GEORGIA:WHEN MIKHEIL Saakashvili, Georgia's pro-western leader, called a ceasefire in the face of intensifying battles with separatist fighters in South Ossetia on August 7th, many in the breakaway enclave heaved a sigh of relief.
"Saakashvili said there would be a ceasefire and we thought it was going to end," said Leyla Bessateva, who fled sniper and rocket fire in Dominis, a South Ossetian village 12km from capital Tskhinvali.
"We stayed at home without fear because we thought that nothing would happen. And then suddenly they began to fire," she said. "I was hiding in the cellar for two days because half my house collapsed. The whole day I could not get up. I could not eat. I could not talk. When I finally came out, the entire village was destroyed."
Many of the more than 300 refugees gathered in the Alagir refugee camp on the Russian side of the Caucasus mountains are still reeling from the heaviest fighting this volatile region has seen.
Many accounts are muddled from chaos and shock of war, highlighting the challenges facing those trying to piece together the events that led to thousands of people being displaced from the region and, by Russian accounts, more than 1,500 being killed.
While Russia and Georgia accuse each other of "ethnic cleansing", for the vast majority sheltering in the Alagir camp the blame lies squarely with Georgia's erratic leader. "Saakashvili is worse than Hitler," said Dolgi Zabolena, who was taken by Russian troops out of Tskhinvali after four days of heavy fighting.
This was a constant refrain in the camp yesterday, where refugees are being encouraged to tell their stories to Russian prosecutors as part of an investigation into alleged ethnic cleansing by Mr Saakashvili's army.
"The Georgian government just went mad . . . The Georgians came in and killed everyone. Who is guilty? It is Saakashvili. They burnt all the houses, and they even set fire to the school and all the hospitals. Nothing remains. It all happened in one instant," Ms Bessateva said. "They wanted to destroy the whole of South Ossetia in one night. All these villages they encircled and took."
Ms Bessateva said she and many other women, children and elderly eventually fled their village, leaving their men to fight Georgian tanks and foot soldiers. She still does not know what has happened to her son.
The troops that entered the village spoke in Georgian, she said, though she and a number of other refugees from the same village claimed they also spoke in languages they did not recognise.
Many question too where the Georgians got the heavy artillery that had never been used before in the region. "During the war in 1992 they only fought with machine guns," said Zaira Khurayeva, a fellow villager. "And they used to warn us by telephoning to say they were coming to take the village." "They must have been Nato troops," said one woman. "The Georgians don't know how to shoot."
There is still fierce debate over who started the conflict. "Our president said we will not start the shooting first, but no one really knows," said one South Ossetian man, who had fled from a cellar in Tskhinvali.
Some independent organisations are now also starting to question Russia's assertion that more than 1,500 died in the fighting.
"We don't think it's helpful in these specific circumstances to start spreading these numbers when they are not backed by data," said Anna Neistat, a researcher for Human Rights Watch in South Ossetia.
She said her team had spoken to hospital officials in Tskhinvali who said the number of dead brought to the hospital from the town and the surrounding villages totalled 44. While many of the bodies would not have made it to the hospital morgue, the figure was low enough to cast doubt on Russia's account, she said. However, Ms Neistat said evidence was mounting that most of the destruction of Tskhinvali was caused by Georgians. The Georgians assert the city was levelled by the Russians.
For women like Anna Kuzayeva, who spent two nights hiding in a cellar with 300 people and rotting corpses in Tskhinvali before being taken to the refugee camp by Russian soldiers, only one thing seems clear. "This war will continue," she said. "It's been going on in various ways for 15 years."
- (Financial Times service )