SAGOLASHENI, Georgia — Georgians in the tiny village of Dvani awoke Wednesday to the sound of doors being battered down.
When they looked outside, Russian-backed soldiers from the separatist enclave of South Ossetia were pillaging the village, home by home. From the local school, they hauled away computers. From the grocery store, they took virtually everything.
En masse, villagers fled. They ran down the street with just the clothes on their backs, fleeing a wholesale ransacking of their tiny farming hamlet. A few minutes later, when villager Merab Merakishvili looked back toward Dvani, he saw his village engulfed in flames.
“I was at my neighbor’s house and looked out the window and saw a soldier breaking into my house,” Merakishvili said. “They were shouting and screaming, so I ran. Now I’m homeless and don’t where to turn. We’ll just go to Tbilisi and find some empty buildings to live in.”
The looting and burning of Dvani and several other villages near Georgia’s border with the breakaway enclave of South Ossetia was stark evidence that, despite the cease-fire reached between the Kremlin and Georgian leaders Tuesday, the war continued to take a devastating toll on civilians caught in the middle Wednesday.
In Gori, seized at least temporarily by Russian troops Wednesday, the few Georgians who stayed behind have little food left. Masked South Ossetian separatist fighters who accompanied Russian tanks and armored personnel carriers in Gori have been looting the small city, sending fearful Georgians fleeing for cover.
And in Georgian villages just outside South Ossetia’s border, a chaotic, brutal scene of wanton destruction is unfolding.
Villagers reported that South Ossetian separatist soldiers, at times accompanied by fighters from Russia’s North Caucasus region, have looted homes and set them ablaze in Dvani, Tamarasheni and Shindisi.
According to a report released Wednesday by Human Rights Watch, a similar pattern of looting and burning of homes is taking place in ethnic Georgian villages within South Ossetia.
Houses belonging to ethnic Georgians in the villages of Kekhvi, Nizhnie Achaveti and Verkhnie Achaveti were burned down Tuesday, researchers for the New York-based rights organization reported. The few people who stayed behind were either incapacitated or stayed to save their belongings and livestock.
“The remaining residents of these destroyed ethnic Georgian villages are facing desperate conditions, with no means of survival, no help, no protection, and nowhere to go,” said Tanya Lokshina at Human Rights Watch.
On the Georgian side of the South Ossetian border, along the dirt roads that connect these hamlets at the foot of the Caucasus Mountains, Georgians have been fleeing their villages and heading toward a nearby main highway, where they desperately tried try to flag down any car in hopes of getting to the Georgian capital, Tbilisi.
Under a large tree in the village of Sagolasheni, villagers from Dvani and another looted village, Dirbi, amassed and waited to learn whether relatives and friends were able to escape.
