Bringing it together...

The grand doyen of photojournalists, Henri Cartier Bresson is quoted saying: "To take a photograph is to align the head, the eye and the heart. It's a way of life." This has rung very true for me for the last ten days…

A slideshow with sound of my attempt to align my head, eye and heart can be accessed here…

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?

Contact with US politics...

GEORGIA. Tbilisi. 26 August 2008. Cindy McCain, wife of Republican US presidential candidate John McCain, visits a shelter for internally displaced persons, set up in the former Ministry of Finance in central Tbilisi. The shelter houses currently about 490 people, mostly from Tskhinvali, South Ossetia.

I was photographing in one of the centres for displaced persons today, at the former Ministry of Finance in central Tbilisi when Cindy McCain was visiting this centre. (OK, I admit I got a tip off that she would visit this centre today). The centre houses 490 people (while Cindy McCain was visiting the centre, her security detail temporarily doubled the number of people in the building), mostly from Tskhinvali and surrounding villages in South Ossetia. With today’s signing of a bill recognising the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, President Medvedev crushed the hopes for these people to return any time soon…

Putting faces to IDPs

GEORGIA. Tbilisi. 25 August 2008. Gaioz Jakhveladze, his sister and his aunt in one of the camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs) set up in Tbilisi. They have been in this shelter for 17 days, fleeing from the Kareli village (about 15km west of Gori) due to the advancement of the Russian army. The Georgian government is attempting to locate the IDPs back to their villages once they have been cleared of mines and provided the Russian army has left. As of now, the Russian army is still in Kareli.

Back to Gori

Today I went back to Gori (incidentally with Anna, a photojournalism student at LCC, her Georgian husband and a close friend of theirs) to see what the situation is like after the Russian ‘withdrawal’…

The road to and from Gori was incredibly busy (quite a change from a few days earlier when I was travelling with the UN and the road was nearly deserted) … a lot of people were starting to return to Gori and the surrounding villages, and quite a few people who were stuck in western Georgia were using the main artery, the S1, to get to the capital and some eastern parts of Georgia… The Russian checkpoints were gone… so far so good…

Entering Gori, there were burnt and bombed out houses… and some residents have returned for the first time to Gori from shelters to try to salvage some of their possessions and to assess the damage… there were also already some efforts by the government to clean out some of the houses and to start rebuilding…










GEORGIA. Gori. 24 August 2008. Destroyed, burnt and bombed out houses and apartments, caused by the Russian bombardment of Gori.

Despite pronouncements to the contrary and efforts by local government officials to convince residents to return to their apartments, these houses and apartments appear pretty uninhabitable to me…


GEORGIA. Gori. 24 August 2008. Irina R. in front of her bombed out apartment. She has returned for the first time today to assess the damage. During the conflict she stayed with her sister in a nearby village.





GEORGIA. Gori. 24 August 2008. A resident of Gori looks at the damage in his apartment. He has returned for the first time today after the withdrawal of Russian troops from Gori.




GEORGIA. Gori. 24 August 2008. A resident of Gori explains how he was jolted around by a bomb explosion ten days ago and how he saw four fellow residents perish by a bomb that was dropped into the apartment complex by the Russian army.




GEORGIA. Gori. 24 August 2008. Gori, city centre in front of the local government house with Stalin’s statue in the background; a family is returning back to Gori from a shelter in Telavi.

What is next for Georgia?

GEORGIA. Tbilisi. 23 August 2008. The seat of the Georgian Parliament.

The Russians have withdrawn to a self-defined buffer zone around Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and are sending in a 500 strong “peace keeping” force, i.e. in effect they just rename some of the army personnel already on Georgian proper soil…

Most of the media are packing in and are going home, or have left already… and the Georgians are resuming their daily lives… So is this the peace we longed for?

There were no celebration parties in the capital Tbilisi tonight, neither in front of the Parliament, nor at the Rose Revolution Square, as most Georgians feel that they will have to live with the Russians and the Russian threat for quite a while… They also feel that this is a shaky truce and that it will be an uphill struggle to regain the Abkhazian and South Ossetian regions back integrated into Georgian territory and brought under Georgian sovereignty… if that will ever happen (I personally have serious doubts about this, in my view, these regions will be lost forever to the Georgians, but I am a pessimist by nature…).

And while the economy and infrastructure have not been crippled, a lot of damage has been done: bridges have been destroyed, railway lines cut off, forests burnt, Poti, the main harbour has been ruined and it will take a while to rebuild it, …and some of the damage done will only emerge over the next few days…

And most of all, the human toll is unbearable: thousands of civilians killed (there is still no officially confirmed number) and more than 130,000 people displaced within Georgia…

There are indications that Russia has started to issue Russian passports to residents of the Crimea, to be able to claim later that they are protecting Russian citizens when they invade the island… So will the Ukraine be the next battleground?

As I saw on a billboard in Tbilisi today in Russian: “Россия, мы хотим мирa!” [Russia, we want peace!]

To Kaspi, Gori and the Ateni valley...

Finally today, I managed to get on a car with the UN and join them for a humanitarian mission to distribute food, check on internally displaced people (IDPs) and to discuss logistics with local governors.

As I mentioned before, my main focus is on the humanitarian side and to give IDPs a face and hear their story.

Our first stop was a food distribution centre at Kaspi, south of Gori and just before the first Russian checkpoint.






Then we got to Gori itself, which is still firmly under Russian control. You have to pass at least three Russian checkpoints to get there. Incidentally, there was a pro-Gerogian demonstration in front of the first one which went unpunished by the Russians...




I was lucky to be on the UN car, which managed to pass the checkpoints with no problems (the BBC which wanted to join us later was held up at one of the control points and could not enter today).






Entering Gori, you see scorched earth, looted buildings and an almost empty town before you reach the city centre …and some pretty stomach-churning scenes of people desperate for food, desperate about having lost their homes and desperate about the current situation…










Two elderly people who found refuge in an abandonned kindergarden in Gori...




Later in the afternoon we moved on to the Ateni valley (a beautiful valley set in a lovely landscape) where about 8,000 IDPs from Gori found refuge… most of them have found refuge with relatives or simply good-hearted people who provide shelter for them…










Coming back in the evening, I saw no signs of the Russian army leaving, they were still up the hills on both sides of the roads, their tanks firmly entrenched, and soldiers digging new positions… I wonder how they want to fulfil the promise to have withdrawn by tomorrow…