Russians Pull Troops Back Into S. Ossetia

ERGNETI, Georgia, Oct. 8 -- Russian troops withdrew Wednesday from positions they had held in Georgia, two days ahead of a Friday deadline, but Georgian officials said the withdrawal was incomplete.

About 20 trucks and armored personnel carriers headed north from the town of Karaleti and crossed into the breakaway region of South Ossetia around midday. Georgian officials confirmed that Russian troops also vacated posts near the breakaway region of Abkhazia.

"The personnel of all six posts has left Georgia and has arrived in South Ossetia," Russian commander Maj. Gen. Marat Kulakhmetov told the news agency Interfax-AVN.

But a spokesman for the Georgian Interior Ministry said two areas that were under Georgian control before this summer's war with Russia -- Akhalgori, in South Ossetia, and the Kodori Gorge, in Abkhazia -- must be vacated in order to comply with a French-brokered cease-fire agreement.

The spokesman, Shota Utiashvili, said that according to the agreement, European Union monitors must also be allowed into the breakaway zones, and thousands of people displaced in the war this summer must be permitted to return.

After the agreement was signed, Russia recognized the breakaway areas as independent countries, and Abkhazian and South Ossetian authorities have shown no sign of allowing monitors into those areas. Russia has said it will keep almost 8,000 troops in the two regions.

Monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe observed the pullout of Russian troops from Karaleti, where they had occupied a post the size of a football field since August. "Smile, Volodya, we're going home," one soldier cried to another as they prepared to drive away. On a road dotted with burned-out houses, villagers watched the Russian vehicles rumble up the road. A small boy waved.

As the Russians left, the Georgians returned. They came to what Russians had dubbed a "buffer zone" separating South Ossetia from the rest of Georgia. Georgian police set up a checkpoint Wednesday afternoon in Ergneti, a town on the administrative border between South Ossetia and undisputed Georgia.

Georgian officials and residents have said that the area controlled by the Russians was left largely unpoliced and that Russian troops allowed Ossetians to cross the border to loot and burn homes.

In the village of Megvrekisi, off the main road, about half a mile from the administrative border, people seemed hardly aware that the Russians had left. Before the war, the town had about 175 families. Only about 20 people remained, to guard the houses. They said they had survived the past two months by crouching in fields as Ossetian marauders came regularly to steal and destroy property.

"They were coming every day, in packs," said Temurazi Mtsqeradze, 59. In one looted house, the stench of excrement rose over piles of overturned drawers and shattered kitchenware. Dark purple grapes hung in clusters in the yard, but no one was there to harvest them; the family had fled to a refugee center in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital.

Villagers wept as they pointed toward burned-out homes and recalled that Temur Kasradze, 43, was shot after he left his house to try to talk with the Ossetians. Kasradze's straw hat sat beside his fresh grave.

Lili Kasradze, 60, an ethnic Ossetian married to a Georgian, said the Ossetians who came had not spared her. "My house was looted as much as the others," she said, adding that she no longer had a desire to see her cousins in South Ossetia.

A few miles south, in the town of Tkviavi, the mood was lighter. Dato Chargazia, 43, grinned as he pointed to where a Russian tank had knocked a hole in his son's garden wall the night before.

"After they left and our people came, I could breathe more easily," he said.

But Giorgi Odiashvili, 46, was more cautious. "How can I feel safe when the army wouldn't protect us and they just fled?" he said, referring to the Georgian military. "I don't trust either ours or the Russians'."

Correspondent Philip P. Pan in Moscow contributed to this report.