Survivors in Georgia Tell of Ethnic Killings

via The New York Times

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TKVIAVI, Georgia — 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 attacks and looting 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 will be grist for competing claims of ethnic cleansing.

Ms. Militaura, an ethnic Georgian, is accusing South Ossetians, 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 wielded with devastating force in Bosnia and Kosovo.

But a dozen interviews with those who fled the fighting, and a trip through seven Georgian villages just south of the fighting, indicated the killing this month was not that systematic, nor on that scale — based on what is known so far.

Georgia’s military campaign ripped through a city just north of here last week, 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 — itself fought over competing claims to the same patches of ground by different groups. Villages had been burned and houses broken; unburied bodies lay rotting; fresh graves were dug in gardens and basements.

Much remains unknown. Because journalists have only limited access to Russian-controlled areas, most of the victims interviewed have been ethnic Georgians. The only access for foreign journalists to the Russian-controlled areas has been with Russian minders, impeding efforts to assess the severity of the damage in the north.

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