Georgia's displaced get by, but practice helps (News Feature)

By Stefan Korshak Aug 13, 2008, 13:45 GMT

Mtskheta, Georgia - Tens of thousands of people displaced by recent fighting in Ossetia could be doing worse - in no small part because Georgia has a lot of practice helping people who have just lost their homes in a war.

Nuri Sarlidze, 44, is a resident of the Georgian town of Gori, but on Wednesday he was killing time in a place called Mkhehti, as the Russian army has apparently occupied his home.

The Russians arrived two days after the Georgian army pulled out, leaving Sarlidze, his wife, children and other residents of the town of 37,000 to await events.

Sarlidze made his way with his family south by hitch-hiking, after having learned by radio that Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili's gambit to take over South Ossetia had failed miserably, and now the Russian tanks, air force, and infantry (called collectively by the Kremlin 'peacekeepers') were coming.

It was, Sarlidze recounted to a Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa reporter, not an easy decision to leave a home built with his own hands, a lifetime of accumulated property and a small garden and orchard representing the family's only source of income.

'But in times like these, a life counts for nothing,' Sarlidze said. 'No one can say what will happen when a soldier comes into your home.'

By lightning-fast word-of-mouth (even in the poorest Georgian towns, almost every family has a mobile phone) Salidze learned that the Georgian government had set up a displaced-person processing centre in the town of Mtskheta, a lovely tourist village in a fragant pine-tree valley with a river running through it - and historical home to Georgia's kings.

And so, using a combination of hitch-hiking and walking, the Sarlidze family made its way to Mtskheta where, in a low area by the river next to a partially-built outdoor restaurant, the centre was located.

It was not the first time: plenty of refugees and displaced people already live in Georgia, especially some 250,000 former residents of the Georgian province of Abkhazia, forced out of their homes in the early 1990s when the region revolted against Tbilisi.

The present wave of displaced people bearing down on Georgia's cash-strapped government is, relatively, small.

UN officials estimate the Ossetia war has forced some 75,000 people out of their homes, the lion's share like Sarlidze from the town of Gori.

Smaller groups of ethnic Georgians from Ossetia and from ethnic Georgian villages invaded when Abkhazia intervened on the Russian side in the war have also been displaced.

Though the precise numbers are unclear - Gori residents themselves disputed the UN's estimate that 50,000 people lived in their town, the locals putting the 'real' number at 35,000 or so - the latest wave of homeless people is a substantial load for Georgia's government, said Nado Erimidze, spokeswoman for the Ministry of Refugees and Resettlement.

At the Mtskheta centre, the first stop for people on the run from the Ossetian war, things were simple, but evidence of a good knowledge of what war refugees need was abundant.

Bread, water, vegetables, fizzy drinks, fruit and cheese were free, and distributed by volunteers from the town.

Tents with cots provided minimal cover, and toilet facilities were relatively clean and functional.

Hand-me-down clothes were available. Washing, however, was in the river, and plans for the education of children, preparation for cold weather or on-site medical screening had not yet been implemented, said Tuki Mishativili, a Mtskheta official.

Most of the displaced from the Ossetia war, Georgian and UN officials agreed, would keep to local tradition and fall back on extended families and live with their relatives.

Of the 75,000 now out of their homes, about 9,000 have no family to fall back on, according to a UN estimate.

A good example of the refugee assistance not being performed by the Georgian government, but still happening, can be seen in the Margiev family, where the family head, an ethnic Ossetian named Timuras, has taken in his ethnic Georgian brother-in-law, Vissarion, and his family - jamming nine people and four generations into a five-room house.

'Family is family, the war was made by politicians, and the simple people want to be left in peace,' Margiev responded when asked about his feeling considering the Ossetia war pitted his ethnicity against his brother-in-law's.

But Vissarion, asked about his hopes for the future, was far from optimistic.

'My family and I are lucky: we have a place to eat and sleep for a while,' he said. 'But our home is now in the hands of the Russians, and I don't know if we will ever live there again.'