Refugees walked towards Tbilisi, tears streaming down many of their faces, writes Lara Marlowein Gori
THE DAY started hopefully and ended in renewed flight, but especially terror of Russian invasion, occupation and death.
Just southeast of Gori, I picked up two middle-aged women on the main highway and gave them a lift to the village of Akhalsofeli. After hearing about president Nicolas Sarkozy's peace plan, they boarded the Tbilisi-Gori bus early yesterday morning.
"It stopped several times on the way, because people kept calling on mobile phones, telling passengers there were Cossaks in Gori," recounted one of the women, called Nunu. She anxiously watched two funnels of smoke to the northeast. Burning villages? No one was certain.
The ethnic Cossak, Chechen and Ossetian irregulars who fight alongside Russian troops are the greatest fear of the Georgian population; my Georgian driver and interpreter refuse to go into areas where they're known to be present. Most of the stories are second- or third-hand, and are probably exaggerated.
For example, Nunu heard that an inhabitant of Gori refused to let Cossaks enter his house on Tuesday "and they cut his head off". Dozens of vehicles, most of them returning refugees and journalists, had stopped at the entrance to Gori, at the sign welcoming visitors to "J Stalin's home country". Two Russian tanks faced us, 200m away.
"I saw three vehicles stolen at gunpont," a driver panted out the window of his lorry. An agitated man burst from a minibus, pouring mineral water over his own head and yelling: "I got attacked. They stopped the minibus and demanded money and hit me. The driver gave them all the money he had. They robbed all the passengers. They take mobile phones, money. Don't go in."
A couple ran by, carrying a heavy bag between them. A volley of gunfire down the road scattered the crowd of journalists and hesitant returnees. A few minutes later, three people ran towards me. The woman, called Lili, was crying. The shots I'd heard were fired at her Neva jeep.
"They told us to get out of the car for two minutes. They took our car and everything in it - money, papers. I don't know what we will do now." By mobile phone, I learned that the Sky News team inside Gori had just lost their camera, car, money and documents in the same manner.
I retreated temporarily to a shady spot beside a spring, a few kilometres down the road to Tbilisi. A battered yellow Mercedes bus was parked beneath the trees. Durmiskani, a 54-year-old tractor operator with a ruddy face, blue eyes and greying ginger hair, told me how 20 people fled in the bus from Shindissi, between Gori and Tskhinvali, on Monday. Most moved on to Tbilisi, but four men were living in the bus, waiting for a chance to go home. They turned back each time they met more people fleeing.
"This war has turned us into beggars," Durmiskani said. "Today, we had to stop a car to ask for food." An increasing number of Georgians criticise president Mikheil Saakashvili for starting this disastrous war, but I was surprised by what Durmiskani said next: "I prefer the Russians to stay, because I'm angry with the Georgian government. This war has been going on for nearly 20 years, and I want it to end, to be ruled by a single power. We were much better off in the Soviet Union. I am very nostalgic."
Several hours later, I passed Durmiskani and the yellow bus on the outskirts of Tbilisi; for all his longing for Russian rule, he and his friends fled yesterday's Russian incursion.
I was returning to Gori when dozens of vehicles screeched towards me, trailed by a column of Russian armour and military vehicles. For more than an hour, we drove just in front of them, watching the Russian soldiers standing in the lead armoured personnel carrier, followed by army lorries with flashing headlights. A van drove alongside the APC, waving a Russian flag out the window.
Georgia's national security adviser appealed for the presidents of France, Ukraine and the Baltic states who visited Tbilisi on Tuesday evening to come back. A little later, the government begged foreign ambassadors in Tbilisi to go to Gori. The military lorries, covered with tarpaulins, were filled with Cossaks who had looted shops, Georgian television claimed.
Refugees waited by the roadside, trying to hitch rides with desperate, flailing gestures. At the sight of the advancing column, they grabbed their belongings and fled into the fields, as if the Russians were devils.
Would the Russians go all the way to Tbilisi? After advancing some 15km, at the turnoff to an Ossetian village called Orjosani, the column turned left into the countryside. It appeared to be a logistics unit, comprised of troop and supply lorries, fuel tankers, a hospital van, several tanks and personnel carriers.
Many of the Russian drivers hung flak jackets on their doors, to protect them from stray bullets. There were about 100 Russian vehicles in all, and for the half hour that I watched them pass, Ossetian irregulars wearing ersatz uniforms stood on the highway, directing traffic. Refugees with petrified faces, some on a horse-drawn cart, others pulled by a tractor, had been caught up in the Russian column. A gunman wearing a black balaclava waved them on. Another militiaman looked particularly menacing, though only a teenager. He grabbed the cord of my digital camera, but let go when I yanked the camera back and smiled at him.
A Russian officer with two stars on his epaulettes seemed to be in charge of the column. "The road to Gori is now open," he announced as the last vehicles turned off the main highway.
"Tell people they can go back. We are regular army - not Ossetians. We don't know if we will go any further. We might. We are waiting for orders. This was not a war, but a provocation by Saakashvili."
As the officer climbed into his muddy sedan car, the Ossetian irregulars piled into the van with the Russian flag and headed alone back towards Gori. The asphalt on Georgia's national highway was churned up by Russian tank treads.
Dozens of refugees walked towards Tbilisi, tears streaming down many of their faces.
Some 10km on, at a place called Igoeti, Georgian special forces were preparing for what could be their last stand. A bulldozer built an earth embankment. Soldiers strained to unload ammunition crates from lorry beds. Many carried rocket-propelled grenades. Three 1950s anti-tank guns pointed up the highway. Some of the soldiers were probably among the 2,000 Georgian troops brought back from Iraq to fight the Russians.
Russia has a million-strong army; Georgia just 11,000. As I watched the grim, sullen faces of the men who dug in on the highway to Tbilisi last night, I kept thinking of the phrase used by Roman gladiators: We who are about to die salute you.