The 2008 war between Georgia and Russia over the separatist region of South Ossetia may have only lasted five days but five years on, Amiran Gugutishvili is still counting the cost.
Snaking through the burnt-out shell of what was once his cousin’s house are 1.2-meter high coils of razor wire that divide the Russian-backed breakaway territory from Georgian-controlled land. The wire also cuts Gugutishvili off from the fruit orchards that once provided his livelihood.
“It feels like I am living in a prison,” Gugutishvili, 67, told Agence France-Presse, pointing at the tangled grapevines that he says are now only patrolled by armed Russian border guards with dogs. “There is no freedom -- what sort of freedom can this be?” On the night of August 7-8, 2008, Georgia’s pro-Western President Mikheil Saakashvili launched an offensive to reclaim breakaway region South Ossetia only to see Russian forces sweep into Georgia.
Until then, the division between Georgia and the self-proclaimed territory of South Ossetia was ill-defined.
Despite a brutal conflict in the early 1990s that saw the breakaway territory declare independence and set up its own administration, the region was a patchwork of Georgian and Ossetian villages where people on both sides often worked together and intermarried.
Now though, five years on from the war, links between the two sides have been almost totally severed and Russian forces continue to build new fences and lay razor wire.
Snaking through the burnt-out shell of what was once his cousin’s house are 1.2-meter high coils of razor wire that divide the Russian-backed breakaway territory from Georgian-controlled land. The wire also cuts Gugutishvili off from the fruit orchards that once provided his livelihood.
“It feels like I am living in a prison,” Gugutishvili, 67, told Agence France-Presse, pointing at the tangled grapevines that he says are now only patrolled by armed Russian border guards with dogs. “There is no freedom -- what sort of freedom can this be?” On the night of August 7-8, 2008, Georgia’s pro-Western President Mikheil Saakashvili launched an offensive to reclaim breakaway region South Ossetia only to see Russian forces sweep into Georgia.
Until then, the division between Georgia and the self-proclaimed territory of South Ossetia was ill-defined.
Despite a brutal conflict in the early 1990s that saw the breakaway territory declare independence and set up its own administration, the region was a patchwork of Georgian and Ossetian villages where people on both sides often worked together and intermarried.
Now though, five years on from the war, links between the two sides have been almost totally severed and Russian forces continue to build new fences and lay razor wire.
