Word: breakaway
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...recent shooting war between Russia and Georgia continued to reverberate as Russia formally endorsed the independence of breakaway Georgian regions South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The clash has had repercussions elsewhere...
...Georgia DISPATCH BURNING ANGER After a brief pause, fires have started again in the breakaway republic of South Ossetia, as Ossetian villagers burn and pillage homes belonging to ethnic Georgian residents. "They did this because they don't want us to come back," says Iosif Zadashvili, who claims Russian soldiers stood by while Ossetian irregulars beat him in the courtyard of his home. With many villages reduced to burned-out shells, looters were seen hauling off TVs, refrigerators and other household appliances. On the road to the Russian border, graffiti on the side of a building read THANK YOU, RUSSIA...
Some local Ossetian officials with the breakaway government have said the looting is justified as retribution for the Georgian attacks on Ossetian positions that provoked Russia's military intervention. The breakaway territory's nominal president, Eduard Kokoity, a former wrestler, when asked whether ethnic Georgians who had been living in South Ossetia would be allowed to return, told the Russian daily Kommersant that "we have no intention of letting them in there...
...death toll from the war and its aftermath has yet to be determined - making allegations of genocide impossible to investigate. No mass graves, for example, have yet to be discovered. Russia has said that Georgian government troops and militia had begun ethnic cleansing when they tried to retake the breakaway region, and South Ossetian Interior Minister Mikhail Minzayev has estimated 2,100 dead. (Western journalists in the area have come up with rough estimates of 500 to 600 dead.) Gogia said the South Ossetian and Russian claims of more than 1,000 dead are "inflated, exaggerated. There...
Even as Russian tanks began their desultory withdrawal from Georgia on Tuesday, dozens of houses were still burning in Georgian villages north of Tskhinvali, the capital of the Georgian breakaway republic of South Ossetia. Many Ossetians appear keen to assure that the displacement of ethnic Georgians from the region becomes permanent...