By Tara Bahrampour
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 14, 2008
OUTSIDE GORI, Georgia, Aug. 13 -- Near a sign reading "J. Stalin's Home Country," Russian military vehicles lumbered along the highway, rifles pointing out from drivers' windows. Most of the soldiers inside looked stony-eyed at the civilian cars going past. But a few nodded and gave casual waves, as if their presence there were no big deal.
It was a big deal for Alexander Lomaia, secretary of Georgia's National Security Council. Along with Estonian Ambassador Toomas Lukk, French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy and a group of Georgian and foreign journalists, he had come hoping to see for himself the place where hostile troops were said to be ravaging what was left of the city of Gori.
"There were numerous reports that the Russian regular army let the irregulars into the city this morning, and immediately after that, we started getting desperate calls from the people, saying, 'Help us, they are looting, they are humiliating us, they are crushing our houses.' "
The "irregulars," according to Lomaia, were Cossacks, Chechens and -- perhaps most terrifying for Georgians in this conflict -- Ossetians. Ossetians and Georgians fought a vicious ethnic war in the early 1990s. The current conflict was ignited last week in South Ossetia.
Lomaia's purpose, he said, was to meet with the leader of the Russians in Gori "to get them out of the city and to let the police in." He meant Georgian police.
A day earlier, Georgians had celebrated in the streets over an announced cease-fire, but Wednesday was again a day of fear. Rumors spread through Tbilisi that a column of Russian tanks was approaching the capital. Employers sent their employees home, and some residents rushed to renew their passports.
But a ride up the main highway out of Tbilisi revealed much of it to be empty, save for a few Georgian military checkpoints and the occasional civilian car. The ancient church town of Mtskheta looked tranquil. Cows walked home against the backdrop of the Caucasus Mountains.
Then ahead -- a Russian checkpoint, soldiers at the ready with rifles, an armored vehicle parked to the side. The convoy cautiously approached, then stopped. It was Lomaia's first view of the enemy. He got out of his van and confidently addressed a soldier. They conversed, in Russian. Tensions seemed low. The soldiers did not raise their guns.
Only one car, carrying Lomaia and half a dozen other people, was allowed to pass. At the next checkpoint, a Russian soldier yelled into Lomaia's window, "Everything is calm in Gori! The only thing that is frightening the people is your President Saakashvili, son of Bush."
Before the crisis, Gori was famous mainly as the birthplace of Joseph Stalin. In recent days, it was the target of Russian bombing. Now the area just outside its city center looked like a Russian military base, with tanks and troop trucks moving through.
After few more checkpoints, the car stopped again. A Russian tank stood in the road. Large trees nearby had been reduced to stumps and the area around them was scorched. Beyond them, the fields were on fire.
Lukk, the Estonian ambassador who had started his assignment in Georgia only nine days earlier, said quietly, "Can you imagine, it's the 21st century?"
"Look," Lomaia said. "They said cease-fire yesterday morning. Those fires aren't of yesterday." He shook his head. "My worst dream."
Lomaia's meeting with the local leader, a Russian major general named Vyachislav Borisov, took place on the dusty road as the sun set, with the smell of smoke in the air. The two men shook hands. Lomaia told the general about the calls he had received, hundreds of them, from terrified Gori residents.
The general, a beefy man in fatigues, had the same relaxed manner as his men. "Everything is calm," he said in Russian. "We're not planning any looting, any bombarding." The troops would stay only until Aug. 15, he said, long enough to secure the armaments they had found there -- American armaments, he said, low-quality ones that he called "trash." As for the people of Gori, he told Lomaia, they were not disturbed by the Russians' presence.
"No," the general said. "People are saying, 'Please help us. The Georgian government has left us. Protect us.' "
The town no longer had an administration, he said, adding that the people who remained were "all Russian-speaking."
When someone in the group mentioned that most Georgians speak Russian, the general acknowledged that there were, in fact, Georgians remaining, but they were "simple Georgians," such as farmers.
The burning fields? A farming technique, he said.
The general began talking about his own past, as a soldier in the Chechnya war. Lomaia listened. Then the general said that only Lomaia would be allowed into the town of Gori, and the two of them drove off.
In the dimming light, Levy, a tall, spectral figure with a mane of dark, wavy hair and a well-tailored black suit, stood beside the tank where a blond Russian soldier sat, and expounded on his latest war.
He had been struck, Levy said, by the lack of protection around Tbilisi. No soldiers, no defenders. "It is a very strange strategy of Saakashvili," he said of Georgia's president. "To tell to the world, 'It's your problem. We are not able, small as we are, to confront the big bear. So it is your job. We wash our hands; it is up to you.' " The Russians, for their part, had decided upon a "panic strategy."
"They spread all over the world the news that they are going to Tbilisi, and then they go left, they go right, they don't go," Levy said. The sky turned black. A column of tanks rumbled loudly by. The lighted tip of a Russian soldier's cigarette glowed.
Lomaia returned. The town, he said, was nearly abandoned. In a hospital where two doctors remained, he had spoken to a lone local man, Ramazi Baliashvili, who said irregulars had shot him that morning.
Lomaia had not seen Gori's Georgian military base, now occupied by the Russians. He had not asked the Russian general to remove his men. "I was trying not to challenge him," he said, adding that he wanted to focus on rescuing the wounded man, and had arranged to bring him back to Tbilisi. Now, he said, was not the time for demands.
"I said, 'Okay, okay, you do whatever you want. And then we'll leave.' " At the checkpoint, Lomaia waited for the wounded man. He gave instructions for Levy and the others to return to the capital without him. As they pulled away, he was standing in the darkness.
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