By Tara Bahrampour
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, September 16, 2008

TSAGVERI, Georgia -- Around noon on Aug. 15, hours before his president signed a cease-fire agreement ending the war with Russia, Viktor Aksashvili saw a camouflage-painted helicopter in the sky. "I saw it coming from Borjomi," a nearby town, said Aksashvili, 58, a school bus driver. "It went up the valley, turned around, and went back."

Later that day, the Borjomi-Kharagauli National Park started getting reports of at least six forest fires in and around the 210,000-acre nature preserve, one of Georgia's biggest and best-known.

Villagers rushed to cut down trees and create a firewall between their homes and the approaching flames. No villages were burned, but the mountainous area, southwest of Gori, a city then occupied by Russian forces, was hard for firetrucks to reach.

Whipped by hot winds, the fires burned for 24 days, destroying more than 2,500 acres of old-growth forest, tainting drinking water in some villages and threatening the local economy, which relies heavily on tourism.

Police say they do not yet know how the fires started. The area has no clear military targets and is not near Russian-occupied areas. Villagers reported seeing a helicopter, possibly the one seen by Aksashvili, later that day, and government officials said some villagers saw unidentified "burning things" dropping from the aircraft.

But as for who started the fires, in the minds of many Georgians, there is no question: the Russians.

"I believe that yes, they did it," said Revaz Enukidze, head of the department of sustainable development in Georgia's Environment Ministry. The purpose? "To make as much as possible the economic and moral damage before the cease-fire."

In the end, about 370 acres of the park burned, plus an additional 2,200 acres of a neighboring buffer zone. A government commission has been formed to investigate the causes and assess the damage, and Enukidze said he hopes international organizations will participate.

Telephone calls and e-mails by a reporter to Russian spokesmen seeking comment elicited no response.

Nana Janashia, executive director of the Caucasus Environmental NGO Network, said it was too early to put a price tag on the damage. Park officials say the fires came during their best season in years and set them back significantly. The park's director, Toma Dekanoidze, estimated the cost to the economy could be as high as $700 million, including lost business for hotels and restaurants, and for local villagers who sell their produce, offer lodgings and work as hiking and horseback guides for tourists.

To Georgians watching television footage of the smoke-covered mountains, the harm goes far beyond the economic. Borjomi is their Adirondacks, home to the country's famed eponymous mineral water, a spa resort whose pine-infused air is considered restorative -- and not just by Georgians. It was a popular vacation spot for the Russian nobility and the Soviet elite; Czar Nicholas II's brother had an opulent country house here, which was later used by the dictator Joseph Stalin.

All the more reason, Georgians say, for Russians to want to target it.

"They know that this place is the treasure of the country," said Natia Muladze, senior specialist of visitor services there. "Borjomi was full of Russians during the Soviet times, and they wanted to destroy the things which they could not take."

To Georgians, the Russian offense was not only in setting the fires, but also in refusing to guarantee the safety of firefighting planes from Ukraine and Azerbaijan. That allowed the blaze to spread, said Interior Ministry spokesman Shota Utiashvili. "Otherwise, one helicopter could have put it out initially," he said. Turkish planes eventually received safe passage from the Russians and helped douse the flames.

Police found a mysterious three-inch metal sphere at the scene but little physical evidence of what started the fires, Utiashvili said, adding that the temperature of the blaze had likely destroyed it. But he said the helicopters must have been Russian, because no Georgian helicopters were flying at the time, and the armed forces of the pro-Russian separatist zone, South Ossetia, do not have helicopters. He theorized that the fires could have been started accidentally, by hot devices that military helicopters drop to divert heat-seeking missiles, or deliberately, to flush out Georgian military forces thought to be hiding in the forest.

In Tsagveri, villagers said another possible reason could have been a statement by South Ossetia leader Eduard Kokoity that Borjomi and a nearby ski resort area, Bakuriani, were rightfully part of South Ossetia because in the 20th century, Ossetians moved into some villages in the area.

Dali Kasashvili, 48, an ethnic Ossetian who lives in the village of Mzetamze, said neither she nor any of the 27 Ossetian families living around her had an interest in separating from Georgia. "South Ossetia is historically a part of Georgia, and the idea of South Ossetia being independent is absurd for me," she said. "They are creating something which did not exist before. . . . Personally, I don't know anyone who wants it."

In addition to lost trees and damaged topsoil, park officials say the fires affected endangered animals such as reindeer, salamander, lynx and brown bear. But it is perhaps Georgia's image as an attractive -- and safe -- destination for hikers and vacationers that will be hardest to recover.

"The Department of Tourism has done a lot to improve the image of Georgia," Muladze said, adding that separatist wars here in the early 1990s, as well as conflict in neighboring Chechnya, gave the region a bad name. "In 2002, 2003, there was still an image of the Caucasus as a war area. We know it's really hard to get rid of this image."