In this article we give the testimony of eye-witnesses that accuses the Georgian troops of genocide of the local population in Kodori. These facts must not be hushed up. An immediate detailed and independent enquiry is called for to investigate all the recounted cases. This task can be achieved today only by conducting an international monitoring of the Kodori Gorge. Regretfully, the Georgian side has been doing all it can to thwart organizing the patrolling of the Upper Kodori. Is Tbilisi just playing for time to cover its tracks?
What is happening now in the Upper Kodori can only be qualified as "ethnic genocide". There has been no other "hot spot" on post-Soviet area where an ethnic group would be exterminated so persistently and purposefully. In real fact, the tiny Svan community that has for centuries been living in the valley of the Kodori River, may be totally wiped off the map. Judge for yourself. During the three weeks that passed since the invasion of the gorge by Georgian troops and police, 700 local people, that is about 20 percent of all the population of Abkhazian Svanetia, have been killed.
The stories told by the people who escaped from the Kodori Valley to Abkhazia are shocking. The atrocities and outrages committed with impunity by Georgian troops in Kodori are staggering in their cruelty. But then it is small wonder, as among those who came to Kodori from Sakartvelo "to make war" there is a lot of people who had quite recently been posing for videos cutting throats of captive Russian soldiers and had taken part in the terrorist attacks on the cities of Budennovsk and Kizliar, and are fighting up to the last ditch for the idea of a bandit-run Ichkeria.
However, the most vicious of them all, according to Anna Ioseliani, 38, resident of Sakeni, and Nani Asatiani, 42, resident of Azhara, is a detachment of Georgian gunmen "Apkhazeti". Though there are also quite a few former members of Basayev's gang in the detachment, the core of it is made up of Kartvels who had been forced to abandon their homes in Abkhazia during the war of 1992-93 and seek refuge over the Inguri. As is known, in 2001 the most radically-minded refugees from Abkhazia founded the so-called International Initiative Group (IIG) "Apkhazeti". Its Articles of Association states that its aim is to restore Georgia's territorial integrity in the boundaries of 1990. In 2005 an IIG paramilitary detachment was created at a Georgian military base in Lanchkhuti. According to the two above-mentioned women, it were gunmen of this detachment, wearing green camouflage uniforms and black berets and sporting golden chevrons on the right-hand side of their tunics, who were especially blood-thirsty no matter whether they dealt with people who supported Emzar Kvitsiani during the invasion or with common peaceful population.
Thus, Anna Ioseliani related that a nephew of her husband, Georgi Ioseliani, who was wounded and agreed to lay down arms on the promise that his life would be spared, was burned alive by "Apkhazeti" gunmen in broad daylight after having been subjected to protracted interrogations and torture. It happened in the village of Sakeni, near the administrative building which the gunmen used as a barracks. A similar fate befell her neighbors, all the 12 members of the Khergiani family. She said that before executing the family the bandits with golden chevrons on their breasts, headed by one Soso, raped the Khergiani women in front of their family members. Their guilt was that the head Soso supposedly recognized in the eldest of the Khergiani family, David, 78, the man who in September of 1993 had reclaimed from him a KAMAZ truck loaded with the "spoils of war" – all that Soso had stacked up during the six months of looting in Abkhazia. Crying, Anna recollects the road she traversed from Sakeni to Lata in Abkhazia. She says: "All the road was strewn with corpses of people and domestic animals. It was very dangerous to go by the road. At all checkpoints, women had to pay a 'toll' to 'the black berets' for being allowed to pass through, while all the men were detained". Anna managed to get to Lata thanks to her new acquaintance Nani Asatiani, a local Svan woman from Azhara, who from her child years knows all the secret paths of the Kodori Gorge.
The story of Nani Asatiani is also highly indicative. The 'golden chevrons' started looting and abusing local people in Azhara as early as August 2. The head of an "Apkhazeti" unit quartered in Azhara, a Georgian nicknamed "Ochamchirets", accompanied by a dozen of drunken raving thugs, burst, shooting off and shouting obscenities, into the house of her neighbor, Tamar Mamaladze, 66, a distant relative of Emzar Kvitsiani. Tamar had recently moved, together with her family, to her birthplace in Azhara from Tbilisi. "Ochamchirets" started shouting at the elderly lady: "You, Svan whore, you will remember us! We are the real warriors of David the Builder! We have sworn to do you all in, you hillbilly assholes. We are the Apkhazeti". Then he chopped her head off with an axe. Then the 'golden chevrons' chopped off Tamar husband's, Vakhtang's, hands, and then they burned him alive because he tried to stand up for 'a non-Georgian'. That was followed by an indiscriminate beating-up and abuse of the local population, with the rest of the Georgian "military and police" personnel joining in the revelry. Nani was lucky to have hid herself in the cellar of her house where she stayed till dusk and then fled. Later she ran into Anna near Chkhalti.
Moving is also the story of another witness of the atrocities in the Upper Kodori, Roxana Khachaturian, 20. She and her family are one of the few Armenian families who lived in Azhara before the Georgian invasion of the Kodori Gorge. Roxana said that August 2 at night gunmen also burst into her home, and one of them at once struck her in the face. Roxana does not remember what happened next. When she came to herself, she found herself in a dark room, after which the most dreadful things happened. Roxana was among Svan girls and women, aged from 14 to 45, who were put in a kind of brothel set up in Azhara. After five days of unending sexual abuse Roxana was exchanged for a Georgia officer captured by Svanetian guerrillas. Thus she managed to get to Lata. The hardest thing for her now is the lack of news of her family, her husband and her 3-month-old son.
This is only a small part of what refugees arriving in Abkhazia tell of the atrocities committed by Georgian gunmen in the Upper Kodori. Notably, Svanetian guerrillas are especially hard on gunmen from the "Apkhazeti" detachment – those beasts are said to be target No. 1 for Svanetian guns. The proof of it is also in the casualty figures of the Georgian side. Various data show that one third of all the casualties are combatants of the IIG military wing.
