Russian tanks roll into Georgia as cities burn.

Hundreds of bodies lie in the streets of war-torn Caucasus towns. What
began as a dispute over the sovereignty of a tiny enclave in a former
Soviet republic has escalated, first into a brutal assault and then
into a counter-invasion. Old hatreds have been rekindled, as the
spectre of another Chechnya rises from the rubble

* Peter Beaumont in London, Matthew Collin in Tbilisi, Tom Parfitt
in Vladikavkaz, Helen Womack in Moscow, Dan Mclaughlin and Svetlana Graudt
* The Observer,
* Sunday August 10 2008
* Article history

Two war-torn towns deep in the Caucasus yesterday presented mirror
images of violence and retaliation. In the Georgian town of Gori, 50
miles from the capital, Tbilisi, buildings burned and scores of bodies
lay in the street following a Russian bombardment. A trans-shipment
point for Georgian soldiers heading to South Ossetia, by yesterday
Gori was coming under sustained Russian aerial attack.

As Georgian soldiers fled their base in the town for the fields and
woods, it was the civilians who bore the brunt as a bomb hit a block
of flats, leaving them to cradle their scores of dead.

There are no such photographs yet from Tskhinvali, capital of the
separatist enclave of South Ossetia. It was attacked on Friday by
Georgia, an assault aimed at wresting back the region of fewer than
100,000 people from de facto independence. Many hundreds were killed
and most of the city's buildings devastated. Instead, it was yesterday
left to witnesses to describe what had happened, even as Russian
troops fought to consolidate their hold after driving the Georgians
out of the northern suburbs.

'The night before, a Georgian attack was finally repelled,' said Olga
Kiriy, a reporter for Russian TV Channel 1 who spent Friday night
sheltering with civilians in a basement during the Georgian assault.
'They have left burnt-out tanks. They were firing at us for a long
time. The retreating Georgians left a sniper, but the Russian troops
have knocked him out. Just now we were shelled again by Georgian Grad
missiles.'

But amid the chaos, one thing seemed clear - Georgian President
Mikheil Saakashvili's extraordinary attempt to reconquer the
separatist region of South Ossetia appeared to be unravelling, as
Russian planes bombed ever deeper into Georgia and his troops were
sucked into street-to-street fighting.

In Tskhinvali - briefly occupied in its entirety by Georgia's
US-trained troops - furious fighting was continuing between Russians
in the city's north and Georgian forces in the south and centre.

And as Georgia's attempt to capture South Ossetia ran into the sand,
the country was plunged into chaos as Saakashvili called for a
ceasefire, his government declared a state of war and the National
Security Council said it might call for foreign military intervention.

Meanwhile separatists from Georgia's Abkhazia region also entered the
fray, announcing that they had started operations to force Georgian
troops out of the disputed Kodori Gorge with aircraft and artillery fire.

Georgia's worst nightmare has come true. Russian tanks and armoured
cars, packed with soldiers, rolled over the border, through the
Caucasus mountains, on to Georgian land, and Russian fighter jets were
streaking across the skies.

For most people in Georgia, this was a Russian invasion, regardless of
the fact that Georgia had initiated the fighting. 'This is an overt,
open attempt to destroy Georgia, to bring Georgia to its knees, to put
an end to Georgia's independence,' said Saakashvili, in one of a
series of televised speeches to his increasingly fearful people.
'Unless we stop Russia, unless the whole world stops it, Russian tanks
will go to any European capital tomorrow,' Saakashvili warned. It was
a note of desperation.

Inevitably it has been civilians who have borne the brunt of the
conflict, with both sides levelling accusation of atrocities and
ethnic cleansing.

What seems beyond doubt is that the Georgian assault that began on
Friday - after two weeks of increasingly heavy skirmishes between
separatists and Georgian forces - was massive and indiscriminate as
volleys of Grad missiles rained down on Tskhinvali and neighbouring
villages.

Refugees also claimed that civilians were shot, kidnapped and burnt to
death by rampaging soldiers in areas occupied by Georgian troops.
Russian television has broadcast claims that Georgian troops
'executed' injured Russian peacekeepers based in Tskhinvali who were
captured during the initial assault: 10 peacekeepers were killed and
up to 150 injured during the rocket and air attack.

Among those fleeing was Lusya Khoriyeva, 40, a housewife from Tsunari
in South Ossetia, one of an estimated 4,000-5,000 refugees who have
arrived in the Russian North Ossetian capital of Vladikavkaz, in the
past two days.

'I spent three days in our basement with two of my neighbours,' she
said yesterday. 'The Georgians were bombing from the air and with Grad
missiles. Then their tanks rolled into the village at 3am on Friday.
People shouted, "Run, run!" We crawled out of the basement. Our Home
Guard fighters were running too: their ammunition was finished. I saw
one man hit by a rocket. It took off his head and splattered it
against a wall.

'We crawled to a field of wheat. A shell landed near me, but did not
explode. Another fell in the wheat and set it on fire. My robe was
burning. I could hear girls screaming: "Don't kill me!" The Georgians
were rounding them up. We escaped beyond the field. I came here in a
car with 15 people in it. My son, my husband and my daughter are
there. I don't know what has happened to them.'

Alisa Mamiyeva, 26, an English student from Znaur region, added:
'Georgian soldiers flung open the doors of our houses, marched in and
destroyed everything. Women were hiding in barrels of salted cheese to
avoid being taken.'

Another woman from the same area said: 'They are going from door to
door, killing. A few of us escaped in a car but my brother and my aunt
and uncle are still there.'

