Letters from Georgia: Bloody vengeance

Standing next to an Orthodox priest, South Ossetian President Eduard Kokoity asks for a minute of silence "to remember those who died in this bloodthirsty attack by a criminal Georgian regime against our people."

It is Thursday, 21 August, and he is addressing a forlorn crowd of roughly 1,000 in the capital of the breakaway enclave, Tskhinvali. Along Stalin Street, the crowd waves Russian flags in an attempt at a victory celebration of sorts. Their faces are worn; no one is cheering, and slowly people begin to drift away.

Kokoity continues his speech nonetheless: "We are going to be an independent state inside Russia - it's so logical." After this remark, he suddenly switched from Russian to make some closing remarks in Ossetian - and only then did the people cheer.

Down Stalin Street the damage becomes more extensive as you approach the edge of town. Alexander Machevsky, an advisor to the Russian president and senior spokesman for the Russian government points into the wreckage: "As we can see there has been extensive indiscriminate shelling of civilian targets in Tskhinvali. Serious violations have been committed here by the Georgian side."

Several streets are completely devastated. Compared to the Georgian town of Gori, where most of the western media has been reporting from - the damage is simply on a different scale. In Gori only a few apartment blocks and strategic targets have been shattered. But in Tskhinvali whole districts have come under direct assault - a sight that goes along with explaining the ferocity with which Ossetian troops retaliated against Georgian villages in the surrounding valleys.

Inside a half-ruined house – only a make-shift structure of wood and tin roofing to begin with - the middle-aged Fatima Tatdaeva and her two boys live without a roof over their heads.

"It was terrifying when the Georgians came. We hid for days in the shelter. We lost family members, and when we came out we found we had lost our roof too. They are evil people to have done this - done this to simple people like us," she tells me.

Her neighbor, the elderly Gayuz Kozayev, has a huge cut along his skull. "That happened to my head - but look what they did to my house," he says.

I look to where he is pointing, and while there is evidence of a house, the house simply is not there anymore. The fruit he had been storing for the summer is rotting in jars. Burned toys sit atop a broken mess of every imaginable personal belonging, from plates to documents, in a glass and rubble heap.

"I never want to see a Georgian again," he says.

Along the road to the village of Khetagurovo several burned-out Georgian tanks are stark reminders of just how intense the fighting was during in the first few days of the war.

Standing in front of the heavily damaged cemetery and World War II memorial, Russian Colonel Igor Konashenko explains his version of what happened here.

"The Georgians attacked the village. It had previously been at peace. They arrived and we have reports from the locals that hostages have been taken and not returned. Several people where shot dead, including an old woman," he tells me.

The villagers confirm his statement by listing the names of those disappeared and taking me to the shallow grave of elderly woman.

A few meters away, the post office has been completely ransacked and the safe blown open, possibly by looters. Oddly, the office is full of Soviet-era pension booklets and postcards. Sitting in the corner of this evocative ruin of the USSR an old man drinking kvass mistakes me for a Russian. "To the great Russian people," he raises his glass. "We'd be chased from here without you. I salute you!"

Outside, a group of Ossetian paramilitaries share their feelings with me, asking not to be named.

"They [the Georgians] came to this village and did this damage. They shelled our city. And we took revenge - blood for blood," one of them says.

Along the main street of Khetagurovo, the diverging interpretations of the war (either as a proxy conflict or a direct clash between Russia and Georgia) seem more than inadequate. For the South Ossetian people in the wreckage it was a question of vengeance and part of a long and vicious feud over villages, hills and fields.