Refugee Camp

Water at one of the tent camps. There are now more than 70,000 Internally Displaced Persons in Tbilisi shelters. More photos here.














We spent more than an hour in the UN headquarters trying to volunteer our "army of chanters" but to no avail. They're so overwhelmed with protocol, databases, and distribution teams, there is no format to incorporate our help.

Later we realized we have to work with smaller teams, so we visited the Save the Children headquarters. They are excited to have our help, and we will take a bunch of our guys there tomorrow.

Our good friends Mira and Micha have raised more than 2000 Euros in Germany and are going out and buying supplies themselves and taking it to one of the IDP centers. I'm so impressed with them.

At this IDP camp that we visited near the Tbilisi airport, we witnessed Estonian volunteers having a round of soccer with the local kids. It was great to see that kids are kids no matter where they are, as the place was abounding with kids playing with water bottles, sticks, and balls. Otherwise it was the most depressing place I've been to in a long time. 40 cots to a tent, rows of tents on the asphalt, the heat palpably radiating from the ground... most people didn't seem to know what to do with themselves and walked back and forth between their cots and the water feedline supplied by four emergency cisterns.














Luarsab learned that it was a very temporary camp as everyone is from the Gori region and should be able to go back to their homes in the next couple of days. Yesterday we met people from Kodori Gorge, which was over-run by Abkhazians with Russian military support, and likely won't come back to Georgian hands for a long time. Also, those people from the villages around Tskhinvali will have a tough time going home as their villages have been systematically destroyed.

I would describe the mood in the shelters and tent camps as still one of shock. People speak in hushed towns, no one is crying, no one is angry... it is a very strange feeling. Comparing the way that people are walking about, taking care of necessary tasks, compared to the stories of horror that they are relating to us in a normal voice... I can only understand this as being in a state of shock.

We talked to a man who said his parents stayed in the village, and they've already had to deal with young Ossetians trying to burn their house down twice. They live in a village 7 kilometers from Gori, in the heart of Georgia and not even near Tskhinvali. He said that his parents have reported that about ten houses have been burned to the ground in their village, and another 20 partially saved by residents who stayed (but put themselves in danger trying to save the burning houses).

This same man, speaking in a grave voice, told us about his decision to flee with his children even though his parents wouldn't leave their village. He repeated a story that we've been hearing elsewhere that is still unfathomable to me: as they were fleeing their village along the main highway, he described a scene from a video game in which cars loaded with civilians were tracked down by helicopters and blown up with rockets and gunfire. He said he personally passed four cars with bodies burning inside of them. This in Georgia, outside the "peace-keeping" zone. Anyway, who ever heard of a peace-keeping mandate that includes deliberately targeting fleeing civilians from an attack helicopter?

These people cannot be approached with a soft hand. This is not a normal army. This is not an open and close case. Mere threats of "worsening future relations" doesn't mean anything to these people. They know that the US will need Russia on Iran and North Korea. They know that Germany depends on gas pipelines from Russia. It's an empty threat, and they don't mind shooting down civilians from attack helicopters in the middle of a sovereign nation, in 2008.

Many analysts are now saying that it is clear that the Russian FSB instigated the latest round of violence by provoking Ossetian separatists to kill Georgian policemen in Georgian villages (Aug. 1st), and fire rockets indiscriminately into Georgian villages. Georgian forces played right into Moscow's hand by returning fire with GRAD rocket systems and other weapons procured from the US, prompting what one can only call an outright invasion of the country.

However, it's important to remember that we're talking about a region of Georgia which until 1990 had a majority Georgian population and only recently has asserted itself as an 'independent region' with a minority population supported by the Russian army.

It doesn't take such a stretch of the imagination to see how problematic this is, especially given Russia's ridiculous reasoning for this. They gave South Ossetians passports a couple of years ago, and now claim they need to "defend Russian citizens." Can one imagine a scenario in which the Canadian government supports separatists in Montana by giving them Canadian citizenship, and then uses this to justify invading and bombing Idaho, Wyoming, North Dakota, and South Dakota when provoked?

The illegitimacy of these actions can only be explained as a historical-cultural sense of entitlement of the Caucasus from the Moscow elite, which was akin to the "wild west" for them. Russians have been invading, killing, and attacking civilians and their defenders in the Caucasus almost non-stop since 1801. For a 19th century glimpse of this manic imperialistic drive, see the bibliography for the "Shamil" article on Wikipedia.