An Uncertain Death Toll In Georgia-Russia War

TBILISI, Georgia -- It was evening, and Manana Rodiashvili had just milked her cow. The disputed region of South Ossetia had seen skirmishes in recent days, but her village was calm.

And then, suddenly, tanks appeared in her street.

"They began shooting all around," said Rodiashvili, 55, an ethnic Georgian. She crouched in her cousin's basement as men speaking Russian entered the house. Then she hid for five days in the countryside.

Like many of the tens of thousands who have fled their villages since the war between Georgia and Russia began more than two weeks ago, Rodiashvili doesn't have a clear sense of whose airplanes she saw, which soldiers came or what date it was. During those chaotic days, people fanned out into the countryside, hiding in orchards and living off plums as they watched their villages burn.

Almost immediately, officials on both sides claimed wild and improbable death tolls. Russian officials accused Georgia's government of committing "genocide," saying 2,000 Ossetians had been killed. Georgian officials spoke of summary executions and announced that "most" ethnic Georgians in South Ossetia had been killed or put in detention camps.

It will probably take weeks to sort out who died and how. Witnesses and nongovernmental organizations say that although widespread looting and some detentions occurred, far fewer civilians died than originally reported. In fact, on both sides it has been hard to find people with firsthand knowledge of deaths in a war that sparked the biggest crisis in Russia's relations with Europe and the United States since the Soviet Union collapsed.

What no one disputes is that villages emptied quickly.

Aid groups and Georgian officials estimate that as many as 158,000 people have left their homes, including 30,000 ethnic Ossetians who went north to Russia. About 100,000 who fled South Ossetia and the Georgian city of Gori went to Tbilisi, Georgia's capital, and 22,000 to other towns.

As they fled, rumors rose like smoke and clouded the air: Cossack, Ossetian and Chechen "irregulars" had razed Georgian villages, committed mass rapes, rounded up all the young people and marched them off to a concentration camp. Women vowed to drink poison rather than be captured alive.

On the other side, Ossetians and Russians said Georgian shells had leveled Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, and targeted Ossetian villages for destruction, killing thousands.

Exaggerated claims from both governments fed the panic.

In the days before the war began, Ossetians seemed aware that something was about to happen. On Aug. 5 and 6, Ossetian officials sent 36 buses to take women and children to Russia.