THE men who came to Gulnara Militaura's house seemed to know what they were looking for. They entered her kitchen and shot her husband and his brother in the head. For the next five days, as fighting raged outside, she cowered at home, sprinkling vinegar on the bodies to try to keep them from rotting.
Now that the fighting between Georgia and Russia over the breakaway region of South Ossetia has subsided, killings like those are becoming the grist for competing claims of ethnic cleansing.
Militaura, an ethnic Georgian, is accusing South Osseti
ans, who ally themselves with Russia, of killing her husband and his brother.
Ethnic cleansing has haunted the borderlands of the old Soviet bloc. It is a weapon that was carried out with devastating force in Bosnia and Kosovo.
Georgia's military campaign ripped through a city just north of here, prompting Russia to strike back and opening a way for South Ossetians to sweep into Georgian villages for revenge.
Still, the victims seemed marked by their ethnicity in a vicious if short war, fought over competing claims to the same patches of ground by different groups. Villages were burned and houses broken into; unburied bodies lay rotting; fresh graves were dug in gardens and basements.
Much remains unknown. Because of limited access to Russian-controlled areas, most of the victims interviewed are ethnic Georgians. The only access to the Russian-controlled areas has been with Kremlin minders, impeding efforts to assess how severe the damage is in the north.
Last week, the few glimpses of the northern area showed what appeared to be a concerted effort to raze some villages completely.
Homes were ripped apart. Sections of courtyard walls lay crushed next to the road. Dozens of men dressed in mismatched fatigues stood on the main road, watching an orange digger rip the façade off a burned stone house.
In a swathe of southern villages, some killings were carried out for revenge, since feuds in this lush farmland go back generations. Some were outright cases of theft. And in still other cases the message seemed to be that the power balance is shifting, away from ethnic Georgians to the Ossetian separatists and their Russian backers.
The actual death tolls do not appear to be what each side is claiming.
Russia has said that 2,000 civilians were killed by Georgian troops. But in three hospitals in Vladikavkaz, the Russian city that has taken most of the wounded, only 259 patients were being treated, suggesting a far lower death toll, since in most conflicts there are far more wounded than killed.
Georgians are saying 213 soldiers and civilians were killed in the fighting. But Georgia has blocked access to morgues, a precaution to protect journalists from angry families, said Alexander Kvitashvili, the country's health minister. The death count, he said, is expected to rise as access to Russian-controlled areas begins to increase.
The grave of Militaura's husband Misha, covered with fresh dirt near a rose bush in the garden, was one dug after what residents said were 11 shooting deaths in the village of about 3,800 people.
Like many elderly Georgians, Militaura, who is in her 70s, decided not to leave her house during the initial attacks. One neighbour's house went up in flames on August 12. Then another. It was too late to run. She and the rest of her family sat and waited.
When the men came, she tried to joke with them. She was from Tskhinvali, the capital city of South Ossetia, which she assumed was their area, and she knew people there.
"They said: 'We don't have time to deal with your acquaintances,'" she said, surrounded by 17 members of her family in her home last week.
Then, in another room, more men shot her husband and his brother. They took a tractor, a Soviet-era car, shoes and glass jars, and they left.
Several days later, a group with different accents came. They took vodka.
"I sat alone all night and cried," she said. "I thought, 'There are no men left here. How will I bury them?'"
There were other killings in the village that day.
Shamil Okropiridze, in his 60s, was shot as he opened his front gate to look at a commotion outside, said Zurab Razmadze, a resident. His corpse went unburied for days, and his garden still smelled sour from the rot.
Koba Chashashvili, 38, was also shot on sight. Razmadze tried burying him in the garden, but looters were everywhere, so he had to quietly bury him in a basement.
Another victim, Nudar Batauri, appeared to have lived for a while.
Last week there was still a rag clutched in his left hand, as if he had tried to staunch the bleeding before dying. Someone had dragged his body to the outdoor washroom and covered it with a beach towel.
In some refugees' accounts, people knew which Ossetians from which villages burned theirs.
A Georgian from Eredvi living in an empty education building on the outskirts of Tbilisi said Ossetians from Sarabuki and Osuri Prisi had burned part of his village. They had fought each other in the previous war in the 1990s, he said. The second wave of looters were strangers. They shot his neighbour dead when she begged them to spare the house. Her body was still there days later.
Ossetians suffered too, though more from intense bombardment than from revenge killings. In Tskhinvali, Olga Valieva was hanging out her washing when a rocket crashed near her garden, knocking her to the ground and destroying part of one wall. Several hundred people hid for four days in the basement of a building in the Jewish quarter.
The full article contains 966 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
