Word: georgians
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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...
Several Russian officials, confronted by aid officials with evidence of widespread looting in the occupied Georgian city of Gori, said the area is not their responsibility because it is legally Georgian territory. But human rights monitors reject that argument. "This area [now occupied by Russian troops] is effectively under Russian control. The Georgian military is not there, so Russia has a responsibility to protect civilians there," says Giorgi Gogia, a researcher for Human Rights Watch in Georgia. In Tskhinvali, however, locals say the Russian presence has helped re-establish security. "When the Russian army came," says Misha Masurashvili, a gangly...
...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...
...This week, after a brief pause, the fires have started again. Over the last three days, a majority of the remaining houses in the villages of Kekhvi, Nizhnie Achaveti, Verkhnie Achaveti and Tamarasheni, have been burned while new fires were started in the smaller surrounding Georgian villages off the main road. On Tuesday a backhoe was used by South Ossetian villagers to tear down courtyard walls and rip into the sides of houses. Men wearing camouflage outfits and white Nikes, along with some in civilian clothes, stood around on the main road as the backhoe took a swipe...