30,000 Georgians Flee Fighting

Ekaterina Dzadzua wrung her hands and wept when she saw the black smoke billowing from yet another house in her little village across the river.

“Look at what they’re doing! We’ve left. Why are they burning our houses and ruining our lands, and why is no one helping us?” the pensioner asked the small crowd that had gathered to watch the scene. Another explosion, followed by automatic gunfire, drove the Georgian villagers back into the safety of the trees.

Dzadzua and about 30,000 other ethnic Georgians are homeless after fleeing the worst fighting in five years in Georgia’s separatist region of Abkhazia--clashes that almost brought this former Soviet republic to the brink of war again after half a decade of relative peace. Fighting broke out between Abkhaz separatists and Georgian partisans a week ago in Gali, Abkhazia’s southern region bordering Georgia proper. The combat had calmed by Tuesday after a cease-fire finally took effect.

But many of the refugees have nothing to return to. International observers in the region said that after Georgian partisans withdrew, Abkhaz separatists began to systematically burn houses and destroy crops and livestock in the abandoned villages to prevent the Georgians from returning.

“It’s tragic,” one observer said. “The Abkhaz [separatists] drove through the villages in a big bus setting houses on fire, and now these refugees are back in the same situation they were in after the first war ended.”

Abkhaz officials blamed the Georgians for the arson. “The Georgian partisans didn’t all withdraw, and, when fighting continued, buildings got burned--that’s the consequences of battle,” Emanvuil Ankvad, an Abkhaz spokesman, said in a telephone interview from Sokhumi, the Abkhazians’ capital.

The Black Sea republic of Abkhazia--once the favored vacation spot of Soviet leaders--declared independence from Georgia in 1992, triggering a bitter conflict in which an an estimated 10,000 people were killed. A fragile peace held after a 1993 cease-fire, and about 50,000 refugees trickled back into the Gali region.

Georgian President Eduard A. Shevardnadze defended his decision not to send government troops into the region to help the partisans as the only way to prevent Georgia from being dragged into a much larger conflict.

But demonstrators gathered Wednesday outside the parliament in Tbilisi, the capital, to call for his resignation for failing to protect Georgians in Abkhazia from what they called “ethnic cleansing.” And outraged members of Georgia’s liberal parliament questioned Shevardnadze’s decision not to send in the army.

“The aftermath of this situation does not bode well for Shevardnadze,” said Ghia Nodia, head of the Caucasian Institute of Peace, Democracy and Development in Tbilisi. “It only builds up more resentment against the government and strengthens the opposition here.”

There are fears that the refugees’ discontent could easily be used to foment further problems in this former Soviet republic.

“It’s quite evident that some external forces want another war here in order to push Georgia back into chaos and anarchy, so we lose foreign investment and everything that we have accomplished in the past few years,” said Peter Mamradze, the Georgian president’s chief of staff.

Shevardnadze, who escaped a well-planned assassination attempt in February, said then that reactionary forces in Russia had masterminded the attack to prevent Georgia from winning a contract for an oil pipeline to carry crude from Central Asia to international markets.

A force of about 1,500 Russian peacekeepers and 100 United Nations military observers has resumed patrols of the cease-fire line in Gali.

But Georgians are suspicious of Russia’s presence in Abkhazia because Moscow’s support in the 1992-1993 conflict helped Abkhaz separatists rout Georgian government forces from the region and left about 250,000 people homeless.

For Ekaterina Kalatozishvili, 37, temporarily housed with her three children and sick mother in a paper factory in the border town of Zugdidi, renewal of fighting means that she has lost everything for the second time. Her first house in Gali was razed in 1993. A year later, she and her family of four moved into her mother’s cramped studio apartment in the village. Little by little, her family had found some land to grow vegetables and bought some cows, pigs and chickens.

But all of that is gone, and she now will have to begin again.

“We wanted to rebuild our house, but we were afraid the war would start again,” she said. “And now I’m sure we won’t even have our apartment to live in. But what can we do? We have to return--we’ve got nowhere else to go.”