Ethnic killings in Georgia

TKVIAVI, Georgia — The men who came to Gulnara Militaura's house seemed to know what they were looking for. They entered her kitchen and shot her husband and his brother in the head.

For the next five days, as fighting raged outside, she cowered at home, sprinkling vinegar on the bodies to try to keep them from rotting.

Now that the fighting between Georgia and Russia over the breakaway region of South Ossetia has subsided, killings like those will be grist for competing claims of ethnic cleansing.

Militaura, an ethnic Georgian, is accusing South Ossetians, who ally themselves with Russia, of killing her husband and his brother.

Ethnic cleansing has haunted the borderlands of the old Soviet bloc. It is a weapon carried out with devastating force in Bosnia and Kosovo.

But in a dozen interviews with those who fled, and a trip through seven Georgian villages just south of the fighting, the killing this month does not seem to have been that systematic, nor on that scale — based on the evidence.

Georgia's military campaign ripped through a city just north of here last week, prompting Russia to strike back and opening a way for South Ossetians to sweep into Georgian villages for revenge.

Still, the victims seemed marked by their ethnicity in a vicious, if short, war — itself fought over competing claims to the same patches of ground by different groups. Villages had been burned and houses broken; unburied bodies lay rotting; fresh graves were dug in gardens and basements.

Much remains unknown. Because journalists have only limited access to Russian-controlled areas, most of the victims interviewed have been ethnic Georgians. The only access for foreign journalists to the Russian-controlled areas has been with Kremlin minders, impeding efforts to assess how severe the damage is in the north.

On Tuesday, a photographer on a Russian tour of the northern area saw what appeared to be a concerted effort to raze some villages completely.

Homes were ripped apart. Sections of courtyard walls lay crushed. Dozens of men in fatigues stood on the main road, watching a backhoe rip the facade off a burned stone house.

In a swath of southern villages, some killings were carried out for revenge; feuds in this farmland go back generations. Some were outright cases of theft. And in still other cases, the message seemed to show a shift in the balance of power, away from ethnic Georgians to the Ossetian separatists and their Russian backers.

The death tolls do not appear to be what each side is claiming.

Russia has said 2,000 civilians were killed by Georgian troops. But in three hospitals visited by a reporter in Vladikavkaz, the Russian city that has taken most of the wounded, only 259 patients were being treated, suggesting a far lower death toll, because in most conflicts there are far more wounded than killed.

Georgians are saying 213 soldiers and civilians were killed. But Georgia has blocked access to morgues, a precaution to protect journalists from angry families, said Alexander Kvitashvili, the country's health minister. The death count, he said, is expected to rise as access to Russian-controlled areas increases

The grave of Militaura's husband, Misha, was one of six that reporters counted Tuesday among what local residents said were 11 shooting deaths in this village of 3,800 people.

Like many elderly Georgians, Militaura, who is in her 70s, decided not to leave her house during the initial attacks. One neighbor's house went up in flames Aug. 12. Then another. It was too late to run. She and the rest of her family sat and waited.

When the men came, she tried to joke with them. She was from Tskhinvali, the capital city of South Ossetia, which she assumed was their area, and she knew people there.

"They said, 'We don't have time to deal with your acquaintances,' " she said, surrounded by 17 members of her family in her home Sunday.

Then, in another room, more men shot her husband and his brother. They took a tractor, a Soviet-era car, shoes and glass jars, and they left.

Several days later, a group with different accents came. They took vodka.

Militaura was rescued Sunday by her son, Badri, who went on a convoy with the Georgian government, because access is still denied by the Russians. She had eaten nothing for four days. They wept together and then buried the bodies. Her husband's grave is under a rose bush in the garden.

"They were Georgians," said an old man leaning on a cane one house down Tuesday. "They're not here anymore."