When there is war, sides to war plunge into amnesia. Laws, a humane approach and the obligation to accurately interpret facts are all forgotten. Murder and looting are, in effect, indemnified. As to mutual recriminations and razing each other’s economic infrastructure, it is just as  Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili told a joint news conference with German chancellor Angela Merkel – “Russia wants the Georgian economy destroyed beyond repair”. The news stream from Russian media says the same. What follows is the tale of those who suffer the ramifications of war the most, the tale of Georgian refugees. It might have its mirror phenomenon to the north of South Ossetia, the region of discord that set ablaze, concurrent to the Olympic flame, a long smouldering ethnic conflict, the next Caucasian one. According to Russian media reports unconfirmed by independent sources, at least 30 000 South Ossetians have fled the region of Tshinvali to Vladikavkaz in North Ossetia. Their story might quite likely sound the same.

An anecdote
Lenin was on his deathbed when Stalin paid him a visit. The dying man said: “I am thinking about who my successor would be. I was considering you as well… But you are too blunt… too coarse. People would not follow you…” Stalin replied, “Don’t worry, comrade Lenin. Whoever fails to follow me will follow you…”

This anecdote has been the word of mouth circulated across a capital of seeming calm. No armed gendarmerie or patrol cars, no curfew or faces rumpled by grief, despair or retaliatory anger. Not a single street with bomb-blasted buildings or places dim lit by candles during blackouts. Tbilisi, Georgia, is in full bloom, having transcended the electricity and gas shortages of four years ago, neat, with stylish, freshly daubed buildings, with busy ongoing construction. Bustling with the energy of routine daily life, the homeland of Stalin represents the Caucasian paragon of a modern city.

Just the posters on a wall hiding an immense construction site and facing parliament read, “Stop Russia”, “Who is next?” and “Benito Medvedev and Adolf Putin” reveal to a Tbilisi visitor that Georgia is at war. The Georgians believe that the characters of the anecdote have exchanged nationality and would not let any external party infringe on their territorial integrity; that the diplomatic shuttles of the world’s top state officials to the Georgian capital were not exaggerated hue and cry (suffice to say that US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and Merkel were in Tbilisi within a three-day timespan), that the consistent and vocal calls by Saakashvili for protection against “the Russian aggressor” have something to do with this city.

Later, regular citizens, media and opposition leaders would insist that Saakashvili’s emotional verbal spurts of indignation were carefully devised “for export”. That this seeming – impervious of war vestiges – calm in Tbilisi was a deliberate attempt to rake panic off people’s minds.

Meanwhile, the city is flooded with refugees and all Tbilisi citizens are affected by the aftermath of war zone escapees.

Georgian refugees
Just 500m from parliament, a dingy building is hectic with people and stacks of clothes, blankets at the bottom of it all. We see Leyla, in her early 40s, through a window speckled with labels of the World Food Programme and calls for help, which with a welcoming smile invites us in. That small facade later turns out to be the entrance of a labyrinth of a three-block five-storey edifice going 100m deep. Previously accommodating the editorial offices of Communist Party publications and printing facilities, it is now shelter for 1200 refugees.

It is one of Tbilisi’s 55 sites with 60 000 officially registered displaced inhabitants of Gori, Tshinvali and other areas adjoining South Ossetia, which, in the past 10 days, has suffered an abundant Russian bomb shower and sniper attacks.

Most sites are public schools and kindergartens alongside a camp tent outside Tbilisi. No official could guarantee that the academic year would start on September 1, as usual, because the situation remained unresolved.

Leyla, a refugee herself and co-ordinator on the fifth floor, guided us into the floors of the decrepit building, which was left to dilapidate to earn a verdict – “Raze to build a mall instead”. Now repair is busy, governmental, humanitarian and voluntary donations are gradually filling with furniture. On our way, we see Djena. She recollects the rushed flee from her home, the version of a story repeated by thousands of cohabitants. With the sole difference that she relived displacement for the second time. In the early 1990s, when the first Georgian-South Ossetian conflict broke out, she had to leave South Ossetia’s Tshinvali in an aftermath of the outright cleansing of the town off Georgians. She fled her home for 18 years outside Tshinvali.

“We ran with our T-shirts alone,” she recalls. “The bomb-sniper-and-then-marauder attack was so unexpected that we left all our belongings but the cross.”

While telling her story, her son would be swiftly hitting a ball vocalising the sound with “grad, grad, grad”, the WW2 weapon hailing bullets in a cannonade that Russians used outside Tshinvali as well.

“We ran past the dead bodies of our neighbours,” Djena went on. “We never had the time to bury them and that’s a sin.”

A stranger can’t help but notice that the vast majority of Georgians – in a pious gesture befitting an Orthodox devotee – invariably make the triple cross whenever facing a church. The 10 Commandments and sin have the same old meaning.

Djena, a mother of three children and accommodated in a three-by-four-metre room together with her husband, arrived not knowing how she ended up in the shelter. Later she found out that strangers had registered her on her behalf. She has received blankets, linen and clothes, all arriving from the state and the Georgian ministry of refugees, and humanitarian aid but mostly from compassionate fellow citizens. As was under the guardianship of hundreds of Tbilisi citizens who volunteered to help fellow citizens in mishap.

The woman’s eyes fill with tears when she remembers the day of her and her fathers birthday.

“My parents were too old to run with us. They would hide for days in nearby forests until Russians, then South Ossetians and Kazakhs, pilfered all our belongings – from cupboards to spoons, even toilet bowls,” she communicated what she last heard from them.

No right to return
Svetlana, from Gori, the town where no building remains unscathed, shared the same fate and also a double displacement, her first, however, being from Moscow. She and her two children had lived there without registration for 18 years. “Fourteen months ago, however, Putin ordered the check into all Muscovites of Georgian nationality,” she says. Lacking registration, she was prosecuted, sentenced and, instead of imprisonment, was deported with a ban on returning. She failed to even make it to her uncle in Belarus because the country and Russia had made a mutual agreement not to admit deportees. The recent conflict found her in Gori, unemployed and surviving a zero-heating winter only thanks to her fur coat.

Her last recollection of Gori was that “this is a ghost town now, deserted, with the handful of people living on bread allotments”.

The dread of seeing his hometown Gori, haunted Alexander from Kaspi, a town bombed a day after Saakashvili signed the revised Sarkozy-Merkel brokered ceasefire agreement. The repatriate from Belgium, who returned when Saakashvili encouraged emigres return by eradicating corruption, cutting tax rates and curtailing the company registration process to 1.5 days, fretted that the Russian principle of emptying the city was ongoing.

“Russians would bomb the city, scare people out of their homes, besiege the city by the downward spiral and then loot,” he said. Step one was already completed, he said, pointing to the shut and curtained windows. “These are all deserted homes now.”

The father of three said he would remain in his house with his wife. Unaware of Russia’s later decision to gradually pull out of Georgia, he said that he would stay even though he feared that any minute soldiers might come, line his family against the wall and…

“We have nowhere else to go,” he said.

His daughter – seven-year-old Liza – smiles and says she’s bored. Her mum would not let her go outside alone. Even if she did, her friends are no longer there, she said.

“But I am an artist,” she boasts and shows a drawing of their clock. It had stopped at 1.20 sharp, the time when the bombing started.