War Journalists

At dinner in the city last night with some journalist friends, I was introduced to some of the hardcore photographers who have been in Gori documenting the crisis. These are a strange crew of people, traveling from conflict to conflict, trying to get the photo that might project a career... according to them there is actually very little money in the business, so adventurism seems to play a part in their psyche.

A certain edgy camaraderie exists between the photographers, because for safety they rely on each other but at the same time they are all in competition with one another for the best photographs. Cliff from Oregon and Chris from London just met each other in the Gori, and as both as free-lancing at the moment, it was a natural connection. They talked about being the only journalists at a funeral for a Gori resident, and described the insane retreat of the Georgian forces from Gori.

On one ATV, they saw seven Georgian soldiers. Along the road, a troop transport had been gutted by a bomb, causing panic among the thousands of people fleeing along the road. Soldiers were trying to commandeer any vehicle that passed by... and Chris said it was a good thing they already had eight people in their press vehicle because there was obviously no more room.

Both of them lamented the loss of the Dutch journalist, who was in his car in the center of Gori, where both Chris and Cliff had been for three days, when a random Russian bomb hit the center of town. The journalist and a couple other people died of shrapnel wounds.

Will related how Georgian reservists, some with just sneakers on, arrived at one of the Georgian bases, and as they were getting out of their truck, a bomb landed and killed ten of them on the spot.

Cliff talked to a Georgian sergeant in Ossetia who related how a captain of one Georgian company had been killed. His troops were disorganized and were "slaughtered" by Russian gunships. This sergeant seemed to know... he estimated that more than a 1000 Georgian troops were killed by the superiorly armed Russian invasion force. So far the government has only admitted about 175 casualties.

Cliff described arriving in a Georgian village near Ossetia, where all was calm. About 1am he started hearing shelling, and at 4am the shells started landing in the village where he was. When he emerged from the basement in the morning, he said he found a crater in the front yard, literally 30 feet from the house. He collected shrapnel from the fence out front.

Will described being in a Tbilisi restaurant on Monday afternoon (the day I left for Sighnaghi) when 1000 Georgian soldiers started running down the street away from the Ministry of Defence headquarters. All pandemonium broke loose, and everyone started discussing which part of the city was least likely to be bombed. Have you ever looked at the sky in absolute terror of seeing a plane there that has the possibility of killing everyone around you? Will described that fear, and the terror that took over the street he had been on.

On Tuesday, as there was a real threat that the Russians were coming towards Tbilisi, Will described not being able to find a single restaurant open, but after the 3pm announcement that Russians were signing the French brokered ceasefire agreement, all kinds of restaurants opened. He described a city-wide sigh of relief.