Abductions disrupt Georgia's peace

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Aliko Tsarielashvili stokes the small wood-burning stove in the room where he lives with his wife and two children. This is how people keep warm in the villages near the frontier with South Ossetia.

But when Aliko went collecting firewood in late October, he became another victim of the kidnappings that are breaking the uneasy peace along the ill-defined Administrative Boundary Line (ABL) between Georgia and its breakaway province.

"'There were several guys with masks and we were detained, we were put on the ground, then our hands were tied up," he says.

"We walked for a while and then a car came, and we were put in the car and I'm not quite sure where we were taken to.

"Of course I was afraid because I haven't experienced anything like it before."

The next evening, Aliko and some fellow captives managed to escape during a trip to the toilet. After fleeing through the woods, he waded across a river to get back to Georgian-controlled territory.

It was a lucky day for Aliko on two counts: he got home to find his wife had given birth.

But a few days later, nine other men from a neighbouring village were abducted.

They were held for 10 days before being released, and people from Aliko's village are now very careful just where they go to collect firewood.

One villager tells me they are too frightened to go to the local cemetery, which is just 50m (160 feet) from a South Ossetian checkpoint.

Murky motives

Stories like this are not uncommon in the areas around the ABL, seven months after a ceasefire ended the fighting.

Only recently a man was kidnapped on Georgia's main east-west highway while on his way to referee a football match. A ransom demand for $50,000 followed, but he was freed after two days by the South Ossetian police.



In that case financial gain was clearly the motive. But Khatuna Tsintsadze, from a Georgian human rights group called Century 21, says a common motive is also political.

"The people who kidnap them want them to be afraid of returning to the area," she says.

"That's what the victims say they were told: 'You should leave because when we come back we will do much worse things to you.'"

In most cases kidnap victims do not suffer major physical abuse, but are left shaken by the experience.

Century 21 is documenting the cases of Georgians kidnapped along the ABL. Ms Tsintsadze had a long list, mostly from the end of last year.

Tsintsadze is preparing to take some cases to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, to seek compensation from Russia. Her cases include a group held for 40 days.

When they were released, Georgian TV showed them looking weak and tired at a local hospital.

"Russia is the controlling power there," she says.

"The precedent for these compensation claims will be similar cases from Chechnya, where the Court has ruled in the plaintiff's favour."




Aliko's captives wanted to exchange him for South Ossetians allegedly being held in Georgia.

The ombudsman of South Ossetia said in January that 15 such people were being held, of whom 11 had been abducted since the war.

Georgia's new Prime Minister Nika Gilauri brushes aside the claims of kidnaps by Georgia.

"I highly doubt that. It's definitely not true," he says.

"If anything took place it's just a result of their own misunderstandings - between Russian forces and South Ossetian ones."

Tanya Lokshina, of Human Rights Watch in Moscow, said conditions in South Ossetia made it impossible to go there to verify these claims.

A report issued by the group in January mentioned only one case of abduction - a South Ossetian called Tomaz Kabisov who was allegedly still being held in Georgia after being captured during the fighting last August.

'There is no ceasefire'

But it is not just kidnappings that are breaking the uneasy ceasefire. It is shootings too.

Tamara Madzemidze fled from South Ossetia during the war last summer, and now lives in a crumbling block of flats on the edge of Gori.

In the first war of the early 1990s she lost her husband and 15-year-old son.

Her other son, a police officer, was shot by a sniper in January. There is a small shrine - a few photos and a candle - in the corner of the living room.

"There's no end to this conflict," she says.

"Our youth will continue to be used as targets. Today mine is dead, tomorrow some others are dead. There is no ceasefire. There is no peace."

In the middle of all this are the EU monitors - still unable to travel freely beyond the South Ossetian lines, despite last year's ceasefire agreement.

They say that what one side calls a kidnapping, the other calls an arrest. Reports of shootings and beatings, they say, are sometimes hard to verify in a conflict of claim and counter-claim.

But there is a distant rumble of armoured vehicles as they peer through their binoculars at the Russian positions. This is an uneasy peace.

Source: BBC

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