A decade after Russia war, plight of Georgian refugees continues

Author: Agencies

Standing in a meadow in the sweltering heat and amid the chirping of grasshoppers, 84-year-old Dato Vanishvili looks through a barbed wire fence and sighs: “It’s like living in a prison, here.”

Around five years ago, the farmer woke up one morning to strange sounds outside his house.

When he looked out, he saw Russian soldiers erecting a barbed wire fence across his property, as the breakaway region of South Ossetia was physically separated from the rest of Georgia.

Vanishvili was trapped on the side of his village, Khurvaleti, that fell under the control of separatist South Ossetian authorities.

And ever since that morning in 2013, he has been unable to cross into Georgia.

Five years prior to that, in August 2008, Russia and Georgia had fought a five-day war over South Ossetia, a tiny enclave where Russia maintained a military base.

Georgia had launched a large-scale military operation against separatist forces who had been shelling Georgian villages in the region.

And over the five days that followed, Russia defeated Georgia’s small military, sweeping into the Black Sea nation of four million people, bombing targets and occupying large swathes of territory.

Russia then officially recognised South Ossetia, alongside another secessionist Georgian region, Abkhazia, where Moscow similarly had a military base.

Published in Daily Times, August 6^th 2018.