mother of three children from the ethnic Georgian village of Achabeti in South Ossetia. "But after these guys return from fire alarms, they have no place to rest, so we were told we have to find another place [to stay] in two-three days."
No one knows where that that place will be. The Tbilisi City Government and the State Ministry for Territorial Integration are in charge of sheltering displaced persons in some 210 locations throughout the country. Koba Subeliani, a popular pro-government parliamentarian and an ex-minister for refugees and accommodation, is overseeing the operation. Two volunteers at each center coordinate information about displaced persons’ needs; mobile groups have been set up to distribute registration cards.
But in many cases, the displaced prefer to rely on themselves and have moved from the government-supplied shelters, citing a lack of water, electricity or even toilets.
"I have two children, 11 and 10, and my husband I left there [Kurta, the administrative center of Georgian-controlled South Ossetia]. We went through all this and here they treat us like beggars," raged Giuli Jalabadze, who was waiting for aid at an emergency headquarters opened inside Tbilisi City Hall. "There was no water, no light, and dirty and damp rooms, that’s where they took us." Instead, Jalabadze and her family selected on their own a Tbilisi kindergarten for a new home. "It was impossible to stay at that [other] place," she added.
The government’s problems in handling the influx of displaced persons have prompted the Public Defender’s Office to take up the task as well. "The defects in addressing the IDPs’ problems have become very obvious today," said Deputy Public Defender Sophio Khorguani.
For now, food supplies appear to be the one positive area in Georgia’s growing refugee crisis.
The
World Food Program is coordinating the distribution of food from
international organizations. This past weekend, 10-day food rations
were handed out over 4,500 individuals in Tbilisi and outside the
capital, the organization says. The WFP says that it has enough food to
feed 16,000 people over ten days, but notes that the continuing
conflict could hamper the arrival of additional supplies.
The August 13 announcement that the US would deliver humanitarian aid to Georgia by sea and air has raised hopes that such breakthroughs will eventually disappear. US President George W. Bush has demanded that Russian forces do nothing to hamper the arrival of aid. Russian ships stationed off Georgia’s Black Sea cost have reportedly already fired on ships bringing in wheat supplies.
The American aid shipment, overseen by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, began on August 13 in Tbilisi with the arrival of two U.S. C-17 aircraft bearing over $862,000 worth of cots, sleeping bags, blankets and medicine. A second C-17 was scheduled to arrive on August 14 with antibiotics; a second shipment will arrive on August 16.
The European Union, in turn, has pledged 1 million euros to help those affected by the conflict in addition to its current 2 million euro aid program for displaced persons from the breakaway region of Abkhazia. Additional funds "could be released as soon as the assessment of the needs will be finalized on the ground," European Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid Louis Michel said in an official statement.
Aside from a $7.5 million aid campaign by the International Committee for the Red Cross and campaigns by Save the Children, UNHCR, CARE and others, Ukraine, Estonia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Australia are among those countries which have launched individual aid drives.
Editor’s Note: Nina Akhmeteli is a freelance writer based in Tbilisi.
