Life and Death close by…

I have gone back to Gori once again yesterday… The situation is starting to “normalise” there, the smashed windows of the banks in the centre are being repaired as are the power transmission lines that have been cut off, daily life seems to resume… And more and more IDPs are returning to Gori and the surrounding villages, trying to get back to their homes… However, there are still many displaced people due to this conflict, as the Russians still are not allowing the IPDs to return to the villages in their self-defined “buffer zone”… And many more displaced persons from Abkhazia and South Ossetia have no hope to return at all with the current political situation… The Georgian government is therefore still setting up new camps for IDPs (I went to one of the camps where tents are set up just outside Gori)… I also went back to one of the shelters in Gori set up in a kindergarden… There I saw life and death close by… a little girl was teaching her dog to play the piano while in the room next door a man was holding the hand of his dying father… Both families by the way are from the Tskhinvali region in South Ossetia and have been told by the Russian army to leave their homes or be killed…

If this is not ethnic cleansing, what is?