Russia is annexing Georgia by pieces

LA Times:

When cars come this way, through the deadened air of this half-abandoned town, the residents shiver and slip into their homes.

They've buried their dead in shallow graves in their gardens and orchards. They've hidden from roving bands of militiamen who they say have repeatedly tramped through town. And now they wait for somebody to come and put an end to these days of lawlessness and anxiety.

In the sprinkling of farming villages behind Russian lines, the war drags on and the future is clouded. Georgian residents say they have been subjected to repeated rounds of ethnic violence at the hands of militiamen from breakaway South Ossetia and Russia -- looting, arson and even killings.

"With violence, they're trying to force people to flee," said Nunu Kirkvalishvili, a 40-year-old woman in the village of Marana. "We don't even bother to hope anymore that somebody will come to protect us."

These Georgian farmers live in the so-called security zone that Moscow has pledged to maintain outside the Russian-backed republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Out of their government's reach, they are stuck in a deadly power vacuum even after the shadow of Russian occupation has lifted from much of Georgia.

"They don't come out and say they want us off the land, but they are forcing us off," Lily Giguashvili said. "They say we will have to get Russian passports."

Giguashvili is a slight, tremulous woman, dragging on Saturday from one house to the next with a dusty leopard-print bathrobe thrown over her clothes. The circles under her eyes are so deep they look like bruises. It's been a week since militiamen abducted her husband, along with 14 other men from the town, she said.

The gunmen forced the men to lie down in the road with their hands on their heads, witnesses said. Then they ordered them all into white minivans and drove away, telling residents the men were needed to help dig graves for the South Ossetian dead.

They haven't been heard from again. "I don't know if he's alive or dead," Giguashvili said, her eyes clouding with tears.

A few days after her husband was abducted, three militiamen burst into her house. They took everything Giguashvili owned, right down to her tea kettle.

"They put a Kalashnikov to my chest and said, 'Do you have money, gold or a car?' " Giguashvili said. "I started crying and one of them said, 'Don't worry, we won't do anything wrong to you.' "

Now Giguashvili and the other villagers sleep in the orchards. They figure they're safer in the woods and fields than in the houses that are steady temptations for the militias.

"The militias are still coming, they're still driving through and robbing us," said Zayra Chikhladze, 55. "When cars come through, we're just hiding. There is nobody to protect us, and we're very scared."

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I guess this is what Russian calls a humanitarian peace keeping mission. The Russian passport scam appears to be the introductory drug for annexation and assuming control of the area. The Russian internal propaganda will ignore Russia's responsibility for what has happened to these people are try to switch blame to the government of Georgia, but their South Ossetia ally is made up of a bunch of thugs who provoked the original conflict with Georgia which Russia used as a pretext for its invasion and aggression.