Word: tskhinvali
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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After years of escalating border incidents, war began in earnest the night of Aug. 7, 2008, when Saakashvili, who says he believed a Russian attack was imminent, ordered the shelling of Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia. It was a colossal miscalculation. Saakashvili told me he never expected the U.S., Georgia's closest ally, to fight for Georgia. Yet the country was nonetheless gripped by a sense of abandonment when the inevitable punishing Russian counterattack came. The Russians bombed infrastructure targets all over Georgia and cut off the main east-west highway, then marched to within 34 miles...
...inquiry says the conflict started the moment Georgia shelled the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali on the night of Aug. 7-8, 2008. "In the mission's view, it was Georgia which triggered off the war when it attacked Tskhinvali with heavy artillery," Tagliavini said in a statement accompanying the report. The document condemns the bombing, saying it was an overly aggressive response to the provocation. "It is not possible to accept that the shelling of Tskhinvali ... would satisfy the requirements of having been necessary and proportionate in order to defend those villages," it says...
...Georgian and South Ossetian blood is very closely connected," says Fatima, 50, as she hems a pillowcase while sitting in the courtyard of her apartment building in the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali. "South Ossetian girls would marry Georgian boys and South Ossetian boys would marry Georgian girls. But today, today there is no connection - it's all been lost." South Ossetia, in northern Georgia, had been a source of tension long before Russia and Georgia fought their brutal five-day war over the region a year ago. Since then, South Ossetia has declared its independence, but Georgia refuses...
...take one of the secret paths through the woods and across the fields, but I really, really want to see my daughter," says Zoya. Before the war, she was able to visit her daughter in Tbilisi any time by taking one of the local buses that ran from Tskhinvali to Tbilisi several times a day. Now, there is not a single bus running from the bus station. "I know blood has been spilled," Zoya says. "But people need to go on living and forget the past...
...Mamuka Zenashvili, an ethnic Georgian who continues to live in Tskhinvali with his South Ossetian wife Nino, says he does not believe the border will be opened soon. But he has seen signs that, one day, people may be able to move on from the war. "People just want to visit family and friends and trade," he says, looking out over a neighborhood that was nearly leveled by the fighting last year. "My neighbors have enough of their own problems to not dwell on my last name. Sometimes they even come over to ask if they can help repair...