KSUISI, Georgia — After Georgian soldiers stormed South Ossetia and killed Vitaly Guzitayev’s friend, he hid in the woods.
Once the Georgians left, he set fire to the elegant brick homes of ethnic Georgians who lived nearby.
“Georgians must not return here. Ossetia is for Ossetians,” Guzitayev spat, sitting on a bench in Ksuisi. “Let Georgians suffer. Now we are independent from them.”
Arson gangs have targeted the homes of ethnic Georgians in breakaway South Ossetia as the conflict over control threatens to erase a centuries-old ethnic mix. Since the warfare between Georgia and Russia in early August, Associated Press reporters have witnessed burning homes and looting in villages in the region.
The conflict has pitted neighbor against neighbor in this region of mountain slopes and fruit orchards where two ethnic groups have lived for centuries: Georgians whose culture is rooted on the Black Sea coast and Ossetians whose language and customs point to the east.
According to Georgia, at least 28,800 ethnic Georgians have fled South Ossetia in recent weeks, part of a larger exodus of about 160,000 people from the conflict zone. South Ossetian officials say the region’s population of Georgians was only about 14,000 when the fighting started.
Whatever the figure, no one disputes that there are few Georgians left in South Ossetia. And any who try to return will find many of their neighbors hostile, their language despised and their homes destroyed.
Olia Bugadze, 68, is one of a handful of ethnic Georgians left in Ksuisi. She said she hid in a corn field as Russian troops swept through, then watched as neighbors descended on her home, looted it and set it on fire. Now she camps in the ruins of her kitchen.
With most Georgians gone, there seems to be an effort to erase even the memory of their presence. Thursday, a South Ossetian policeman knocked down a sign with the name of the Georgian village of Tamasheni, written in Georgian and Latin scripts, as bulldozers razed the last houses.
