The heaviest fighting ever seen in the breakaway enclave of South Ossetia has left refugees on both sides of the conflict.
The Ossetians who have fled north to the Alagir camp tell a very different story to those who view the events of the last week as Georgia's plucky struggle against a heavy-handed and imperialist Russia.
Many of their accounts are muddled, but the prevailing view in this camp on the Russian side of the Caucasus mountains is that Georgia's pro-western leader, Mikheil Saakashvili, tried to wipe out their breakaway enclave.
"The Georgian government just went mad," said Leyla Bessateva, who fled snipers and rockets to escape from the village of Dominis, 12km away from Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital. "The Georgians came in and killed everyone. Who is guilty? It is Saakashvili. They burned all the houses, and they even set fire to the school and the hospital. Nothing remains. It all happened in one instant.
"They wanted to destroy South Ossetia in one night. All these villages, they encircled and took them."
Many of the refugees were stunned that after days of confrontations involving small arms between separatist South Ossetians and Georgian troops, Tbilisi then unleashed tanks and heavy weapons in attempting to seize Tskhinvali.
This camp houses 344 refugees, is the nearest to the North Ossetian capital of Vladikavkaz and is the one most well-known to western journalists. The refugees' tales hand Russia potent fuel in a propaganda war and are certain to be used to accuse Mr Saakashvili of war crimes and ethnic cleansing.
A note pinned to a tree near the camp entrance calls for witnesses of atrocities committed by Georgian forces to report them to a Russian prosecutor in Vlad-ikavkaz. Law enforcement officers note the details of each new arrival.
Georgia's government said it was forced to attack by Russian peacekeepers and South Ossetians, who it says opened fire on their troops even after Mr Saakashvili had publicly declared a ceasefire on August 7.
Georgia and independent groups such as Human Rights Watch point to the heavy civilian casualties incurred when Russia bombed the Georgian village of Gori, near Tskhinvali.
One refugee, who had fled Tskhinvali and did not want to give his name, said: "Our president said that we will not start the shooting first, but no one is ever going to know [who did]," he said, referring to the South Ossetian leader Eduard Kokoity.
Rights groups close to the Kremlin have been called in to help the refugees deal with the psychological scars left by the six-day war. It is unclear whether Russian officials have told them news of the US's growing support for the Georgian regime, but it is starting to filter down into how many of them view the war. "They say the uniforms and guns all came from the United States," said Zaira Khurayeva a refugee from Dominis. "We hadn't heard anything about this until Condoleezza [Rice] came to Georgia. But where did they get such weaponry from and such uniforms? And where did they get the helicopters from?"
Russian TV has reported that the US army helped train Georgian soldiers. The last time Georgians and South Ossetians engaged in an all-out war, "they only had machine guns", Ms Khurayeva said. "Now they have rockets and tanks."
"They must have been Nato troops," added another refugee, who gave her name only as Medea. "The Georgians don't know how to shoot."
Other refugees spoke of the Georgian troops who had rampaged through their village and sent them into hiding along with other women and children in a cellar for two days. They eventually emerged and fled into the surrounding forest, only to be fired on by snipers.
Anna Neistat, a researcher with Human Rights Watch, said yesterday that evidence was mounting that most of the destruction of Tskhinvali was caused by Georgians.
The Georgians, however, say more damage came as the Russians fought to retake the town from Georgian troops.
While it could take years to piece together the events, for women such as Anna Kuzayeva, who spent two nights in a cellar with 300 people and rotting corpses under school number 6 in Tskhinvali before being taken to the refugee camp by Russian soldiers, only one thing seems clear.
"This war will continue," she said. "It's been going on in various ways for 15 years."
Man in the News, Page 7
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
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