Word: ossetians
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...situation has been made worse by a second wave of violence after the Russian intervention, carried out not by soldiers but by looters, including some local Ossetian militias as well as Chechen and Cossack gangs from Russia. It has laid further waste to the region, say refugees and human rights workers. "This conflict has been a disaster for civilians," Rachel Denber, Europe and Central Asia deputy director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement on Monday. She said there was an urgent need for fact-finding missions to establish the facts of the conflict and to "urge authorities...
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...
...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 is no way to say a genocide take place...
...been burned are the ones that were still under construction and didn't contain anything valuable to steal. "People are burying their dead in the courtyard of their homes and in their clan cemeteries in the mountains," Minzayev says. Priests at Mary Mother of God church, a South Ossetian congregation in Tskhinvali, said they had carried out more than 100 funerals in a three-day span. "But we have carried out many more than that outside of the church, in people's courtyards," one said. "When the body begins to smell, they are not allowed to have a service...
...Though Russian and Ossetian sources have claimed that between 1,500 and 2,000 died in fighting in and around Tskhinvali, officials at the city's main hospital said only 45 people had died in that facility since fighting had begun, while another three had died a field hospital in the courtyard outside...