Georgia marks anniversary of war with Russia

[David]

AP


TBILISI, Georgia – Georgia marked one year since its war with Russia on Friday with quiet moments and somber ceremonies — a nationwide minute of silence, a human chain in a war-battered town, a soldier's small son gazing at his father's tombstone.

The brief war killed at least 390 people and left a legacy of animosity between leaders and fears among civilians that more fighting may erupt. About 26,000 people displaced by the conflict still live in temporary housing in Georgia, many on less than $3 a day, according to aid group World Vision.

For five days Georgian troops fought to rein in the breakaway region of South Ossetia and push back advancing Russian forces, while on the other side Russian troops and tanks backed the separatist forces against what they called an unprovoked Georgian assault.

Fighting ended with an EU-brokered agreement that left South Ossetia cut off from the rest of Georgia by military checkpoints. Russia, which recognizes South Ossetia as independent, maintains thousands of troops there to support local forces, which have widely been accused of killing ethnic Georgian civilians, burning their houses and driving them at gunpoint from the region.

"We feel there is a great danger in the current situation," Tbilisi resident Lia Tabukashvili said while visiting a memorial to war victims on parliament's steps. "We can only place our faith in God and the international community."

Georgian soldiers watch the tense boundary line from a few hundred meters (yards) away, and European Union monitors use binoculars to survey the South Ossetian side, which Russia refuses to allow them to enter.

Both sides have claimed the other fired mortars or shot at them in recent weeks.

And no one agrees on who started the conflict.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev defended his decision to go to war. "Each time I remember these events, I scroll the tape backward, as they say, and realize that on the one hand, we had no other choice," he said in a statement released by the Kremlin.

For Friday's one-year anniversary of the war, Tbilisi closed its main avenue, Rustaveli Prospekt, for a photo exhibition chronicling Moscow's Soviet-era control, or occupation, of Georgia. Pedestrian traffic through the exhibit was thin as rain fell intermittently throughout the day.

The country observed a minute of silence and church bells tolled Friday afternoon.

In the hard-hit city of Gori, about 80 kilometers (50 miles) west of Tbilisi, several hundred people formed a human flag display at the ruins of a medieval fortress.

Gori's residents later held hands in a human chain through the city of 50,000, which was bombed when the war spread into Georgia proper from South Ossetia.

Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili planned to speak at Gori's cathedral Friday night.

Earlier in Tbilisi the president attended a wreath-laying ceremony, where a 2-year-old boy in a tiny military uniform stood by the grave of his father Emzar Tsilosani, who was killed in the war.

"He will be a soldier, like his father," said widow and mother Teona Tsilosani. "But Emzar is not coming back — that's what Russia brought upon us with this war they created."

Both Russia and South Ossetia contend the war began with a thunderous Georgian artillery assault on Tskhinvali, and that Moscow sent in troops to protect Russian peacekeeping forces and civilians. They claim Saakashvili retains ambitions to seize South Ossetia by force, and have denounced Western military aid to Georgia.

Georgia says it launched the barrage to repel Russian tanks and troops that had begun an invasion before dawn. Saakashvili and other Georgian officials say Russia wants to drive him from power because Moscow resents his efforts to bring Georgia into NATO and the European Union.

Georgia's conduct of the war was a focus of weeks of anti-Saakashvili protests this year, but the opposition laid low Friday. "This should be a demonstration of the unity of the nation," said Irakly Alasania, an opposition leader. South Ossetia leader Eduard Kokoity on Friday claimed Georgian forces had massacred civilians on a road as they fled the Tskhinvali attack.

"The refusal of Georgia or its Western supporters to even acknowledge this massacre is proof of the moral failure by the leaders responsible for last year's war," he said in a statement. Kokoity blamed Saakashvili and Georgian military officers for "making a deliberate and horrible decision to kill innocent people. Why do U.S. and European leaders continue to support such men?"

A Russian Orthodox priest and Cossacks from Moldova's separatist province of Trans-Dniester erected a cross and placed icons near heavily shelled Russian peacekeepers' barracks on the outskirts of the South Ossetian capital, Tskinvali.

"This place is drenched in the blood of our soldiers who stood up against the Georgian aggression," Father Andrei Zizo said.