Zarema Kochieva, 45, the owner of a small shop in Tskhinvali, managed
to flee with her two daughters to Vladikavkaz on Thursday. 'My husband
stayed behind to fight,' she said. 'Our men have only automatic rifles
against tanks. He told me he ran into our apartment. A Georgian tank
saw him and fired at our apartment block, destroying half of it. There
are constant firefights. I think my brother may be already dead.'

Anatoly Kabisov may not have been the first victim of South Ossetia's
dirty little war; it seems certain he will not be the last. But he is
emblematic, at least, of how, in a few short days, it spiralled out of
control. In a conflict where truth and blame have been hard to
determine, how he died represents the complaints of South Ossetia's
Russian-speaking separatist movement in the run-up to war.

On the night of 1 August, they say, Kabisov, a separatist 'policeman'
from the village of Mugat, was killed by Georgian fire from an outpost
near the village of Dvani. As his comrades took his body to be buried,
Georgians opened fire on the funeral procession as well.

Georgia has its own stories to explain the collapse into violence on
Friday as the world sat down to watch the Olympic opening ceremony in
Beijing. The day before Kabisov died, according to Saakashvili,
separatists exploded a bomb next to a Georgian police car in the
village of Eredvi, wounding six.

But if one thing was certain in Tskhinvali before the outbreak of war,
it was that separatist leaders and their people were united in one
certainty - if Georgia attacked, they would not be deserted.

'All we see is Georgia preparing for another war. But we won't be
alone,' Boris Chochiev, the rebels' deputy foreign minister warned The
Observer before the bombing in Eredvi. 'It would be a war of the
Caucasian peoples against Georgia, and Russia would be obliged to
protect its citizens. About 98 per cent of South Ossetians have
Russian passports.'

'Stalin divided Ossetia between the Russia and Georgia, but you cannot
split one heart in two,' 76-year-old Lev Valiev said in what was once
Tskhinvali's sleepy main square. 'We should be reunited, like Germany
was, and that means joining Russia. And if we have to fight for that,
it would be the Caucasus versus Georgia.'

While the first statement has proved brutally true, the threat of the
second is looming as across the Caucasus fighters have volunteered to
join on the Russian side. In Chechnya, pro-Kremlin leader Ramzan
Kadyrov offered his fighters as unlikely peacekeepers, despite their
reputation for kidnap, torture and murder to quell a rebel insurgency.
In Abkhazia and Dagestan, other volunteer units were forming, while
Cossacks were also flocking to the cause.

And it is precisely this that may now be Georgia's greatest problem -
that it has unleashed a wave of violent hatred against it across the
region.'

'The West and Nato back the revanchist policies of Georgia. But in the
Caucasus you can't arm one side to the hilt and expect the other side
to take it,' Abkhaz foreign minister Sergei Shamba in the separatist
capital of Sukhumi, warned before the outbreak of war.

For its part, Tbilisi insists there can be no compromise over South
Ossetia being part of Georgia. Historically, however, the Ossetians
have always been more allied to Russia than those who resisted the
expansion of the Russian empire into the area in the 18th and 19th
centuries, with many fighting alongside the Russians against
neighbours who had long been rivals. Ossetians also allied with the
Bolshevik forces when they occupied Georgia in the early 1920s.

As the Soviet Union disintegrated and Georgia declared independence,
the South Ossetians and Georgians fought over Tskhinvali in a conflict
that led to South Ossetia's de facto independence.

Since then, a stalemate has persisted in a tiny region where two
thirds of the population are separatists, many holding Russian
passports, and a third consider themselves Georgians.

In November 2006, separatists voted to secede while Georgians voted
equally as emphatically to remain. While compromise seemed impossible,
it was the arrival of Saakashvili on the political scene that changed
the dynamic.

One of Saakashvili's promises since becoming president had been to
re-integrate South Ossetia and Abkhazia into Georgia. The separatists,
he said, could enjoy almost unlimited autonomy - but not independence.
It was not enough.

'He seems to have flipped,' said James Nixey an expert on the Caucasus
at the Royal Institute for International Affairs. 'He has walked into
a great bear trap. It is not that he was unprovoked. But it seems he
has, in 24 hours, scuppered all the hard work he had put into pursuing
Nato and EU membership.'

It is precisely this that has acted as the dangerous accelerant,
pushing Russia and Georgia ever closer to war.

Nixey sees in Saakashvili a man of contradictions. With his fluent
English, he appears remarkably Western and cautious, but in his native
'Georgian speaking to other Georgians', Nixey observes, he sounds like
a hardline nationalist. 'Even his friends,' he adds, 'see him as
something of a loose cannon.' But if Saakashvili - perhaps prodded by
advisers who had persuaded him that South Ossetia could be quickly
retaken and the Russians fended off by the US - has made a historic
mistake, Nixey does not absolve the Russians from responsibility for
goading Georgia.

'Russia has been waiting for this to happen. They had put enough of a
mechanism in place that, if they needed to take over, they could do it
very quickly. They have made that clear. They have been making
bilateral deals with the "government" of Abkhazia, too, over
exploration rights and cutting off Georgian exports such as wine and
cutting flights.'

That phoney war was been swept away by the fierce heat of the fighting
as Tskhinvali has crumbled between the two sides.

'There is a massive bombardment that has been going on between the
city's north and south,' Mikhail Lebedev of Russia Today, told The
Observer by telephone not far from Tskhinvali.

'It has not been retaken. There are Georgian troops with tanks in the
town's centre and Russian forces on their way to meet them.

'We were in a village close to the town earlier and saw many civilian
buildings destroyed. It looks like a Swiss cheese. The university and
hospital have been destroyed. I just spoke to the Russian commander in
the town and he says there have been very serious civilian casualties.

'Where we are we can see more Georgian troops driving into town. Seven
truckloads a few minutes ago. We are anticipating very serious fighting.'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/10/russia.georgia1