Russian shelling and gunfire are still to be heard amid the abandoned villages and torched fields between Gori and Tbilisi, writes Lara Marlowe
THE STANDOFF between Georgia and Russia almost took a fatal turn yesterday when Russian and Georgian troops came close to a bloody shoot-out on the hot, dusty stretch of road beside the sign saying "J Stalin's Home Country Gori".
The day started well, with a Russian commitment to hand the town back to Georgian authorities by 3pm. Hundreds of the refugees who have flocked to Tbilisi in the week-long war waited to be allowed through police barricades on the main national highway.
Around 10am, the Russian general in command of the town - described by witnesses as drunk and foul-mouthed - allowed a dozen pick-up trucks filled with Georgian police and five carloads of journalists to enter the town. We saw a half dozen T-72 tanks on the road where apartment buildings were bombed during the first days of the war, and two Russian armoured personnel carriers on the town's main square.
"In about two hours, we'll re-open the town and everyone can go home," a Russian officer announced.
Zaza, a Georgian policeman who was part of the convoy, told me his unit got on fine with the Russians, but avoided contact with the South Ossetian proxies known as North Caucasus Volunteers who are blamed for the looting in Gori.
"The Russians don't pay them," Zaza explained. "They're allowed to keep what they plunder." Suddenly, people vanished from the main square and the Georgian police sped out of town; something had turned sour between the Russians and Georgians. Kakha Lomaia, the Georgian national security advisor, arrived in a flak jacket, accompanied by two Russian officers, and told journalists to leave within 15 minutes "and then it's going to get very nasty".
Coming from the direction of Tbilisi, a convoy of Georgian troops in pick-up trucks, armed with US M-16 rifles, then approached the Russian checkpoint beyond the Stalin sign. The Russian T-72s lurched forward, towards the Georgians, their barrels pointing at them. Taking advantage of the panic, a couple of Ossetian irregulars fired in the air, demanded car keys and drove off in two of the media cars.
Russian soldiers fanned out in the brush on the hillside above the highway and took aim at the Georgians. The journalists scrambled for cover. The showdown was defused when a Russian officer walked out in front of the tanks and spoke to a Georgian counterpart. The Georgians drove away.
Later, Russian artillery fired between 20 and 30 shells at the hills to the south of Gori, raising thick clouds of black smoke. To the west, Russian helicopters dropped flares to set fields on fire. "The Russians told us there would be no harvest this year," a woman refugee from the area told me a few hours earlier. "They said they would take everything with them."
To the north, the smoke was grey and more diffuse - probably the village of Tkhviari, between Gori and Tskhinvali, whose fleeing inhabitants I met on the road in the morning.
I heard sporadic bursts of gunfire through the afternoon. By early evening, when I returned to Tbilisi, a shopkeeper on the western perimeter of Gori told me over the telephone he heard constant shooting inside the town.
Just after 3pm, two Russian BTR armoured personnel carriers and a smaller armoured car came through the check-point, drove down the highway and returned 15 minutes later. One of the BTRs broke down and had to be towed back into Gori.
Like much of the Russians' behaviour in Georgia, the little sortie had no apparent explanation. "They want to make sure the Georgians can't surprise them," speculated an observer from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
The Russians first denied entering Gori on Wednesday. They deployed a column of armour and vehicles some 15km south, which returned to Gori on Wednesday night. A Russian official told the BBC they'd entered the town because the departure of Georgian officials left a vacuum. Yesterday, Moscow said it had deployed only "reconnaissance parties" in Gori.
In a tacit acknowledgement of the mass looting characteristic of the Russian presence in Georgia, the Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov yesterday said Russian forces "have strict orders to apply wartime law to looters".
South Ossetian authorities reportedly shot two looters dead on Wednesday.
None of which was any comfort to the crowd of refugees who walked down the main street of Akhalsofeli village. I'd given two returning refugees a lift there on Wednesday. By yesterday morning, they'd already fled a second time to Tbilisi.
I went back to check reports the village was burned; it wasn't, though a nearby field was scorched, probably set alight by a flare or artillery shell.
Each day, the refugees seem to grow older; the young are always the first to leave. Meri, a tiny, white-haired woman of 75, told me how she and her husband watched from a field as "they" set fire to the family's two houses in Tkhviavi.
Assiat (63) had gone through five villages in four days: Beloti, Ditsi, Tkhviavi, Sathemo and now Akhalsofeli. "Every time I arrived in a village, there was an alert by people and I had to leave again," she said. "It wasn't an official alert, but each time there was panic and we left and the
villagers left with us. Only the very old and infirm remain."
Assiat had to leave Houshangi (67) her husband for the past 48 years, in Ditsi. "He said he couldn't walk anymore, that if they were going to kill him, they would kill him there, and that I should go all the way to Tbilisi."
Until yesterday, Georgian security forces were few and far between on the main highway. Reacting to the Russian incursion on Wednesday, the Georgians seem to have dispersed their entire army and police force the length of the 60km between Tbilisi and Gori.
Some are hidden in trees and bushes, others wait in vehicles parked by the roadside. The deployment may be intended to reassure the country's population, but it fools no one.
"We cannot fight the Russians," said Zaza, the policeman. "If they want to go to Tbilisi, they can do it."
